At a meeting in the Saudi capital that included the U.S. and Russian top diplomats, the way was paved for talks to end the Ukraine war and to improve bilateral relations, while Europe is furious, reports Joe Lauria.
High-level U.S. and Russian delegations meeting on Ukraine in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025 (U.S. State Dept.)
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
The Ukrainian war, which began in 2014 as a civil conflict and led to Russia’s intervention eight years later in February 2022, appeared headed to a resolution after top U.S. and Russian officials met in the Saudi capital Riyadh on Tuesday, incensing European and Ukrainian leaders who were excluded.
Speaking to reporters after meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out what was accomplished in Riyadh.
He said four principles had been agreed to: restoring ties by reopening diplomatic missions; the U.S. would appoint a high-level team to achieve “the end of the conflict in Ukraine” that is “enduring” and acceptable to all parties; the countries would work together towards economic cooperation; and the participants at the Tuesday meeting to remain engaged.
U.S. National Security Advisor Michael Waltz told reporters after the four and a half hour meeting that the U.S. was seeking a permanent end to the war.
“The practical reality is that there is going to be some discussion of territory and a discussion of security guarantees,” Waltz said, adding that President Donald Trump wants the killing to end and is “determined to act very quickly.”
Walz pointed out that less than a week after a 90-minute call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the first call between Russian and U.S. leaders since 2021, the two sides were meeting in Riyadh.
“We expect to continue to drive that pace, not only to end the war, but then to unlock what could be very productive and stalizing relationships going forward,” Waltz said.
Asked whether the U.S. would accept Russian retaining territory that it conquered, Waltz said that is “for the tough work ahead, but the important thing is that we have started that process.”
“President Trump has shifted the question from if the war is going to end, to how it’s going to end,” Waltz said.
“What happened in Saudi Arabia is the most positive news for Ukrainians in years,” Jeffery Sachs, the Columbia University economist and geopolitical analyst, told Democracy Now! “President Trump understands, and unfortunately previous presidents did not, that the U.S. provocations need to stop, so this war stops, so the deaths stop. That is the bottom line.”
Sachs pointed out the 30-year expansion of NATO towards Russia’s borders despite a promise not to and over strenuous Russian objections; the U.S. backing for the 2014 violent coup in Kiev; the U.S. rejection of implementing the Minsk accords that would have left autonomous Russian-speaking areas inside Ukrainian borders and the U.S. rejection
Europeans Furious
Secretary Marco Rubio, with from left, U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, attend a meeting together at Diriyah Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, February 18, 2025. (Official State Department photo/Freddie Everett)
Asked about sidelining the Ukrainians and Europeans from the process, Rubio told reporters that the “only leader in the world that could make this happen, to bring people together to seriously begin talking about it, is President Trump.” Rubio said every party to the conflict will have to agree to the settlement. “Nobody is being sidelined here.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told a press conference in Moscow before his departure to Riyadh that the Europeans don’t belong at the table. “I don’t know what they 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?,” he said.
The Europeans are furious that Trump is acting on his own after being solidly in line with the Biden administration on Ukraine, even at the expense of their own economies. The information, economic and ground proxy wars that the U.S. set in motion by provoking Russia’s intervention in the conflict have all been lost.
The Russian economy survived, but Europe’s, especially Germany’s, was badly damaged. It made Europeans appear to be vassals of the United States, ready to sacrifice everything to serve their masters. But the European reaction to the U.S. peace moves calls that notion into question. They are no longer obeying the U.S.
Vassals normally obey their masters. But the Europeans only obeyed the Americans when they agreed with a U.S. aggressive policy on Russia. When the U.S. now talks peace with Russia, Europe ceases to be vassals and rebels. It seems they were co-conspirators all along.
German rulers, for instance, went along with damaging the country’s interests, such as widespread de-industrialization and the destruction of Nord Stream, because the defeat of Russia was evidently more important to them than the interests of their people.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also complained bitterly that he was not being included in the negotiations. He went as far as trying to crash the negotiations, flying to the nearby United Arab Emirates from where he requested that the Saudis let him attend. When he was told to come on Wednesday, Zelensky arranged to go to Turkey instead.
“I don’t know who is attending these talks, and I don’t really care. We are completely transparent in what we do,” he said in Ankara. “I decided not to travel to Saudi Arabia [on Wednesday], and I don’t pretend otherwise.’
Sachs noted that Zelensky had ruled out any peace negotiations in October 2022, saying it would be “illegal.”
“Now they want a seat at the table, [when] they said they didn’t want any table all along,” Sachs said. “And Zelensky rules by martial law, by decree when the opinion surveys show that a majority of Ukrainians want peace right now even at the cost of territorial concessions.”
