Ukraine said it would support a Trump administration proposal for a 30-day cease-fire with Russia after talks in Saudi Arabia, as the United States agreed to immediately lift its pause on intelligence sharing and military assistance to Ukraine.
The announcement on Tuesday gave new momentum to efforts to halt the fighting. The United States and its allies said the onus was now on Russia to end the war.
What happened in Saudi Arabia?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz, the U.S. national security adviser, sat down in the city of Jeddah with a delegation led by Andriy Yermak, the Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov.
After more than eight hours of talks, the United States and Ukraine issued a joint statement saying that Kyiv would support the Trump administration’s proposal for a 30-day cease-fire with Russia, subject to Russia’s approval. The United States said it would resume providing military aid and intelligence to Ukraine, which it had suspended after an explosive U.S.-Ukraine meeting at the White House.
The United States and Ukraine also agreed to conclude “as soon as possible” a deal to develop Ukraine’s critical mineral resources.
“We’ll take this offer now to the Russians, and we hope that they’ll say yes, that they’ll say yes to peace,” Mr. Rubio said at the end of the meetings. “The ball is now in their court.”
The United States has been pursuing talks separately with Russia and with Ukraine.
A spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia told reporters on Wednesday that the Kremlin was “carefully studying” the outcome of the talks between the United States and Ukraine, and their call for a monthlong cease-fire.
The spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said he expected the United States to inform Russia in the coming days of “the details of the negotiations that took place and the understandings that were reached.” He raised the possibility of another phone call between Mr. Putin and President Trump, signaling that the Kremlin saw the cease-fire proposal as just a part of a broader flurry of diplomacy.
While Mr. Trump says he wants to end the war as soon as possible, Mr. Putin has signaled that he will not stop fighting until he extracts major concessions from the West and from Kyiv, including a pledge that Ukraine will not join NATO and that the alliance will reduce its presence in Central and Eastern Europe.
Ukraine and Russia trade strikes
Ahead of the talks, Ukraine and Russia launched deadly strikes on each other’s territory, including a large-scale drone attack on Moscow.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said it shot down at least 91 drones before dawn on Tuesday in the Moscow region, along with over 240 drones targeting other parts of the country. At least three people were killed and 18 others were injured in the Moscow region, the Russian authorities said. Ukraine’s military said it had targeted Moscow’s oil refinery, along with an oil production station in the Orel region. Neither claim could be independently verified.
Kyiv has long maintained that the only way to force Russia to accept an enduring peace deal is through force and by raising the cost of the war for the Kremlin. The timing of the overnight attack on Moscow was meant to drive home that message, Andriy Kovalenko, a senior Ukrainian official focused on Russian disinformation operations, said in a statement.
Russia has also continued its relentless bombardment of Ukrainian civilian and military institutions, regularly launching more than 100 drones each night.
On Tuesday morning, Ukraine’s Air Force said that Russia had launched 126 drones and one ballistic missile overnight. At least one person was killed when a Russian drone struck a warehouse in Kharkiv and at least 17 others were injured in attacks elsewhere in the country, the Ukrainian authorities said.
State of the war
Russian forces have long held the initiative on the battlefield in Ukraine. They also have managed to retake about two-thirds of the territory Ukraine seized last summer in the Kursk region of Russia.
Kyiv has kept its hold on territory in Kursk despite heavy casualties in the hope of using it as a bargaining chip in peace talks.
But Ukrainian forces have stalled the Russian offensive in the eastern Donetsk region in recent months and have started to win back small patches of land, according to military analysts and Ukrainian soldiers. However, military analysts have been debating whether, after more than 15 months on the offensive, Russian brigades are depleted or are regrouping for a renewed push.
The war has killed and wounded more than a million soldiers in all, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates.
Now drones — not the big, heavy artillery that the war was once known for — inflict about 70 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties, according to the Ukrainian military.
U.S.-Ukraine tensions
These were the first high-level, in-person talks for the United States and Ukraine since a Feb. 28 meeting at the White House in which Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance castigated and berated President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying he was not grateful enough for U.S. support.
Ukraine has been facing the dispiriting challenge of adapting to its main ally adopting the positions of its enemy. Russia and the Trump administration question Mr. Zelensky’s legitimacy and have blamed Ukraine for starting the war.
Since the Oval Office debacle, Ukraine has sought to smooth over relations with the Trump administration. French and British officials coached the Ukrainian delegation before the talks in Jeddah about how to speak with the Americans, a Ukrainian official with the delegation said.
Potential concessions
While European allies have pledged further support to Kyiv, Ukraine is seen as having few options for reversing Russia’s recent gains on the battlefield.
On the flight to Jeddah, Mr. Rubio said Ukraine would have to make concessions over land that Russia had taken since 2014 as part of any agreement to end the war. But he also said that it would be imperative in future talks with Moscow to determine what Russia was willing to concede.
“We don’t know how far apart they truly are,” he said, referring to Ukraine and Russia.
Before Tuesday’s talks, Ukraine had insisted that any cease-fire include security guarantees, but there was no indication from the statement issued on Tuesday that any such guarantees would be provided before any interim cease-fire would take effect.
Mr. Waltz told reporters, however, that security guarantees had been part of the conversations in Jeddah.
“We also got into substantive details on how this war is going to permanently end, what type of guarantees they’re going to have for their long-term security and prosperity,” Mr. Waltz said.
Anton Troianovski and Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.
