Why the GCC-hosted peace talks should concern Ukraine

February 18th, 2025 in Riyadh. From the left: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud, National Security Advisor Mosaad bin Mohammad al-Aiban, aide to the President of Russia Yuri Ushakov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia Sergey Lavrov. Photo: US Department of State / wikimedia.org

Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to end the Russo-Ukrainian conflict “within 24 hours of being elected” has predictably fallen flat. As a result, the US president has now given himself a more plausible, albeit still farfetched, “100 days upon assuming office” to achieve this gargantuan task. Reluctant to lose face twice, Trump is hellbent on strong-arming Ukraine into accepting a “cold peace” against its will before the end of this self-imposed deadline. Gutting USAID is part of a pressure campaign intended to leave the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy no choice but to choose “jaw-jaw” over “war-war”. Granted, the previous administration bears much culpability for not permitting strikes deep inside Russia in the name of “escalation management” right up until the dying days of Joe Biden’s presidency. That being said, pulling the plug on foreign assistance that has hitherto shielded Ukraine’s wartime economy from total collapse and kept state organs functioning is a far more consequential move.

Worse yet, the current establishment is playing right into Vladimir Putin’s hands by barring Ukraine from mediation efforts. This sidelining has also happened to the “Weimar+” Group (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Great Britain and Poland). The Kremlin maintains that Zelenskyy is an “illegitimate usurper” by virtue of him staying on in power beyond his official mandate and has refused direct engagement with the so-called “expired Ukrainian president”. Moscow has cited a decree he ratified in October 2022, which precludes bilateral discussions between Moscow and Kyiv. Knowing that Ukraine can ill afford the rough and tumble synonymous with general elections as it struggles to mobilize enough warm bodies to the front lines and fend off Russian battlefield advances, Putin is making it seem as if he is legally constrained from negotiating with Zelenskyy. This has been done in the hope that humiliating and discrediting his opposite number will bring about regime change in Kyiv.

The 90-minute phone conversation between Trump and Putin that took place earlier this week somewhat validates the Russian president’s narrative on Europe being completely irrelevant. This also appears to be the case regarding their upcoming tête-à-tête in Saudi Arabia. As signatories to the Rome Statute that enforced a pan-continental airspace ban on all Russian carriers once the full-scale invasion was launched, EU member states are admittedly off-limits to ICC-designated war criminal Putin. After all, an arrest warrant has been issued for the Russian leader. Nonetheless, the fact that a resolution to the nearly three-year long “special military operation” is now being sought in an entirely different place than the actual theatre does not bode well at all for the supranational bloc, whose raison d’être was to prevent such flare ups following the Second World War. It has also affected the EU’s ability to project strength in the global arena. Brussels’s dovishness and refusal to go all in for Ukraine has not only emboldened Moscow but also the White House.

Apart from threatening to forcibly annex Greenland, as well as levy prohibitive 25 per cent tariffs on all steel and aluminium imports from the EU, brushing the Eurocrats aside and attempting to cut a deal with Putin over their heads reflects Trump’s sheer contempt for an entity he considers a spent force. A Reuters article published two weeks ago suggested that both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were frontrunners to host Russo-American deliberations on Ukraine’s future. Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s commitment to invest 600 billion US dollars in the US economy, as well as his refusal to entertain BRICS membership anytime soon, clearly played a role in Riyadh being favoured over Abu Dhabi as the host venue for this high-profile meeting. Overall, Trump remains keen on roping the Saudis into his Abraham Accords project, skirting around the “two-state solution” they have demanded as a precondition for establishing diplomatic relations with Israel.

Lionizing Bin Salman as a key power broker and allowing him to share the spoils if a cessation to the fighting is eventually agreed on by Moscow and Washington could prompt the House of Saud to take a less intransigent stance vis-à-vis Palestinian statehood. As a result, Riyadh could enter into the “deal of the century” regardless. Trump has even suggested that his first overseas trip could be to Saudi Arabia, as was the case during his previous term in the Oval Office. Make no mistake, the Saudis place greater emphasis on posturing and grandstanding than actually saving lives or delivering tangible results when taking it upon themselves to hold a summit of such magnitude. At the same time, a vanity exercise of this kind serves as a a much needed red herring for the Saudi leader, with his Vision 2030 initiative floundering. Grandiose infrastructure projects like NEOM have failed to draw significant interest from external investors, whereas the sheikhdom still suffers from an “image problem” owing to its abysmal human rights record. This includes the inhumane treatment of migrant workers, draconian cybercrime laws, and a record upsurge in beheadings for petty crimes.

Zelenskyy, for his part, should harbour no illusions about Saudi Arabia being a good faith and neutral interlocutor. Last July, its officials threatened to sell the kingdom’s European debt holdings if the Group of Seven (G7) seized 300 billion US dollars worth of Russia’s frozen foreign reserves. Mere weeks after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in late February 2022, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal – a Saudi billionaire businessman and member of the ruling dynasty – ploughed nearly 500 million US dollars into three legacy state-owned Russian energy companies. These were namely Gazprom, Rosneft and Lukoil. Moreover, and as per an OCCRP-led investigation, Riyadh spent roughly 2.3 billion US dollars to procure 39 Russian Pantsir-S1M missile systems from the sanctioned defence contractor Rostec back in April 2021. A year and a half later, the Saudi government slashed OPEC+ oil production by two million barrels a day. In doing so, the state fuelled the Kremlin’s war chest thanks to higher crude prices.

The neighbouring UAE has likewise positioned itself as a neutral destination for peace talks, yet warrants some degree of scepticism. Whereas the Emiratis have successfully arranged multiple prisoner swaps, the sobering reality is that for every Ukrainian POW released, hundreds of high-net-worth Russians are being issued UAE “Golden Visas”. This allows them to live in the lap of luxury in Dubai. According to a 2024 report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ), Russians have snapped up 6.3 billion US dollars in Dubai real estate since the onset of the war. They also constitute the third largest group of foreign property buyers in 2023. Meanwhile, the UAE welcomed two million tourists from Russia last year, with 150 weekly flights operating between both countries. Their citizens are also mutually exempt from entry requirements. Moreover, the tiny federation has long been permissive of illicit financial flows from co-belligerent Iran and has emerged as the go-to playground for IRGC-affiliated fugitives to splurge and launder their ill-gotten wealth.

Despite their decades-old and unresolved territorial dispute over three small Persian Gulf islands, the UAE remains Iran’s second biggest trading partner. Abu Dhabi exported goods valued at 21 billion US dollars to the Islamic Republic in the first seven months of 2024. Numerous Emirates-based logistics companies were targeted by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) for facilitating the transfer of Iranian-made Shahed UAVs to Russia. Abu Dhabi was additionally at the forefront of rehabilitating the murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad and bringing Syria – one of the few UN nations to recognize Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics – back into the Arab League before the ruling Ba’athist Party was overthrown last December. Incumbent as it may be on Zelenskyy to leave no stone unturned in pursuing an immediate and sustainable ceasefire, he must be sure to view Saudi Arabia and the UAE with his eyes wide open in the coming weeks. After all, their leadership is ideologically aligned with Russia and focused on mainstreaming the “authoritarian stability” model beyond the Middle East.

Saahil Menon is an independent wealth advisor based in Dubai with an academic background in business, economics and finance.

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Gulf states, peace talks, Russia, Russian foreign policy, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Ukraine, US foreign policy