Top U.S. and Russian officials wrapped up their meetings Tuesday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to discuss a pathway to end the war in Ukraine, days before Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is set to convene a summit with leaders from Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to discuss an Arab response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s vow to take over Gaza.
The two separate talks reflect the growing role of the prince in Trump’s efforts to fulfill his campaign promise to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
On Tuesday, Trump again declared he would swiftly end fighting.
“I have the power to end this war,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago, his residence in Florida, dismissing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s concern that Kyiv was excluded from the Riyadh meeting.
“Well, you’ve been there for three years, you should have ended it,” he said of Zelenskyy in response to a reporter’s question. “I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land.”
Trump did not clarify which part of land would remain Ukrainian. Russia began its full-scale invasion in February 2022 and now controls parts of the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions, and fighting has been ongoing at the borders of Kharkiv and Mykolaiv. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.
The Saudi talks signaled a major détente between Washington and Moscow and an abrupt end of U.S. policy under former President Joe Biden to isolate Russia and support Ukraine “for as long as it takes.”
Instead, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio dangled the prospects of “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians” on trade and other global issues when the war ends.
Arab response to Gaza plan
Later this week, Prince Mohammed will bring together leaders from Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and the UAE to discuss an Arab response to Trump’s vow to take over Gaza and create a “Riviera in the Middle East” by expelling Palestinians from Gaza to neighboring countries.
Trump’s plan has angered regional leaders, who are now scrambling to come up with a counteroffer that they will discuss in Riyadh ahead of a broader Arab League gathering in Cairo next week.
One of the Arab proposals being discussed is an Egyptian-led plan that involves forming a national Palestinian committee to govern Gaza without Hamas and raising up to $20 billion from Arab and Gulf states over three years for reconstruction.
As Saudi Arabia makes a play for the diplomatic mainstage, Prince Mohammed is motivated to be proactive rather than reactive, to counsel pragmatism rather than rigidity, said Laura Blumenfeld, a senior fellow and Middle East analyst at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.
Blumenfeld told VOA that the prince could pair his approach with a language that Trump likes to speak: investments.
On Wednesday, global financiers and tech executives will gather in Miami, Florida, in a conference hosted by the Future Investment Initiative Institute, a nonprofit arm of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund led by the prince. Trump is scheduled to deliver an address at the event.
“Trump is a peacemaker in a hurry, with his eye on the Nobel Prize. [The prince] is a dealmaker in a hurry, with his eye on the Saudi Vision 2030 economic diversification plan,” Blumenfeld added. “The two men are a match made in transactional heaven.”
Prince Mohammed the power broker
With his efforts focused on Ukraine and Gaza, the 39-year-old de facto leader of Saudi Arabia has emerged as a power broker that Trump leans on for his foreign policy goals.
Prince Mohammed has done this in part by leveraging close ties during Trump’s first term, maintaining business ties while Trump was out of office, and further expanding the relationship since the president’s inauguration last month.
Saudi Arabia was Trump’s first foreign trip in 2017, where he signed several deals, including a $110 billion arms deal, which could expand up to $350 billion over 10 years.
Trump spoke openly about the transactional nature of the visit, telling reporters days after his second inauguration in January that the reason he chose Riyadh for that first visit was because “they agreed to buy $450 billion worth of our products.”
Trump suggested on the day of his last inauguration that he would again make Saudi Arabia his first destination in return for Saudi funds, and days later, the prince told him during a phone call that he planned to invest $600 billion or more in the U.S. over the next four years.
In 2021, Saudi Arabia invested $2 billion with a firm that belonged to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and former aide. The Trump Organization has also expanded its real estate presence in the region, announcing it had leased its brand to two real estate projects in Riyadh in December after launching the Trump Tower project in Jeddah.
As Prince Mohammed cultivated his political and business ties with Trump, he maintained a relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin amid Biden’s effort to isolate the Russian leader following his 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
“The crown prince has been making the argument for the last five years that it’s in America’s interest that Saudi Arabia maintains very good ties with Russia and China,” said Ali Shihabi, author and commentator on the politics and economics of Saudi Arabia.
“Saudi Arabia was insisting on maintaining a multipolar policy while maintaining very strong ties with the United States,” he told VOA.
The prince is poised to host a summit between the two leaders that Trump said he agreed to during his call with Putin last week. The summit, Shihabi said, would be an example of how the prince’s gambit has paid off.
“I don’t think there are any leaders in the world that have the relationship that the crown prince has with both Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump,” he said.
There is also a practical reason. The kingdom is not a signatory of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023.
