Ukraine and U.S. to give diplomacy another try

Russia launched another attack Thursday night on Ukraine’s civilian power grid, officials in Kyiv said, with 250 missiles and drones injuring 10 people, causing widespread outages, and prompting the government to urge people to ration their energy consumption.

Washington’s NATO allies in Europe are attempting to plug the gap left by Washington, announcing hundreds of billions of dollars in new military spending at a Thursday summit in Brussels. As with Ukraine, Trump’s ties with Europe have dramatically frayed, with officials telling NBC News that the administration is considering a radical policy shift in which it would favor NATO allies who spent more on their militaries.

Ukraine relations thawed somewhat Tuesday after Trump said Zelenskyy had sent him a letter expressing contrition and that he was ready to sign a peace deal. The Ukrainians have not confirmed the letter, but Zelenskyy echoed Trump’s description in a post on X.

Witkoff said the “really good, positive” letter had prompted the Saudi meeting.

Saudi Arabia has increasingly become the venue for such summits. A Rubio-led American delegation met with Russian counterparts there last month, drawing ire from Europeans and Ukrainians who felt they were being left out.

The kingdom is set to get another diplomatic boon after Trump said that it would be his first foreign destination “the next month and a half” — as it was during his first term.

“I have a great relationship with them, and they’ve been very nice,” he said. “But they’re going to be spending a lot of money to American companies for buying military equipment and a lot of other things. Probably over the next month and a half.”

Trump said that the Saudis had agreed to invest $1 trillion in American companies.

“This time they’ve gotten richer, we’ve all gotten older, so I said, ‘I’ll go if you pay a trillion dollars to American companies over a four year period and they’ve agreed to do that,’” he said.

One U.S. firm to benefit from Saudi investment is Affinity Partners, the Miami-based fund founded by Trump’s son-in-law and former-adviser Jared Kushner. It received $2 billion from the kingdom six months after Trump left office in 2021.

In his first term, Trump said his visit there led to the signing of $350 million in deals. However his destination was a major break with tradition, with every president since Calvin Coolidge in 1928 choosing either Mexico, Canada or Europe for their first international visit.