The Meeting in Paris
German Chancellor Scholz with Emmanuel Macron in 2021 in Paris. (French President’s Facebook page.)
Miffed European leaders were called by French President Emmanuel Macron to an urgent meeting in Paris on Tuesday to coincide with the Riyadh discussions in an attempt to demonstrate Europe’s relevancy.
“This was supposed to be a meeting of friends, of people who are supposed to agree with each other,” said geopolitical analyst Alexander Mercouris on his YouTube channel. Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer … “planned in advance … to cobble together a European force to send to Ukraine after a peace agreement is reached,” he said, but it “blew up in their faces” when the other participants in the summit outright rejected the idea.
Creating such a force was intended, Mercouris surmised, to show that Europe is still a power to be reckoned with and as an attempt to wreck the negotiations begun in Riyadh. But Russia once again rejected the European force idea.
In the end Starmer and Macron could not even get a unified statement out of Paris because of the disagreement. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz left the meeting early, issuing a statement that it was “highly inappropriate” and “completely premature” to discuss peacekeeping forces, Mercouris said.
The Financial Times said the five European leaders “clashed” at the meeting, as Italy, Poland and Spain also rejected the peacekeeping proposal. Anatol Lieven, writing in Responsible Statecraft, called the Paris summit “theater and much ado about nothing.” He wrote:
“The chaotic state of present European thinking on Ukraine and the Ukraine peace process reflects this underlying lack of public will, as well as the bewilderment of European establishments that for many years have left responsibility for their strategy in the hands of the United States, and now find themselves expected to think for themselves.”
Mercouris called the sidelining of Europe, brought about by the breathtaking change in U.S. policy towards Russia and the eventual end of the war, a major event in the past six centuries of European history.
“The end of the Ukrainian conflict is going to result in a significant rearrangement of the geopolitical pieces around the world,” Mercouris said. Though it isn’t clear yet how extensive that change will be, he argued it was
“fair to say that the United States, Russia and China are indisputably emerging as the great powers. Europe, which has been the core continent in global affairs since the 15th century, and which dominated international affairs in the 20th century, is now definitely in eclipse.”
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on X @unjoe.
Europe is hardly a representative group in this debate, as we never have in-put from most of the EU countries.. The usual big-mouths successfully sabotaged the Minsk accords, a forum to which the US was not invited.. Mr Lavrov was right; why invite them, indeed..
Rather,Russia will grow within BRICS and deepen even more relations with China nor will R be bribed into any ceasefire or freezing of the conflict…Fool me once …
No, Russia needs the US more than it needs BRICS. And the deal between Trump and Putin sharing Ukraine shows why.
This sums it up nicely:
“…European establishments that for many years have left responsibility for their strategy in the hands of the United States, and now find themselves expected to think for themselves.”
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, every step of the way Europeans have followed in the footsteps of Americans, without a blink of an eye, from the 1990s Balkan wars, to the long Middle Eastern wars, and to the 30-year expansion of NATO towards Russia’s borders and of course the current Ukrainian war. Wherever the US has stepped in, for better or worse, the Europeans have been more than happy to be there too.
One can understand the behaviour of Europeans in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union which caused excitement and confusion and led to a unipolar world dominated by the US. After all that was the era of “the end of history”. However it is difficult to understand how
Europeans, “which have been the core continent in global affairs since the 15th century…” have failed to notice that the US unipolarity was fast ending, even Trump noticed it. Perhaps they were too embroiled with their perceived enemies so they couldn’t see the changes that were taking place right in front of their eyes.
OK the European establishments, it is a time for the European strategy, and sincere good luck with it, as the world truly needs another pole of power besides the US, China and Russia.
It’s crazy to me that two great nuclear powers haven’t talked in four years. How mind-numbingly stupid is that policy? JFK and Khrushchev still talked even when they were putting nuclear missiles in each other’s back yards (American missiles in Turkey, Russian missiles in Cuba) and bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. But Biden couldn’t be bothered to pick up the phone even BEFORE Russia invaded Ukraine? How monumentally irresponsible. It’s clear that in not even being willing to speak to the Russians as the Ukraine conflict escalated (but before shots were fired), that the Biden Administration wanted the war and was doing everything in their power to stoke the tensions rather than tamp them down and save hundreds of thousands of lives. There was no price in Ukrainian lives or American taxpayer lucre that Biden’s puppet-masters were not willing to pay to hurt Russian interests.
Though I would have to give Dubya the title for worst president of my lifetime due to starting multi-decade wars that killed millions, Biden certainly gave it the old college try to claim the title for himself. If Putin had starting firing off nukes (a possibility that Biden’s ‘foreign policy experts’ blithely hand-waved away), Biden could have taken the prize as the most bloody-minded chicken-hawk of the last half-century.
