SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan — Secretary of State Marco Rubio made it plain on Monday: President Donald J. Trump wants the war between Russia and Ukraine to end, and he will do whatever he can to get there. “I think the president is open to anything that he can do to help bring a war to an end if it’s possible,” Rubio told reporters in Samarkand. “And we’ll continue to look for opportunities to do that.”
Rubio said the President has been clear from the start. “He’d like the war in Ukraine and Russia to end. He wants that war to end. He has said that when he was a candidate,” Rubio said. “He said it never would have happened if he’d been president at the time, but it did happen. And now we’ve done everything we can and we’ll continue to do everything we can to help facilitate the end of that war.”
Then he spelled out the human cost. “No one’s winning that war. People are dying every day. Things are being blown up every day. Things are being destroyed every day,” Rubio said. “If you’ve listened to the president, he repeatedly cites the 25,000 people a month dying in these wars. The amount of destruction that’s occurred. The amount of economic damage that’s occurring.”
Rubio tied it straight to the President’s latest move. He said President Trump’s overnight post laid out once again why he suspended the sanctions for 60 days: “It’s because he wants to see if there’s an opportunity for the talks that are going on right now with both Ukraine and Russia to lead to something positive and avoid another disastrous year of war and conflict.”
Rubio did not pretend the job is done. “So far, obviously, we haven’t made the kind of progress we would like to have made. But it’s not for lack of trying,” he said. “And the president remains very committed to it.” Asked about a possible meeting, he said there have been talks of one, but he did not know if anything had been finalized.
Rubio is in Uzbekistan for talks with the foreign ministers of the five Central Asian nations. For a President who promised to be a peacemaker, the message from his top diplomat was simple: America will keep pushing until the killing stops.
