 "A Russian floating dock is towed by tugboats through Bosphorus to the Black Sea, in Istanbul, Turkey, on September 18, 2024. Reuters File")
The Kremlin on Thursday said that the next round of US-Russia talks may take place on Sunday or early next week in the Saudi city of Jeddah, as Washington is also set to engage in discussions with Kyiv in Saudi Arabia in the coming days.
US President Donald Trump had conversations with both Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this week.
“It may not be Sunday itself, the nuances are being agreed. It could be the start, the very start, of next week,” AFP quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying.
Apart from Ukrainian peace settlement talks, Russia and the US will also discuss ways to ensure safe shipping in the Black Sea.
Peskov said that when Putin and Trump spoke by telephone on Tuesday, they had discussed the “Black Sea Initiative.”
Turkey and the United Nations played key roles in mediating the Black Sea Grain Initiative, an agreement established in July 2022 that enabled the secure export of nearly 33 million metric tons of Ukrainian grain across the Black Sea amid the ongoing conflict.
After a year, Russia exited the agreement, citing significant barriers to its own food and fertilizer exports.
“We fulfilled all the conditions then, but the conditions in relation to us were not fulfilled,” Peskov Reuters quoted Peskov as saying.
The White House, in its March 18 statement on the Putin-Trump call, said the leaders agreed to technical negotiation on the implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, a full ceasefire and permanent peace.
The World Bank’s global commodities outlook from April 2024 says that despite the Black Sea shipping risks, both Russia and Ukraine were shipping grain to global markets without major problems. It also said the collapse of the Black Sea Grain Initiative had a minimal fallout.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe bank’s latest report from October 2024 does not mention Black Sea shipping risks.
It was unclear if US officials would meet both the Ukrainian and Russian teams on the same day, or if there was a possibility of three-way talks that would involve Kyiv and Moscow talking face-to-face.
US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said Wednesday that “technical teams” from Russia and the US would meet in Riyadh “to focus on implementing and expanding the partial ceasefire President Trump secured from Russia”.
Putin turned down a US-proposed unconditional ceasefire in Ukraine, agreeing only to a 30-day halt in strikes on energy infrastructure.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 has left hundreds of thousands of dead and injured, displaced millions of people, reduced towns to rubble and triggered the biggest confrontation between Moscow and the West in six decades.
The conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014 after a Russia-friendly president was toppled in Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution and Russia annexed Crimea, with Russian-backed separatist forces then fighting Ukraine’s armed forces in the east.
With inputs from agencies