NewsX World: Zelensky Heads to Saudi Arabia for Talks with Crown Prince

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NewsX World: Zelensky Heads to Saudi Arabia for Talks with Crown Prince

I am pleased to share the link to yesterday’s 10-minute interview with NewsX World (India) about the negotiations that began today between a senior Ukrainian delegation and Team Trump led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. In this we concentrated attention of the pressure that has been applied by the USA preparatory to this meeting, which I believe served to underline Donald Trump’s remark to Zelensky in the Oval Office that without U.S. military aid at the start of the war the Ukrainians would not have been able to hold their own against the Russians for no more than a few days to a maximum of two weeks.  

Now, the withholding of further arms shipments to Ukraine and still more importantly, the cut-off of intelligence needed for targeting purposes and for their air defense, should shake the Ukrainians from their dreams of invincibility and bring them down to some form of realism when they set out their peace terms.

Note that this afternoon News X World reopened the question, asking for my thoughts on how the negotiations in Jedda may end.  I will post this video here when the link is sent to me by the broadcaster. But I use this opportunity to say that I am not very hopeful of constructive results, judging by what Marco Rubio told reporters yesterday evening or this morning, namely that he believes that the Ukrainians are bringing an interesting proposal for a temporary partial cease fire to halt long range missile and drone strikes as well as to open the sea channels in the Black Sea.  Regrettably this sounds very much like the proposal that Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron prepared for the Ukrainians to take to Jedda and it is absolutely useless because it does not at all take into account Russian thinking, as if the Russians do not exist. Such an offer will elicit immediate rejection by the Russians, as Sergei Lavrov made clear in recent days. 

Moscow has no interest in a temporary cease fire whether full or partial. Moreover, Rubio’s remarks that neither side can win this war and that the Ukrainians may have to give up some territory to achieve peace are very mealy-mouthed.  Why can no side win?   When Rubio says that the Russians cannot take the whole of Ukraine, he is repeating the propaganda line of Joe Biden over the past year and of the Europeans today.  The Russians have no interest in taking all of Ukraine, and never did. They seek to take and hold only the territory where their presence is welcomed by the local population, which means Ukraine up to the Dnepr River, no further. And that objective is fully within their capabilities.

And what if the Russians reject the truce offer advanced by the Ukrainians?  Will Trump then try to bring them to agree by imposing still more sanctions on Russia?  Here again, we are in the realm of delusionary thinking.  The United States has already applied all economic and military pressure on Russia that it dared apply lest the Russians unleash a deadly attack on the U.S. mainland and set off WWIII.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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