US and Russia begin talks in Saudi Arabia on Ukraine ceasefire

US and Russian officials have begun talks in Saudi Arabia as Donald Trump pushes to broker a limited ceasefire that Washington hopes will mark the first step toward lasting peace in Ukraine.

Ukraine and Russia have agreed in principle to a one-month halt on strikes on energy infrastructure after Trump spoke with the countries’ leaders last week. But uncertainty remains over how and when the partial ceasefire will take effect – and whether its scope would extend beyond energy infrastructure to include other critical sites, such as hospitals, bridges, and vital utilities.

US officials held initial talks with Ukraine on Sunday evening and were meeting separately with Russia on Monday, with most meetings taking place at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh.

The US is expected to shuttle between the two countries to finalise details and negotiate separate measures to ensure the safety of shipping in the Black Sea. “The ultimate goal is a 30-day ceasefire, during which time we discuss a permanent ceasefire. We’re not far away from that,” said the US special envoy Steve Witkoff in a podcast with the far-right journalist Tucker Carlson over the weekend.

The Ukrainian and US delegations discussed proposals to protect energy facilities and critical infrastructure, Ukraine’s defence minister said.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said his country’s delegation to Sunday’s talks was working in “a completely constructive manner”, adding: “The conversation is quite useful, the work of the delegations is continuing.”

Zelenskyy earlier said he would hand the US a list of energy infrastructure that would be off-limits for strikes by the Russian military.

The Ukrainian delegation could hold additional discussions with US officials on Monday. “We are implementing the President of Ukraine’s directive to bring a just peace closer and to strengthen security,” Rustem Umerov, the Ukrainian defence minister who heads the country’s delegation, said on Facebook.

Russia is represented in the talks by Sergey Beseda, a secretive adviser to Russia’s FSB services and Grigory Karasin, a former diplomat who negotiated the 2014 Minsk accords between Russia and Ukraine.

The lead-up to the talks was marked by a series of controversial pro-Russian statements by Witkoff – tapped by Trump as his personal envoy to Putin – in which he appeared to legitimise Russia’s staged referendums in four Ukrainian regions.

Speaking with Carlson, Witkoff claimed that in the four regions where Moscow held widely condemned referendums on joining Russia, “the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule”.

The referendums in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia provinces were widely rebuked in the west as illegitimate and are viewed as a thinly veiled attempt to justify Russia’s illegal annexation of the regions. Their annexation marked the largest forcible seizure of territory in Europe since the second world war.

In the interview with Carlson, Witkoff also claimed Putin had commissioned a portrait of Trump “by a leading Russian painter” that the envoy had brought back with him after a trip to Moscow.

Witkoff went on to say that after the assassination attempt on Trump last July, Putin told him that he visited his local church, met his priest and prayed for Trump. “Not because he was the president of the United States or could become the president of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend,” Witkoff said.

“I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war and all the ingredients that led up to it,” he added.

Witkoff’s willingness to echo Kremlin talking points and his praise for Putin are likely to heighten anxiety in Ukraine and across European capitals.

Meanwhile, Moscow appears to be exploiting the window before any ceasefire takes hold, launching mass drone attacks on Ukraine over the weekend. At least three people were killed during a large Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, killing at least three people.

At present, Moscow and Kyiv remain far apart on what would be acceptable terms for a peace treaty, with no sign that Putin has relinquished any of his maximalist aims in the war against Ukraine.

Moscow has set out several maximalist conditions for any long-term settlement – most of which are non-starters for Kyiv and its European allies. These include a halt to all foreign military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, restrictions on the size of its armed forces, and international recognition of the four Ukrainian regions Russia illegally annexed following staged referendums in 2022.

The Kremlin has also signalled it would reject any presence of western troops in Ukraine – something Kyiv views as essential to securing lasting security guarantees.

Ukraine remains deeply sceptical of any Russian agreement, pointing to past instances where Moscow failed to honour its commitments.