DUBAI, United Arab Emirates— U.S. negotiators worked on a proposed partial ceasefire in Ukraine on Monday, meeting with representatives from Russia a day after holding separate talks with the Ukrainian team. Each side has accused the other of undermining efforts to reach a pause in the 3-year-old war.
Kyiv and Moscow agreed in principle Wednesday to a limited ceasefire after U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with the countries’ leaders, but the parties have offered different views of what targets would be off-limits to attack.
While the White House said “energy and infrastructure” would be covered, the Kremlin declared that the agreement referred more narrowly to “energy infrastructure.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he would also like to see railways and ports protected.
Talks Monday are expected to address some of those differences, as well as a potential pause in attacks in the Black Sea to ensure the safety of commercial shipping.
U.S. and Russian representatives met in the morning in the Saudi capital, Russia’s state Tass and RIA-Novosti news agencies reported. The U.S. and Ukrainian teams met Sunday in Riyadh.
Serhii Leshchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian presidency, said the delegation remained in Riyadh on Monday and expected to meet again with the Americans.
Grigory Karasin, head of the foreign affairs committee in the Russian parliament’s upper house and a participant in Monday’s talks, told the Interfax news agency the negotiations were going on in a “creative way” and that the U.S. and Russian delegations “understand each other’s views.”
Meanwhile, both Russia and Ukraine continued to launch attacks across their borders.
The Russian Defense Ministry said Monday a Ukrainian drone attacked an oil pumping station in southern Russia that serves a pipeline carrying Kazakhstan’s Caspian Sea oil to the Russian port of Novorossiisk for export. It said the drone was downed before it could reach the pumping station.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday the Russian military has been fulfilling President Vladimir Putin’s order to halt attacks on energy facilities for 30 days. He has accused Ukraine of derailing the partial ceasefire with attacks on Russia’s energy facilities, including a gas metering station in Sudzha in Russia’s Kursk region.
Ukraine’s military General Staff rejected Moscow’s accusations and blamed the Russian military for shelling the station, a claim Peskov called “absurd.”
Zelenskyy said Sunday evening that “since March 11, a proposal for an unconditional ceasefire has been on the table, and these attacks could have already stopped. But it is Russia that continues all this.”
He added that Ukraine’s partners — “the U.S., Europe, and others around the world” — should increase pressure on Russia “to stop this terror.”
Zelenskyy has emphasized that Ukraine is open to Trump’s proposal of a full, 30-day ceasefire. Putin has made a complete ceasefire conditional on a halt of arms supplies to Kyiv and a suspension of Ukraine’s military mobilization — demands rejected by Kyiv and its Western allies.
Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said he expected “some real progress” at talks and that a pause in hostilities by both countries in the Black Sea would “naturally gravitate into a full-on shooting ceasefire.”
