Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday that the Trump administration will decide this week whether to continue pursuing a negotiated settlement in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or to turn its attention to other matters.
This week will be “very important,” Mr. Rubio said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “We have to make a determination about whether this is an endeavor that we want to continue to be involved in or if it’s time to sort of focus on some other issues that are equally if not more important in some cases.”
“But we want to see it happen,” he added. “There are reasons to be optimistic, but there are reasons to be realistic of course as well. We’re close, but we’re not close enough.”
Mr. Rubio did not give further details of the state of the talks.
It was not clear if the timeline he offered was meant to pressure Ukraine and Russia to agree to enter direct discussions toward a deal, or whether President Trump and his aides were seriously considering walking away.
In an interview on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Sergey V. Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, did not suggest any settlement was imminent. “We are ready to reach a deal,” he said. “But there are still some specific points — elements of this deal which need to be fine-tuned.”
Russia launched a barrage of missiles and drones at Kyiv last Thursday that killed at least 12 people, prompting unusually sharp criticism from Mr. Trump. Mr. Lavrov said in the interview, which was recorded on the day of the strikes, that Russia still had not agreed to a U.S. proposal for a 30-day full cease-fire that the Ukrainians have said they accepted.
Mr. Rubio’s remarks came a day after Mr. Trump met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the halls of the Vatican while both leaders were attending the funeral of Pope Francis. Aides posted photos of the two men sitting together in conversation in St. Peter’s Basilica.
It was the first time the two men had met in person since an explosive Oval Office meeting in February, when Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Mr. Zelensky in front of reporters, saying he had not shown sufficient gratitude.
Tensions flared over the winter and spring as Mr. Trump made statements favoring the perspective of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Mr. Trump has also said he wants to form economic partnerships with Russia, while also trying to press Ukraine into a deal with his administration on critical minerals extraction.
In meetings this month in Paris and London and in exchanges via allied channels, U.S. and Ukrainian officials, including Mr. Rubio, have discussed possible terms of a negotiated settlement involving Russia and traded proposals and counterproposals.
Several of the most contentious issues include the Trump administration’s insistence that the United States recognize Crimea as Russian territory and give de facto acceptance to Russian occupation of much of the land in eastern Ukraine that Mr. Putin’s military has seized since 2014.
Mr. Trump also wants to declare that Ukraine cannot join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, at least under his watch.
After he met with Mr. Trump on Saturday, Mr. Zelensky thanked the U.S. president in a social media post and said the encounter was a “very symbolic meeting that has potential to become historic, if we achieve joint results.”
Steven Cheung, a White House spokesman, called the discussion “very productive.”
Another photo from Saturday showed Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky chatting with President Emmanuel Macron of France and Keir Starmer, the prime minister of Britain. The French and British leaders have expressed an urgent need for allied nations to provide security guarantees to Ukraine in the event of a negotiated settlement, something that Mr. Zelensky says is critical but that the Trump administration insists should be done by the Europeans and not the Americans.
Mr. Zelensky said in his social media post that he had discussed security guarantees with Mr. Trump.
On Friday, Steve Witkoff, a real estate businessman who is a special envoy for Mr. Trump, met with Mr. Putin in Moscow for three hours. After hearing about the results of that meeting, Mr. Trump wrote on social media on Saturday: “A good day in talks and meetings with Russia and Ukraine. They are very close to a deal, and the two sides should now meet, at very high levels, to ‘finish it off.’”
Both Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Rubio had planned to attend a set of talks with Ukrainian officials in London last week, but they canceled after Mr. Zelensky’s aides objected to the main elements in the settlement proposal that the two Americans presented to Ukrainian negotiators in Paris on April 17. Other U.S. officials did attend the talks in London on Wednesday.
After the Paris talks, Mr. Rubio said the Trump administration would decide “in a matter of days whether or not this is doable in the next few weeks.” He said at the time that the United States would “need to move on” if it did not appear possible to reach a compromise with all parties to end the war in Ukraine.
