US seeks to reset tense ties with Russia

U.S. officials have cast Tuesday’s outreach to Moscow as a bold effort to draw Russia away from China, mend ties with a nuclear-armed adversary and halt a war that has already led to more than a million casualties.

President Trump has raised expectations that relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin will be restored. Even before Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, national security adviser Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio left for the talks here, Trump mused that his administration’s diplomacy might lead to a summit meeting between himself and Putin in Saudi Arabia in the “not too distant future."

But the talks here have been seen in Europe as another indication that decades of Western foreign policy is undergoing a tectonic shift. Trans-Atlantic ties, already battered by a scathing speech by Vice President JD Vance that accused European leaders of ignoring the will of their voters, have been strained further as allies have confronted the fact that the Riyadh meeting will take place without their participation or that of Ukraine.

Russia is represented by Yuri Ushakov, a close adviser to Putin who served as the Russian ambassador in Washington, and Sergei Lavrov, who has been the Russian foreign minister for more than 20 years.

Russia has telegraphed that its objectives include rolling back punishing U.S. economic sanctions and expanding diplomatic ties while holding on to its gains in Ukraine. Before leaving for Riyadh, Lavrov said there could be “no thought" of making territorial concessions to Ukraine and would be no need for European nations to assume a role in future negotiations over the Ukraine conflict.

The talks, which are being held at the ornate Diriyah Palace, are the highest-profile meeting between U.S. and Russian officials since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Trump administration officials said their accelerated diplomacy, which began with a phone call Trump held with Putin last week, reflected the U.S. president’s penchant for action.

“As we’ve already seen with President Trump and this administration, things that maybe normally would take six months or a year or two years are taking a matter of weeks," State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce told reporters Monday.

But the Trump administration’s rush to engage Russia has unnerved European leaders by dispensing with the sort of advance consultations about U.S. policies toward Moscow that have long been a staple of the Western alliance.

“What Trump and the administration should have done is work out details with Ukraine and the Europeans on how to advance peace and then talk to the Russians," said Ivo Daalder, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization during the Obama administration.

European worries were underscored Monday when Elon Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive who has emerged as one of Trump’s closest advisers, applauded the arrival of the Russian delegation in Riyadh on Monday night.

“This is what competent leadership looks like," Musk wrote on X, the social-media site he owns, referring to a photo of the Russian envoys disembarking from their government aircraft.

Other Trump administration officials have sought to assuage allies’ concerns by casting the Tuesday talks as a chance to explore Russia’s intentions, rather than the start of detailed negotiations over Ukraine’s future.

On Monday, Bruce described the Riyadh talks as “another step further to see what was possible" over Ukraine and in U.S.-Russian relations, but not “something that is about details or moving forward in some kind of a negotiation."

If formal negotiations over the conflict in Ukraine take place, administration officials say, Ukrainian officials will be at the table, though American officials have said European representatives wouldn’t be included.

In explaining that structure, Keith Kellogg, the retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who is serving as a special envoy on the Ukraine issue, said a new approach was needed because a decade-old agreement that involved European powers, but not the U.S., had failed to produce a sustainable peace.

Kellogg was referring to the 2015 Minsk-2 accord, negotiated by Germany and France with Ukraine and Russia. “There were a lot of people at the table, but it didn’t work out," Kellogg said at a security conference in Europe on Saturday.

Now the pendulum has swung to a new approach in which the U.S., but not European allies, will be directly involved. Trump administration officials say that European concerns will be taken into account.

Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland who is at the Atlantic Council think tank, said the diplomatic process Trump has begun could prove useful if the White House doesn’t allow its enthusiasm for boosting ties with Putin to override its willingness to stand up for Ukraine’s interests.

Britain and Sweden have suggested they would be willing to put their own troops on the ground to safeguard a potential peace settlement. Fried said such an approach could work if the European troops were backed up by U.S. logistics, communications and air power, which could be called on if the European forces were in danger.

But Russia’s Foreign Ministry has already rejected the idea of stationing European peacekeeping troops in Ukraine.

“There is an argument that we shouldn’t meet with them while they’re continuing to smash the Ukrainians," Fried said, referring to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine. “It is more important that when we do talk, we maintain the firm position to not be suckers."

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com