Russia seeks ‘progress' at Saudi talks, says negotiator

MOSCOW: Russia hopes to make "some progress" in peace talks with Ukraine at a meeting in Saudi Arabia on Monday, a senior Russian negotiator has said.

Moscow has rejected a joint US-Ukraine proposal of a full and unconditional 30-day ceasefire, instead suggesting only a halt to aerial strikes on energy facilities.

Despite that offer, both sides have continued to launch aerial attacks in the run-up to the negotiations.

A Russian strike on the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia late on Friday night killed a family of three, triggering anger among Ukrainian officials.

US negotiators will meet separately with Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Saudi Arabia on Monday, in what US envoy Keith Kellogg described as "shuttle diplomacy" between hotel rooms.

Despite the flurry of diplomacy and pressure from US President Donald Trump, a breakthrough has so far proved elusive.

"We hope to achieve at least some progress," Russian senator Grigory Karasin, who will lead the Russian delegation, told the Zvezda TV channel, without specifying on what issue.

He said he and fellow negotiator, FSB advisor Sergey Beseda, would take a "combative and constructive" approach to the talks.

A senior Ukrainian official told AFP a day earlier that Kyiv hopes to secure agreement "at least" on a partial ceasefire covering attacks on energy, infrastructure, and at sea. Kyiv is sending its defence minister to the negotiations.

"We are going with the mindset to fight for the resolution of at least one issue," Karasin told Zvezda, which is owned by Russia’s defence ministry.

He said they were leaving for Saudi Arabia on Sunday and would return on Tuesday.

Drone barrage

Russia’s choice of negotiators for the talks has raised questions. Both are outside traditional diplomatic decision-making institutions such as the Kremlin, the foreign ministry, or the defence ministry.

Karasin is a career diplomat who now sits in Russia’s upper house of parliament, while Beseda is a long-time FSB officer and now an advisor to the security service’s director.

The FSB in 2014 admitted that Beseda was in Kyiv during a bloody crackdown in the Ukrainian capital in the midst of the country’s pro-EU revolution.

Ukraine has accused Russia of not genuinely seeking peace and condemned its ongoing attacks, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin saying on Tuesday he had ordered his army to stop targeting Ukrainian energy sites.

In contrast, a US official close to Trump, White House envoy Steve Witkoff, has praised Putin — whom he met in Moscow last week — as a "great" leader seeking to end the conflict with Kyiv.

"I thought he was straight up with me," Witkoff told an American right-wing podcast host, Tucker Carlson, in an interview aired on Friday.

"I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war, and all the ingredients that led up to it," Trump’s envoy said.

Russia fired 179 drones at Ukraine in its latest overnight barrage, the Ukrainian air force said on Saturday.

In the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, an entire family, including a 14-year-old girl, was killed when a drone crashed into their house late on Friday, the regional authorities said.

An AFP photographer at the scene of one strike saw rescue workers sifting through the rubble of a destroyed building, as smoke and fog hung in the night air.

In the eastern Donetsk region, Russian strikes on Saturday killed at least two people and wounded three, according to the local governor.

Ukraine also targeted Russia with drone attacks overnight, wounding two in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don.

Zelensky, meanwhile, said he had visited troops fighting to defend the embattled eastern city of Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to encircle and capture for months.