Saudi Arabia could be the only winner of Russia-US peace talks

As the US and Russia meet in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, to discuss a ceasefire in Ukraine, the talks potentially mark the end of a battle over who would get to serve as the mediator to help bring the war to an end. The diplomatic tussle to be the Ukraine war’s peace broker has been fractious. So how did Saudi Arabia come out on top? It comes down to the Kingdom’s cordial relations with both Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Donald Trump’s White House – and, of course, a lot of money.

MbS is said to be Trump’s favorite foreign leader

Saudi Arabia’s triumph was not a foregone conclusion. Prior to the Trump White House’s latest efforts, Turkey, France, India, Hungary, Austria, Denmark and even Israel (before the October 7 massacre) among many others made bids to claim the prize of chief middleman. As Trump knows all too well, enormous kudos is attached to being a successful fixer on the international stage. The conflict has attracted everyone, from experienced state mediators to opportunistic chancers.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has positioned himself as a one-man peace broking machine, dishing out hugs to both Putin and Ukraine’s President Zelensky in historic visits, and declaring his willingness to play a “personal role” to bring peace. Brazil and China opted to jump in as a tag team duo in May 2024, jointly proposing a six-point plan calling for an international peace conference to end the war. Back in June 2023, seven African leaders chose to go in mob-handed with their own ten-point peace initiative, sending delegations seemingly representing nearly every corner of Africa to Ukraine and Russia to throw their hats into the ring.

Prior to Saudi Arabia’s victory, the two frontrunners were Turkey and Qatar, who’d had some tangible success in negotiating agreements between the two sides.

Turkey’s mediation efforts secured the Black Sea grain deal in July 2022, effectively reopening Ukrainian agricultural exports and helping to bring down spiking global food prices until Russia withdrew from the agreement a year later. At a meeting with Zelensky only last month, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was touting Turkey as the “ideal host” for Ukraine peace talks. 

Qatar meanwhile had brokered several humanitarian deals to repatriate Ukrainian and Russian children, displaced by Moscow’s war, to their respective countries. It was set to mediate an agreement on halting strikes on energy and power infrastructure between Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Doha, before Ukraine’s surprise Kursk incursion in August 2024 scuppered the summit.

But it was Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s longstanding relationship with Putin that won the day and helped secure Riyadh’s role as the host. The pair know each other through the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which expanded in 2016 to include Russia in a new OPEC+. The “new oil bromance,” as it was then dubbed, has occasionally been a fractious alliance, but has otherwise stood the test of time. Both leaders have been united in their respective desire to collaborate to keep oil prices high. MbS, on the one hand, must maintain a minimum price point for oil to fund his gigantic domestic infrastructure projects, not least the sprawling, cyberpunk metropolis of NEOM city; Putin, on the other, requires a steady supply of oil funds to keep his war machine rolling.

While Saudi Arabia has publicly condemned Russian aggression, Riyadh has refused to join Western sanctions on Russia and has continued its bilateral meetings with them throughout the war. At a state visit for Putin in Riyadh in December 2023, the Russian leader declared that “nothing can prevent the development of our friendly relations.” Earlier that year, Saudi Arabia hosted international talks in Jeddah to build support for its own peace plan for Ukraine and began to position itself as a potential mediator in the war.

With Trump now driving the negotiations, any would-be mediator also needed to have great personal relations with the Donald. Luckily for Saudi Arabia, the president thinks MbS is “a great guy.” Reportedly Trump’s favorite foreign leader, MbS was the first he called after his inauguration and the first he plans to visit. During their phone conversation in January, MbS pledged that Saudi Arabia would invest $600 billion in the United States over Trump’s four-year term – a figure that Trump has asked to be rounded out “to around $1 trillion.”

Trump may have agreed to the Kingdom’s role as a mediator and host for the Ukraine peace talks to help woo them in to joining the Abraham Accords, which were brokered during Trump’s first term. The Accords normalized relations between several Arab countries and Israel, with potential Saudi involvement derailed by the war in Gaza. MbS is still seeking to rehabilitate his global image. This was, of course, tarnished by the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was allegedly killed by agents of the Saudi state on MbS’s orders, according to US intelligence. Participation in an international peace process could help rebuild MbS’s relations with the West and sweeten his acceptance of the Abraham deal.

It’s too early to say whether the latest round of talks will be a success. The Ukraine war could end like the Northern Ireland conflict, where both sides eventually committed to peace, and the United States was able to act as a single, effective mediator to help bring the Troubles to a close. But given the irrational and abiding nature of the Putin regime’s antipathy towards Ukraine, it could well turn out more like North versus South Korea, or Israel versus the Palestinians, where a carousel of mediators from around the world have tried and failed to find a resolution. Let’s hope that Saudi Arabia isn’t simply the first in a long line of peace brokers trying unsuccessfully to bridge an irreconcilable divide, even if that means MbS gets the credit.