Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly pulled out of high-stakes Ukraine peace talks in London—just hours after President Volodymyr Zelensky publicly shot down a major pillar of Donald Trump’s reported ceasefire plan.
In a statement Tuesday, Rubio announced that he was canceling his plans to attend the meeting of U.S., Ukrainian and European officials in London on Wednesday, but said he would reschedule his visit to the United Kingdom “in the coming months.”
“I look forward to following up after the ongoing discussions in London and rescheduling my trip to the UK in the coming months,” he said in a post on X, noting that Trump’s Ukraine envoy General Keith Kellogg would take part.
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said Tuesday that Rubio couldn’t attend due to “logistical issues.”
The announcement came shortly after Zelensky said Ukraine wouldn’t bow to Russia’s demands to legally recognize Putin’s annexation of Crimea. The Black Sea peninsula was annexed by Russia in 2014, but it remains internationally recognized as part of Ukraine.
“Ukraine will not legally recognize the occupation of Crimea,” Zelensky told reporters on Tuesday. “It is against our constitution.”
Zelensky’s remarks came on the heels of a report from the Wall Street Journal that Trump’s ceasefire proposal may include U.S. recognition of Crimea as Russian territory and blocking Ukraine from joining the NATO military alliance.
And on Wednesday, the Financial Times reported that Putin had offered to halt the war along the current front line in order to reach a peace deal with Trump. That would include giving Putin Crimea, as well as recognizing Russia’s Sept. 2022 annexations of Ukraine’s Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
“There is a lot of pressure on Kyiv right now to give up on things so Trump can claim victory,” one official told the newspaper.
Vice President JD Vance appeared to all but confirm the reports, telling reporters in India on Wednesday that the U.S. had issued a “very explicit proposal” to Russia and Ukraine, adding that “it’s time for them to either say yes or for the United States to walk away from this process.”
“The current lines, somewhere close to them is where you’re ultimately, I think, going to draw the new lines in the conflict,” Vance said.
Meanwhile, Kremlin newswire Tass this month began to refer to Ukraine’s four partially occupied regions as “Novorossiya”, or new Russia, a term used to describe a pro-Russian geopolitical movement to break southeastern Ukraine away from the rest of the country.
The Institute for the Study of War said the move was “likely as part of Kremlin efforts to set conditions for Russian society to expect Russia to achieve extensive territorial concessions in Ukraine.”
Observers of the conflict fear Trump could cut a deal with Putin that strong-arms Ukraine into giving up its NATO dreams and handing over its partially occupied land—effectively capitulating to Moscow’s demands.
Trump has warned he will abandon efforts to bring the conflict to an end if a deal can’t be reached soon.
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