Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has vowed that any peace talk without their participation will not be accepted.
He said this as Russia prepares to hold peace talks with US in Saudi Arabia.
“Ukraine regards any negotiations on Ukraine without Ukraine as ones that have no result, and we cannot recognise any agreements about us without us,” Zelenskyy said on Monday as the Guardian UK quoted him.
Russian and US officials are in Riyadh as talks are set to begin on Tuesday, aiming at ending the nearly three-year war between Moscow and Ukraine with Kyiv and Europe excluded from the negotiations.
Zelenskyy confirmed that Ukraine will not take part in the talks. “Ukraine did not know anything about it,” he said.
The talk is coming following last week’s call between President Trump and his Russian counterpart, where the two leaders discussed launching negotiations on the war.
The meeting between the two countries would be the first in-person discussions between US and Russia in years, after a sharp downturn in relations after the invasion.
Both sides are being represented by high-level delegations, underscoring the importance they place on the talks.
The US secretary of state Marco Rubio would lead Trump’s delegation and he has arrived in Saudi Arabia on Monday, as well as US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and White House national security adviser Mike Waltz.
On Putin’s side, Moscow’s most senior foreign policy envoy, Yuri Ushakov, along with longtime foreign minister Sergei Lavrov would attend the meeting in Saudi Arabia.
The Kremlin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said the meeting “will be devoted to the preparation of possible negotiations on the Ukrainian settlement and the organisation of a meeting between the two presidents.”
In comments cited by TASS on Monday morning, Lavrov said that Russia had no intention of making territorial concessions to Ukraine during the peace talks.
