Sec. Marco Rubio spoke with reporters on Friday about a framework for peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
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00:01Mr. Secretary, Michael Gordon, Wall Street Journal.
00:04The State Department said yesterday that a framework had been presented to all sides,
00:09to the Ukrainians, to the European officials, and to the Russians.
00:13What does the framework say? What issues does it involve?
00:16Well, I'm not going to tell you what the framework says,
00:18because when you start negotiating these things through the media and so forth, they fall apart.
00:22And it's a broad framework. It's a framework that gets us into a position to see,
00:26look, there are going to be differences.
00:28No one's saying it's going to be done in 12 hours, but we want to see how far apart it is
00:32and whether those differences can even be narrowed,
00:36if it's even possible to get movement within the period of time we have in mind.
00:39And so we've talked about outlines of both sides.
00:41I thought we had positive meetings yesterday.
00:43Obviously, the Ukrainians have to go back home.
00:45They have to run and by their president.
00:47They have to take into account, you know, their views on all of this.
00:50And we hope to hear back from them very soon.
00:52But we need to figure out here now, within a matter of days,
00:56whether this is doable in the short term.
00:59Because if it's not, then I think we're just going to move on from our perspective.
01:02The president feels very strongly about that.
01:04He has dedicated a lot of time and energy to this.
01:07And there are a lot of things going on in the world right now that we need to be focused on.
01:10So this is important.
01:11But there are a lot of other really important things going on that deserve just as much if not more attention.
01:16So we want to do everything we can to be helpful.
01:18We had a good meeting yesterday.
01:19I thought the French, the British, the Germans were very constructive, were very helpful.
01:24We thank them for hosting this.
01:26And hopefully we'll have another meeting early next week at some point where we'll have some more definitive answers about how close we are to actually making progress.
01:35But this isn't going to go on forever.
01:37Mr. Secretary.