Rubio said he believes that the relationship between Trump and Zelenskyy can be repaired, if Ukraine wants to achieve an enduring and lasting peace.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy should apologize after a heated meeting with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance at the White House on Friday.
“I think he should apologize for wasting our time for a meeting that was going to end the way it did,” Rubio told CNN on Friday night.
Zelenskyy should apologize for “turning this thing into the fiasco for him that it became,” he said. “There was no need for him to go in there and become antagonistic.” The goal of the meeting was to finalize an economic agreement for the United States to gain access to Ukraine’s natural resources. That deal never came to be.
In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, Rubio elucidated his view on the breakdown in negotiations, Trump’s intentions to end the conflict with Russia, and what Zelenskyy should do next.
“We’ve explained very clearly what our plan is here, which is we want to get the Russians to a negotiating table,” Rubio said. “We want to explore whether peace is possible.”
He said the agreement that was supposed to be signed Friday would have bound America to Ukraine economically, which Rubio said is a security guarantee. But, for the past 10 days, Ukraine has complicated the negotiations.
“This agreement could have been signed five days ago, but they insisted on coming to Washington,” Rubio said, noting that Zelenskyy came to Washington and lectured Trump on diplomacy.
“President Zelenskyy took it in that direction, and it ended in a predictable outcome as a result,” he said, calling it unfortunate and suggesting it set the peace negotiations back. “There was no need for him to go in there and become antagonistic.”
Rubio reiterated that the war must come to an end. “The way you bring it to an end is you get Russia to the table to talk.”
Instead, Rubio said, Zelenskyy attacked Russian President Vladimir Putin, and tried to goad Trump into doing the same. “And so you start to perceive that maybe Zelenskyy doesn’t want a peace deal,” said Rubio, who underscored the administration’s strategy would be to trust, but verify that the Russian side legitimately wanted to bring the war to an end.
