The Ukrainian president is trying to secure a favorable deal to end his country’s war with Russia. Saudi Arabia has emerged as a host to talks that the Trump administration is pursuing with Moscow and Kyiv.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, working to repair his strained relationship with the United States and secure a favorable deal to end the war with Russia, met on Monday with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia.
The talks between Mr. Zelensky and Prince Mohammed, the de facto Saudi leader, who has sought to take a central role on the world’s diplomatic stage, were described as “very good” by Dmytro Lytvyn, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, according to CNN. Details of the meeting have not yet been shared.
It came ahead of talks planned for Tuesday between Ukrainian and U.S. officials in the oil-rich Gulf state.
“Ukraine has been seeking peace since the very first second of the war, and we have always said that the only reason it continues is Russia,” Mr. Zelensky wrote Monday on social media before he landed in the seaside city of Jeddah.
Once shunned internationally because of accusations of human rights abuses that he has denied, Prince Mohammed has positioned his country as a middleman in efforts to end the war in Ukraine. Last year, Saudi Arabia played a pivotal role in a complex U.S.-Russia prisoner swap, and President Trump has suggested it could be the site of a possible meeting between him and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Last month, Mr. Zelensky postponed a trip to Saudi Arabia after it hosted an extraordinary meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, in which the two sides sought to reset their relationship and discussed the war in Ukraine, without Mr. Zelensky.
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