Top US and Russian officials are set to meet in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday with the aim of restoring ties and setting up negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin has said the discussions in Riyadh could pave the way for a face-to-face meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin “very soon”.
It comes after the pair held a ground-breaking lengthy phone call last Wednesday.
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Riyadh, which is also involved in talks with Washington over the future of the Gaza Strip, has played a role in early contacts between the Trump administration.
But who will be involved in the discussions tomorrow?
Mr Trump’s secretary of state, who arrived in Riyadh on Monday, serves as the president’s chief foreign affairs adviser and the country’s top diplomat.
Mr Rubio, a former Florida senator, already spoke to Russian foreign affairs minister Sergey Lavrov over the phone on Saturday, discussing the war in Ukraine and other topics, according to readouts of the call from both countries.
The US president and Mr Rubio were adversaries when they both ran to be the Republican presidential candidate in 2016, launching public insults at one another.
But over the past few years Mr Rubio has softened some of his stances to align more closely with Mr Trump’s views, particularly on foreign policy – so much so that he was one of three final contenders for Mr Trump’s vice-presidential pick for this term, eventually losing out to JD Vance.
Before he was made secretary of state, the 53-year-old said Ukraine needed to seek a negotiated settlement with Russia rather than focus on regaining all territory that Russia has taken in the last decade.
“I’m not on Russia’s side – but unfortunately the reality of it is that the way the war in Ukraine is going to end is with a negotiated settlement,” he said in September.
Michael Waltz
Michael Waltz at the Republican National Convention last year. Pic: Reuters
US national security adviser Michael Waltz will be alongside Mr Rubio during the US-Russia talks.
The 51-year-old is a Green Beret veteran who served in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa.
Since 2019, he has represented a congressional district in the House, where he’s a member of the Armed Services, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees.
Before his appointment in Mr Trump’s cabinet, he co-wrote an article in The Economist that laid out his view of how the US could move to convince Russia to end the war: either by offering to ease sanctions or threatening greater assistance to Kyiv.
“America can use economic leverage, including lifting the pause on exports of liquefied natural gas and cracking down on Russia’s illicit oil sales, to bring Mr Putin to the table,” he wrote in the 2 November piece, co-authored with Matthew Kroenig, a former Pentagon strategist.
“If he refuses to talk, Washington can, as Mr Trump argued, provide more weapons to Ukraine with fewer restrictions on their use. Faced with this pressure, Mr Putin will probably take the opportunity to wind the conflict down.”
He said that he didn’t want Moscow to be able to declare its actions in Ukraine a victory.
Instead, he wrote that requiring Mr Putin to accept a deal whereby Ukraine remains an independent state, closely tied to the West “would be a strategic defeat for the Russian leader and seen as such in Beijing”.
Steve Witkoff
Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff (left): Pic: Reuters
Mr Witkoff, Mr Trump’s special Middle East envoy, is a long-time friend of the president’s and a fellow billionaire real estate developer.
The 67-year-old, who has known Mr Trump for decades, is a Republican donor and served on one of the president’s Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups to combat the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Like Mr Trump, he made his fortune in real estate in both New York and Florida, and brought family members – his wife, Lauren, and sons Alex and Zach – into the Witkoff Group.
He is regularly seen bonding with Mr Trump on the golf course, and was present on the course in Florida during the apparent assassination attempt on the president last September.
Mr Witkoff has been busy in his new Middle East role, having been Mr Trump’s man in the room for the extremely fragile Israel-Hamas ceasefire negotiations.
In a Fox News interview on Sunday, he confirmed he was heading to Riyadh, adding: “And hopefully we’ll make some really good progress.”
Sergei Lavrov
Sergei Lavrov at a meeting in Moscow. Pic: Reuters
Sergei Lavrov is Russia’s longstanding foreign minister, having taken the role back in 2004.
The highly decorated Kremlin official has been described as “the Jedi master of the dark arts of Russian diplomacy” by Sky News’ international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn.
He said Mr Lavrov is “a diplomatic bruiser who cajoles and bullies where he sees fit” who has been known, like others at the Kremlin, to make outlandish claims about the reality of the war.
Initially, when rumours of a Russian invasion sparked, he said it would never happen – then once it began, he for some time insisted that it hadn’t.
The 74-year-old made headlines when he unintentionally made the audience at an international conference in India laugh in March 2023 by attempting to portray his country as the victim of the war in Ukraine.
“The war, which we are trying to stop, which was launched against us using Ukrainian people, of course, influenced the policy of Russia, including energy policy,” he said to a chorus of laughs and groans.
Yuri Ushakov
Yuri Ushakov. Pic: AP
Mr Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov will join Mr Lavrov or the Russian side of the table.
Americans will be familiar with the Kremlin official, as he served as the Ambassador of Russia to the United States from 1998 until 2008 before taking up his current post in 2012.
What exactly is the meeting for?
Specifically, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the meeting would focus on restoring US-Russia relations and setting up talks for a potential Ukraine peace deal.
The talks will be among the first high-level in-person discussions in years between Russian and US officials and are meant to precede a meeting between Mr Trump and Mr Putin.
Mr Rubio has said the coming weeks and days would determine whether Mr Putin is serious about making peace.
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Keith Kellogg, Mr Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, is not expected to attend the meeting, as he is at NATO’s HQ in Brussels, but he has been working with Mr Trump on a plan to broker a war-ending deal with Russia.
They have offered scant details about such a plan, nor any timescale for its implementation.
This meeting comes off the back of Mr Trump’s phone call with Mr Putin last week.
Writing about the call on Truth Social, the US president said: “As we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine.
“We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations. We have also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately.”
Ukraine and Europe are not invited
The US and Russia have excluded Ukraine and Europe from the meeting, as tensions grow between America and European countries.
It’s prompted European leaders to put together their own impromptu talks in Paris, with Sir Keir Starmer saying: “We cannot allow any divisions in the alliance to distract from the external enemies we face.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has confirmed his country has been left out of the talks in Saudi Arabia, saying any negotiations without them will have “no result”.
“And we cannot acknowledge anything, any arrangements about us, that were made without us. And we will not recognise such agreements,” he told reporters on Monday.
Speaking to Sky News’ US partner network NBC News, Ukraine’s president thanked Donald Trump for his support, but added there is not “any leader in the world who can really make a deal with Vladimir Putin without us”.
Asked whether he believed Mr Trump was negotiating in good faith, Mr Zelenskyy said: “I hope so. I hope so. Yes, I count on it.
“I trust Trump because he’s the president of the US, because your people voted for him and I respect their choice.”
In an interview on CBS News on Sunday, Mr Rubio moved to reassure Europe and Ukraine that they would be part of negotiations further down the line if they were to materialise.
He said: “If it’s real negotiations, and we’re not there yet, but if that were to happen, Ukraine will have to be involved because they’re the one that were invaded, and the Europeans will have to be involved because… they have sanctions on Putin and Russia as well, and they’ve contributed to this effort.”
