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Translated by: Shkëlzen Dema
- April 18, 2025 12:19 am
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US President Donald Trump will abandon efforts to reach a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine within days if there are no clear signs that a deal can be made, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday. Reuters news agency reported.
"We are not going to continue this effort for weeks and months without a conclusion. So we have to decide very quickly now, and I'm talking about a matter of days as to whether this is possible in the coming weeks," Rubio said in Paris after meeting with European and Ukrainian leaders.
"The president feels very strongly about it. He's dedicated a lot of time and energy to this ... that's important, but there are a lot of other very important things going on that deserve the same attention, if not more," Rubio added.
Rubio's warning came amid signs of little progress in US talks with Ukraine.
Trump on Thursday said he expects to sign a deal with Kiev next week that would give the US access to Ukrainian minerals.
After Thursday's talks in Paris — the first substantive, high-level talks and a meeting on Trump's peace push that has included European powers — Rubio said the U.S. framework for peace had received an encouraging reception. Zelensky's office called the talks constructive and positive.
Rubio's comments on Friday underscore a growing frustration in the White House over the lack of progress in pushes to fix a list of geopolitical challenges.
Trump promised during the campaign to stop the war in Ukraine within his first 24 hours in the White House, but when he took office he suggested that a deal could be reached in April or May, after new challenges arose.
Rubio announced that he spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after the talks in Paris and told him that they had been constructive, and that he had briefed him on some elements of the US peace framework.
Rubio also spoke about the problems caused by security guarantees, but that it is not a major problem, while emphasizing that there are even bigger problems, such as the problem of whether it is possible for the agreement to be reached in a short time.
He added that it is clear that a peace agreement would be difficult to achieve but there should be signs that it can be achieved.
"Nobody is saying it can be done in 12 hours. But we want to see how far along it is and whether these differences can be narrowed, whether it's even possible to have movement within the time frame that we have in mind," Rubio declared.