We dodged a lot of bullets to get here to this point. Unfortunately for some very large numbers of Russian young men and even more Ukrainians, bullets with their name on them found them.
But we as a species seem to have eluded the Fates one more time, in spite of the mentally ill members of the Biden administration who so wantonly pursued what could be construed as their own version of the Samson Option.
The collective fate of the world going up in flames seems to have been held in abeyance one more time. But on the way to here we got an all-too-vivid example of what crazed ideologues for employees can get accomplished while the boss is away. And away he was from all observations, for the entirety of his one (Thank God!) term.
The Biden Bunch owe us and the rest of the peace and justice-seeking people of the world for the fear, and the pain and anguish which they perpetrated so callously and recklessly over this just passed duration. Their fading into retirement without consequence into their think tank and business concerns world should not go unremarked. Nor unprosecuted.
Their place in the history books of this nation deserve some special chapters. I think the grieving Slavic families on both sides in the Donbass could add some very graphic footnotes. I know they could, if ever given the chance to tell what befell their most beloved.
If I ever got to vote about sending those scoundrels to stand in the docket at the coming Russian-held war crimes trials, mine would be an immediate assent to send our unnelected bloodthirsty Biden Bunch directly there.
They OWE the survivors.
There’s no doubt that Putin and Trump are playing 4D chess while all others are still at checkers.
Russia gets the territories they want, they get the sanctions lifted and they get a stake in Trump’s world.
US gets the minerals in East Ukraine (now West Russia), they get Russia away from BRICS and they get an ally to use in the coming Great Game.
Thanks Joe.
“Vassals normally obey their masters. But Europeans only obeyed the Americans when their agreed with the U.S. aggressive policy on Russia.”
Yes a policy that was lied about repeatedly by neocon Hawks (esp. 41) in the U.S.. Besides that fact the U.S. was providing financing. In fact how many super wealthy in Europe benefited from the U.S. MICCMAT financially?
I still am of the opinion should the U.S. have several of thousands of ‘French caliber’ resistors the political environment might not have been to advantageous to those neocon Hawks for so long. The lack of opposition to the Afghanistan Iraq war is a prime example of what happens when a secret arm of our government gets it’s way.
On the U.S. emerging as one of the ‘Big Three’ you mention, I agree currently it remains to be seen how the wind of change might affect the continuity of government and those millions of Americans who live currently hand to mouth as you are most certainly aware of.
Even a peaceful revolution at this time in the U.S. will be deadly to many, I fear.
Thanks again to CN, the crew and you!
This is truly a joyous moment for those of us in Europe tiered of the toadying and ingratiating roll of Europe’s leadership towards the United States, which has been the case now for the last eighty years. Oh how happy the European leadership was as as obedient servants of the American Empire, yes open your bases, yes bring your Trident and Polaris submarines and yes NATO is terrific, we’re all in, let us rejoice! Every new European leader rushes to Washington to kiss the presidents ring, the essential photo opportunity for political survival and now they’ve been dumped. What humiliation. And over an issue where the leadership, the elite, and their people whereas one. They had bought the line on mass that Russia was just like the former Soviet Union an expansionist empire, a bear that has to be contained, The mass media wete of one voice, the left and right from the London review of Books to the New York Post – headlines roared the monster must be defeated, plucky Ukraine will do the job, David will defeat Goliath, praise be! Everything is just fine, keep sending the weapons, a million dead, yes they are suffering but we are with you, keep going, And then it’s all over and the Europeans are not even brought to the table, the Ukrainians are ghosts, the big boys decide. Watching on it is an humiliation for the European leadership, their impotence exposed as they are flicked off the table like crumbs. They look so foolish in front of their people impotent and weak and completely unable to coordinate as Europeans, they know they’ve been trumped by Trump, it hurts and it shows. Let’s enjoy it while it lasts.
thanks for the laughs Chris. but the foolish, impotent and weak leaders are adamant they will not give up defending the most corrupt country in europe. they are “hoist by their own petard”. let us hope their inept actions will not lead to more serious consequences.
Subservience is the price they pay for outsourcing their (supra)national defense to America for the past 70 years. All those European social safety nets that many Americans look with envy are financed by European countries spending token amounts on national defense since the end of WWII. If America spent less than 1% of it’s GDP on defense it could have those programs too, but that would have left Europeans with their butts hanging out in the cold just waiting for Ivan to get Randy.
Seems to me Europe is losing it’s ‘shine’…Too much squabbling and too much obedience to America. Fingers crossed that this will finally bring peace.
Excellent recap Joe. Thank you!!!
Bravo! I am utterly ashamed and scared shitless by the relentless warmongering and brainless refusal of Starmer, Scholes, Macron and rest of them to negotiate.
Hopefully, this will be the political end for this bunch of preening, psychotic incompetents.