Ukraine conflict ‘needs to end now’ – Rubio

It was dishonest to claim that Kiev could defeat Moscow, the US secretary of state has said

Ukraine is being destroyed by the fighting with Russia and the conflict must be swiftly settled through negotiations, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said.

In an interview on Sirius XM’s The Megyn Kelly Show on Thursday, Rubio reiterated US President Donald Trump’s willingness to find a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis, saying that Trump believes the conflict “needs to end now.”

“It needs to end to a negotiation. In any negotiation, both sides are going to have to give something up,” Rubio stated.

Even a growing number Democrats who vowed to support Kiev for “as long as it takes” under the previous administration of US President Joe Biden “would now acknowledge that what we have been funding is a stalemate, a protracted conflict, and maybe even worse than a stalemate, one in which incrementally Ukraine is being destroyed and losing more and more territory,” the secretary of state said.

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“What the dishonesty that has existed is that we somehow led people to believe that Ukraine would be able not just to defeat Russia, but, you know, destroy them, push them all the way back to what the world looked like in... 2014,” Rubio added.

As a result of the conflict, Ukraine is “being set back a hundred years. Their energy grid is being wiped out… And you know how many Ukrainians have left Ukraine, living in other countries now? They may never return. I mean, that is their future, and it is endangered in that regard,” Rubio warned.

After his inauguration last week, Trump said he was ready to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin “anytime” to find a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict. The Kremlin replied by saying that Putin is also willing to talk to his US counterpart, but stressed that Moscow has not yet been approached by Washington about organizing contacts between the two leaders.

The Russian president said earlier this week that there is “a very simple way” for the US and other “sponsors” of Kiev to achieve peace by ending funding for Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky’s government.

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“They will not last a month if the money and, in a broader sense, the ammunition, runs out. That’s it. It will all end in a month, a month and a half, or two,” Putin stated.