Russia and the United States will meet in Saudi Arabia on Monday.
Officials from the United States and Ukraine are expected to meet in Saudi Arabia on March 23 to negotiate a potential partial cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine after three years of war.
The meeting will be held one day before U.S. and Russian delegations are scheduled to meet for talks on a 30-day truce, which would see both sides stop targeting each other’s energy infrastructure. Russia said its Monday meeting with U.S. officials will be focused on finding ways to preserve the safety of shipping in the Black Sea.
Both meetings are occurring after a series of discussions in Saudi Arabia, first between Russia and the United States and then later between Ukraine and the United States, which saw Kyiv accept a 30-day cease-fire proposal.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov will lead the nation’s delegation at the Sunday meeting, which would allow Ukraine to act in a “very quick and very substantive” way, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Ukrainian officials, however, have said they see the meeting in Riyadh as simply technical.
On Friday, foreign ministry spokesperson Heorhii Tykhyi said the Ukrainian and U.S. delegations were set to “clarify the modalities, the nuances of possible different ceasefire regimes, how to monitor them, how to control them, in general, what is included in their scope.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 18 agreed to President Donald Trump’s plan for Russia and Ukraine to cease attacks on each other’s energy infrastructures for 30 days, with Putin ordering the Russian military to stop them.
Meanwhile, both Russia and Ukraine have reported continued attacks from either side, with Russia continuing to slowly advance into eastern Ukraine.
On Saturday, Trump said plans to end the war between Russia and Ukraine were “somewhat under control.”
Ukrainian officials said on Sunday that a large-scale overnight Russian drone attack on Kyiv killed at least three, including a 5-year-old child. The strikes caught high-rise apartment buildings on fire and damaged areas of the capital.
On Sunday, Russian authorities said their air defenses had shot down 59 Ukrainian drones targeting the nation’s southwestern areas. They say the attacks killed at least one person in Rostov.
Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, an escalation of the Russo–Ukrainian War that began in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea.
Last week, Britain’s Ministry of Defense estimated that somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 Russian soldiers have perished since early 2022.
Zelenskyy said in December 2024 that roughly 43,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed since that time.
Reuters contributed to this report.