Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday that President Trump made “some progress” in his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin toward ending Moscow’s war with Ukraine, but added there are still “big areas of disagreement.”
“We made progress in the sense that we identified potential areas of agreement,” Mr. Rubio said on ABC’s “This Week.” “We are still a long ways off. We are not at the precipice of a peace agreement; we are not at the edge of one.”
The next round of peace negotiations is scheduled for Monday, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders travel to Washington for a high-stakes meeting at the White House.
Mr. Rubio and Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, took point for the Trump administration on the TV talk show circuit Sunday, heralding the Republicans’ efforts to end the war that started in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Mr. Trump’s meeting in Alaska with Mr. Putin ended without a deal. Both leaders signaled progress, sang each other’s praises, and signaled a mutual desire to end the war.
Mr. Trump warned before the high-profile Anchorage summit that there would be “severe consequences” for Russia if it did not agree to a ceasefire.
However, he changed his tune afterward, saying he would rather focus on an outright end to the war.
“It was determined by all that the best way to end the war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a peace agreement which would end the war and not a mere ceasefire agreement, which often times do not hold up,” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social.
The stance opened him up to attacks from critics who said Mr. Putin had achieved his goal of having Mr. Trump roll out the red carpet for him on the world stage, without ceding ground in the peace negotiations.
On Sunday, Mr. Rubio pushed back, saying the meeting would never yield a “peace agreement” without Ukrainian leadership at the table, and that the negotiations are never going to be done in the media.
“As much as everyone would love it to be a live pay-per-view event, these discussions only work best when they are conducted privately, in serious negotiations,” he said. “We need to create space for concessions to be made.”
Mr. Rubio said Mr. Trump decided against imposing new sanctions because it would jeopardize the peace negotiations.
“The problem is this, the minute you levy additional sanctions, strong additional sanctions, the talking stops, talking stops, and at that point the war just continues, you probably just added, 6,8, 9, 12 more months to the war if not longer,” he said. “More people dead, more people killed, more people maimed, more families destroyed.”
Mr. Rubio said, “We may end up being at a point where we may have to do that.”
