US President Donald Trump will withdraw from efforts to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine within days if there are no clear signs that a deal can be reached, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday.
"We're not going to continue this effort for weeks and months. So we need to determine very quickly, and when I say quickly, I mean within a few days, whether this is feasible in the coming weeks," Rubio said in Paris after meetings with European and Ukrainian leaders.
“The president feels very strongly about this issue. He has devoted a lot of time and energy … that is important, but there are many other things of great importance that deserve just as much, if not more, attention.”
Rubio's warning came at a time when there are signs of progress in US-Ukraine talks.
Trump said Thursday he expected to sign a deal with Kiev next week that would give the U.S. access to Ukrainian minerals. An attempt to sign a minerals deal in February fell through after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy clashed with Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office.
After talks in Paris on Thursday — the first high-level, face-to-face talks on Trump’s peace efforts involving European powers — Rubio said a U.S. peace framework was met with “encouraging reaction.” Zelenskiy’s office called the talks constructive and positive.
Rubio's comments on Friday underscore growing frustrations in the White House over the lack of progress in efforts to resolve a growing list of geopolitical challenges.
Trump promised during the election campaign to end the war in Ukraine within his first 24 hours in the White House. He watered down that promise after taking office, suggesting a deal by April or May as obstacles mounted.
Rubio said he had spoken to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after the talks in Paris and told him they had been constructive, and had briefed him on "some of the elements of" the US peace framework.
Rubio said the issue of U.S. security guarantees as part of any deal was discussed in the Paris talks, without providing further details. He said security guarantees are an issue “that we can resolve in a way that is acceptable to everyone,” but “we have bigger challenges that we need to understand, if they are even possible to resolve in the short term.”
He said it was clear that a peace deal would be difficult to reach, but there had to be signs that it could be done quickly. “Nobody is saying that this can be done in 12 hours. But we want to see how far apart the parties are and whether those differences can be narrowed, whether it is even possible to make progress within the period that we have in mind,” he said. Neither the French presidency nor the foreign ministry immediately responded to requests for comment.