The President of the United States Donald Trump will renounce to try to mediate a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in a few days, unless there are clear signs that an agreement is possible. This is the warning launched by the American secretary of state, Marco Rubio, after meeting European and Ukrainian leaders.
“We have no intention of continuing this effort for weeks and months. We must therefore determine very quickly, and I speak of a matter of days, if this is feasible or not in the coming weeks. If it is, we are. If it is not, we have other priorities to concentrate on it,” he said. The one in Ukraine “is not our war. We have not started it. The United States have helped Ukrainian in the last three years and we want it to end, but it is not our war”, Rubio specified, according to which “if it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we must turn the page”.
During the election campaign Trump had promised that he would make the war end in “24 hours”, but so far he has not succeeded even in three months and there are no signs that can make it shortly.
The interviews in Paris
Yesterday (Thursday 17 April) Rubio participated in Paris in the first interviews on Ukraine between Americans and European Championships, which also took part in high British, German and Ukrainian officials, as well as the special correspondent for Trump, Steve Witkoff. “I believe that the United Kingdom, France and Germany can help us, make the situation progress and get closer to a solution. I found their ideas very useful and constructive,” said Rubio.
The French president Emmanuel Macron defined the “positive and constructive” discussion, affirming in an X post that “we all share the same desire for peace”. “The discussions will continue next week in London”, then announced, adding that “the coordination between the allies is fundamental”, at a time when Europeans feared for weeks to be put aside in the negotiations.
The United States “have understood that a right and lasting peace can only be achieved with the consent and contribution of the Europeans”, has claimed the French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot.
Ukrainian requests
The Ukrainian presidency welcomed “a constructive and positive discussion”, underlining “the importance of humanitarian aspect, in particular the return of Ukrainian children displaced with the force in Russia and the release of prisoners of war and civil hostages”.
Rubio explained that he had spoken to the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after the interviews of Paris, referring to him that they were constructive and informing him about “some elements” of the US peace framework. The Secretary of State said that the question of US security guarantees as part of any agreement emerged in the interviews, without going into details.
It has limited itself to explaining that security guarantees are a question that “we can resolve in an acceptable way for everyone”, but “we have bigger challenges that we must understand, if possible even in the short term”.
The coalition of the willing
Under pressure from Washington, Kiev had accepted an unconditional 30 -day truce that Russia has ignored. Witkoff met Vladimir Putin for the third time at the beginning of April and last Monday he had argued that the talks were “on the point” to make progress. Paris and London, for their part, have set up a “coalition of the willingness”, made up of about thirty allied countries of Ukraine, who works in particular to the creation of a “reinsurance force” aimed at guaranteeing a possible ceasefire and preventing any new attack by Russia. An idea to which Moscow opposes.
