Top US and Russian officials are set to meet in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday with the aim of restoring ties and setting up negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin has said the discussions in Riyadh could pave the way for a face-to-face meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin “very soon”.
It comes after the pair held a ground-breaking lengthy phone call last Wednesday.
Riyadh, which is also involved in talks with Washington over the future of the Gaza Strip, has played a role in early contacts between the Trump administration.
But who will be involved in the discussions tomorrow?
Image: Marco Rubio after arriving in Riyadh. Pic: Reuters
Mr Trump’s secretary of state, who arrived in Riyadh on Monday, serves as the president’s chief foreign affairs adviser and the country’s top diplomat.
Mr Rubio, a former Florida senator, already spoke to Russian foreign affairs minister Sergey Lavrov over the phone on Saturday, discussing the war in Ukraine and other topics, according to readouts of the call from both countries.
The US president and Mr Rubio were adversaries when they both ran to be the Republican presidential candidate in 2016, launching public insults at one another.
But over the past few years Mr Rubio has softened some of his stances to align more closely with Mr Trump’s views, particularly on foreign policy – so much so that he was one of three final contenders for Mr Trump’s vice-presidential pick for this term, eventually losing out to JD Vance.
Before he was made secretary of state, the 53-year-old said Ukraine needed to seek a negotiated settlement with Russia rather than focus on regaining all territory that Russia has taken in the last decade.
“I’m not on Russia’s side – but unfortunately the reality of it is that the way the war in Ukraine is going to end is with a negotiated settlement,” he said in September.
Michael Waltz
Image: Michael Waltz at the Republican National Convention last year. Pic: Reuters
US national security adviser Michael Waltz will be alongside Mr Rubio during the US-Russia talks.
The 51-year-old is a Green Beret veteran who served in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Africa.
Since 2019, he has represented a congressional district in the House, where he’s a member of the Armed Services, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees.
Before his appointment in Mr Trump’s cabinet, he co-wrote an article in The Economist that laid out his view of how the US could move to convince Russia to end the war: either by offering to ease sanctions or threatening greater assistance to Kyiv.
“America can use economic leverage, including lifting the pause on exports of liquefied natural gas and cracking down on Russia’s illicit oil sales, to bring Mr Putin to the table,” he wrote in the 2 November piece, co-authored with Matthew Kroenig, a former Pentagon strategist.
“If he refuses to talk, Washington can, as Mr Trump argued, provide more weapons to Ukraine with fewer restrictions on their use. Faced with this pressure, Mr Putin will probably take the opportunity to wind the conflict down.”
He said that he didn’t want Moscow to be able to declare its actions in Ukraine a victory.
Instead, he wrote that requiring Mr Putin to accept a deal whereby Ukraine remains an independent state, closely tied to the West “would be a strategic defeat for the Russian leader and seen as such in Beijing”.
Steve Witkoff
Image: Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff (left): Pic: Reuters
Mr Witkoff, Mr Trump’s special Middle East envoy, is a long-time friend of the president’s and a fellow billionaire real estate developer.
The 67-year-old, who has known Mr Trump for decades, is a Republican donor and served on one of the president’s Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups to combat the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Like Mr Trump, he made his fortune in real estate in both New York and Florida, and brought family members – his wife, Lauren, and sons Alex and Zach – into the Witkoff Group.
He is regularly seen bonding with Mr Trump on the golf course, and was present on the course in Florida during the apparent assassination attempt on the president last September.
Mr Witkoff has been busy in his new Middle East role, having been Mr Trump’s man in the room for the extremely fragile Israel-Hamas ceasefire negotiations.
In a Fox News interview on Sunday, he confirmed he was heading to Riyadh, adding: “And hopefully we’ll make some really good progress.”
Sergei Lavrov
Image: Sergei Lavrov at a meeting in Moscow. Pic: Reuters
Sergei Lavrov is Russia’s longstanding foreign minister, having taken the role back in 2004.
The highly decorated Kremlin official has been described as “the Jedi master of the dark arts of Russian diplomacy” by Sky News’ international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn.
He said Mr Lavrov is “a diplomatic bruiser who cajoles and bullies where he sees fit” who has been known, like others at the Kremlin, to make outlandish claims about the reality of the war.
Initially, when rumours of a Russian invasion sparked, he said it would never happen – then once it began, he for some time insisted that it hadn’t.
The 74-year-old made headlines when he unintentionally made the audience at an international conference in India laugh in March 2023 by attempting to portray his country as the victim of the war in Ukraine.
“The war, which we are trying to stop, which was launched against us using Ukrainian people, of course, influenced the policy of Russia, including energy policy,” he said to a chorus of laughs and groans.
Yuri Ushakov
Image: Yuri Ushakov. Pic: AP
Mr Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov will join Mr Lavrov or the Russian side of the table.
