The prospects for a deal to end the Russia-Ukraine war “don’t look great,” America’s top diplomat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, acknowledged on Tuesday despite extensive efforts from the administration.
President Donald Trump came into the White House last year declaring that he’d be able to resolve the devastating war within 24 hours, but those efforts have not been fruitful to date, and the war in Iran has taken priority for the administration over the last couple of months.
“So, to this point, neither side has been willing to make concessions, particularly on the Russian side, necessary in order to bring peace about,” Rubio told lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Committee Tuesday morning. “We remain ready to play any role we can in that context of bringing a peace about, because we think the war in Ukraine, devastating war, has no military solution. It can only be solved through a diplomatic route, and it’s been unfruitful.”
The United States met with Ukrainian and Russian leaders at various points last year, culminating in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to the U.S. last August, which came several months after President Volodymyr Zelensky got into a public feud with Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Under Trump administration, the Pentagon also stopped giving military assistance to Ukraine, instead creating a new system in which European countries would pay the U.S. for weapons that would then be given to the Ukrainian armed forces.
“We’d love to see that come to a negotiated settlement,” Rubio told foreign affairs lawmakers. “As of right now, the prospects don’t look great that either side is prepared to make the concessions necessary in order to reach an agreement, but we stand ready, and we’ve engaged and invested a tremendous amount of high-level time on that conflict over the last year. We are not impartial mediators in that war. OK, we don’t provide weapons to Russia, we only provide weapons to Ukraine. We don’t impose sanctions on Ukraine, we only impose sanctions on Russia. So we have clearly taken a side.”
The front lines of the war continue to focus largely on the eastern part of Ukraine, though Russian forces have carried out several recent drone and missile attacks against Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, which is hours from the front lines. Nearly two dozen people were killed in a major Russian assault on Kyiv Dnipro on Tuesday night, which included more than 600 attack drones and dozens of missiles.
Ukrainian leaders, including Zelensky, have repeatedly asked the U.S. and their European allies for more air defense systems and interceptors that they can use to intercept the larger missiles Russia has fired into civilian areas. They have come up with innovative and cheaper ways to stop incoming one-way attack drones.
“I held a meeting on additional ways to supply air defense to Ukraine — both systems and interceptors,” Zelensky said on Wednesday. “We have an agreement at the highest political level on the purchase of Patriot systems, and this agreement is awaiting implementation at the financial, legal, and technical levels. The wait has taken too long.”
Ukrainian forces have also begun increasingly attacking Russian supply lines beyond the front lines.