US negotiators hold talks with Russia on potential ceasefire
Dubai: US negotiators worked on a proposed partial ceasefire in Ukraine on Monday, meeting with representatives from Russia a day after holding separate talks with the Ukrainian team. Each side has accused the other of undermining efforts to reach a pause in the 3-year-old war.
Kyiv and Moscow 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.
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 has said he would also like to see railways and ports protected.
Talks Monday are expected to address some of those differences, as well as a potential pause in attacks in the Black Sea to ensure the safety of commercial shipping.
US and Russian representatives met in the morning in the Saudi capital, Russia’s state Tass and RIA-Novosti news agencies reported. The US and Ukrainian teams met Sunday in Riyadh. Serhii Leshchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, said the delegation remained in Riyadh on Monday and expected to meet again with the Americans.
Grigory Karasin, head of the foreign affairs committee in the Russian parliament’s upper house and a participant in Monday’s talks, told the Interfax news agency the negotiations were going on in a “creative way” and that the US and Russian delegations “understand each other’s views”.
Meanwhile, both Russia and Ukraine continued to launch attacks across their borders.
The Russian Defence Ministry said Monday a Ukrainian drone attacked an oil pumping station in southern Russia that serves a pipeline carrying Kazakhstan’s Caspian Sea oil to the Russian port of Novorossiisk for export. It said the drone was downed before it could reach the pumping station.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Russian military has been fulfilling President Vladimir Putin’s order to halt attacks on energy facilities for 30 days.
