U.S. and Russia agree to restore embassy staffing in high-level talks on Ukraine war

The United States and Russia agreed to restore embassy staffing in high-level talks marking President Donald Trump's reversal of American policy on Moscow, fueling fears in Kyiv and building the Kremlin’s hopes of reentering the international mainstream.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said both countries had agreed to “reestablish the functionality of our respective missions in Washington and Moscow” and that Washington would create a high-level team to work on a path to ending the war in Ukraine.

Rubio said negotiators also agreed to “begin to discuss and think about and examine both the geopolitical and economic cooperation that could result from an end to the conflict in Ukraine,” which he said could only happen once the war came to an end.

His comments came after he led a U.S. delegation in a four-and-a-half hour meeting attended by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other Kremlin officials in Saudi Arabia.

Under the Trump administration, he had “reason to believe that the American side has begun to better understand our position.”

Separately, Yuri Ushakov, President Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy adviser, said the talks had paved a way for a possible meeting between Trump and Putin, although he did not say when that might take place, according to the Russian state news agency TASS.