The US said Ukraine would meet with Russia to discuss peace. That was news to Kyiv.

Ukrainian officials reacted with a mixture of shock and confusion to the news that top Trump administration officials are traveling to Saudi Arabia to kickstart peace talks with Russia in the coming days — and that Ukrainians were also apparently coming.

“I saw that someone said that there would be a meeting in Saudi Arabia. I do not know what it is,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Saturday. On the prospect of talks without Ukraine at the table, he said: “Well, this is not a serious conversation, it seems to me."

One Ukrainian official at the conference expressed exasperation at the news, saying: “I don’t know where this came from, or what they expect to be the outcome of these talks where we are not invited.” And back in Kyiv, Mykhailo Podolyak, a top Zelenskyy adviser, was even more blunt. "There is nothing on the negotiating table that would be worth discussing,” he said. “Russia is not ready for negotiations.”

The Ukrainians interviewed by POLITICO were left confused not only about what was happening, but who was in charge.

Vice President JD Vance made no mention of the peace talks in his Munich speech, Rubio made no public remarks at the conference, and Trump’s special envoy for peace talks, Keith Kellogg, provided few answers about where the administration was headed in a closed-door lunch session. Kellogg is not scheduled to attend the talks.

But others cautioned against alarmism before the meetings happened and said the result — not the process — mattered most. Some European leaders pushed back against the alarmism, too.