PARIS (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump will walk away from trying to broker a Russia-Ukraine peace deal within days unless there are clear signs that a deal can be done, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday.
“We’re not going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end. So we need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable in the next few weeks,” Rubio said in Paris after meeting European and Ukrainian leaders.
“The president feels very strongly about that. He has dedicated a lot of time and energy to this … this is important, but there are a lot of other really important things going on that deserve just as much, if not more attention.”
There was no immediate comment from Paris, London, Berlin, Kyiv or Moscow on Rubio’s statement, which coincided with signs of some progress in U.S. talks with Ukraine.
Trump said on Thursday he expected to sign a deal with Kyiv next week that would give the U.S. access to Ukraine’s minerals. An attempt to sign a minerals pact in February fell apart after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy clashed with Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office.
After the talks in Paris on Thursday – the first substantive, high level and in-person talks on Trump’s peace push that have included European powers – Rubio said a U.S. peace framework received an “encouraging reception”. Zelenskiy’s office called the talks constructive and positive.
GROWING FRUSTRATIONS AS PEACE DEALS PROVE ELUSIVE
Rubio’s comments on Friday underline mounting frustrations in the White House over a lack of progress in pushes to settle a growing list of geopolitical challenges.
Trump promised during his election campaign to end the war in Ukraine within his first 24 hours in the White House. He moderated that claim on taking office, suggesting a deal by April or May as obstacles mounted.
He has pressured both sides to come to the negotiating table, threatening tougher sanctions on Russia or an end to billions of dollars in U.S. military support for Kyiv.
Both Ukraine and Russia showed up for U.S.-brokered talks in Saudi Arabia, which resulted in a partial ceasefire, but nothing more. Meanwhile, the war has continued, including a recent Russian missile attack that hit Sumy in northeastern Ukraine, killing 35 people – an attack Trump called a “mistake.”
If Washington walks away, efforts to broker a peace would likely founder because no other nation is able to bring similar pressure on both Moscow and Kyiv.
Other impacts are unclear. The United States could keep its current policy on the conflict unchanged, maintaining sanctions on Russia and keeping U.S. aid flowing to Kyiv. Alternatively, Trump could decide to halt payments to Ukraine.
Rubio said he spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after the Paris talks and had told him they had been constructive, and also briefed him on “some of the elements of” the U.S. peace framework.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he wants Ukraine to drop its ambitions to join NATO, Russia to control the entirety of four Ukrainian regions it has claimed as its own, and the size of the Ukrainian army to be limited. Kyiv says those demands are tantamount to demanding its capitulation.
Rubio said the issue of U.S. security guarantees as part of any deal came up in the talks in Paris, without going into greater detail.
He said security guarantees were an issue “we can fix in sort of in a way that’s acceptable to everyone,” but “we have bigger challenges that we need to figure out, whether it’s even possible within the short term”.
He said it was clear that a peace deal would be difficult to strike but there needed to be signs it could be done soon.
“There’s no one saying this can be done in 12 hours. But we want to see how far apart it is and whether those differences can even be narrowed, if it’s even possible to get movement within the period of time we have in mind,” he said.
“We need to figure out here now, within a matter of days, whether this is doable in the short term, because if it’s not, then I think we’re just going to move on.”
(Reporting by Bart H. Meijer and Dominique Vidalon; Additional reporting from Michel Rose in Paris, Andreas Rinke in Berlin and Christian Lowe in Kyiv Writing by Gabriel Stargardter; Editing by David Goodman, Andrew Heavens, Philippa Fletcher)
By Bart H. Meijer and Dominique Vidalon
