Ukraine will have a delegation in Riyadh on the same day the US is holding ceasefire talks there with a Russian negotiating team led by a secretive former FSB chief who played a key role in planning Vladimir Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the delegation would meet with US representatives on Monday and supply a list of energy infrastructure that would be off-limits for strikes by the Russian military. The US representatives would then meet the Russian negotiating team, Zelenskyy said on Thursday.
The Ukrainian announcement indicates the US could shuttle between the two sides to try to achieve Donald Trump’s goal of a quick ceasefire. But both Russia and Ukraine have already disputed the White House’s accounts of their earlier talks with the US president, indicating Trump may have misrepresented the progress of the talks – and his chances of striking a quick deal to halt the war.
On Thursday, Zelenskyy contradicted Trump by denying he had discussed a US plan to take over Ukrainian power plants as part of a peace deal, saying that they “belong to the people of Ukraine”.
Trump had announced on Wednesday that US ownership of the plants “would be the best protection for that infrastructure and support for Ukrainian energy infrastructure”.
Zelenskyy denied there had been any discussion with Trump about privatising the plants. “If the Americans want to take the station from the Russians and they want to invest there and modernise it, that is a completely different issue,” he said. “We are open to discuss it, but the issue of property we definitely did not discuss with President Trump.”
Moscow announced on Thursday that Sergei Beseda, the former head of the spy agency’s fifth directorate – who oversaw intelligence operations in Ukraine and orchestrated the recruitment of collaborators before the full-scale invasion – would travel to Riyadh for Monday’s talks with the US.
Both sides said the talks in Saudi Arabia were aimed at finalising a limited ceasefire deal agreed this week, and initiating negotiations on a maritime ceasefire.
Before Russia’s early failures in the invasion, reports surfaced that Beseda had briefly fallen out of favour with Putin owing to flawed intelligence in the lead-up to the war. Beseda will be joined by Grigory Karasin, the chair of the Russian senate’s committee on international affairs, for the new round of talks with US officials.
Zelenskyy has accused Russia of making “unnecessary demands” that will drag out the war, and said Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure had not stopped despite Putin’s claims about his readiness to halt them.
Moscow doubled down on Thursday on its insistence that a requirement for serious peace talks would be the complete cessation of both foreign military aid and the provision of intelligence to Kyiv.
Trump, speaking on Fox News earlier, denied that arms supplies were discussed during his call with the Russian president, despite a Kremlin readout explicitly stating Putin had demanded an end to military aid to Ukraine.
There is still uncertainty over the timing and terms of a limited US-brokered ceasefire agreed this week, with both countries exchanging aerial assaults overnight. Zelenskyy, who was in Oslo on Thursday, said Russia had launched nearly 200 Iranian Shahed drones overnight, wounding at least 10 people, including four children, and damaging “residential buildings, a church, and infrastructure”.
Zelenskyy said in a morning statement on Telegram: “Russia’s strikes on Ukraine continue despite its propagandistic statements … With each launch, the Russians show the world their true attitude toward peace.”
Russian forces also struck a village in the Sumy region and carried out a series of airstrikes on a town near the city of Kharkiv.
Ukraine launched its own mass drone attack on Russia, appearing to hit a key airbase about 435 miles (700km) from the frontlines. The airbase in the Russian city of Engels hosts the Tupolev Tu-160 nuclear-capable heavy strategic bombers that have frequently been involved in strikes against Ukrainian cities.
Roman Busargin, the governor of Russia’s Saratov region, wrote on Telegram: “Engels today suffered the most massive UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] attack of all time.”
Busargin said the attack had left an airfield on fire and that people living nearby had been evacuated. He did not specifically mention the airbase, but it is the main airfield in the area.
Images shared by Russian Telegram channels showed thick smoke rising from an area west of the airfield, with reports suggesting an ammunition depot cruise missile exploded. Regional officials said 10 people were injured in the strike.
Zelenskyy said on Wednesday he had signed up to a partial ceasefire that Trump had agreed with Putin a day earlier after what the Ukrainian leader had described as a “positive, very substantive and frank” call with the US president.
But there was confusion over what exactly Trump and Putin had agreed after Moscow and Washington gave different readouts afterwards. Trump, in an initial post on Truth Social, said the partial ceasefire would apply to “energy and infrastructure”, giving the impression it would extend to all civilian infrastructure. Zelenskyy, after his call with Trump, spoke about “ending strikes on energy and other civilian infrastructure”.
However, Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said on Wednesday the ceasefire would apply only to the energy sector, and a White House statement on Wednesday also referred only to energy.
