In a series of confrontational interviews with ABC, CBS and NBC on Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered combative, often-vague answers to questions about the details of the Trump administration’s supposed agreements with Russia over a solution to its conflict with Ukraine.
Though President Donald Trump had claimed during his 2024 campaign that he would solve the Russia–Ukraine war on his first day in office, by mid-August he had made little headway in moving the two nations toward peace.
Despite advocating alongside Ukraine for months for a ceasefire, Trump appeared to have abandoned the idea after his Friday meeting with Vladimir Putin in favor of a straight-to-peace deal, echoing a long-held Kremlin position.
Margaret Brennan of CBS Face the Nation asked Rubio to explain the mixed messages from Trump, who left the meeting after three hours without a ceasefire agreement after he had said on television that he would walk out in two minutes if Putin didn’t agree to one. “Because obviously something – things happened during that meeting,” Rubio said.
“Our goal here is to have a peace agreement to end this war, okay? And obviously we felt – and I agreed – that there was enough progress – not a lot of progress but enough progress made in those talks to allow us to move to the next phase.”
“You can’t have a peace agreement unless both sides make concessions – that’s a fact,” he said on ABC’s This Week. “That’s true in virtually any negotiation. If not, it’s just called surrender. And neither side is going to surrender. So both sides are going to have to make concessions.”
Rubio said on Sunday that a ceasefire “is going to be difficult,” even as Trump has openly demanded one for months and threatened “severe consequences” for Russia if it continued its aggression toward Ukraine.
Putin has ignored Trump’s escalating threats that he would invoke sanctions on Russia if it did not take steps to move toward a ceasefire, and continued to bombard Ukrainian troops on Friday night after the summit in Anchorage.
Despite Rubio’s comments that there would need to be bilateral concessions for there to be a peaceful resolution to the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly stated that Kyiv will not cede any territory to Russia,abandon its NATO ambitions or allow restrictions on its armed forces — three of the conditions the Kremlin has repeatedly stated are mandatory parts of its “peace agreement” proposal.
According to the Ukrainian military, Russian casualties have surpassed 1 million killed, wounded, and captured as of August. Though Moscow does not publish casualty figures, a June study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that 400,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed or wounded since 2022. Even still, Russia has a 3-to-1 advantage in manpower and a 2.4-to-1 advantage in artillery, Zelensky said, according to The Kyiv Independent.
Ukraine has long struggled with infantry shortages and lacks the ability to offset losses at the same rate as Russia. In advocating for a ceasefire, Ukraine likely would have the capability to reinforce and strengthen its military presence before fighting resumed, something a well-supplied Russia is disinterested in.
A peace agreement, on the other hand, would likely involve Ukraine ceding territory, arms or its pursuit of more significant Western alliances. Trump’s about-face after his meeting with Putin, now advocating for a peace deal instead of a ceasefire, reveals a new approach by the White House more favorable to Russia‘s demands.
Rubio framed the Alaska meeting between Putin and Trump as a step in the right direction, saying they had “made progress in the sense that we identified potential areas of agreement – but there remains some big areas of disagreement.”
“We’re still a long ways off,” he added. “We’re not at the precipice of a peace agreement. We’re not at the edge of one. But I do think progress was made and towards one.”
Trump, whose 2016 presidential campaign was boosted by a Russian hacking and disinformation interference project, said last week that a peace deal may consist of “land swapping.”
In a conflicting statement, Rubio told Meet the Press on Sunday that “no one is pushing” Ukraine to give up territory. Shortly after, Trump shared a Truth Social post from a supporter that said: “Ukraine must be willing to lose some territory to Russia otherwise the longer the war goes on they will keep losing even more land!!”
Trump and Vice President JD Vance are expected to meet with Zelensky on Monday at the White House, just months after the American leaders ambushed Zelensky in a humiliating, shouting exchange inside the Oval Office.
It will follow a visually spectacular meeting with Putin, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on accusations of war crimes, during which Trump clapped for him as he strode down a red carpet.