US negotiators are holding talks in the Saudi capital Riyadh with their Ukrainian counterparts and separately with the Russians on Monday.
Washington’s aim is to bring about an immediate partial ceasefire to the war in Ukraine, followed by a comprehensive peace deal.
So could these Riyadh talks produce the breakthrough so many are hoping for?
It depends who you listen to.
“I feel that he (Putin) wants peace,” said President Trump’s personal envoy Steve Witkoff, adding: “I think that you’re going to see in Saudi Arabia on Monday some real progress.”
Yet Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman has dampened expectations. “We are only at the beginning of this path,” he told Russian state TV.
Kyiv suffered one of its heaviest attacks from Russian drones on Saturday night, with three people killed, including a five-year-old girl.
“We need to push Putin to give a real order to stop the strikes,” said Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in his evening address on Sunday. “The one who brought this war must take it away.”
The Kremlin, meanwhile, seems to be in no rush to sign up to a ceasefire, with Vladimir Putin adding on numerous “nuances”, or preconditions, before agreeing to the 30-day ceasefire proposed by Washington and agreed to by Kyiv.
In Riyadh the US-Ukraine talks began soon after nightfall on Sunday, behind closed doors in one of Saudi Arabia’s many luxury establishments, with the Ukrainian delegation headed by the country’s defence minister, Rustem Umerov.
These, he said, were “technical” discussions, focusing on how best to safeguard energy facilities and critical infrastructure.
Black Sea shipping lanes are also under discussion, with Russia reportedly keen to revive a deal that allowed Ukraine to export grain from its ports without being attacked, in exchange for relief on sanctions.
Both sides, Russia and Ukraine, have carried out hugely destructive attacks on each other’s infrastructure.
Moscow has sought to plunge Ukraine’s population into cold and darkness by targeting its electricity generation, while Kyiv has become increasingly successful in its long-range drone strikes that have struck Russian oil facilities critical to its war effort.
President Trump wants a quick end to this war, Europe’s worst since 1945 and one which has led to combined casualties on both sides of hundreds of thousands of killed, captured, wounded or missing men.
Ukraine’s leadership, still bruised from that catastrophic row in the Oval Office last month, is trying hard to convince Washington it is not the obstacle to peace.
When the Americans proposed a comprehensive 30-day ceasefire on land, sea and in the air at talks in Jeddah this month, Ukraine quickly agreed to the terms.
The ball, said the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the time, was now in Russia’s court.
But despite the US failure to get Moscow to agree to that ceasefire, the Trump administration is putting little or no pressure, at least not in public, on Russia to fall into line. In fact, quite the opposite.
In an interview this weekend with the pro-Trump journalist Tucker Carlson, Steve Witkoff, the man spearheading the US drive for a ceasefire, appeared to take a stance totally at odds with that of Europe.
Ukraine, he suggested, was “a false country”, Russia had been provoked and Putin was a man of his word who could be trusted.
Witkoff, a former New York real estate developer and golfing partner of Donald Trump, also dismissed Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s efforts to put together a military force to help safeguard an eventual peace deal in Ukraine, calling it “a posture and a pose”.