Americans will be familiar with the Kremlin official, as he served as the Ambassador of Russia to the United States from 1998 until 2008 before taking up his current post in 2012.
What exactly is the meeting for?
Specifically, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the meeting would focus on restoring US-Russia relations and setting up talks for a potential Ukraine peace deal.
The talks will be among the first high-level in-person discussions in years between Russian and US officials and are meant to precede a meeting between Mr Trump and Mr Putin.
Mr Rubio has said the coming weeks and days would determine whether Mr Putin is serious about making peace.
Keith Kellogg, Mr Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, is not expected to attend the meeting, as he is at NATO’s HQ in Brussels, but he has been working with Mr Trump on a plan to broker a war-ending deal with Russia.
They have offered scant details about such a plan, nor any timescale for its implementation.
This meeting comes off the back of Mr Trump’s phone call with Mr Putin last week.
Writing about the call on Truth Social, the US president said: “As we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine.
“We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations. We have also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately.”
Ukraine and Europe are not invited
The US and Russia have excluded Ukraine and Europe from the meeting, as tensions grow between America and European countries.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has confirmed his country has been left out of the talks in Saudi Arabia, saying any negotiations without them will have “no result”.
“And we cannot acknowledge anything, any arrangements about us, that were made without us. And we will not recognise such agreements,” he told reporters on Monday.
Speaking to Sky News’ US partner network NBC News, Ukraine’s president thanked Donald Trump for his support, but added there is not “any leader in the world who can really make a deal with Vladimir Putin without us”.
Asked whether he believed Mr Trump was negotiating in good faith, Mr Zelenskyy said: “I hope so. I hope so. Yes, I count on it.
“I trust Trump because he’s the president of the US, because your people voted for him and I respect their choice.”
In an interview on CBS News on Sunday, Mr Rubio moved to reassure Europe and Ukraine that they would be part of negotiations further down the line if they were to materialise.
He said: “If it’s real negotiations, and we’re not there yet, but if that were to happen, Ukraine will have to be involved because they’re the one that were invaded, and the Europeans will have to be involved because… they have sanctions on Putin and Russia as well, and they’ve contributed to this effort.”
While the UK’s FTSE 100 closed down 1.55% and the continent’s STOXX Europe 600 index was down 2.67% as of 5.30pm, it was American traders who were hit the most.
All three of the US’s major markets opened to sharp losses on Thursday morning.
Image: The S&P 500 is set for its worst day of trading since the COVID-19 pandemic. File pic: AP
By 8.30pm UK time (3.30pm EST), The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 3.7%, the S&P 500 opened with a drop of 4.4%, and the Nasdaq composite was down 5.6%.
Compared to their values when Donald Trump was inaugurated, the three markets were down around 5.6%, 8.7% and 14.4%, respectively, according to LSEG.
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Worst one-day losses since COVID
As Wall Street trading ended at 9pm in the UK, two indexes had suffered their worst one-day losses since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The S&P 500 fell 4.85%, the Nasdaq dropped 6%, and the Dow Jones fell 4%.
It marks Nasdaq’s biggest daily percentage drop since March 2020 at the start of COVID, and the largest drop for the Dow Jones since June 2020.
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5:07
The latest numbers on tariffs
‘Trust in President Trump’
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN earlier in the day that Mr Trump was “doubling down on his proven economic formula from his first term”.
“To anyone on Wall Street this morning, I would say trust in President Trump,” she told the broadcaster, adding: “This is indeed a national emergency… and it’s about time we have a president who actually does something about it.”
Later, the US president told reporters as he left the White House that “I think it’s going very well,” adding: “The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom.”
He later said on Air Force One that the UK is “happy” with its tariff – the lowest possible levy of 10% – and added he would be open to negotiations if other countries “offer something phenomenal”.
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3:27
How is the world reacting to Trump’s tariffs?
Economist warns of ‘spiral of doom’
The turbulence in the markets from Mr Trump’s tariffs “just left everybody in shock”, Garrett Melson, portfolio strategist at Natixis Investment Managers Solutions in Boston, told Reuters.
He added that the economy could go into recession as a result, saying that “a lot of the pain, will probably most acutely be felt in the US and that certainly would weigh on broader global growth as well”.
Meanwhile, chief investment officer at St James’s Place Justin Onuekwusi said that international retaliation is likely, even as “it’s clear countries will think about how to retaliate in a politically astute way”.
He warned: “Significant retaliation could lead to a tariff ‘spiral of doom’ that could be the growth shock that drags us into recession.”
It comes as the UK government published a long list of US products that could be subject to reciprocal tariffs – including golf clubs and golf balls.
