During this week’s broadcast of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio rejected the premise of a question from show host Margaret Brennan that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was going to be “bullied into signing something away.”
SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: And, by the way, everyone is begging us to be involved in this. The Europeans want us involved. The Ukrainians want us involved. Obviously, the Russians want us involved because the President is the only leader in the world- if this is possible, he’s the only one that can help make it happen.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, he’s got the leverage over Vladimir Putin if he wanted to crush his economy or at least do more damage to it, but you have held off on those secondary sanctions.
President Trump told Fox News his advice to President Zelensky is make a deal, Russia’s a very big power and they’re not. You know there is concern from the Europeans that President Zelensky is going to be bullied into signing something away. That’s why you have these European leaders coming as back up tomorrow. Can you reassure them?
RUBIO: No, it isn’t. That’s not why they’re coming That’s not true. They’re not coming here tomorrow to keep Zelensky from being bullied. They’re not coming- in fact —
BRENNAN: Well, that February Oval Office meeting in front of television cameras, where President Zelensky was dressed down–
RUBIO: Do you know how many meetings we’ve had since then?
BRENNAN: Oh, no, I know. And I was just up in Alaska —
RUBIO: Yeah, but we’ve had a bunch of meetings since then.
BRENNAN: — watching the one with Vladimir Putin where a red carpet was rolled out for the Russian leader. It was very different–
RUBIO: No, but it wasn’t Zelensky. We’ve had more meetings, we’ve had, we’ve had, we’ve had one meeting with Putin and like a dozen meetings with Zelensky. So that’s not true. They’re not coming here tomorrow to keep Zelensky from being bullied. They’re coming here tomorrow because we’ve been working with the Europeans. We talked to them last week. There were meetings in the UK over the following, the previous weekend — as early as Thursday.
BRENNAN: And they said President Trump was going to demand a ceasefire —
RUBIO: No, no, but you said that they’re coming here tomorrow to keep Zelensky from being bullied. They’re not coming here tomorrow–
This is such a stupid media narrative that they’re coming here tomorrow because Trump is going to bully Zelensky into a bad deal. We’ve been working with these people for weeks, for weeks on this stuff. They’re coming here tomorrow because they chose to come here tomorrow. We invited them to come. We invited them to come. The President invited them to come.
BRENNAN: But the President told those European leaders last week that he wanted a ceasefire. The President went on television, said he would walk out of the meeting if Vladimir Putin didn’t agree with him. He said there would be severe consequences if he didn’t agree to one. He said he’d walk out in two minutes. He spent three hours talking to Vladimir Putin, and he did not get one, so there’s some mixed messages?
RUBIO: Because obviously something, things happened during that meeting.
Look, our goal here is not to stage some production for the world to say, “Oh how dramatic he walked out!” Our goal here is to have a peace agreement to end this war. Okay? And obviously, we felt, and I agreed, that there was enough progress, not a lot of progress, but enough progress made in those talks to allow us to move to the next phase.
If not, we wouldn’t be having Zelensky flying all the way over here. We wouldn’t be having all the Europeans coming all the way over here. Now understand, and take with a grain of salt, I’m not saying we’re on the verge of a peace deal, but I am saying that we saw movement, enough movement to justify a follow up meeting with Zelensky and the Europeans, enough movement for us to dedicate even more time to this. You talk about the sanctions. Look, at the end of the day, if peace is not going to be possible here, and this is just going to continue on as a war, people will continue to die by the thousands, the President has that option to then come in and impose new sanctions. But if he did this now, the moment the President puts those additional sanctions, that’s the end of the talks. You’ve basically locked in at least another year to year and a half of war and death and destruction. We may unfortunately wind up there, but we don’t want to wind up there. We want to wind up with a peace deal that ends this war so Ukraine can go on with the rest of their lives and rebuild their country and be assured that this is never going to happen again. That’s the goal here. We’re going to do everything possible to make that happen if it’s doable. It will require both sides to make concessions. It will require both sides to get things they’re asking for. That’s how these deals are made, whether we like it or not.
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