US secretary of state Marco Rubio said on Sunday that a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine needs to happen soon, adding that the Trump administration will spend the coming week trying to determine whether to continue as a mediator.
“It needs to happen soon. We cannot continue to dedicate time and resources to this effort if it’s not going to come to fruition,” Mr Rubio told NBC’s Meet the Press programme.
“This week is going to be a really important week in which we have to make a determination about whether this is an endeavour that we don’t want to continue to be involved in, or if it’s time to sort of focus on some other issues,” he said.
Mr Rubio spoke a day after president Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy met in Rome during the funeral of Pope Francis to revive faltering efforts to end Russia’s war with Ukraine.
Mr Zelenskiy said the meeting could prove historic if it delivers the kind of peace he is hoping for, and a White House spokesperson called it “very productive”.
Mr Rubio said Washington has held off imposing sanctions on Russia to allow diplomacy to work but warned that Mr Trump has options for dealing with any party that resists a peace deal.
“If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t come to fruition, then as a nation state, there are options that we have for those who we hold responsible for not wanting the peace,” the secretary of state said. “But we prefer not to get to that stage yet, because we think it closes the door to diplomacy.”
US senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said on Sunday that he worries Mr Trump will “cave in to Putin”.
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“To just abandon Ukraine, after all the sacrifice that they made, after so much loss of life, and with the rallying of the whole West against Putin, it would just be a moral tragedy,” Schumer said on CNN’s State of the Union.
Mr Schumer said siding with Russia in the conflict would tear apart alliances with Europe and embolden dictators around the world.
Meanwhile a Russian military commander has told president Vladimir Putin that “the scattered remnants” of the Ukrainian army remaining in Russia’s Kursk region will soon be destroyed, the state RIA news agency reported on Sunday.
Mr Putin on Saturday hailed what he said was the complete failure of an offensive by Ukrainian forces in Kursk after Moscow said they had been expelled from the last village they had been holding.
Kyiv denied that its forces had been expelled from Kursk and said they were also still operating in Belgorod, another Russian region bordering Ukraine.
Russia launched a sweeping drone assault across Ukraine overnight into Sunday, targeting multiple regions.
Foreign minister Sergey Lavrov on Sunday said Russia will continue to target sites used by Ukraine’s military, and foreign fighters and instructors sent by Europe. – Reuters
