Saudi Arabia's crown prince may not be inside the room where the first high-level talks between Russia and the United States over Moscow’s war on Ukraine are taking place.

Saudi Arabia made their debut at the Asian Winter Games in China this week and will controversially host the next edition in a move derided as "awful" by one Olympic skier and denounced by environmental groups.

As Europeans talked the possibility of contributing peacekeepers to back any Ukraine peace deal, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also said in Riyadh that Moscow would not accept the deployment of NATO troops there,