Washington — Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday that “both sides are going to have to make concessions” to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, hinting at the road ahead for talks aimed at getting Moscow and Kyiv to reach a lasting peace agreement.
“We want to wind up with a peace deal that ends this war so Ukraine can go on with the rest of their lives and rebuild their country and be assured that this is never going to happen again,” Rubio said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” noting that doing so would require both sides “to give.”
President Trump is set to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr and European leaders at the White House on Monday following his high-stakes summit with Putin in Alaska last Friday. Mr. Trump called the nearly three-hour meeting with Putin “extremely productive” with “many points” the two leaders agreed on. But “there’s no deal until there’s a deal,” he said, and no ceasefire was announced.
Rubio, who attended the summit, was thin on details Sunday, saying that “there are things that were discussed as part of this meeting that are potentials for breakthroughs.” He added that the details would be discussed with Zelenskyy and other European leaders on Monday as the administration works to “narrow the gap between the two sides.”
“We have to make enough progress so that we can sit down President Zelenskyy and President Putin in the same place, which is what President Zelenskyy has been asking for, and reach a final agreement that ends this war,” Rubio said, noting that there were “some concepts and ideas discussed” with Putin that they expect the Ukrainians would support.
When asked whether the U.S. would demand Russian withdrawal from Ukrainian territory as part of an agreement, the secretary of state acknowledged that both sides would have to make concessions in order to reach a deal to end the conflict.
“If one side gets everything they want, that’s called surrender,” Rubio said. “And that’s not what we’re close to doing, because neither side here is on the verge of surrender, or anything close to it.”
Rubio outlined a handful of areas where agreement needs to be reached, including the details of security guarantees for Ukraine, the question of territories “and where the lines are going to be drawn” and the issue of rebuilding the country. He said the ideas “require some more specificity,” noting that the U.S. will “need to work with our partners to see what that looks like.”
Monday’s discussions come after Zelenskyy met with Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance in February, when an Oval Office meeting descended into insults and chaos, exposing severe rifts between the U.S. and Ukraine.
Rubio pushed back on the idea that European leaders are joining Zelenskyy in Washington to provide the Ukrainian president with backup to prevent him from accepting a bad deal after the contentious meeting earlier this year.
“We’ve been working with these people for weeks, for weeks on this stuff,” Rubio said. “They’re coming here tomorrow because they’re supposed to come here tomorrow. We invited them to come. The president invited them to come.”
The secretary outlined that after the meeting with Putin, “we felt, and I agreed, that there was enough progress — not a lot of progress — but enough progress made in those talks to allow us to move to the next phase.”
“I’m not saying we’re on the verge of a peace deal, but I am saying that we saw movement,” Rubio added. “Enough movement to justify a follow-up meeting with Zelenskyy and the Europeans, enough movement for us to dedicate even more time to this.”
