President Trump’s administration and the U.S. president personally still believe it’s not yet time to punish russia with new sanctions. This was implied in an interview with Politico by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, European Pravda reports.
President Volodymyr Zelensky and other European leaders hope to convince Trump on Wednesday, during the NATO summit in The Hague, to impose new sanctions on russia, since putin has repeatedly rejected U.S. ceasefire proposals.
“If we do what everyone here wants from us — namely, intervene and crush them with new sanctions — we’ll probably lose the opportunity to negotiate a ceasefire with them. And who will talk to them then?”, - Rubio said.
He added that Trump “will know the right time and place” for new economic measures. According to Rubio, the presidential administration is working with Congress to ensure Trump has the appropriate flexibility.
But when the U.S. does decide to impose sanctions, he added, it will likely signal that the window for negotiations with russia has closed. “If he does that, it’ll be almost an acknowledgment that negotiations won’t happen anytime soon”, - Rubio said.
“We’ll keep engaging. In the sense that if we get a chance to change something and force them to come to the table, we’ll take it”, - the U.S. Secretary of State added.
Since negotiations with russia have stalled, Rubio stated that moscow believes it can achieve its territorial goals on the battlefield, a notion Washington disagrees with.
“Our sense is that the russians will try to achieve on the battlefield what they were demanding at the negotiating table — namely, preserving the administrative borders of certain territories and so on. We think it’ll be much harder for them to achieve this than they think”, - Rubio added.