More talks is a positive move - but the decision to hold them in Saudi Arabia raises questions

On the surface, the announcement that Saudi Arabia will host talks between the US and Ukraine in Jeddah next week appears promising news.

- Peter Beaumont

After the disastrous meeting between the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and Donald Trump in the White House last week, a more neutral location for this meeting of lower-level figures makes sense in terms of trying to dial down the temperature.

In his nightly address on Thursday, Zelenskyy said he would travel to Saudi Arabia on Monday to meet the country's crown prince, and his team would stay on to hold talks with US officials.

The real question, however, is how neutral Saudi Arabia and its crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, actually are and why the talks are being held there and not in a European capital, for instance.

The reality is that Saudi Arabia is primarily a comfortable location for the Trump administration.

In his first term in office, Trump's first foreign visit was to Saudi Arabia, a country with ambitions to be a major diplomatic player despite its horrific human rights record, including the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. For his part, Trump sees a normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel as the key prize in his attempts to forge a region-wide peace deal after the signing of the Abraham accords - bilateral normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain - which he pursued during his first term but which have done little to improve security in the Middle East.