As Ukrainian and American officials sat down in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday for their first high-level meeting since an Oval Office shouting match between their presidents last month, the goal will be finding a way to halt the bloodiest European war in generations.
But the United States, Ukraine and Russia appear to have very different ideas about what any cease-fire should look like. Two of the three took new steps to try to bridge those gaps on Tuesday.
In a conference room at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in the city of Jeddah, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz, the U.S. national security adviser, met with a delegation from Kyiv led by Andriy Yermak, the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov.
“We want to have very constructive, deep, friendly, partner conversation,” Mr. Yermak said before the talks began.
Ukraine has proposed an immediate cessation of air and sea strikes, but wants security guarantees before its infantry lays down its arms. The United States is pressing for an immediate, comprehensive cease-fire. And Russia, which is not at the talks, has signaled that it wants concessions of its own before halting the war it started.
If the Ukrainian proposal to halt the air and sea strikes is agreed to, it would bring about the first negotiated reduction in the fighting in three years of war, but the Trump administration has made clear it is looking for more. Ukraine has offered the unconditional truce on long-range strikes as a confidence building measure while continuing talks on a more comprehensive cease-fire.
Mr. Rubio has said that Ukraine would have to make concessions over land that Russia has taken since 2014 as part of any peace agreement.
“The most important thing that we have to leave here with is a strong sense that Ukraine is prepared to do difficult things, like the Russians are going to have to do difficult things, to end this conflict or at last pause it in some way,” Mr. Rubio told reporters on Monday.
Mr. Yermak, the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, said Tuesday before the talks got underway that his delegation was “very open” to any dialogue that would bring a settlement, but noted the importance of security guarantees — an issue that has become contentious in negotiations with the United States.
These are the first high-level, in-person talks for the United States and Ukraine since a Feb. 28 White House meeting between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine unraveled into an argument and insults. “You’ve talked enough,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Zelensky at one point. “You won’t win.”
Since then, Mr. Zelensky has sought to smooth relations with Mr. Trump, and Ukrainian officials have been careful in framing their proposal. Over the weekend, French and British officials coached the Ukrainian delegation on how to talk with the Americans, a Ukrainian official with the delegation said.
Ukraine favors a truce at sea and in the air, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly of the delegation’s plans, but may pose the idea tentatively. “We don’t know if the Russians are ready for any steps to peace” the official said, adding that the Ukrainians would ask if the Americans, who have been talking to the Russians separately, had insight into Moscow’s position.
The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said Tuesday that it was “impossible to talk about positions now” and that Russia expected the American side to inform Moscow about the results of talks with Ukraine.
Mr. Zelensky proposed the partial cease-fire last week, with support from President Emmanuel Macron of France. Russia has not directly responded. Ukraine’s president has also called for an all-for-all exchange of prisoners of war, a traditional confidence-building measure in peace talks.
The proposals that Ukraine is bringing to Jeddah are its most detailed to date. In return, it is seeking one immediate action from the United States: a resumption of American military aid and intelligence sharing that was suspended after the Oval Office debacle.
The intelligence cutoff has already impaired soldiers in combat, particularly in the Kursk region of Russia, where Russian soldiers, aided by fighter from North Korea, have been rapidly advancing, according to Ukrainian commanders in the field.
The picture appears somewhat different of late in eastern Ukraine, where Kyiv’s forces have stalled a Russian offensive and won back small patches of land. Since the beginning of the month, Russia has captured only five square miles of Ukrainian territory.
Mr. Rubio declined to outline a potential agreement but made clear that concessions will be critical. He said it would be important to learn what Russia is willing to concede. “We don’t know how far apart they truly are,” he said.
“I think both sides need to come to an understanding that there’s no military solution to this situation,” Mr. Rubio said.
It is unclear whether the offer of an aerial and maritime truce, perhaps accompanied by an agreement to share revenues from Ukraine’s mineral mining with the United States, would be sufficient for Mr. Trump to resume intelligence sharing and restart weapons shipments.
Mr. Trump has pushed for the warring sides to stop fighting as soon as possible, without first negotiating terms that might include mechanisms to safeguard the peace. At the Oval Office meeting, he argued that a cease-fire could be achieved more swiftly than a peace agreement, and that Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, would keep his word.
Russia violated two previous cease-fires, reached in 2014 and 2015, and denied an intention to invade just days before invading in 2022.
In an interview on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Mr. Trump reiterated that he thought that Mr. Zelensky was not grateful for American military aid.
Mr. Trump also said that he also saw “some weakness” with Russia that would facilitate talks. “You know, it takes two,” he said.
Russia has publicly called for conditions to be imposed before a cease-fire takes effect, and Mr. Putin has signaled that he wants to secure a raft of concessions from Ukraine and the West.
Analysts believe that beyond seeking to keep the territory Russia has captured so far and claiming additional land, Mr. Putin will demand a guarantee that Ukraine not join NATO, a retreat by the Western alliance from Central and Eastern Europe and limits to the size and firepower of Ukraine’s military.
“We must choose for ourselves a version of peace that would suit us and that would ensure calm for our country in the long-term historical perspective,” Mr. Putin said on Thursday.
Russia is also pressing for Ukraine to hold presidential elections, arguing that Mr. Zelensky’s rule is illegitimate. Ukrainian elections scheduled for the spring of 2024 were suspended because of the war.
For Ukraine, the talks pose the dispiriting challenge of adapting to an ally that is now adopting positions of its enemy. Both Russia and the Trump administration have questioned Mr. Zelensky’s legitimacy and accused Ukraine of starting the war.
The United States has also offered no support for a role for European peacekeepers in Ukraine under a cease-fire — a prospect top military officials are expected to discuss in Paris on Tuesday as the talks in Jeddah are underway.
Ukraine’s broader goals in the talks with the United States are to slow the fallout on its war effort from America’s geopolitical pivot to Russia under Mr. Trump. That might buy time for European states to ramp up aid, analysts and former Ukrainian officials said.
“It’s the alignment between Putin and Trump that is the problem,” said Orysia Lutsevych, a Ukraine analyst at the London-based research institute Chatham House. “There’s nothing that Zelensky can do. Ukraine is ready to compromise but not capitulate. I don’t see a leader of Ukraine wanting to be friendly to Trump and Putin.”
Ukraine is unlikely to bend on it insistence that there be an enforcement mechanism for any cease-fire, said Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister. Russia has greater potential to rebuild its army over any pause in the fighting, he said.
“If we have nothing, and Russia is pumping up their forces, in one year they will be ready to strike again,” Mr. Zagorodnyuk said in a telephone interview.
Reporting was contributed by Marc Santora from Kyiv, Ukraine, Anton Troianovski from Berlin, Ivan Nechepurenko from Tbilisi, Georgia, and Aurelien Breeden from Paris.