Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should apologize to President Trump over Friday’s heated Oval Office showdown, expressing doubt over whether the Ukrainian leader wants to forge a peace agreement to end the war in Eastern Europe.
The country’s top diplomat told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins the Kyiv leader should “apologize for turning this thing into the fiasco for him that it became. There was no need for him to go in there and become antagonistic. Look, this thing went off the rails.”
“When you start talking about that aggressively, and the President’s a deal maker. He’s made deals his entire life, you’re not going to get people to the table,” Rubio added.
The secretary of state added that he was unsure if Zelensky wants to reach a peace agreement that would end the three-year conflict between Ukraine and Russia.
“And so you start to perceive that maybe Zelensky doesn’t want a peace deal. He says he does, but maybe he doesn’t, and that active, open undermining of efforts to bring about peace is deeply frustrating for everyone who’s been involved in communications with them leading up to today,” Rubio said.
Just hours before Rubio’s interview on “The Source,” Zelensky said on Fox News that he won’t apologize for the Friday White House meeting, which erupted into a contentious back-and-forth between the two sides. He added that the heated exchange between him, Trump and Vice President Vance was bad for both countries.
“No, I respect the president, and I respect the American people and if, I don’t know, I think that we have to be very open and very honest and I’m not sure that we did something bad,” Zelensky responded when asked by Fox News’s Bret Baier if he would apologize for the meeting.
“This is not good for both sides, anyway, and I was very open, but I can’t change our Ukrainian attitude toward Russia,” he said.
The Friday meeting, which did not end with signing a deal revolved around Ukraine’s rare minerals, went from warm to hostile when Vance asserted that Trump was utilizing diplomacy to get the deal done, a point Zelensky questioned, noting that Russian President Vladimir Putin has broken ceasefire agreements before and refused to exchange prisoners.
Vance said Zelensky was “disrespectful” for coming to the Oval Office to “try to litigate this in front of the American media.”
“Right now, you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front lines because you have manpower problems, you should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to his conflict,” Vance said.
Vance accused Zelensky of not being grateful for U.S. military assistance, while Trump later, after Ukraine’s president said the U.S. has not felt the ramifications of the war due to it being far away from Europe, said that Ukraine leader’s leverage to broker a deal is minuscule and that he is risking igniting another world war.
“You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards,” Trump told Zelensky, warning him that he is “gambling with the lives of millions of people, you’re gambling with World War III … and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country, that’s backed you far more than a lot of people said they should have.”
Rubio, similar to Trump earlier Friday, said that Zelensky can come back to the Oval Office when he is prepared to “make peace and he’s serious about peace.”
On CNN Friday, Rubio said the way the Russia-Ukraine war ends is that “you get people to negotiating table, and the President, who’s the ultimate dealmaker, knows you don’t get people to a negotiating table when you’re calling them names and you’re accusing them of things, because at the end of the day, this is not a political campaign, okay?”
“This is high stakes international diplomacy and an effort to bring about an end to a very, very dangerous war,” he said.
After the intense meeting at the White House, a number of European prime ministers and top-level diplomats offered support for Zelensky, saying Kyiv is “not alone.”
European Union (EU) foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, of Estonia, said the “free world needs” a new leader while also reiterating her full support for Zelensky and the Ukrainian people.
Rubio fired back at Kallas and other European officials, arguing the EU does not have a “strategy” to end the devastating conflict.
“I mean, these people are just playing silly games and saying these things, what is their exit strategy? What is anybody else’s exit strategy? The only person on the planet who is actively trying to bring an end to this conflict is named Donald Trump, the President of the United States,” Rubio said on CNN.
“He’s the only one that’s trying to do it, and we should be helping him to achieve it,” he added.
