Marco Rubio says Trump is the ‘only’ leader to make Russia-Ukraine peace deal possible and outlines conditions

Donald Trump is the ‘only leader’ who can bring about peace between Russia and Ukraine, his secretary of state Marco Rubio said following talks in Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. kicked off the talks with Russian officials where they were able to reach four outlining principles, but whether a full deal can materialize remains to be seen amid questions over Ukraine’s involvement in the negotiation process. 

Rubio, U.S. National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and special envoy Steve Witkoff met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin aide Yuri Ushakov in Riyadh on Tuesday.

It was the first round of talks as the U.S. looks to broker a peace deal to the war that has been raging since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

The talks came after Trump spoke with Putin last week as the U.S. moves away from isolating Russia, but Ukrainian representatives were not present for the sit-down in the Middle East.

Rubio said that the U.S. and Russians agreed on four principles during their meeting as they start the initial steps toward reaching a deal. 

First, he said the U.S. and Moscow will work to reestablish their ‘missions’ in both countries, so they can move forward with diplomatic relations.

Second, the secretary of state said the U.S. will appoint a high-level team to help negotiate, and third, they will begin to discuss geopolitical and economic cooperation that could help resolve the conflict.

Fourth, he said that the five people who were involved in the first meeting will remain engaged, so they know it is moving along ‘in a productive way.’

Rubio said they would not pre-negotiate and it would involve ‘hard and difficult diplomacy’ over a period of time, but he claimed only Trump could facilitate an end to the war.

‘The only leader in the world who can make this happen, who can even bring people together to begin to talk about it in a serious way is President Trump,’ the secretary of state said. 

Rubio also said that ‘in order for the conflict to end, everyone involved in that conflict has to be OK with it.’

He noted it has been more than three years since there was any ‘regularized’ contact between the U.S. and Russia. 

Waltz said they discussed that it needs to be a permanent end to the war and not a temporary pause.

He said there will be discussion of territory as well as security guarantees which will underlie any talks that they have. 

However, Waltz would not say whether the U.S. would agree to Russia retaining any Ukrainian territory it had annexed since it invaded three years ago, only that it was to be discussed.

‘What the president did not find acceptable was an endless war in Europe that was  literally turning into, has  turned into a meat grinder of people on both sides,’ Waltz said.

It comes less than a week after Trump and Putin spoke by phone. The president also spoke with Zelensky by phone, he revealed. 

Zelensky signaled Ukraine could see the war coming to an end, but he has been pushing for security guarantees as part of the peace process with the U.S. and other European leaders at the table.  

The Ukrainian president responded to the talks between the U.S. and Russia on Tuesday from Ankara, Turkey where he is meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. 

He said Ukraine will not ‘give in to Russia’s ultimatums’ as he hit back on the U.S. and Russians holding one-on-one talks as Erdogan said his country would be an ‘ideal host’ for talks between Ukraine, Russia and the U.S. in the future.

‘I wonder why they believe Ukraine would accept all these ultimatums now if we refused them at the most difficult moment,’ the Ukrainian President said, referring to Kyiv’s refusal to bow to Moscow’s demands during crisis talks at the start of the war. 

‘As President of Ukraine, I have never given any guarantees to anyone or confirmed anything. Moreover, I have never intended to accept Russia’s ultimatums. And I am not going to,’ Zelensky said. 

Zelensky also revealed he was cancelling is own planned visit to Saudi Arabia. 

On Monday, Zelensky confirmed that Ukraine and European leaders were not invited to the talks in Saudi Arabia and said Ukraine cannot recognize any peace agreement without its participation.

Although they were also not at the table in Riyadh, other European leaders have also engaged in discussions of a peace deal. 

On Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron met with other European leaders in Paris where they addressed the war in Ukraine. The meeting took place after Macron spoke with Trump. He also had a call with Zelensky. 

Macron said the leaders want a ‘strong and lasting peace in Ukraine.’

‘To achieve this, Russia must end its aggression, and this must be accompanied by strong and credible security guarantees for the Ukrainians,’ Macron said in a statement.

He signaled the Europeans, Americans and Ukrainians would all work on it and that European countries will invest more in their security and defense. 

Rubio on Tuesday pushed back on the accusation that Europeans and Ukrainians have been sidelined in the negotiation process, arguing for three years ‘no one has been able to bring together something like’ their Tuesday meeting. 

‘No one is being sidelined here,’ the secretary of state said. ‘But President Trump is in a position that he campaigned on, to initiate a process that could bring about an end to this conflict.’

Rubio claimed the only thing Trump is trying to do is bring about peace, which he campaigned on.

Waltz argued that the U.S. allies are being consulted on a daily basis, and that will continue. 

After the meeting, the Russians issued their own set of demands as the negotiations move forward. 

Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that NATO membership for Ukraine is unacceptable to Moscow. 

‘It is worth noting that a refusal to accept Kyiv into NATO is not enough,’ she said. ‘The alliance must disavow the Bucharest promises of 2008.’

At a summit in the Romanian capital in 2008, NATO declared that both Ukraine and Georgia would join the defense alliance but gave them no plan for how to get there.

While both sides have been laying out their demands, Rubio said on Tuesday that whether or not a peace agreement  can ultimately be reached will be determined by both sides to agree to things. He did not go into specifics. 

He said the meeting set the table for future conversations, but ‘how that turns out will be up to the parties.’