US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the current peace plan for Ukraine consists of two main phases – first a ceasefire, then actual negotiations – that he said are equally difficult to achieve.
“We’re not going to negotiate this in the public,” Rubio said in comments over the weekend when asked about the progress of the 30-day ceasefire proposal for Ukraine following his latest conversations with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. But he maintained that his meeting with Lavrov was “promising.”
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Rubio held his latest phone call with Lavrov on Saturday, where the two discussed rebuilding bilateral ties and ongoing US military operations in Yemen, among other things.
“As I’ve said repeatedly, we’re not going to negotiate this in the public. Hopefully, we’ll have something to announce at some point fairly soon,” Rubio told Margaret Brennan of CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, according to a State Department transcript.
“I can’t guarantee that, but I certainly think the meeting was promising, the exchange was promising,” he said.
Rubio added that the peace plan consists of two parts and argued that to progress, the parties must stop shooting before any further negotiations can be done regarding how to “permanently end this war in a way that’s enduring.”
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“Plan A is to get the shooting to stop so that we can move to plan B, phase two, which is to have everybody at a table, maybe not – maybe with some shuttle diplomacy, to figure out a way to permanently end this war in a way that’s enduring and that respects everybody’s needs and so forth,” he said.
He forewarned that the process would not be easy, as US President Donald Trump said several times on the campaign trail as he emptily promised to end the war even before taking office.
“That will be hard,” Rubio said Sunday. “It will involve a lot of hard work, concessions from both sides, but it has to happen. This war cannot continue. The President has been clear about that, and he’s doing everything he can to bring it to an end.”
While Kyiv has voiced its openness to easing sanctions on Russia as part of its peace concessions, it is unclear what concessions the Kremlin is willing to make at present.
Kyiv agreed to the US-backed 30-day ceasefire proposal after a high-level meeting between Ukraine and US officials in Saudi Arabia. Russian leader Vladimir Putin said he is open to ceasefires in theory but raised a number of conditions for the 30-day proposal.
US Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff also met with Putin in Moscow to brief him on the US’s ceasefire proposal, though the details of the conversation remain unclear.
Trump said he would have a phone call with Putin on Tuesday to continue negotiations.
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