The State Department is dispatching a senior official this week to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and Moscow for talks to try to ease tensions. But the trip, by Karen Donfried, the assistant secretary of state who oversees American policy in Europe, will also “reinforce the United States’ commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity,” the department said in a statement.
Diplomats in Liverpool also discussed ways to counter what was described as China’s human rights abuses and predatory economic partnerships with developing countries, as well as how to speed humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, which is facing vast food shortages, while holding the Taliban to account.
Additionally, Ms. Truss, the British foreign secretary, repeated her warning that the latest rounds of nuclear talks between world powers and Iran represented Tehran’s “last chance to come to the negotiating table with a serious resolution.” Diplomats are trying to revive the 2015 accord — from which the Trump administration withdrew the United States in 2018 — that limited Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for easing American financial sanctions.
But eight months of negotiations after Mr. Biden took office, and signaled his intent to rejoin the deal, were dealt a severe, and perhaps fatal, setback by new leaders in Iran who are demanding that the sanctions be lifted before agreeing to other conditions.
The talks, in their seventh round, continued on Sunday in Vienna. They recently resumed after a break of more than five months as Iran elected a new harder-line government.
Germany’s new foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said in Liverpool that “time is running out” for a deal. Iran has moved to reject compromises reached in earlier rounds, she said. The latest round, she told reporters, “has shown in the last days that we do not have any progress.”
China and Russia have indicated more patience with Iran, saying that the talks are proceeding, if slowly.