Before the interlocuters could sit in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, US President Donald Trump said on March 21 that ongoing negotiations to end the war between Russia and Ukraine include discussions on land division.
Donald Trump, US President
Days ahead of the three-way talks among the interlocutors of the US, Russia and Ukraine to iron out a ceasefire bringing the Russia-Ukraine war to an end, US President Donald Trump said that the potential agreement included division of Ukraine.
Before the interlocuters could sit in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, US President Donald Trump said on March 21 that ongoing negotiations to end the war between Russia and Ukraine include discussions on land division.
Donald Trump: Negotiations include division of Ukraine
Talking to journalists, he said, “Pretty soon, we’ll have a full ceasefire, and then we’re going to have a contract.”
He added, “The contract’s being negotiated, the contract in terms of dividing up the lands, etc., etc. It’s being negotiated as we speak.”
Talking about the peace deal, the US President told the journalists, “In getting that ceasefire, they had a lot of guns pointing at each other. You had some soldiers, unfortunately, surrounded by other soldiers. I think we’re going to have a ceasefire in a lot of areas, and so far, that’s all held very well.”
The three days of meetings, which did not include direct Russian-Ukrainian negotiations, are part of an attempt to hammer out details on a partial pause in the 3-year-old war in Ukraine.
30-Day ceasefire on anvil
It has been a struggle to reach even a limited, 30-day ceasefire — which Moscow and Kyiv agreed to in principle last week
Russia and Ukraine have also taken differing interpretations of what a possible partial ceasefire would look like and disagreed over what kinds of targets would be included in a pause on strikes — even after U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with the leaders of both countries to advance a deal.
No attack on energy infrastructure?
Yet despite the numerous sticking points — the White House has said a partial ceasefire would include ending attacks on “energy and infrastructure,” while the Kremlin declared that the agreement referred more narrowly to “energy infrastructure” — attempts to secure safe commercial shipping in the Black Sea appeared to garner support in principle from both parties, though no specific agreements have been announced.
Safe shipping in Black Sea
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday told the country’s state-run Channel One TV station that the Russian and U.S. delegations in Riyadh had discussed “primarily issues of safe shipping in the Black Sea” — a major shipping corridor on which both Russia and Ukraine have ports and coastline. Lavrov also said that Moscow is up for resuming — “in some form, acceptable to everyone” — a 2022 deal that allowed Ukraine to ship grain through the Black Sea to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia where hunger was a growing threat and high food prices had pushed more people into poverty.
The landmark Black Sea Grain initiative was brokered by the U.N. and Turkey in the summer of 2022; Moscow halted it in July 2023 until its demands to get Russian food and fertilizer to the world were met.
Serhii Leshchenko, advisor to the head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office, said that the Ukrainian delegation would brief Zelenskyy following renewed talks on Tuesday with the U.S. delegation.
(With inputs from AP)