Rubio: Under Trump, Post-Conflict Ukraine Has A Right To Enter Security Alliances With Other Countries
FOX News Channel’s Jesse Watters interviews Secretary of State Marco Rubio about the White House meeting on Monday between President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and European leaders. Rubio said Americans should be proud that we have a “peace president.”
JESSE WATTERS, HOST: So these European nations, and some of these are NATO countries, are they willing to put troops on the ground in Ukraine to cement this peace deal? Would that make Ukraine kind of like a NATO ally? SECRETARY OF STATE MARCO RUBIO: Well, what’s being contemplated, look, any sovereign country in the world has a right to enter into security alliances with other countries. You know, it’s not just NATO, we have such alliances with South Korea, we have it with Japan, other countries have it with each other. And so I think everyone would acknowledge, including, by the way, for the first time, the Russian side, under President Trump’s sort of pressure or, you know, suggestion, is that, in fact, a Ukraine post-conflict has a right to enter into security agreements with other countries. And we will work with our European allies and non-European countries, by the way, to build such a security guarantee. We’re working on that right now. We’ll continue to work on that. And that’ll be something that’ll have to be in place after a peace deal so that Ukraine can feel safe moving forward. And we’re coordinating that as we speak. We’re involved in the coordination of it. So, yeah, there are a number of countries that are willing to step forward and provide Ukraine security guarantees. But as the Ukrainians have said to us, and I think have said publicly, you know, the strongest security guarantee they can come up with in their future is to have a strong military moving forward. And that’s the other dynamic that’s changed. We’re no longer giving Ukraine weapons. We’re no longer giving Ukraine money. We are now selling them weapons, and European countries are paying for it through NATO. They are using NATO to buy the weapons and transfer them to Ukraine. That’s another big change from the way this war was approached just a few, you know, just under the Biden administration, for example.
