Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to take responsibility for turning Friday’s highly charged Oval Office meeting into a “fiasco” and to issue an apology.
Rubio, who was seated just a few feet from the 47-year-old Ukrainian president, criticized Zelensky’s behavior and accused him of provoking both President Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
“Apologize for turning this thing into the fiasco for him that it became,” Rubio told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday. “There was no need for him to go in there and become antagonistic.”
According to Rubio, the meeting, which had been cordial for the first 45 minutes, took a turn when Zelensky raised concerns with Vance about the lack of diplomatic progress in the war-ravaged region.
Vance responded by accusing Zelensky of trying to “litigate” matters in front of the press.
“This is a serious thing,” Rubio said. “Thousands of people have been killed, and (Zelensky) talks all these horrible things that have happened to prisoners of war and children, all true all bad. This is what we are dealing with, it needs to come to an end.”
Rubio, 53, outlined his approach to bringing the ongoing three-year war in Ukraine to a close, suggesting that the focus should be on negotiating peace with Russia, rather than the tense one-on-one conversations.
“The way you bring it to an end, is you get Russia to the table to talk, and (Zelensky) understands that,” Rubio said.
He also accused Zelensky of provoking Trump and trying to get the 78-year-old president to attack Russian President Vladimir Putin while demanding that Russia cover the costs of reconstruction.
“When you start talking about those things aggressively, and the president is a deal maker, you’re not gonna get people to the table,” Rubio added.
“You start to perceive that maybe Zelensky doesn’t want a peace deal, he says he does but maybe he doesn’t. And that active, open undermining of efforts to bring about peace is deeply frustrating for everyone that’s been involved in communications with them leading to today.”
Rubio also demanded an apology from Zelensky for the manner in which the meeting ended and expressed little concern that Trump could be “suckered” into a false deal with Putin.
“The goal here is we have to explore whether peace is possible,” Rubio said. “I don’t know, I think it is but we have to explore that. How else is this war going to end?”
Zelensky, in his first public comments since the heated exchange with Trump on Friday, denied any wrongdoing.
“I’m not sure that we did something bad,” Zelensky told Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier. “I respect the president and I respect the American people.”
He maintained that he was still open to continuing the discussions, which were originally intended to include signing a deal with the U.S. on rare earths and minerals on Friday.
“I said that we have to sign this [mining] document, and we are ready for this, and this will be the first step to security guarantees. But it’s not enough,” Zelensky said.
“Just a cease-fire without security guarantees, it’s so sensitive for our people…. Everybody is afraid that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will come back tomorrow. We want just and lasting peace. It’s true. We want security guarantees.”
{Matzav.com}