In a combative series of interviews on Sunday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said that “both sides are going to have to make concessions” for there to be a peaceful resolution to the war that erupted when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
“You can’t have a peace agreement unless both sides make concessions – that’s a fact,” the Trump administration’s top diplomat said Sunday 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 the recent talks in Alaska between Russian president Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump toward ending the war 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,” Rubio 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.”
He declined to go into specific areas of agreement or disagreement, or outline what Trump has described as “severe consequences” for Russia if its aggression toward Ukraine continued.
“Ultimately, if there isn’t a peace agreement, if there isn’t an end of this war, the president’s been clear – there are going to be consequences,” Rubio remarked. “But we’re trying to avoid that. And the way we’re trying to avoid those consequences is with an even better consequence, which is peace, the end of hostilities.”
US special envoy Steve Witkoff said Putin agreed at the summit to allow the US and Europe to offer Ukraine a security guarantee resembling Nato’s collective defense mandate as part of any peace deal.
In an interview on CNN, Witkoff said the US had won the concession that “the United States could offer Article 5-like protection, which is one of the real reasons why Ukraine wants to be in NATO”. He said the concession was “game-changing”.
Rubio agreed that no agreement was possible without both sides – including that of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy – being at the table. “You’re not going to reach a ceasefire or a peace agreement in a meeting in which only one side is represented,” Rubio told ABC News. “That’s why it’s important to bring both leaders together – and that’s the goal here.”
Rubio confirmed that a ceasefire – or, as Trump now reportedly prefers, a straight-to-peace deal – “is going to be difficult”, despite the White House’s openly demanding one.
The war, he said, has been “going on for three and a half years”.
“You have two very entrenched sides, and we’re going to have to continue to work and chip away at it,” Rubio said.
Separately, on NBC’s Meet the Press, Rubio said a ceasefire was “not off the table”, though he added: “It was agreed by all that the best way to end this conflict is through a full peace deal.”
He said the US had advocated for a ceasefire, but “unfortunately, the Russians as of now have not agreed to that.
“But the ideal here, what we’re aiming for here is not a ceasefire,” he said. “What we ultimately are aiming for is an end to this.”
Soon after Rubio told Meet the Press that “no one is pushing” Ukraine to give up territory, 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!!”
Nonetheless, Rubio said he doubted that a new set of western sanctions on Russia would force Moscow to agree to any deal.
“The Russian economy has basically been turned into a full-time wartime economy,” Rubio told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday – while pointing out that Russia is estimated to have lost 20,000 soldiers in the last month alone.
“That just tells you the price they’re willing to pay,” Rubio said. “Not saying any of this is admirable – I’m saying that this is the reality of the war that we’re facing. It’s become attrition, in some ways. It’s a meat grinder, and they just have more meat to grind.”
He also denied that Trump, as critics claim, had merely given the aggressor in the conflict, Putin, an unwarranted place on the world stage.
“Putin is already on the world stage,” Rubio said on ABC News. “The guy’s conducting a full scale war in Ukraine.
“That doesn’t mean he’s right about the war. That doesn’t mean he’s justified about the war. You’re not going to end a war between Russia and Ukraine without dealing with Putin. That’s just common sense. So people can say whatever they want.”
On NBC’s Meet the Press, the Democratic US senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut countered on Sunday that the Trump-Putin “meeting was a disaster”.
“It was an embarrassment for the United States,” Murphy said. “It was a failure. Putin got everything he wanted.”
Murphy said that Trump had given Putin “that photo-op” he wanted and to “be absolved of his war crimes in front of the world.
“War criminals are not normally invited to the United States of America,” Murphy remarked.
Secondly, he said, Putin had not been forced to give up anything.
“President Trump said he wanted a ceasefire – it appears the ceasefire wasn’t even seriously discussed,” Murphy added. “And then, third, there’s no consequences.
“Trump said, ‘If I don’t get a cease fire, Putin is going to pay a price.’ And then he walked out of that meeting saying, ‘I didn’t get a ceasefire. I didn’t get a peace deal, and I’m not even considering sanctions.’”
Fiona Hill, a deputy assistant to Trump in his first term, told CBS: “The optics were much more favorable to Putin than they were to the United States. It really looked like Putin set the agenda there, the narrative and in many respects the tone for the whole summit meeting.”
The national security adviser during Joe Biden’s presidency, Jake Sullivan, said the prior administration had concluded – based on contacts – that Russia was not in a position to negotiate an end to the war.
“We didn’t want to set up a summit where we were literally rolling out the red carpet for Putin in America to have him come and walk away and continue the war without any clear and convincing outcome of the summit,” Sullivan told ABC News.
“I think our judgment on that was correct,” he added, saying any summit needs to be “properly prepared to produce an outcome that the American president can articulate in advance and produce in the aftermath”.
“The outcome that this American president articulated, a ceasefire or consequences – he did not produce,” Sullivan said. “And that is why I think we find ourselves in a difficult situation today.”
