Marco Rubio says US may walk away from Ukraine-Russia peace deal
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the press the U.S. may walk away from Russia-Ukraine peace talks if a deal is not reached within days.
WASHINGTON – With talks stalling, President Donald Trump is weighing whether to abandon his efforts to achieve a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine.
The president has grown increasingly frustrated as negotiations have dragged out and is nearing his limit, three sources familiar with the situation said.
Trump famously promised during his White House campaign to end the war in one day. He then gave himself a longer timeline, saying in January he expected a deal within six months. His special envoy to Ukraine set a goal of negotiating an agreement even quicker during the first 100 days of Trump’s term.
But a month after Russian President Vladimir Putin effectively rejected a U.S.-proposed unconditional ceasefire, which Ukraine accepted, in favor of a narrow agreement on energy infrastructure, Trump has determined a peace deal may not be possible and could instruct his administration to pull out of talks.
How quickly that could happen is both fluid and entirely up to Trump, two people familiar with his thinking said. The president negotiates by instinct and will make a gut decision when the time comes, they said.
“My whole life has been one big negotiation, and I know when people are playing us, and I know when they’re not, and I have to see an enthusiasm to want to end it,” Trump said Friday. “And I think I see that enthusiasm to want to end it . . . I think I see it from both sides.”
The president had indicated a week earlier, as he spoke to reporters on Air Force One, that his administration would not hold endless rounds of talks. “There’s a point at which you have to either put up or shut up,” Trump said on April 12.
And at the conclusion of a trip to Paris on April 18, where U.S. negotiators met with Europeans and representatives from Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Trump was likely to move on within days if no real progress towards peace was made.
“We’ve dedicated the – almost the entirety of the president’s first hundred days in office at the highest levels possible to trying to achieve a peace here,” Rubio said. “And if it’s going to happen, we want to help. But if it’s not going to happen, we need to know now because we have other things we have to deal with.”
A White House official told USA TODAY that Trump’s domestic priorities would be a factor in the decision making process, with the president more likely to pull his team back if he feels the negotiations are getting in the way of his domestic policy agenda.
In the Oval Office after Rubio’s remarks, Trump would not say if he is prepared to completely walk away.
But he affirmed Rubio’s comments and said that if “for some reason” one of the countries makes it very difficult, “We’re just going to say you’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people, and we’re going to just take a pass.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to Poland Daniel Fried said it was not clear from Rubio’s remarks what moving on from peace talks would entail.
“What does walk away mean? Walk away from Ukraine? Pull our support? Leave Ukraine to the mercy of the Russians,” said Fried, a fellow at the Atlantic Council. “Or does it mean walk away from the talks and then decide to put more pressure on Putin and more military support for Ukraine. His language could be interpreted either way.”
The administration also has not said publicly whether it would allow Ukraine to purchase weapons from the United States under such a scenario.
Trump has threatened to put additional sanctions on Russia and secondary tariffs on its oil exports if Moscow refuses to engage in the peace process, but he he held off as Steve Witkoff, his special envoy to Russia, has met privately with Putin.
Retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery, a former director for transnational threats at the National Security Council, said Russia has not been committed to the process, because it has not felt enough pain from the United States.
“There is 0 degrees Kelvin chance that Putin is going to enter into a deal without a maximum level of pressure applied to him, whether it’s by sanctions, by increased military support, whatever,” Montgomery said. “Those are the kind of things that will move Vladimir Putin.”
U.S. presents peace framework
Ukraine accepted the temporary ceasefire proposal the United States put forward on March 11. The two sides then agreed in principle to a ceasefire on energy that was never fully implemented amid disputes over the terms. A halt in fighting in the Black Sea did not go forward after Russia said it wanted sanctions lifted on its some of its financial institutions to implement a maritime deal.
The prospects of ceasefire dimming, the U.S. said it presented a framework peace agreement this week to Russia, Ukraine and Europe. The administration has not made the document public.
In an interview that The Times of London published before the announcement, Trump special envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg suggested the country could “look like what happened with Berlin,” with British, French and other troops serving as a “reassurance force” in the western part of the country.
Ukrainian troops could patrol an 18-mile demilitarized zone, he said, that would separate the western part of the country, which is under Ukraine’s control, from territory in the east that is currently occupied by Russia.
He said later on social media that he was discussing zones of responsibility for allied forces to patrol, without U.S. troops, after a ceasefire and was not referring to a partitioning Ukraine.
Rubio told reporters as he left Paris that the blueprint the U.S. presented was broad and did not get into the specifics of potential security guarantees for Ukraine.
Ukraine’s delegation, which included President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s top adviser, is taking the framework back to Kyiv, he said. Rubio said he spoke to his Russian counterpart, foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, on the phone on Thursday.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the negotiations “fairly complex” after Rubio’s remarks and said, “Russia is striving toward resolving this conflict, securing its own interests, and is open to dialogue. We are continuing to do this.”
Trump slammed Zelenskyy prior to the Paris talks for requesting to buy air defense systems from the U.S. and suggested again that the Ukrainian leader started the war, which began when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
“I’m not blaming him, but what I am saying is that I wouldn’t say he’s done the greatest job,” Trump said as he as met with Italy’s prime minister at the White House later in the week. “I’m not a big fan.”
Trump told NBC he was “pissed off” at Putin at the end of March. He also told reporters he set a “psychological deadline” for Putin to agree to a ceasefire. As Witkoff prepared to meet with Putin in St. Petersburg, Trump said in an April 11 social media post Russia had to “get moving” on negotiations to end the war.
Brian Taylor, a professor at Syracuse University and author of the book “The Code of Putinism,” said the positions of Moscow and Kyiv are still “extremely far apart,” with Russia fighting to subjugate and control Ukraine. Leaders of Ukraine, meanwhile, are pushing to maintain independence and sovereignty.
He noted that in early April, Putin sent his foreign investment envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, to meet with Witkoff in Washington.
“Putin isn’t really interested in a deal at this moment, but he is trying very hard to shift the blame for the lack of a deal onto Zelenskyy and Ukraine and also to entice Trump with this whole parallel line of discussions about the broader U.S.-Russia relationship,” he said.