Running to more than 400 pages, the list is part of a four-week-long consultation with British businesses and suggests whiskey, jeans, livestock, and chemical components.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said on Thursday that the US president had launched a “new era” for global trade and that the UK will respond with “cool and calm heads”.
It also comes as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a 25% tariff on all American-imported vehicles that are not compliant with the US-Mexico-Canada trade deal.
He added: “The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services, is over. This is a tragedy.”
Tanking stock markets, collapsing world orders, devastating trade wars; economists with their hair ablaze are scrambling to keep up.
But as we try to make sense of Donald Trumps’s tariff tsunami, economic theory only goes so far. In the end this surely is about something more primal.
Power.
Understanding that may be crucial to how the world responds.
Yes, economics helps explain the impact. The world’s economy has after all shifted on its axis, the way it’s been run for decades turned on its head.
Instead of driving world trade, America is creating a trade war. We will all feel the impact.
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0:58
PM will ‘fight’ for deal with US
Donald Trump says he is settling scores, righting wrongs. America has been raped, looted and pillaged by the world trading system.
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But don’t be distracted by the hyperbole – and if you think this is about economics alone, you may be missing the point.
Above all, tariffs give Donald Trump power. They strike fear into allies and enemies, from governments to corporations.
This is a president who runs his presidency like a medieval emperor or mafia don.
It is one reason why since his election we have seen what one statesman called a conga line of sycophants make their way to the White House, from world leaders to titans of industry.
The conga line will grow longer as they now redouble their efforts hoping to special treatment from Trump’s tariffs. Sir Keir Starmer among them.
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President Trump’s using similar tactics at home, deploying presidential power to extract concessions and deter dissent in corporate America, academia and the US media. Those who offer favours are spared punishment.
His critics say he seeks a form power for the executive or presidential branch of government that the founding fathers deliberately sought to prevent.
Whether or not that is true, the same playbook of divide and rule through intimidation can now be applied internationally. Thanks to tariffs
Each country will seek exceptions but on Trump’s terms. Those who retaliate may meet escalation.
This is the unforgiving calculus for governments including our own plotting their next moves.
The temptation will be to give Trump whatever he wants to spare their economies, but there is a jeopardy that compounds the longer this goes on.
Image: Could America’s traditional allies turn to China? Pic: AP
Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian prime minister who coined the conga line comparison, put it this way: “Pretty much all the international leaders I have seen that have sucked up to Trump have been run over. The reality is if you suck up to bullies, whether it’s global affairs or in the playground, you just get more bullying.”
Trading partners may be able to mitigate the impact of these tariffs through negotiation, but that may only encourage this unorthodox president to demand ever more?
Ultimately the world will need a more reliable superpower than that.
In the hands of such a president, America cannot be counted on.
When it comes to security, stability and prosperity, allies will need to fend for themselves.
And they will need new friends. If Washington can’t be relied on, Beijing beckons.
America First will, more and more, mean America on its own.
Actors, directors and celebrity friends have paid tribute to Val Kilmer, after he died aged 65.
The California-born star of Top Gun, Batman and Heat died of pneumonia on Tuesday night in Los Angeles, his daughter Mercedes told the Associated Press.
She said Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 but later recovered.
Tributes flooded in after reports broke of the actor’s death, with No Country For Old Men star Josh Brolin among the first to share their memories.
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2:49
Watch: Val Kilmer in his most iconic roles
He wrote on Instagram: “See ya, pal. I’m going to miss you. You were a smart, challenging, brave, uber-creative firecracker. There’s not a lot left of those.
“I hope to see you up there in the heavens when I eventually get there. Until then, amazing memories, lovely thoughts.”
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Kyle Maclachlan, who co-starred with Kilmer in the 1991 biopic The Doors, wrote on social media: “You’ll always be my Jim. See you on the other side my friend.”
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Michael Mann, who directed Kilmer in 1995’s Heat, also paid tribute in a statement, saying: “I always marvelled at the range, the brilliant variability within the powerful current of Val’s possessing and expressing character.
“After so many years of Val battling disease and maintaining his spirit, this is tremendously sad news.”
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Heat co-star Danny Trejo also called Kilmer “a great actor, a wonderful person, and a dear friend of mine” on Instagram.
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Cher, who once dated the actor, said on X that “U Were Funny, crazy, pain in the ass, GREAT FRIEND… BRILLIANT as Mark Twain, BRAVE here during ur sickness”.
Lifelong friend and director of Twixt, Francis Ford Coppola said: “Val Kilmer was the most talented actor when in his High School, and that talent only grew greater throughout his life.
“He was a wonderful person to work with and a joy to know – I will always remember him.”
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The Top Gun account on X also said it was remembering Kilmer, who starred as Iceman in both the 1986 original and 2022 sequel, and “whose indelible cinematic mark spanned genres and generations”.
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