When President Trump said on Wednesday that he might soon meet with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, to discuss an end to the nearly three-year war in Ukraine, he named what may have seemed like an unlikely venue for the talks.
“We expect that he’ll come here, and I’ll go there and we’re going to meet also probably in Saudi Arabia the first time,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’ll meet in Saudi Arabia, see if we can get something done.”
Mr. Trump cited both his and Mr. Putin’s relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, as a reason for choosing the Gulf nation for their first meeting since he regained the White House. “We know the crown prince, and I think it’d be a very good place to be,” Mr. Trump said.
There was no immediate comment from Saudi Arabia regarding a potential Trump-Putin meeting in the country. The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said Thursday that preparations for such a meeting could take as long as several months, but added that both sides agreed the Saudi capital, Riyadh, was a suitable location, according to the Russian Interfax news agency.
Saudi Arabia has increasingly played the role of mediator in the Russia-Ukraine war, along with its neighbor the United Arab Emirates.
For Prince Mohammed, mediating the war presents an opportunity to solidify his status as a global leader with influence that extends beyond the Middle East. It also enables him to position himself as a key intermediary capable of bringing powerful nations to the table, despite his continuing struggles to end Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the devastating war in Yemen.
In September 2022, Prince Mohammed helped to broker the release of 10 prisoners from various countries as part of a broader exchange process between Russia and Ukraine. Later, in May 2023, he invited Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to speak at a gathering of Arab leaders in the Saudi city of Jeddah, where Mr. Zelensky called on Middle Eastern nations to support Ukraine against Russia.
Later that summer, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine jointly hosted closed-door talks in Jeddah aimed at ending the war, attended by diplomats from over 40 countries, though not from Russia.
