U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized in his interview on the Fox News “Jesse Watters Primetime” on Aug. 18, Monday night, after the meeting with the European seven dwarves and Volodymyr Zelenskyy was over, not to expect quick results. “This is a complicated war. There’s no doubt about it. I mean, this has been going on for three and a half years. A lot of people have died, a lot of territories exchanged back and forth, so it’s not an easy thing to unwind…. It’s going to take a little bit more work and a little bit more time, but we are making progress.” He defined the “progress” as moving away from the previous policy of funding Ukraine “for however much they need for however long it takes,” to talking “about pathways towards ending” the Ukraine conflict.
When it came to “security guarantees” for Ukraine, however, Rubio’s comments left the door open for some real non-starters. Jesse Watters asked him, for example, that if the European nations, some of them being NATO countries, put troops on the ground in Ukraine to cement this peace deal, “wouldn’t that make Ukraine a NATO ally?”
Rubio avoided the question, asserting that “any sovereign country in the world has a right to enter into security alliances with other countries … a Ukraine post-conflict has a right to enter into security agreements with other countries.” He reported that the U.S. is involved in coordinating the creation of such security guarantees even “as we speak,” specifying that “we will work with our European allies, and non-European countries by the way, to build such a security guarantee. We’re working on that right now…. That will be something that will have to be in place after a peace deal so that Ukraine can feel safe moving forward.”
