Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has postponed a visit to Saudi Arabia after he was excluded from the peace talks between Russia and the U.S. ongoing in the country.
At a press conference in Turkey on Tuesday, Zelensky said that he had pushed the long-planned visit, which was announced last week, to avoid the impression that he was taking part in the negotiations.
“We are honest and we are open for peace talks but I have taken the decision of not visiting Saudi Arabia as I don’t want to create a false image,” the Ukrainian leader said, according to the Telegraph.
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Zelensky was supposed to fly to Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, but now the trip will take place in March.
On Monday, Zelensky had slammed news of the peace talks, revealing that he had not received any notice that they were happening—or an invite.
“Ukraine regards any negotiations on Ukraine without Ukraine as ones that have no result, and we cannot recognize… any agreements about us without us,” he said, according to The Guardian.
The conversation in Riyadh is happening between top officials in Donald Trump’s administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and their Russian counterparts.
The discussion—the most significant between the two powers since the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine began three years ago—comes a week after Trump announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin was open to peace talks.
At the discussion on Tuesday, Rubio announced that the U.S. and Russia had agreed to restore staffing at their respective embassies in the other country—a reversal of American policy, according to NBC News.
Russia has been diplomatically and financially isolated from the U.S. since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The Trump administration’s approach to negotiating the end of the conflict has created fear from Ukraine and its European allies that Zelensky and his team are being sidelined.
Rubio, however, insisted earlier on Tuesday that “nobody” was being iced out of the conversations, according to the Telegraph.
