Russian Officials Praise Trump For ‘Very Useful’ Talks In Saudi Arabia While Democrats Slam ‘Sell Out’ Of Ukraine

Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, praised the discussions between U.S. and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia this week. President Donald Trump‘s efforts to end the war in Ukraine through recent talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin have also been widely recognized as a major shift in U.S. policy. 

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov commended Trump for attributing the Ukraine conflict to efforts to bring Kyiv into the NATO military alliance.

Russian and U.S. officials had high-level talks on Tuesday in Riyadh, hours before Trump suggested that Ukraine was to blame for the conflict. The four-hour meetings, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Lavrov, agreed to set up teams to investigate restoring staffing at the U.S. and Russian embassies in Moscow and Washington.

The meeting came a week after Trump spoke to Putin by phone. It was the first face-to-face meeting between the nations since former Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Lavrov in Geneva in January 2022 to prevent the Ukraine conflict.

Rubio told reporters that negotiators agreed to “begin to discuss, think about, and examine both the geopolitical and economic cooperation that could result from an end to the conflict in Ukraine.”

Lavrov told reporters that under the Trump administration, he had “reason to believe that the American side has begun to better understand our position.” He said the meeting was “very useful” as he confirmed efforts to “remove obstacles” to diplomatic efforts from the Biden administration.

“No one is being sidelined here,” Rubio said in response to Ukraine leader Volodymyr Zelensky’s frustration with his exclusion from peace talks. “Obviously, there’s going to be engagement and consultation with Ukraine, with our partners in Europe and others. But ultimately, the Russian side will be indispensable to this effort.”

He continued to say that ending the conflict cannot happen “unless we have at least some normalcy in the way our diplomatic missions operate in Moscow and in Washington, D.C.”

“We need joint projects, including in the Arctic and other regions,” Dmitriev told reporters. Rubio responded to the suggestion, saying that it could open opportunities to partner with Russia “on issues that hopefully will be good for the world and also improve our relations in the long term.”

Russian state news agency TASS reported a statement from Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, who said the talks had paved the way for a possible meeting between Trump and Putin. In a Security conference in Munich last week, Zelensky said that Kyiv “regards any negotiations on Ukraine without Ukraine as ones that have no result, and we cannot recognize any agreements about us without us.”

Democrats were less charitable in their assessment of Trump’s Ukraine policy. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California) wrote on BlueSky, “It was perhaps fitting that Munich was the site of the Trump Administration’s dramatic appeasement of the Kremlin dictator, when the Vice President attacked our western allies, and the Defense Secretary weakened our NATO alliance.”