Saudi talks reveal Russia’s hopes for Ukraine deal
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Welcome to the World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Stuart Willey and Alex Dibble. Four hours of negotiations in Saudi Arabia today ended with the American Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying it's just the first step in a long and difficult journey.

As Russia and the US appoint teams to try and find an end to the war in Ukraine, there is plenty of hard diplomacy to come. What Ukraine wants from these negotiations is relatively clear. But today we're going to consider what Russia will be seeking from this process and why, which should help us to understand everything that happens from this point onwards. Our guest is Sir Laurie Bristow, a long-time British diplomat who was the UK's ambassador to Moscow between 2016 and 2020.

Laurie, what is your view of Russia's calculations, their purpose going into these negotiations? And will they be leaving Riyadh happy today?

Obviously, everybody is going to be very tight-lipped at this stage, so I wouldn't expect to see a lot of information come out for a while yet. But I think the most important quotation I've seen from any of the participants so far is from Yuri Ushakov. That's Mr. Putin's foreign policy advisor, a real veteran of the scene in Moscow.

What he said was that the two sides agreed to take each other's interests into account and to develop their bilateral relations. I think that's a pretty good guide to what the Kremlin will have been looking for going into the talks in the first place. And I think the fact of the talks themselves, and this is about the leadership in Moscow talking directly with the leadership in the United States, is telling us all that we need to know about what the Kremlin's objectives here really are.

There's been lots of talk that the two leaders will eventually meet, but not, we're told, next week. One of the two, Vladimir Putin, does loom large, I think it's fair to say, over these talks in Saudi Arabia. What do you think he is seeking from this negotiation? Well, you certainly wouldn't expect Mr Putin or Mr Trump to start out with a face-to-face meeting. There needs to be preparation of the ground, as always, in these kinds of things.

But the most important thing of all for Mr. Putin in all of this, been establishing two things. One is that whatever happens in Ukraine, or indeed more widely, is essentially decided between the big boys, between the President of the United States and the President of Russia. Nobody else gets a look in on that. Not the Ukrainians, not the Europeans, nobody. This is decided amongst, as the Russians understand it, the two great powers.

The second thing that he's looking for here is to break out of that isolation that was imposed on Russia, on Putin and on the Kremlin. Since starting really going back to their annexation of Crimea in 2014 and stirring up of the war in the Donbass at that point, but particularly after the full-on invasion of 2022.

What Mr Putin is seeking to demonstrate here is that nothing can be decided, nothing can be resolved without Russia in the room. Donald Trump says that Vladimir Putin wants peace. Do you think that is true? It depends what you mean by peace. Mr Putin probably wants a ceasefire. Who wouldn't? This is a grotesque war. It's killed very, very large numbers of people and I think will kill a lot more before it's over.

But I think we need to be clear what Mr. Putin understands by a ceasefire. Ceasefires with the Kremlin rarely involve the complete and final ceasing of fire. What we will get, whatever deal comes out of these talks or any other talks, will be a continuation of war by other means, essentially. So a constant testing of the military threshold, all the things that we should be used to by now from the way that the Kremlin exercises power in the world.

We would expect the Kremlin to want the Americans particularly to lose interest in what happens in Ukraine. And he will want to be able to dial up or down the pressure on the government in Kiev, whoever that is, at will. So essentially, he'll be looking to achieve an outcome that fundamentally compromises Ukraine as a country, as a sovereign state.

As you say, the outcomes that Russia's demanding have been well signalled going back years and years. What does seem to be new today is Russia wanting disavowal of the road to NATO membership that was promised to Ukraine back in 2008. They also said they don't mind if Kiev joins the European Union. Is this all a natural progression from what the American Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said last week? The Kremlin's position on this has been perfectly clear for a very long time.

They do not want Ukraine to join NATO full stop. They don't want NATO forces or any foreign forces in Ukraine because what they do want at the end of the day is a demilitarized Ukraine ruled by someone who is essentially in the Kremlin's pocket, and that's what they intend to achieve over time. They want no Ukrainian membership of NATO ever. They want no US or NATO forces in Ukraine.

