By ISMAEEL NAAR NYTimes News Service
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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — When President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he might soon meet with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to discuss an end to the nearly three-year war in Ukraine, he named what may have seemed like an unlikely venue for the talks.

“We expect that he’ll come here, and I’ll go there and we’re going to meet also probably in Saudi Arabia the first time,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’ll meet in Saudi Arabia, see if we can get something done.”

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Trump cited both his and Putin’s relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, as a reason for choosing the Gulf nation for their first meeting since he regained the White House. “We know the crown prince, and I think it’d be a very good place to be,” Trump said.

There was no immediate comment from Saudi Arabia regarding a potential Trump-Putin meeting in the country. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Thursday that preparations for such a meeting could take as long as several months, but added that both sides agreed the Saudi capital, Riyadh, was a suitable location, according to the Russian Interfax news agency.

Saudi Arabia has increasingly played the role of mediator in the Russia-Ukraine war, along with its neighbor the United Arab Emirates.

For Crown Prince Mohammed, mediating the war presents an opportunity to solidify his status as a global leader with influence that extends beyond the Middle East. It also enables him to position himself as a key intermediary capable of bringing powerful nations to the table, despite his continuing struggles to end Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the devastating war in Yemen.

In September 2022, the crown prince helped to broker the release of 10 prisoners from various countries as part of a broader exchange process between Russia and Ukraine. Later, in May 2023, he invited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to speak at a gathering of Arab leaders in the Saudi city of Jeddah, where Zelenskyy called on Middle Eastern nations to support Ukraine against Russia.

Later that summer, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine jointly hosted closed-door talks in Jeddah aimed at ending the war, attended by diplomats from over 40 countries, though not from Russia.

In August 2024, Saudi Arabia played an influential role in negotiating the biggest U.S.-Russian prisoner swap since the Cold War, and Putin personally thanked the crown prince.

Earlier Wednesday, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, said that Crown Prince Mohammed had played an “instrumental” role in mediating the release of Marc Fogel, an American teacher who was arrested on charges of bringing medical marijuana into Russia in August 2021.

“He has a very strong friendship with President Trump, and behind the scenes he was encouraging and pushing and looking for the right result, and it was helpful, it really was,” Witkoff said of the crown prince’s role.

Like many countries in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has made it clear that it does not seek to take sides in the war. It has sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine even while cultivating close ties with Russia.

The Trump administration is also looking to the resource-rich Gulf nations, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to play a postwar role in the Gaza Strip. Trump has been pushing a proposal to transfer all 2 million Palestinians out of Gaza and then rebuild the enclave as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

Earlier this week, King Abdullah II of Jordan said there would be a meeting in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, involving Crown Prince Mohammed and others to discuss Trump’s Gaza proposal before Arab leaders meet for an emergency Arab League summit in Cairo on Feb. 27.

The Arab world has outright rejected the proposal. Speaking in Dubai this week, the secretary-general of the Arab League, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, called the resettlement of Palestinians “unacceptable.”

Saudi Arabia, widely regarded as the leader of the Arab and Muslim world, has so far agreed with that, describing its position as “clear and explicit.”

Still, the country’s potential role as a mediator in the Russia-Ukraine war may serve as a litmus test for how far the kingdom is willing to negotiate on other issues — especially as Trump continues to pursue his long-standing goal of persuading Saudi Arabia to join the 2020 Abraham Accords, which established formal ties between Israel and four Arab nations.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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