US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should apologize after his meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office devolved into what Rubio described as a “fiasco,” while questioning whether the Ukrainian leader really wants peace in the country’s war with Russia,
CNN reports.
In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Rubio called on Zelensky to “apologize for turning this thing into the fiasco for him that it became,” after his White House meeting with Trump and Vice President JD Vance turned into a shouting match. “There was no need for him to go in there and become antagonistic,” he said Friday on “The Source.”
“When you start talking about that aggressively – and the president is a deal maker, he made deals his entire life – you’re not going to get people to the table,” Rubio said.
“And so you start to perceive that maybe Zelensky doesn’t want a peace deal. He says he does, but maybe he doesn’t,” Rubio added.
Rubio’s remarks underlined the serious damage that has been done to the US-Ukrainian relationship at the end of a week that also saw the leaders of the UK and France visit Washington to make the case to Trump that the US needs to mediate an end to the war that doesn’t prioritize Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interests over Zelensky’s.
America’s top diplomat spoke to CNN hours after attending the meeting, which ultimately ended absent a deal that would leverage Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals or bring Russia’s three-year war any closer to an end.
It instead saw Trump and Vance castigating the Ukrainian leader for what they saw as insufficient gratitude for the support the US has already provided for Ukraine and accusing him of over-playing his ability to negotiate.
Following the meeting, Trump ordered Zelensky to leave the White House despite a desire from Ukraine to continue the talks, scrapped a scheduled joint press conference and plunged the future of US assistance to the Ukraine war effort, along with Zelensky’s own future as a leader, into serious doubt.
