White House Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on Sunday said he would travel to Saudi Arabia later in the day with National Security Advisor Mike Waltz for talks on how to end Russia’s war on Ukraine.
His remarks to Fox News were the first official confirmation that the talks would take place.
“I am going tonight,” Witkoff said of the trip in a Fox News interview. “I’ll be traveling there with the national security advisor, and we’ll be having meetings at the direction of the president, and hopefully we’ll make some really good progress.”
The upcoming talks in Saudi Arabia will be among the first high-level in-person discussions between Russian and US officials in years and are meant to precede a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
They come just days after Trump announced that he had spoken to Putin for the first time since returning to office, and that they had agreed to start talks on a ceasefire in Ukraine.
Former property developer Witkoff was heavily involved in a prisoner exchange deal earlier this week that paved the way for the call between Trump and Putin.
Kyiv and its European allies were however blindsided by Trump’s sudden move to start negotiations with Russia. Both fear being frozen out of negotiations on Ukraine’s future after the biggest land invasion in Europe since World War II.
Witkoff pushed back against the idea that the Ukrainians have been cut out of talks with the Russians. In the Fox interview, he noted that Ukrainian officials met with several high-ranking US officials during the Munich Security Conference over the weekend.
“I don’t think this is about excluding anybody,” Witkoff said. “In fact, it’s about including everybody.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday said the next few days would determine if Putin was serious about peace in Ukraine.
