White House envoy, national security advisor head to Saudi Arabia for Russia talks

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By Gram Slattery and David Ljunggren

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – White House Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on Sunday said he would travel to Saudi Arabia later in the day with National Security Advisor Mike Waltz for talks on how to end Russia’s war on Ukraine.

His remarks to Fox News were the first official confirmation that the talks would take place.

“I am going tonight,” Witkoff said of the trip in a Fox News interview. “I’ll be traveling there with the national security advisor, and we’ll be having meetings at the direction of the president, and hopefully we’ll make some really good progress.”

The upcoming talks in Saudi Arabia will be among the first high-level in-person discussions between Russian and U.S. officials in years and are meant to precede a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Ukrainian leaders and officials in other European countries have publicly expressed frustration that U.S. officials have excluded them with some negotiations with the Russians. Ukrainian officials have said they were not invited to the upcoming meeting in Saudi Arabia and that they would not be bound by any agreement that comes out of any dialogue there.

Witkoff pushed back against the idea that the Ukrainians have been cut out of talks with the Russians. In the Fox interview, he noted that Ukrainian officials met with several high-ranking U.S. officials during the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, though he did not say that the Ukrainians were welcome in Saudi Arabia.

“I don’t think this is about excluding anybody,” Witkoff said. “In fact, it’s about including everybody.”

(Reporting by Gram Slattery; Writing by David Ljunggren; Editing by Mark Porter)