People walk past Lenin's Mausoleum on a snowy Red Square in Moscow, Russia, 4 March 2026. Photo: EPA / SERGEI ILNITSKY
Russian negotiators will not be present at the planned Ukraine peace talks to be held in the US on Saturday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov confirmed at a press briefing on Friday.
The announcement indicates that the current suspension of trilateral peace negotiations between Ukraine, Russia and the US will continue, after a previous round of talks in Abu Dhabi was cancelled two weeks ago in the wake of the US-Israeli attacks on Iran.
Peskov said that the negotiations on Saturday would consist only of “bilateral contact between the Ukrainians and Americans”, but nonetheless claimed that the Kremlin hoped the current pause in three-way talks would be “temporary”.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky previously announced that he had sent a delegation to the US ahead of an expected meeting on Saturday, but did not specify who would be participating in the talks.
In a post to his followers on Telegram on Thursday, Zelensky said that Ukraine had “received signals from the US side indicating readiness” to engage in renewed negotiations, adding: “There has been a pause in the talks, and it is time to resume them.”
Since launching massive airstrikes on Iran on 28 February, US President Donald Trump has appeared to lose interest in negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine, with several analysts in the West and in Russia suggesting that the war in Iran has improved Russia’s strategic position in Ukraine.
European leaders have warned that the massive deployment of US military equipment in the Middle East risks jeopardising Ukraine’s supply of expensive US-made missile systems, which play a vital role in Ukrainian air defence.
Trump has consistently snubbed Ukraine’s offers to provide technology to counter Iranian Shahed drones in exchange for American missile systems, telling Fox News last week: “We don't need their help in drone defence. We know more about drones than anybody. We have the best drones in the world, actually.”
The last trilateral peace talks were held in Geneva in February, and ended with little progress, although later reports suggested Russian negotiators had accepted certain US security guarantees for Ukraine.
