The Dictatorship
A deeper look at the talks between US and Russian officials as Trump suggests Ukraine is to blame
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Top U.S. and Russian officials had their most extensive high-level engagement since Moscow sent troops into Ukraine almost three years ago, meeting for four hours Tuesday before President Donald Trump suggested that Kyiv was to blame for the conflict.
Trump showed little patience for Ukraine’s objections to being excluded from the talks in Saudi Arabia. He said repeatedly that Ukraine’s leaders never should have allowed the conflict to begin, indicating Kyiv should have been willing to make concessions to Russia before it sent troops into Ukraine in 2022.
“Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you been there for three years. You should have ended it three years” ago, Trump told reporters at his Florida residence. “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
Such comments and Trump’s goal of mending ties with Moscow may come at a cost to the transatlantic alliance of the U.S. and Europe and significantly damage Washington’s standing with Ukraine as well as with other nations counting on U.S. leadership in NATO and elsewhere for their security and protection.
During former President Joe Biden’s administration, the U.S. and Europe focused on isolating Russia and defending the post-World War II international order.
In Riyadh, the delegations led by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov agreed to set up teams to look into restoring staffing at the U.S. and Russian embassies in Moscow and Washington that have been decimated by a series of tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions.
The effort is aimed at using those channels to support Ukraine peace negotiations and to explore ways to restart economic and global cooperation. A Russian official pointed to possible joint energy ventures.
Here’s a look at the meeting and what comes next:
Reestablishing tattered diplomatic relations
First on both countries’ list of accomplishments was an agreement to end what has been years of dwindling diplomatic relations that hit a post-Cold War low point after Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022.
The meeting, which came just a week after Trump spoke to Putin by phone, was the first substantive face-to-face discussion between the nations’ top diplomats since former Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Lavrov in Geneva in January 2022 in an unsuccessful bid to prevent the Ukraine conflict.
Lavrov said after Tuesday’s talks that the sides agreed to fast-track the appointment of new ambassadors, adding that senior diplomats from the two countries will meet shortly to discuss specifics related to “lifting artificial barriers to the work of the U.S. and Russian embassies and other missions.”
In reality, the decimation of the U.S. and Russian embassies’ personnel began well before Russian troops rolled into Ukraine in 2022, starting after 2014 Russia’s annexation of Crimea. That was seen as illegal by most of the world during the Obama administration, which ordered several Russian offices in the U.S. to close.
It picked up steam after the 2018 poisoning in Britain of an exiled Russian spy and his daughter, which British authorities blamed on Russia, and which resulted in mass expulsions of diplomats and the closure of numerous consulates in both countries and Europe.
Asked by The Associated Press if the U.S. now considered those cases closed, Rubio declined to say but said it would be impossible to get a Ukraine peace agreement without diplomatic engagement.
“I’m not going to negotiate or talk through every element of the disruptions that exist or have existed in our diplomatic relations, on the mechanics of it,” he said. Bringing an end to the conflict cannot happen “unless we have at least some normalcy in the way our diplomatic missions operate in Moscow and in Washington, D.C.”
Negotiating an end to the conflict in Ukraine
The two sides agreed to set up high-level working groups to begin exploring a negotiated end to the conflict. It was not immediately clear when these teams would first meet, but both said it would be soon.
As to concessions that may need to be made by all sides, Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, who participated in the talks Tuesday, said the issue of territory and security guarantees would be among the subjects discussed.
Rubio said a high-level team, including experts who know technical details, will begin to engage with the Russian side on “parameters of what an end to this conflict would look like.”
On the key issue of a prospective peacekeeping mission to monitor a potential ceasefire in Ukraine, the top Russian diplomat said Moscow would not accept any troops from NATO members, repeating its assertion that Ukraine’s bid to join the Western military alliance poses a major security issue.
“We explained that the deployment of troops from the countries that are NATO members, even if they are deployed under the EU or national flags, will not change anything and will certainly be unacceptable for us,” Lavrov said.
Exclusion of Ukraine and Europe from the talks
Neither Ukraine nor European nations were invited to Tuesday’s talks in Riyadh, but U.S. officials said there is no intention to exclude them from peace negotiations should they begin in earnest.
“No one is being sidelined here,” Rubio said. “Obviously, there’s going to be engagement and consultation with Ukraine, with our partners in Europe and others. But ultimately, the Russian side will be indispensable to this effort.”
Waltz agreed: “If you’re going to bring both sides together, you have to talk to both sides. … We are absolutely talking to both sides.”
He noted that Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy immediately after speaking with Putin last week and that U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Rubio met Friday with Zelenskyy in Germany.
Still, Zelenskyy was clearly peeved at being omitted from the meeting, postponing plans to visit Saudi Arabia on Wednesday to avoid any linkage of his trip with Tuesday’s U.S.-Russia talks.
