U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday he expects to see his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Saudi Arabia for their first meeting since the Republican took office.
Trump made the remarks following an almost 90-minute phone conversation with Putin in which the two leaders discussed ending Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“We ultimately expect to meet. In fact, we expect that he’ll come here, and I’ll go there, and we’re gonna meet also probably in Saudi Arabia the first time, we’ll meet in Saudi Arabia, see if we can get something something done,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
A date for the meeting “hasn’t been set” but it will happen in the “not too distant future,” Trump added. He suggested the meeting would involve Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “We know the crown prince, and I think it’d be a very good place to meet.”
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov also said Wednesday that Putin had invited Trump and officials from his administration to visit Moscow to discuss Ukraine.
“The Russian president invited the U.S. president to visit Moscow and expressed his readiness to receive American officials in Russia in those areas of mutual interest, including, of course, the topic of the Ukrainian settlement,” Peskov said.
The invitation followed Trump’s announcement Wednesday that peace talks would start “immediately” and that Ukraine would probably not get its land back, causing uproar on both sides of the Atlantic.
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