Doha, Mar 25: US and Russian negotiators on Monday sat down for talks in Saudi Arabia on a partial ceasefire in Ukraine, hours after a round of negotiations between US and Ukrainian delegations, Russian news reports said.The state Tass and RIA-Novosti news agencies said the negotiations had begun in the capital Riyadh. The meeting is expected to be followed by another contact between US and Ukrainian teams.
The separate meetings are set to discuss details of a pause in long-range attacks from both Russia and Ukraine against energy facilities and civilian infrastructure, as well as a halt on attacks in the Black Sea to ensure safe commercial shipping.
Ukraine and Russia agreed in principle Wednesday to a limited ceasefire after US President Donald Trump spoke with the countries’ leaders, but the parties have offered different views of what targets would be off-limits to attack and accused each other of undermining efforts to reach a pause.
While the White House said “energy and infrastructure” would be covered, the Kremlin declared that the agreement referred more narrowly to “energy infrastructure”. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he would also like railways and ports to be protected.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized Friday that the agreement reached between Trump and Putin referred only to energy facilities, adding that the Russian military is fulfilling Putin’s order to halt such attacks for 30 days.
Peskov accused Ukraine of derailing the partial ceasefire with an attack on a gas metering station in Sudzha in Russia’s Kursk region. Ukraine’s military General Staff rejected Moscow’s accusations and blamed the Russian military for shelling the Sudzha gas metering station, a claim Peskov rejected as “absurd”.
As negotiations on a partial ceasefire progressed, Russia launched a barrage of drones across Ukraine overnight on Saturday that killed at least seven people, including a father and his 5-year-old daughter in the capital Kyiv.
In a televised statement Sunday evening, Zelenskyy said that “since March 11, a proposal for an unconditional ceasefire has been on the table, and these attacks could have already stopped. But it is Russia that continues all this”.
“There must be more pressure on Russia to stop this terror,” Zelenskyy said, adding that it “depends on all our partners — the US, Europe, and others around the world”.
Zelenskyy has emphasized that Ukraine is open to a full, 30-day ceasefire that Trump has proposed, while Russian President Vladimir Putin has made a complete ceasefire conditional on a halt of arms supplies to Kyiv and a suspension of Ukraine’s military mobilization — demands rejected by Ukraine and its Western allies.