And that was before Trump’s comments suggesting Kyiv was at fault in starting the fighting.
“This whole negotiation from the start seems very tilted in Russia’s favor. And it’s even a question whether it should be termed a negotiation or in some sense, a series of American capitulations,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, senior fellow for Eurasia and Russia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and a former British ambassador to Belarus.
Possible lifting of US sanctions against Russia
Asked whether the U.S. could lift sanctions against Moscow imposed during the Biden presidency, Rubio noted that “to bring an end to any conflict, there has to be concessions made by all sides” and “we’re not going to predetermine what those are.”
Asked if the U.S. could officially remove Lavrov from its sanctions list, Rubio said that “we’re just not at that level of conversation yet.”
Potential US-Russian cooperation
Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund who joined the Russian delegation in Riyadh, told reporters that Russia and the U.S. should develop joint energy ventures.
“We need joint projects, including in the Arctic and other regions,” he said.
Should the parties succeed in negotiating an end to the Ukraine conflict, Rubio said, it could open “incredible opportunities” to partner with the Russians “on issues that hopefully will be good for the world and also improve our relations in the long term.”
He did not say what those would entail.
___
Isachenkov reported from Moscow. Associated Press Writer Emma Burrows in London and Jonathan J. Cooper in Phoenix contributed to this report.
Amanda Gorman shared a powerful poem on Instagram that she wrote in honor of Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. citizen killed by a federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Saturday.
The poem, “For Alex Jeffrey Pretti,” characterizes Pretti’s killing as a “betrayal” and an “execution.”
Gorman, earlier this month, also paid tribute to Renee Nicole Good, another U.S. citizen killed by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. In a caption accompanying another poem shared on Instagram, Gorman said she was “horrified by the ongoing violence that ICE wages upon our community. Across our country, we are witnessing discrimination and brutality on an unconscionable scale.”
Her poem says, in part: “You could believe departed to be the dawn/ When the blank night has so long stood./ But our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone,/ When they forever are so fiercely Good.”
The 27-year-old writer and activist famously recited her poem, “Blue Light News We Climb,” at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration in 2021. Gorman has also written poems in the wake of other tragedies in the country, including “Hymn for the Hurting,” about the Robb Elementary mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas in 2022. She also performed a poem she wrote about reproductive rights and the Roe V. Wade Supreme Court case in a NowThis video in 2019.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in recordings obtained by Axiosseems to have a bone to pick with Vice President JD Vance and sometimes, President Donald Trump.
In his remarks, which lasted about 10 minutes and were reportedly made in a private meeting with donors sometime last year, Cruz portrays himself as an economically-minded, pro-interventionist who has the president’s ear.
The Texas senator is also heard criticizing former Fox News personality, Tucker Carlson, and his relationship with the vice president. “Tucker created JD. JD is Tucker’s protégé, and they are one and the same,” Cruz told donors.
Cruz, who has clashed with Carlson in the past over foreign intervention policies, bashed the administration’s appointment of Israel critic Daniel Davis to a top national intelligence position. A vocal supporter of Israel himself, Cruz called Davis “a guy who viciously hates Israel,” and credited himself with removing Davis from the job.
The Republican senator also blamed Vance and Carlson for ousting former national security adviser Mike Waltz over similar anti-interventionist sentiments related to Iran.
“[Waltz] supported being vigorous against Iran and bombing Iran — and Tucker and JD took Mike out,” Cruz said.
Cruz also said he has been trying to get the White House to accept a trade agreement with India, but claimed White House economic adviser Peter Navarro, Vance and “sometimes” Trump, are resistant.
Domestically, Cruz cautioned donors about Trump’s tariffs, which he said could result in severe economic and political consequences. Cruz is reportedly heard telling donors that he told the president “if we get to November of [2026] and people’s 401(k)s are down 30% and prices are up 10–20% at the supermarket, we’re going to go into Election Day, face a bloodbath.”
Cruz said a conversation he had with Trump about tariffs “did not go well,” and that Trump was “yelling” and “cursing.” Cruz said Trump told him: “F*** you, Ted.”
“Trump was in a bad mood,” Cruz said. “I’ve been in conversations where he was very happy. This was not one of them.”
In a statement about the recordings, a spokesperson for Cruz said he is “the president’s greatest ally in the Senate and battles every day in the trenches to advance his agenda. Those battles include fights over staffers who try to enter the administration despite disagreeing with the president and seeking to undermine his foreign policy” and that “these attempts at sowing division are pathetic and getting boring.”
In an email responding to MS NOW’s request for comment on Cruz’s reported statements, the White House did not address Cruz’s statements.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
Alex Pretti was shot to death on the sidewalk of a street in Minneapolis after he didn’t leave when federal agents demanded he leave. Renee Good was shot to death in her car on a street in Minneapolis because she tried to leave when federal agents demanded she not.
