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Dozens of countries will take part in a Saudi-hosted conference beginning on Friday that aims to sway developing countries to support a Ukrainian peace plan and its demands that Russia withdraw troops from its territory.

The conference of national security advisers, which will run until Sunday, follows a similar meeting in Copenhagen, as Ukraine increases its efforts to engage key developing countries in isolating Moscow internationally ahead of a planned “peace summit” that Kyiv is pushing to arrange before the end of the year.

“The value [of the summits] is actually trying to nudge the Global South countries and ourselves to find some basic agreements around which the global peace summit could then be organised,” said a senior European Commission official who requested anonymity to preview the meeting.

“If we can agree on a date for the global peace summit led by the Ukrainians, plus a statement of the basic principles, that would be what I‘d define a success,” the person added.

Dozens of countries, many of them developing nations that have been reluctant to condemn Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, have been invited to the conference in Jeddah, where national security adviser Jake Sullivan will represent the US.

China, which has maintained close links with Russia while warning against further escalation, confirmed on Friday that it would attend, after skipping the Copenhagen meeting.

Beijing’s attendance is a victory for both the Ukrainians and the Saudis, who have maintained close ties with Opec+ partner Russia while hosting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and sending financial aid to Kyiv. Russia has not been invited to the Jeddah gathering.

Saudi Arabia has mediated prisoner exchanges between Russia and Ukraine and has sought to establish itself diplomatically on the global stage.

Ihor Zhovkva, Zelenskyy’s deputy head of administration, was optimistic that Ukraine would be able to convince developing countries to sign up to Kyiv’s peace plan, which will demand a Russian withdrawal from all Ukrainian territories and the setting-up of a tribunal to prosecute Russian war crimes.

“We’re involving additional countries of the Global South,” Zhovkva wrote in a Facebook post, adding that holding the summit in the Middle East “completely destroys Russia’s narrative about the support of Ukraine exclusively by western countries”.

But Ukraine has struggled to court states with longstanding ties to Russia in a conflict that many developing countries view as a struggle between a US-led Nato and Russia. “The focus is on engagement and outreach,” said a senior official from an EU member state.

Officials from the Ukrainian presidency and foreign ministry met developing world experts in Poland last month as they sought ideas of how to improve engagement with Africa, Asia and Latin America.

“There have been growing efforts to improve Ukraine’s diplomatic engagement and communications strategy in countries beyond the Euro-Atlantic region,” according to an agenda of the meeting in Warsaw seen by the Financial Times. “Unfortunately, these efforts suffered from a lack of solid co-ordination mechanisms or measurable targets.”

The countries targeted in that conference were India, Indonesia, Kenya, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, South Africa and Brazil.

India, which will attend this weekend’s talks and which relies heavily on Russian oil, has made some gestures of support towards Ukraine but remains mostly neutral. “There’s a question here about turning a very large tanker around, and I’m not sure the captain of the tanker wants to turn that ship around,” said a person familiar with the discussions.

Ukraine’s efforts have also faced scepticism in several African countries. “A lot of African countries think this is not their war and [that they] should not be involved,” said a senior Ukrainian diplomat in Africa.

One participant in the Warsaw conference said they had advised Kyiv to split international resolutions on Russia’s invasion into two parts, so that developing nations could vote in favour of condemning the invasion without having to sign up to punitive measures against Moscow.

“The Ukrainians couldn’t understand why we weren’t against Russia. But we’re not like eastern Europe, we don’t define our existence through opposition to Russia,” the person said.

Additional reporting by Samer Al-Atrush in Dubai