Moscow, Feb 17: Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Presidential aide Yuri Ushakov are heading to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia to meet a US delegation comprising Secretary of State Marco Rubio, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on Tuesday to prepare the ground for the much-anticipated meeting between President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin on resolving the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
“At President Putin’s request, Lavrov and Ushakov are flying to Riyadh today. They will meet with their American counterparts to discuss, first and foremost, restoring the full scope of the US-Russia relations,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov while addressing a press briefing in Moscow on Monday.
Supporting the decision to keep the European Union away from the scheduled meeting, the Russian Foreign Minister stated that he saw no reason for European leaders to take part in negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine and accused Brussels of wanting to prolong the conflict.
“I don’t know what they (European officials) would do at the negotiating table. If they are going to sit at the negotiating table with the aim of continuing war, then why invite them there,” Lavrov said while speaking to the media in Moscow on Monday.
Meanwhile, Germany has expressed its unhappiness for not being invited to the negotiation table on the Russian-Ukraine conflict. The Russian media quoted Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova as saying that Germany should look for the reasons for this decision in its own country.
The recent turn of events at the Munich Security Conference gives a clear indication that the US will not allow Europe to piggyback in resolving the three-year-old Russia-Ukraine conflict. The European leaders have also openly expressed their unhappiness for being excluded from talks.
Lavrov and Rubio held a telephonic conversation on Saturday to discuss a range of issues, including the planned meeting between President Putin and President Trump. Both agreed to maintain a channel of communication to resolve the accumulated problems in US-Russian relations and “for removing unilateral barriers, inherited from the previous administration, to mutually beneficial trade, economic and investment cooperation,” stated the Russian Foreign Ministry.
IANS