Advocates of President Donald Trump’s administration will cite this disobedience as a central factor in Pretti and Good’s deaths. Each has been assigned a contrived danger, as well, to reinforce the urgent need for their killings: Pretti had a gun (that he doesn’t appear to have drawn) and Good had her car (that she doesn’t appear to have used as a weapon).
But their central offense, among those eager to champion Trump’s politics and policies, was their failure to be pliant. They were at odds with the state and, well, sometimes that’s punishable by death.
It is stunning, though not surprising, to see the president of the United States and sworn federal officials impugn dead citizens so callously.
It has been posited that the eagerness with which Trump and his allies have defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents against charges of excessive force, and the alacrity with which they assign blame to the victims of those shootings, demonstrates hypocrisy, given their collective willingness to absolve — to beatify! — the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They, too, defied state authority and, in many cases, far more aggressively. But they are hailed as heroes by the current administration.
But this isn’t hypocrisy at all. It’s consistent. If you object to or impede their politics, they will hurt you. That is the consistency and it is why off-duty police were in the mob on Jan. 6 and why Trump supporters defend ICE today. It’s not the badge that matters. It’s the red cap.
The most jarring element of the response to Pretti’s death and to Good’s death is the speed with which the administration has disparaged the victims rather than the perpetrators. Each of them was also immediately asserted to have been a premeditated, violent actor. A terrorist. When each, instead, was at the scene of their unwitting deaths because they were part of and supportive of their community.
It is stunning, though not surprising, to see the president of the United States and sworn federal officials impugn dead citizens so callously. It’s utterly immoral, if not deranged. What flows through their veins is partisanship, and what dominates their thoughts is knocking their opponents and critics back on their heels. Perhaps there are flutters of recognition that this is not how human beings behave, much less political leaders in a democracy. But if those flames flicker into existence, they are quickly snuffed.
And for what! This is the question that continues to baffle me more than any other. Why has the Department of Homeland Security dispatched vans and SUVs filled with masked men to Minneapolis? Most immediately, it seems, it’s because a bad-faith “investigation” from a right-wing media personality made Minnesota a focus of the right’s collective anger. So the president pointed at Minnesota and his shock troops marched.
Their mission has been described in a number of ways, which means that (as with so much else in Trump’s world) the effect was decided before the cause. Maybe it’s about combatting the fraud alleged by the media personality, even though prosecutors had been investigating and securing convictions for social services fraud in Minnesota for years. Or maybe it’s just about uprooting immigrants.
This is the government’s most common explanation. Trump and his aides have repeatedly insisted that the expansive, guerrilla-style raids being conducted by federal agents in Minnesota have been effective at removing the “worst of the worst” criminal immigrants from the area, something it insists that the state’s Democratic leaders had refused to do. (The state disagrees.)
What’s the right ratio here, Mr. President? How many citizens being shot to death is worth this campaign of fear and its sporadic deportations?
At a White House press conference on Jan. 20, Trump held up images of 40 individuals who he claimed had been detained by federal agents in Minnesota. A DHS website titled, “ARRESTED: WORST OF THE WORST,” — identifies just under 500 such people in the state. Some of them (as was the case with Trump’s visual aids) seem less like “the worst of the worst” than like “people with any criminal record at all.” Does having a DUI make you one of the nation’s worst criminals? If you weren’t born here, I guess so.
Even by DHS’ count, though, the government isn’t only targeting “the worst of the worst.” On Jan. 14, the agency put out a press release claiming that they’d arrested 2,500 of the “worst of the worst,” meaning that the website, even with the drunk drivers, is a couple thousand short in its tally. Nationally, of course, ICE has accelerated its detention of people with no criminal records at all. One analysis estimates that 92 out of every 100 people added to ICE detention last year faced no criminal charges and had no past convictions. Besides, violent crime in Minnesota was already on the decline before DHS and ICE showed up (also mirroring national trends).
So the feds rolled up some people with criminal records or maybe pending charges. In doing so, they spread chaos and confusion around the city, shipped a kindergartener off to Texas and sent a baby to the hospital.
In doing so, they killed two residents of Minneapolis, their dying bodies laying at the side of the road.
What’s the right ratio here, Mr. President? How many citizens being shot to death is worth this campaign of fear and its sporadic deportations?
It seems as though the answer is clear by now: As many as can be killed with his base still believing that they were violent opponents of the president’s politics. As long as that belief is sustained, the killings can continue because it means that his supporters’ confidence and trust in him is sustained, too. And that, more even than purifying the populaceis what matters to Trump.
The White House and DHS frequently validate their work by pointing to the killers they’re taking out of the country, outsiders who’d killed Americans. It would be a more effective argument if they weren’t defending the outsiders they brought into Minneapolis who did the same thing.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor.
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