Top Trump administration officials are set to meet with senior Russian officials to begin talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine, according to multiple sources.
National security adviser Mike Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff are expected to travel to Saudi Arabia for the meeting with senior Russian officials, two sources familiar with the plans tell CNN.
One of the sources said the meeting will take place in the coming days.
The sources declined to say which Russian officials would be in attendance, but CNN has previously reported the Kremlin is assembling a high-level negotiating team to engage in direct talks with the US, including top-level political, intelligence and economic figures, and Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian official who played a key behind-the-scenes role in a recent US prisoner release deal.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Mike McCaul also confirmed the plans during an interview with Politico at the Munich Security Conference, saying, “Rubio and Waltz and Witkoff (are) being dispatched to Saudi to talk to the Ukrainians and the Russians about Ukraine.”
The State Department had previously announced Rubio would travel to Saudi Arabia in the coming days as part of a larger trip to Munich and the Middle East. He is due to land in Israel on Saturday.
President Donald Trump indicated earlier this week that he could meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Saudi Arabia in the “not too distant future,” but cautioned that no formal decision had been made.
Key context: The conference in Munich has been steeped in uncertainty about how the Trump administration will approach ending the war in Ukraine. A phone call between Trump and Putin this week raised fears that Kyiv was being frozen out of the negotiations, and Trump’s envoy for the conflict said today that European negotiators will not be involved in the talks.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday that a Trump-Putin meeting that takes place before Zelensky can sit down with the US president could be “dangerous.”
Also today: Rubio had a phone call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Saturday.
The Russian foreign ministry said the call was held “at the initiative of the American side.” Both the ministry and US State Department issued statements describing the conversation as a follow-up to the Trump-Putin call, and said it included discussion of their commitment to working toward a resolution to the conflict in Ukraine.
CNN’s Mariya Knight contributed reporting to this post.
This post has been updated with additional details on the talks.
