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US and Ukrainian delegations held high-stakes talks in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday that Kyiv hopes can repair its fraught relationship with Washington and restart American weapons delivery and intelligence-sharing.
The Ukrainian team is expected to present US officials with a proposal for a partial ceasefire in which Ukraine and Russia would refrain from long-range drone and missile strikes, attacks on energy and civilian infrastructure, and military activities in the Black Sea.
“The meeting with the US team started in a very constructive manner. We’re working towards a just and lasting peace,” Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and leader of Kyiv’s delegation, said on Telegram ahead of the meeting in the city of Jeddah.
Ukraine has been seeking guarantees of its future security from the US, a pledge that US President Donald Trump and his team have been unwilling to make.
“The security guarantee is important because we never want this aggression to be repeated,” Yermak told reporters at the start of talks. “Now we think it’s necessary to discuss how to start this process.”
The talks came as both Ukrainian and Russian forces launched fresh attacks on each other’s territory.
On Tuesday, officials in Moscow reported the biggest ever drone attack on the capital by Ukraine since Russia’s full invasion in 2022, with more than 90 drones targeting the city and 343 downed in total across the country.
Ukraine, which also reported Russian drone strikes on several regions overnight, said its drones had targeted an oil refinery in Moscow and other strategic energy facilities, and attributed any civilian damage to the work of Russian air defences.
Russia’s defence ministry claimed the attack, which killed three people and wounded 14 others, was conducted by Ukraine “in order to demonstrate its ability to continue hostilities” on the eve of talks with the US in Saudi Arabia.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio, who leads the US delegation, told reporters that his team would seek to “understand the Ukrainian position” and gauge the concessions Kyiv would be ready to make.
The US’s top diplomat added on the eve of the talks that Kyiv would need to cede some territory to Russia as part of a peace deal.
“The Russians can’t conquer all of Ukraine, and obviously it’ll be very difficult for Ukraine in any reasonable time period to sort of force the Russians back all the way to where they were in 2014,” Rubio said, referring to Ukraine’s borders before the Kremlin’s annexation of Crimea that year.
Mike Waltz, US national security adviser, and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East, join Rubio in the US delegation.
Zelenskyy travelled to Saudi Arabia to meet Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Monday, but is not taking part in the discussions with the US. “Ukraine’s position in these talks will be fully constructive,” Zelenskyy said on X.
Ukraine has hurried over the past 10 days to mend its ties with the Trump administration after the disastrous White House meeting between Zelenskyy and the US president.
The dispute led Washington to postpone the signing of a minerals deal and pause all military assistance to Ukraine, including the sharing of intelligence that Kyiv has relied on to hit Russian targets beyond the frontline.
Witkoff told Fox News on Monday that intelligence-sharing would be discussed at the talks, but denied that Washington had stopped providing intelligence for defensive purposes.
He also said Zelenskyy had apologised for the White House argument in a letter sent to Trump.
The halt in US military assistance coincided with a new Russian offensive in the Kursk region, which was seized by Ukrainian forces in August.
Russia’s military said on Tuesday it had made further gains in the region, claiming to have retaken a further 100 sq km. Pro-Kremlin military bloggers shared images apparently showing Russian troops at the edges of Sudzha, the largest settlement held in the region by Ukraine.
Ukraine said Russia had launched ballistic missiles and 126 kamikaze drones at several of its regions overnight as part of a near-daily campaign of attack that has lasted several weeks.
The Ukrainian drone attack on Russia led several international airports to suspend operations, forcing dozens of flights to divert.
Images from the capital shared on social media showed several high-rise apartment blocks with fire and dozens of burnt-out vehicles. Officials claimed all the drones were shot down by Russian air defences.
