After walking a fine line with Trump, Zelenskyy shows his annoyance

KYIV, Ukraine — Shortly after the United States’ opening meeting with Russian officials on Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine lashed out at the Trump administration’s negotiating tactics in his harshest terms yet for excluding Ukrainians from talks on their own country’s fate.

The talks in Riyadh ended with an agreement to establish teams to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine and normalize relations, and with upbeat statements and pledges for closer ties between the United States and Russia — continuing a thaw in relations that Ukraine and European allies have found unnerving.

Zelenskyy protested his exclusion from the discussions by canceling his own planned trip to the Saudi capital.

“Decisions on how to end the war in Ukraine cannot be made without Ukraine, nor can any conditions be imposed,” Zelenskyy said from Turkey, where he had traveled as part of a planned tour of the Middle East. “We were not invited to this Russian-American meeting in Saudi Arabia. It was a surprise for us, I think for many others as well.”

Ukraine has been seeking talks that would provide it protection against future aggression by Russia, with a commitment of membership in NATO or peacekeepers deployed into the war zone. Ukraine has also asked nations to consider prosecutions for Russian war crimes and reparations for a conflict that has leveled whole cities and killed and wounded tens of thousands of civilians, as well as about 1 million soldiers on both sides.

Those kinds of demands were nowhere near the conversation in Riyadh, where U.S. negotiators instead focused on “the incredible opportunities” that would come with an improved relationship with Moscow, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

But Zelenskyy insisted that the terms of any settlement negotiated without Ukraine “cannot be imposed” on Ukraine.

Over the course of the war, Ukraine has fought Russia’s far larger and better equipped army to a near standstill, although momentum is now in Russia’s favor.

“At this point, it is clear that neither side will win this war on the battlefield,” Zelenskyy said Tuesday. “Russia wanted this, it failed. No one believed in Ukraine, yet we proved ourselves and defended our independence at an incredibly high cost in the lives of our soldiers, our people. This proves that a shift toward diplomacy must happen, but it must lead to a just peace.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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