U.S., Russia begin preparations for Trump-Putin meeting

  The heads of U.S. and Russian diplomacy Marco Rubio and Sergey Lavrov spoke by telephone on Saturday and agreed to stay in regular contact to prepare for the summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, according to both governments.

There is no date set for the summit yet, but Trump said this week that it could be held in Saudi Arabia and that its goal would be to end the war in Ukraine.

  According to the Russian Foreign Ministry in a statement, the call was made at Washington's initiative and in it both ministers "reaffirmed their willingness to collaborate to re-establish an interstate dialogue based on mutual respect, in line with the tone set by the presidents" in their conversation on Wednesday.

  In addition, Moscow noted that "both sides expressed their willingness to cooperate on current international issues, including the resolution of the conflict in Ukraine, the situation in Palestine and, in general, in the Middle East, as well as on other regional issues."

  For its part, the U.S. State Department explained in another statement that, during the call, Rubio reaffirmed Trump's "commitment" to finding a solution to the conflict in Ukraine.

  The announcement of the conversation came shortly before Rubio arrived in Jerusalem, as part of a tour that will also take him to Saudi Arabia.

Where he is scheduled to meet with Russian officials to begin negotiations to end the war in Ukraine, CNN reported Saturday, citing multiple sources familiar with the matter.

In addition to Rubio, White House National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff are expected to participate in those talks.

According to CNN, the Russian delegation could include senior political, intelligence and economic officials, including Kirill Dmitriev, the official who played a key role in the recent prisoner exchange between the two countries: that of American professor Marc Fogel, detained in Russia since 2021, by alleged Russian cybercriminal Alexander Vinnik.

The conversation between Trump and Putin, after which the American called his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymir Zelensky, was the first public contact between the US and Russian presidents since February 2022, when Putin spoke with then-President Joe Biden before the start of the invasion of Ukraine.

After the call, Trump announced that he had reached an agreement with Putin for the two countries to begin "negotiations immediately" with the aim of ending the war in Ukraine.

In the days that followed, the president broke with the Biden administration's stance by stating that Ukraine's aspiration to join NATO is "impractical" and considering it "unlikely" that the country will regain all the territory occupied by Russia since 2014, including the Crimean peninsula, which means concessions to Moscow.

In addition, the Trump administration has argued that Europe should not participate in negotiations with Russia and, unlike Biden, has begun to discuss directly with Moscow the terms of a possible agreement without counting on Ukraine.

The Russian offensive in Ukraine began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea. Subsequently, in February 2022, the Kremlin launched a full-scale invasion that was strongly condemned by the West.

In response, the United States, along with the European Union and Canada, imposed harsh sanctions against the Russian economy and sent large amounts of humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine.