Kremlin says it won't give details of talks with US over Ukraine

Bloomberg News on Mar 25, 2025

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The Kremlin said it won’t disclose details of 12 hours of negotiations between Russian and U.S. officials in Saudi Arabia, sowing confusion about progress toward securing at least a partial ceasefire in the war in Ukraine.

Results of the “technical” discussions are now being studied in Moscow and Washington and “the content of these negotiations will definitely not be made public,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Tuesday, declining to elaborate. “This should not be expected,” he said.

Russia’s state-run Tass news service had reported late Monday that the two sides were attempting to agree on a joint statement, citing a member of the Russian delegation that it didn’t identify.

Peskov spoke after U.S. and Ukrainian officials held a second round of talks in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Tuesday, following discussions on Sunday that Ukraine’s defense minister, Rustem Umerov, had called “productive and focused.”

The Russia-U.S. dialog was difficult but constructive and covered many issues, Grigory Karasin, a former deputy foreign minister who jointly led the Kremlin’s negotiating team, said earlier Tuesday, according to Tass. Talks will continue and involve the United Nations as well as other countries, he said.

The U.S. had billed the meetings as the next stage in President Donald Trump’s campaign to bring an end to Russia’s more than three-year-long invasion of Ukraine. Washington and Moscow said the talks focused on securing a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea to ensure the safety of shipping.

Russia favors a Black Sea agreement in a form that suits all sides, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Russia’s First Channel TV on Tuesday, according to Tass. It will need guarantees to resume an agreement, he said.

Turkey and the United Nations mediated talks on a grain-export deal from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in 2022-2023 that collapsed when Russia withdrew.

The Saudi meetings followed Trump’s separate phone calls last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He secured agreement from the two leaders for a 30-day truce covering energy infrastructure though details of how this would be enforced and monitored remained unclear.

White House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz suggested on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that the negotiations would lead into discussions about “the line of control, which is the actual front lines” of the war that started when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

“That gets into the details of verification mechanisms, peace-keeping, freezing the lines where they are,” Waltz said. “And then, of course, the broader and permanent peace” including security guarantees for Ukraine.

Ukraine unconditionally supports the idea of a full ceasefire with Russia that goes beyond the energy truce, the nation’s envoy to the U.S. said.

“We embrace it wholeheartedly,” Ambassador Oksana Markarova said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Monday. “We need Russia to agree to that,” she said, adding “it takes two to dance.”