They want recognition of Russia's annexation of Crimea and as much as possible of the other four oblasts. What they're also looking for is something way beyond that. So if you go back to the two rather strange draft treaties that the Kremlin put on the table just before the full-on invasion in the beginning of 2022, they talked essentially of winding back NATO to the 1997 limits of membership of NATO in Europe.

And they essentially ask the United States or demand of the United States, in effect, wholesale withdrawal from commitment to Europe's security. That doesn't seem to be even remotely compatible with the security interests of countries like the UK or France or Germany or Poland, or I would argue even the United States itself.

There have been reports that Ukraine has refused to sign a U.S. deal that would give hundreds of billions of dollars of Ukraine's mineral wealth to the Americans. Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, was also at these talks in Saudi Arabia. He says they discussed energy prices. How important are these kind of transactional issues for the U.S. and for Russia?

what was put on the table or floated a few days ago between the United States and Ukraine was some kind of really transactional deal. Personally, I think that Mr. Zelensky was right not to pick it up off the table.

But the question for all of us is knowing what we know of Mr. Trump's approach to diplomacy, approach to statecraft and view of the world, how do we engage his understanding of US interests in the things that are at stake here? With regard to Russia...

I think what's happening here is something rather different. It's that Russia's economy is under really serious pressure. That doesn't mean, of course, that we should expect it to collapse any time in 2025. It won't. And I think for as long as it's relevant for these purposes, Mr. Putin will be able to go on to continue financing his war if that's what he wants to do.

But I think the Russians will certainly be looking for things like sanctions relief. They will be worried by any fall or pushing down of the oil price because their economy is dependent on commodities prices. And they'll be looking to break out of the straitjacket that G8-led sanctions have put Russia under since the full-on invasion in 2022.

It is 80 years ago, last week, since the Yalta conference was held in Crimea. Many in Eastern Europe see the carving up of the continent that was agreed there by Britain, Russia and the US as the cause of many of their woes. Are we seeing Moscow and Washington again making deals at the expense of smaller states?

That's very much the fear. And I suspect that when we look back on it, last week and this week will be one of those periods in time where the importance of what just happened will only become apparent when we see it in the rearview mirror. So the things to be really concerned about here, I mean, top of my list would be making sure that we understand in the UK why what happens in Ukraine matters directly and immediately to our security.

Second, the importance of keeping the United States bound into what happens in transatlantic security. This has been the absolute bedrock of everybody's defense and security thinking really since the end of the Second World War.

It's very, very important, I think, that we have that conversation both amongst the Europeans and with our American friends. As is being signalled by the US, a deal is agreed to by Easter. Will that be the end of it? Will that be an enduring peace for Ukraine? I don't think there is any scenario in which there is enduring peace.

I think it's possible that you could achieve a ceasefire in that timescale. But the point about a ceasefire with Mr. Putin is it's the next stage in the conflict. It doesn't resolve the underlying conflict. I don't think that the underlying conflict is resolvable because I think the underlying conflict is about Russia itself and about Mr. Putin's view of Russia's place in the world, which is, I think, a large part of what his people have been doing today in the talks with the United States.

This is about demonstrating that Russia perceives itself to be a great power. Its voice, it will insist that its voice is heard. It will insist that its interests are accommodated by others. That is a zero-sum game. There is no ground for compromise with Mr. Putin over Ukraine's existence as a sovereign democratic country. He doesn't think it should exist as a country at all, let alone as a sovereign democratic one.

So, you know, our choices are to try to find ways to bring the fighting to a ceasefire, but not really to give away the point of principle there. Laurie, thank you. That is Sir Laurie Bristow, the former UK ambassador to Moscow and now president of the Cambridge College, Hughes Hall.

Last week on The World in 10, we looked in detail at what the U.S. is seeking from these negotiations. Scroll back to an episode entitled Ukraine Negotiations Part 1, The U.S. Goes Alone. But that's it from us. Thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. We'll see you tomorrow. ACAS powers the world's best podcasts. Here's the show that we recommend.

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