Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke with reporters on Friday about security guarantees for Ukraine.
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00:00In your conversations yesterday with the Europeans and Ukrainians,
00:06I'm sure you spoke about security guarantees for Ukraine in case of a sea flyer.
00:11Could you give us a sense of what that could look like,
00:15and is the U.S. ready to back up any eventual European reassurance force for Ukraine?
00:20Well, that gets into a level of specifics that we're not ready to discuss publicly yet.
00:24Obviously, the term security guarantees came up because they come up in every meeting.
00:28We've heard about it, and it's not an illegitimate desire.
00:30Every sovereign nation on Earth has a right to defend itself.
00:34Ukraine will have a right to defend itself and to enter into whatever agreements it wants to enter into
00:40on a bilateral basis with different countries and so forth.
00:44So, I mean, it was discussed, but I don't, and that'll have to be part of any sort of conversation.
00:49Ukraine, in order for there to be peace, we recognize that Ukraine has to feel like it has the ability
00:54to defend itself from a future attack from anyone.
00:56And every country in the world has that right.
00:59But I think everyone recognizes that Ukraine's ability to defend itself is going to be a part,
01:04it's its right as a country, and will be a part of any agreement.
01:07But we're not working yet on that level of specifics.
01:10I think that's something we can fix and solve in a way that's acceptable to everyone.
01:13I think we have bigger challenges that we need to figure out whether it's even possible within the short term.
01:18I can tell you this. This war has no military pollution to it. It really doesn't.
01:23It's not going to be decided with, neither side has some strategic capability to end this war quickly.
01:28And so what we're talking about here is avoiding thousands and thousands of people from dying over the next year.
01:34We're trying to avoid that.
01:35We saw what happened last weekend with a missile strike in Sumi, where people died on Palm Sunday.
01:40We're just going to see more like that on both sides.
01:42We're going to see more of that. We're trying to prevent it.
01:44But we're not going to continue to fly all over the world and do meeting after meeting after meeting if no progress is being made.
01:50So if they're serious about peace, either side or both, we want to help.
01:54If it's not going to happen, then we're just going to move on.
01:56We're going to move on to other topics that are equally, if not more important in some ways, to the United States side.