Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, tipped to become the next US secretary of state, would support President-elect Donald Trump’s rumored plan to pressure Ukraine into agreeing a peace with Russia, the New York Times has reported.
On Monday, the newspaper claimed that three people had told it that Trump had decided to assign the post to Rubio.
However, the unnamed insiders also warned that the president-elect “could still change his mind at the last minute.”
According to the Times, if Rubio gets the job, he will “likely go along” with Trump’s expected policy to persuade Kiev to come to a settlement with Moscow and give up on its plans to join NATO.
The report stressed that it was “unclear” if Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky would respond to the US president-elect’s call to sit down at a negotiating table.
Rubio, once a strong supporter of US military aid to Ukraine, appears to have changed his stance on the issue recently.
Speaking about the Ukraine conflict to NBC last month, he said that “what we are funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion because that country is going to be set back a hundred years.”
“That does not mean that we celebrate what Vladimir Putin did, or are excited about it, but I think there has to also be some common sense here,” he added.
During his campaign, Trump repeatedly claimed that he would end the fighting between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours if reelected, but did not explain how exactly he would achieve this. He only told the US media that he was going to tell Zelensky: “No more. You got to make a deal.” The president-elect also implied that he could also leverage further assistance to Kiev in a bid to push Moscow to engage in talks.
Putin reiterated last week that Russia remains ready for negotiations if they are substantive and take into account the current situation on the ground in the conflict. Moscow’s goal is “to create conditions for a long-term settlement and for Ukraine to eventually become an independent, sovereign state, instead of being an instrument in the hands of third countries,” he explained.