U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, appearing August 6 on Fox Business News with host Larry Kudlow, was asked by Kudlow, “And you think, Secretary, that a meeting, quote/unquote, either a meeting with Putin or a meeting with the three of them, would occur next week? “
Rubio responded, “ I don’t know if it’ll be next week or not. It remains to be seen. I think it’ll depend a lot on how much progress we can make. I don’t—again, this is important in the sense that we think what happened was good because we have a sense now of what conditions the Russians would require in order to end the war. Now, they may not be the conditions Ukraine can accept or, frankly, that others would accept. But at least we have something to work off of.”
He continued, “So I think a lot of that is going to depend now on how close can we bring the two sides to each other—can we make enough progress, can we get 85 percent of the way there, 75 percent of the way there. Because I don’t think you can have a leaders-level meeting if you’re not close enough, because then nothing is going to come of that meeting. So, we want to get it close enough, and then we’ve got—we want to give the President the opportunity to come in and close it. So, I can’t prejudge how long that could take. It could take hours, it could take days—frankly, it could take weeks. We don’t know. But we’re going to try here. We’re working on it even as we speak.”
