On the surface, the announcement that Saudi Arabia will host talks between the US and Ukraine in Jeddah next week appears promising news.
After the disastrous meeting between the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Donald Trump in the White House last week, a more neutral location for this meeting of lower-level figures makes sense in terms of trying to dial down the temperature.
In his nightly address on Thursday, Zelenskyy said he would travel to Saudi Arabia on Monday to meet the country’s crown prince, and his team would stay on to hold talks with US officials.
The real question, however, is how neutral Saudi Arabia and its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, actually are and why the talks are being held there and not in a European capital, for instance.
The reality is that Saudi Arabia is primarily a comfortable location for the Trump administration. In his first term in office, Trump’s first foreign visit was to Saudi Arabia, a country with ambitions to be a major diplomatic player despite its horrific human rights record, including the kidnap and murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
For his part, Trump sees a normalisation of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel as the key prize in his attempts to forge a region-wide peace deal after the signing of the Abraham accords – bilateral normalisation agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain – which he pursued during his first term but which have done little to improve security in the Middle East.
If the ties between Trump and his circle and Saudi Arabia have long been close in terms of diplomacy and business, more concerning are perceptions of Prince Mohammed’s proximity to Moscow and Vladimir Putin.
In recent years, the prince – who is reportedly fascinated by Putin and his grip on power in Russia – has moved closer to the Russian president’s orbit. According to some analysts, he was given a key role in two prisoner exchanges between Russia and the US, including one involving the journalist Evan Gershkovich last year.
That warm relationship began in 2015 when Prince Mohammed visited the Russian president in St Petersburg, and Putin then visited Saudi Arabia in 2023.
The relationship between Moscow and Riyadh has grown ever more important, as Jens Heibach and Luíza Cerioli pointed out in an essay for the Contemporary Security Policy journal last year that explained Saudi Arabia’s long-term reluctance to criticise Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia, they wrote, was Riyadh’s “pivotal partner” within the wider Opec+ and “an important pillar of its foreign-policy diversification strategy”.
They added: “On one hand, Saudi Arabia voted in favour of adopting key resolutions of the United Nations general assembly on [the war in Ukraine], including those condemning Russia’s illegal use of force against, and its illegal referendums and annexations in, Ukraine. On the other hand, the kingdom avoided seriously encroaching on Russia’s interests by refusing to isolate it diplomatically.”
Significantly, as Heibach and Cerioli noted, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022: “Saudi Arabia continued to cooperate with Russia within Opec+ and, on October 5, 2022, led the group’s decision to cut oil production by 2m barrels per day, increasing global oil prices and, implicitly, Russian revenues.
“In doing so, Saudi Arabia rebuffed [the Biden administration’s] pleas to use its central position within Opec + to lower oil prices. This decision strained Saudi relations with the United States, which was also dissatisfied with Riyadh’s eventual official stance on the Ukraine crisis.”
That closeness has continued. Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia hosted Russian and US delegations – though with Kyiv significantly absent – to discuss a Ukraine peace deal, a major reversal of the Biden administration’s efforts to isolate Russia diplomatically.
Set against that, however, is the fact that Saudi Arabia also hosted a two-day peace summit on Ukraine in 2023 with representatives from more than 40 countries, although some sceptics noted that was as much about laundering Saudi Arabia’s international reputation.
And if Ukraine feels comfortable holding talks in Jeddah it is because of the personal connections of the country’s defence minister, Rustem Umerov, who has his own lines to Saudi Arabia through his former business connections as an investment banker.
Orysia Lutsevych, the deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia programme at the Chatham House thinktank in London, said those and other links between Saudi Arabia and Ukraine meant there was a degree of trust.
“I think it’s a bit of a myth about neutral places for negotiations. Practically, you need to find an actor or a mediator that has a stake or a connection to both parties to have trust,” she said.
“Ukrainians have always thought that the Middle East could be [a] counterweight and invested in relations with the global south, arguing that it is a global war because it has had global consequences.”
Lutsevych added that Saudi Arabia owned one of the largest agricultural companies in Ukraine, suggesting it may have a “pragmatic interest”.
“One of the Saudis’ motivations [in hosting the talks] is to lend a hand to Trump,” she said. “But the bigger risk for Zelenskyy and Ukraine remains Trump himself – the risk of America siding with the Russian agenda. The location doesn’t change that.”
