IGNORE THE HYPE: Kurt Volker’s guide to US-Russia Ukraine peace talks in Saudi Arabia.

The Kyiv Independent: There has been a lot of panic in Ukraine and Europe about the possibility of the U.S. and Russia negotiating a peace agreement over their heads — is this justified?

Ambassador Kurt Volker: People were upset about (being excluded from the table) and I have to keep telling people there isn’t a table.

There is (U.S.) President Trump picking up the phone, calling Putin, calling Zelensky, people having meetings at NATO, people having meetings in Munich. It’s going to be like that. It’s going to be a lot of consultation, a lot of conversations, but there’s no single negotiation going on.

In fact, we don’t even know if it’s going to be possible with Russia.

I think there are several things going on and a lot of it is being misread, but there are some things to be watching as well. First off, as we knew, President Trump was going to reach out to Putin in order to try to urge him to end the war, and he’s followed that up now by sending a team to meet with the Russians in Saudi Arabia.

I think there was a lot of media excitement over different comments that different people said in the past week, and I think some of them were maybe just not careful enough and the media ran with it.

For example, when (U.S. Defense Secretary) Pete Hegseth at the NATO meeting said that it’s not realistic for Ukraine to take its territory back (to the 2014 borders), that’s not that different from what President Zelensky was saying in January about not being able to take the territory back militarily, but having to pursue that by other means, provided there were security guarantees for the rest of Ukraine. That’s not that different.

Similarly with NATO, (Trump) said it’s not realistic to think that NATO membership would be a result of these negotiations, which I think is absolutely right, because Russia would not agree to that, and we shouldn’t even be talking to Russia about that. That’s none of their business.

I think those comments were blown out of proportion a bit.

“A bit” was Volker’s way of being …diplomatic… about the hype.