Rubio: I cannot guarantee that peace agreement to be concluded in a week or a month, it must take sanctions into account
A peace agreement with Ukraine and Russia must take into account the sanctions imposed, while the time frame for completing negotiations and concluding a peace agreement has not been determined yet, says U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“We’re committed to trying to achieve peace as long as it takes. That doesn’t mean that I can guarantee you that there’s going to be an agreement in a week or a month. I just can’t put a timeframe on it because it doesn’t depend on us. It depends on the Russians and it depends on the Ukrainians. It also depends on our partners in Europe who have sanctions that will have to be taken into account, I believe, as part of any final deal,” Rubio said, while speaking to reporters en route to Miami on Friday.
He also stated that the readiness to conclude this agreement will be known, “when the time comes to sign” or if there’s still resistance from one side or the other,” but we’re not at that stage yet.”
The Secretary of State expressed conviction that at the current stage they “have to make more progress on a technical level.”
“I want to sit and talk to our team that was on the ground and get a better sense how those negotiations went … And by the way, we met with the Ukrainians twice as well, so we want to get that perspective, which we met with them on Sunday and again on Tuesday, and the Russians on Monday. So I need to hear from them directly a little bit more about how it went, and then we’ll present that. We’ll meet with the team and we’ll present that to the President, and then decide on a path of what the next steps are,” Rubio said.