Trump leans on close ties to Saudi prince as he looks for a deal on Ukraine

More than simply providing his desert kingdom as a venue for talks, Prince bin Salman and his diplomats are expected to play a role in brokering a peace agreement, according to officials familiar with the matter, as they look to elevate Saudi Arabia into an influential international player.

Trump is eager for a quick resolution to the war, and views Riyadh as his best collaborator. Officials say if preliminary talks Tuesday between senior Trump administration officials and their Russian counterparts are successful, work toward arranging a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin could progress quickly – potentially culminating in a summit in Saudi Arabia within the coming month.

“It’ll be soon, we’ll see what happens,” Trump said Sunday. “This should have been done three years ago, four years ago, before (the war) started. But it should have been done immediately after it started, as opposed to now.”

From Vienna to Reykjavik to Geneva to Helsinki, history books are filled with US-Russian summits in Europe reaching various degrees of diplomatic achievements. Never before has such a high-stakes meeting been held in Riyadh.

A number of other nations had offered to host an upcoming Trump-Putin summit, including Serbia and Switzerland.

But Russian officials had viewed a meeting in Europe as potentially weighted on the side of Ukraine, given most European nations’ condemnation of Russia’s invasion and support of Kyiv over the course of the three-year conflict, according to people familiar with the matter.

By contrast, Saudi Arabia has maintained a neutral stance, stopping short of criticizing Moscow or joining the West in applying sanctions. Saudi Arabia is also not a member of the International Criminal Court, which has issued a warrant for Putin, meaning the Russian leader can travel there for talks without risking arrest.

Ties between the president and the prince

Prince bin Salman, the country’s de facto leader, has cultivated close ties with Trump, illustrated last month when he became the first world leader to speak to him on the telephone following his swearing-in.

“We are glad to work with you and with President Trump,” the prince said Monday ahead of a meeting with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who will join national security adviser Mike Waltz and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff for Tuesday’s talks with the Russians at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh.

“We can work on positive things for Saudi Arabia and America and also for many countries around the world,” the prince said.

If Trump indeed travels to Saudi Arabia in the coming weeks for a meeting with Putin, he’ll become the only American president to make Saudi Arabia the site of his first two foreign trips for both terms in office, a sharp departure from the traditional visits to neighboring Mexico or Canada that many of his predecessors have done.

 

Eight years ago, Trump basked in the pomp and ceremony of his arrival at the King Khalid airport in Riyadh, with a brass band and a fighter jet flyover welcoming him to the kingdom, complete with a five-story image of Trump’s face projected on the exterior of the Ritz-Carlton hotel where he stayed.

This time, choosing Riyadh over a Western capital also underscores how Trump is seeking to prioritize and empower the Arab state from its isolation following the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 – even as he seeks to diminish European allies who have a much bigger direct stake in the outcome of any Russia-Ukraine peace negotiation.

Friendliness toward Putin

Prince bin Salman is one of a handful of powerful world leaders to have maintained close ties to Putin since the invasion of Ukraine. The two share certain autocratic traits, including lethal crackdown on dissent.

“We know the crown prince, and I think it’d be a very good place to be,” Trump said Wednesday in the Oval Office.

As he looks to bolster his stature as an influential international player, the prince has identified the Ukraine crisis as a potential area of opportunity. He hosted a peace summit in Jeddah in 2023 and has met individually with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Last week, the prince played an instrumental role in a swap of US and Russian detainees, reprising a role he played in August last year when he helped to broker the biggest US-Russian prisoner swap since the Cold War.

“He has a very strong friendship with President Trump and behind the scenes he was encouraging and using and looking for the right result and it was helpful, it really was,” Witkoff, Trump’s envoy who helped secure the swap, said afterward.

If the Trump-Putin confab comes together in Riyadh, it would mark their sixth meeting and second major summit. Their Helsinki conclave in 2018, where Trump sided with Putin over the US intelligence community’s assessment of election interference, still stands out as one of the most extraordinary moments in the long history between the US and Russia.

For Putin, a meeting with Trump would mark a continuation of yet another relationship with an American president, dating back nearly three decades. From Clinton to Bush to Obama to Biden, Trump stands apart in his friendly view of Putin.

Yet Trump is also eager to restore his relationship with Prince bin Salman, a task made more complicated by his plan to displace Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and take control of the seaside land for development.

Saudi Arabia has criticized the plan, and is hosting other Arab leaders later this month to devise alternative ideas for what to do with Gaza.

The controversial proposal, which has been deemed a non-starter across the Middle East, hangs in the air as Trump is scheduled to address a global financial meeting in Miami this week hosted by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

For the most transactional of US presidents, it could be investments from that fund that ultimately dictate his view of the kingdom – an approach not lost on Prince bin Salman.

After Trump said on his first day in office last month that he would consider making Saudi Arabia his first stop abroad if Riyadh purchased $500 billion in American products, the crown prince got on the phone to say he was ready to spend $600 billion over the next four years.

A day later, Trump had upped his price.

“I’ll be asking the crown prince, who’s a fantastic guy, to round it out to around $1 trillion,” he told the World Economic Forum in Davos. The crowd gently laughed.