Ukrain­ian Pres­i­dent Volodymyr Ze­len­skyy ar­rived Mon­day in Sau­di Ara­bia for a vis­it with its pow­er­ful crown prince ahead of his team’s meet­ing with Amer­i­ca’s top diplo­mat.

While Ze­len­skyy him­self won’t be there, his team will try to re­pair the dam­age done when his Feb. 28 vis­it to Wash­ing­ton de­scend­ed in­to an Oval Of­fice ar­gu­ment with Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and Vice Pres­i­dent JD Vance.

At stake is the mil­i­tary aid and in­tel­li­gence pre­vi­ous­ly of­fered by the Unit­ed States that had helped Kyiv since Rus­sia’s full-scale in­va­sion of Ukraine in 2022.

Sau­di state tele­vi­sion re­port­ed Ze­len­skyy’s ar­rival in Jed­dah, a port city on the Red Sea where the Ukraine-U.S. sum­mit will take place Tues­day.

Ze­len­skyy was due to meet with Crown Prince Mo­hammed bin Salman some­time af­ter sun­set, fol­low­ing the end of the dai­ly fast dur­ing the Mus­lim holy month of Ra­madan.

U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio was en route to Jed­dah as well. How­ev­er, it didn’t ap­pear that Ru­bio and Ze­len­skyy would meet in per­son there, though the sec­re­tary of state al­so was due to meet Prince Mo­hammed.

Ze­len­skyy has said a team in­clud­ing his chief of staff An­driy Yer­mak, For­eign Min­is­ter An­driy Sybi­ha and De­fense Min­is­ter Rustem Umerov will take part in the talks Tues­day. Ru­bio will lead the Amer­i­can team.

If Ukraine and the U.S. reach an un­der­stand­ing ac­cept­able to Trump, that could ac­cel­er­ate his ad­min­is­tra­tion’s push to peace talks. How­ev­er, the rest of Eu­rope re­mains skep­ti­cal as it has been side­lined.

The Eu­ro­pean Union last week agreed to boost the con­ti­nent’s de­fences and to free up hun­dreds of bil­lions of eu­ros for se­cu­ri­ty in re­sponse to the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s shift in stance on Ukraine.

As­so­ci­at­ed Press writer Jon Gam­brell in Dubai, Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, con­tributed to this re­port.

JED­DAH, Sau­di Ara­bia (AP) —