US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio has said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should apologise after his meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office devolved into what Rubio described as a “fiasco.”
Rubio questioned whether the Ukrainian leader really wants peace in the country’s war with Russia.
He stated this in an exclusive interview with CNN’s ‘The Source’, calling on Zelensky to “apologise for turning this thing into the fiasco for him that it became,” after his White House meeting with Trump and Vice President JD Vance turned into a shouting match.
He said, “There was no need for him to go in there and become antagonistic.
“When you start talking about that aggressively – and the president is a deal maker, he made deals his entire life – you’re not going to get people to the table”.
“And so you start to perceive that maybe Zelensky doesn’t want a peace deal. He says he does, but maybe he doesn’t.”
Rubio’s remarks underlined the serious damage that has been done to the US-Ukrainian relationship at the end of a week that also saw the leaders of the UK and France visit Washington to make the case to Trump that the US needs to mediate an end to the war that doesn’t prioritize Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interests over Zelensky’s.
The meeting on Friday saw Trump and Vance castigating the Ukrainian leader for what they “saw as insufficient gratitude for the support the US has already provided for Ukraine and accusing him of over-playing his ability to negotiate.”
Following the meeting, Trump ordered Zelensky to leave the White House despite a desire from Ukraine to continue the talks, scrapped a scheduled joint press conference and plunged the future of US assistance to the Ukraine war effort, along with Zelensky’s own future as a leader, into serious doubt.
