exclusive interview with POLITICO\u2019s Dasha Burns<\/a> on the sidelines of the NATO summit, Rubio outlined the administration\u2019s rationale for holding off on further sanctioning Russia.\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cIf we did what everybody here wants us to do, and that is come in and crush them with more sanctions, we probably lose our ability to talk to them about the ceasefire and then who\u2019s talking to them?\u201d Rubio said, adding that Trump will know the \u201ctime and place\u201d for changing tack.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Asked about the discrepancy, a senior U.S. official said Rubio is stressing the same main points, but his interlocutors are focusing on different parts.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe secretary has been very consistent in meeting and calls with his counterparts on three key points \u2014 one is that the president believes strongly that the only way this war ends is through negotiations; second, as soon as the U.S. imposes new sanctions on Russia the opportunity for the U.S. to be involved in those negotiations closes; and third, that the Senate, in America anyway, is an independent body that at some point is going to move on those sanctions,” the official said.<\/p>\n
Sanctions bill in Congress<\/p>\n
Although the sanctions bill by Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, has more than 80 co-sponsors, which is more than enough to override a potential presidential veto, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, has indicated that he prefers to wait for a signal that Trump supports the measure before taking it up.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rubio, who came under criticism at the dinner over Trump\u2019s reluctance to toughen up on Moscow, acknowledged to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7655],"tags":[32,46647,2915,47778,2820,2821,32949,2661,770,14792,332,7339,2663,1771,1772,657,49,335],"class_list":{"0":"post-213401","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-russia","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-eu-russia-relations","10":"tag-exclusive","11":"tag-lindsey-graham","12":"tag-marco-rubio","13":"tag-nato","14":"tag-nato-summit","15":"tag-oil","16":"tag-poland","17":"tag-radoslaw-sikorski","18":"tag-russia","19":"tag-russia-sanctions","20":"tag-sanctions","21":"tag-u-s-foreign-policy","22":"tag-u-s-politics","23":"tag-ukraine","24":"tag-united-states","25":"tag-war-in-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114744577516857216","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}