March 1, 2025 (EIRNS)—In an interview with CNN following the Feb. 28 meeting of Trump and Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was straightforward in his assessment that Zelenskyy doesn’t behave like someone who actually wants peace: “Attacking Putin, no matter how anyone may feel about him personally, forcing the President into a position where you’re trying to goad him into attacking Putin, calling him names, maximalist demands about Russia having to pay for the reconstruction—all the sorts of things that you talk about in a negotiation. And so you start to perceive that maybe Zelenskyy doesn’t want a peace deal. He says he does, but maybe he doesn’t. And that act of open undermining of efforts to bring about peace is deeply frustrating for everyone who’s been involved in communications with them leading up to today.”
Side-stepping an attempt by interviewer Kaitlan Collins to get him to denounce Putin, Rubio stated, “I’m not going to fall into this trap of who’s bad and who’s evil…. [A]t the end of the day, this is not a political campaign, okay? This is a high-stakes international diplomacy and an effort to bring about an end to a very, very dangerous war.”
On the role of the State Department, Rubio insisted, “the State Department doesn’t fight wars, it ends them…. And that’s usually, by the way, celebrated…. I think we should be very proud and happy that we have a President whose prime objective is not to get into wars but to prevent wars and to get out of wars.”
Coming back to Zelenskyy, he reiterated: “What I have doubts about is whether he’s willing to say and do the things that we need in order to get a negotiation…. [M]y hope is that this all can be reset and maturity can kick in. Tonight, people will die in this conflict. We’re trying to bring an end to this conflict which is unsustainable.”