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Friday on CNN’s “The Source,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio called on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to apologize for the dust-up between him and President Donald Trump earlier in the day.
Rubio said the much-publicized moment made the entire visit by Zelensky a “waste of time.”
“[W]hat specifically do you want to see President Zelensky apologize for?” CNN host Kaitlin Collins asked.
“Well, apologize for turning this thing into the fiasco for him that it became,” Rubio replied. “There was no need for him to go in there and become antagonistic. Look, this thing went off the rails. You were there, I believe. It went off the rails when he said, let me ask you a question to the Vice President. What kind of diplomacy are you talking about? Well, this is a serious thing. I mean, thousands of people have been killed, thousands. And he talks about all these horrible things that have happened to prisoners of war and children, all true, all bad. This is what we’re dealing with here. It needs to come to an end.”
“We are trying to bring it to an end,” he continued. “The way you bring it to an end is you get Russia to the table to talk. And he understands that attacking Putin, no matter how anyone may feel about him personally, forcing the president into a position where you’re trying to goad him into attacking Putin, calling him names, maximalist demands about Russia having to pay for the reconstruction, all the sorts of things that you talk about in a negotiation. Well, when you start talking about that aggressively, and the president’s a dealmaker, he’s made deals his entire life, you’re not going to get people to the table. And so 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 who’s been involved in communications with them leading up to today. And I think we should apologize for wasting our time for a meeting that was going to end the way it did.’
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