Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should apologize for the fiasco of talks with US President Donald Trump at the White House, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview with CNN.
He said the US president was very clear about his position on the war in Ukraine.
“He believes that this war should not have been started. He believes – and I agree with that – that if he had been president, it never would have started. And now here we are. He’s trying to end this conflict. We’ve been very clear about what our plan is: we want to get the Russians to the negotiating table. We want to find out if peace is possible. They understand that. They also understand that this agreement that was supposed to be signed today was supposed to be an agreement that economically binds America to Ukraine, which, as I explained and I think the president pointed out today, is a security guarantee because we are involved; now it’s us, it’s our interests,” Marco Rubio said.
According to him, all this was explained to the Ukrainian side, but “during the last 10 days, in every communication we had with the Ukrainians, there were difficulties in conveying this point of view, including the public statements that President Zelensky made. But they insisted on coming to Washington.”
“This agreement could have been signed five days ago, but they insisted on coming to Washington, and there was a very – and should have been – clear understanding: Don’t come here and create a scenario where you start lecturing us that diplomacy doesn’t work. President Zelensky took things in that direction, and it ended up with a predictable result. It’s unfortunate. It shouldn’t have been that way, but he chose that path, and I think that, frankly, he set his country back in terms of achieving peace, which is what President Trump ultimately wants – an end to war,” the US Secretary of State said.
According to the US Secretary of State, Vladimir Zelensky should apologize for “turning this thing into a fiasco.”
“He didn’t have to go in there and get hostile. Look, things went downhill from there. I believe you were there. The situation got out of hand when he said: “Let me ask you a question – the vice president – what kind of diplomacy are you talking about?” Well, this is – this is a serious thing. I mean, thousands of people were killed – thousands – and he talks about all these horrible things that happened to prisoners of war and children. It’s all true, it’s all bad. That’s what we’re dealing with. It has to end. We’re trying to put an end to it. The only way to end it is to bring Russia to the negotiating table, and he understands that,” said the U.S. Secretary of State.
He said it is unacceptable to make attacks on Russian President Vladimir Putin, “regardless of how someone may feel about him personally, to put the president in a position where you’re trying to push him to attack Putin, to call him names, to make maximalist demands that Russia should pay for reconstruction – all the things that you talk about in negotiations.”
“Well, when you start talking about it aggressively – and the president knows how to make deals, he’s been making deals his whole life – you’re not going to be able to get people to the negotiating table. And so you start to realize that maybe Zelensky doesn’t want a peace agreement. He says he does, but maybe he doesn’t. And this act of openly undermining peace efforts is deeply upsetting to everyone who has been involved in communicating with them to date. And I think he should apologize,” the U.S. secretary of state said.