Secretary Of State Marco Rubio Asked Point Blank About Security Guarantees For Ukraine Amidst Peace Talks With Russia

Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with reporters on Friday about security guarantees for Ukraine.

Transcript

00:00In your conversations yesterday with the Europeans and Ukrainians,

00:06I'm sure you spoke about security guarantees for Ukraine in case of a sea flyer.

00:11Could you give us a sense of what that could look like,

00:15and is the U.S. ready to back up any eventual European reassurance force for Ukraine?

00:20Well, that gets into a level of specifics that we're not ready to discuss publicly yet.

00:24Obviously, the term security guarantees came up because they come up in every meeting.

00:28We've heard about it, and it's not an illegitimate desire.

00:30Every sovereign nation on Earth has a right to defend itself.

00:34Ukraine will have a right to defend itself and to enter into whatever agreements it wants to enter into

00:40on a bilateral basis with different countries and so forth.

00:44So, I mean, it was discussed, but I don't, and that'll have to be part of any sort of conversation.

00:49Ukraine, in order for there to be peace, we recognize that Ukraine has to feel like it has the ability

00:54to defend itself from a future attack from anyone.

00:56And every country in the world has that right.

00:59But I think everyone recognizes that Ukraine's ability to defend itself is going to be a part,

01:04it's its right as a country, and will be a part of any agreement.

01:07But we're not working yet on that level of specifics.

01:10I think that's something we can fix and solve in a way that's acceptable to everyone.

01:13I think we have bigger challenges that we need to figure out whether it's even possible within the short term.

01:18I can tell you this. This war has no military pollution to it. It really doesn't.

01:23It's not going to be decided with, neither side has some strategic capability to end this war quickly.

01:28And so what we're talking about here is avoiding thousands and thousands of people from dying over the next year.

01:34We're trying to avoid that.

01:35We saw what happened last weekend with a missile strike in Sumi, where people died on Palm Sunday.

01:40We're just going to see more like that on both sides.

01:42We're going to see more of that. We're trying to prevent it.

01:44But we're not going to continue to fly all over the world and do meeting after meeting after meeting if no progress is being made.

01:50So if they're serious about peace, either side or both, we want to help.

01:54If it's not going to happen, then we're just going to move on.

01:56We're going to move on to other topics that are equally, if not more important in some ways, to the United States side.