Secretary of State Marco Rubio showed irritation Sunday with suggestions that Europe is worried President Trump will bully Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into an unfavorable peace deal, calling it a “stupid media narrative.”
Rubio fired back at CBS “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan when she said there was concern from Europeans that “Zelensky is going to be bullied into signing something away.”
“That’s why you have these European leaders coming as backup tomorrow. Can you reassure them?” she said.
“That’s not true,” Rubio responded. “They’re not coming here tomorrow to keep Zelensky from being bullied.”
Rubio said the U.S. has held many more meetings with Zelensky and Ukraine than with Putin, and that Trump has been in regular contact with Zelensky’s allies in Europe.
“They’re not coming here tomorrow to keep Zelensky from being bullied,” he said of the leaders coming to the White House for a meeting with Trump and Zelensky on Monday.
“They’re coming here tomorrow because we’ve been working with the Europeans. We talked to them last week. There were meetings in the U.K. over the following, the previous weekend.”
“No, no, but you said that they’re coming here tomorrow to keep Zelensky from being bullied. They’re not coming here tomorrow — this is such a stupid media narrative that they’re coming here tomorrow because … Trump is going to bully Zelensky into a bad deal,” a seemingly frustrated Rubio said.
“We’ve been working with these people for weeks, for weeks on this stuff. They’re coming here tomorrow because they chose to come here tomorrow. We invited them to come. We invited them to come. The president invited them to come.”
One reason some might be worried about Trump bullying Zelensky is the last meeting the Ukrainian president attended at the White House, when he, Trump and Vice President Vance got into a shouting match.
At that meeting, Trump and Vance doubled up on Zelensky, who ended up being essentially kicked out of the White House.
Trump also after his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday said whether there was a deal would be up to Zelensky and Ukraine. That appeared to put the onus on Zelensky to make concessions to get a deal.
Rubio rejected suggestions that Trump had given too warm a welcome to Putin at their meeting in Alaska on Friday.
Brennan noted that Trump had suggested there would be severe consequences if a ceasefire wasn’t reached at the summit, but then did not follow up with any tough words, let alone punishments, for Putin.
Rubio said that was the case because the administration felt enough progress was made to move forward and have another meeting.
“Look, our goal here is not to stage some production for the world to say, ‘Oh, how dramatic, he walked out.’”
“Our goal here is to have a peace agreement to end this war. OK? 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.”
Rubio said he did not think Russia and Ukraine were on the precipice of a peace deal, but that there had been enough progress to do Monday’s follow-up meeting with Zelensky and European leaders.
“Look, at the end of the day, if peace is not going to be possible here, and this is just going to continue on as a war, people will continue to die by the thousands, the president has that option to then come in and impose new sanctions,” he said.
“But if he did this now, the moment the president puts those additional sanctions, that’s the end of the talks. You’ve basically locked in at least another year to year and a half of war and death and destruction.”
“We may unfortunately wind up there, but we don’t want to wind up there. We want to wind up with a peace deal that ends this war so Ukraine can go on with the rest of their lives and rebuild their country and be assured that this is never going to happen again.”
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