US President Donald Trump will abandon his attempt to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine within days unless there are clear signs that a deal can be reached, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday, Reuters reported.
"We're not going to continue this endeavor for weeks and months. So we have to determine very quickly now, and I'm talking about the question of the day, whether or not this is feasible in the next few weeks," Rubio said in Paris after meeting with European and Ukrainian leaders.
"The president feels this very strongly. He has devoted a lot of time and energy to this... this is important, but there are a lot of other really important things going on that deserve just as much, if not more, attention," he said.
Rubio's warning came amid signs of some progress in US negotiations with Ukraine, according to Reuters.
Trump said on Thursday that he expects to sign an agreement with Kiev next week that will give the US access to Ukrainian minerals.
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An attempt to sign a minerals pact in February collapsed after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky clashed with Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in the Oval Office.
After talks in Paris on Thursday - the first substantive high-level and personal discussions on Trump's peace effort involving European powers - Rubio said the US peace framework had received an "encouraging reception".
Zelensky's office called the talks constructive and positive.
Rubio's comments on Friday underscored growing frustration in the White House over the lack of progress in efforts to address a growing list of geopolitical challenges, Reuters reports.
Trump promised during the campaign to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office. He has moderated that claim, suggesting a deal by April or May as obstacles have mounted.
Rubio said he spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after the talks in Paris and told him they were constructive, and also briefed him on "some elements" of the US peace framework.
Rubio said the issue of US security guarantees as part of any deal had come up in the Paris talks, without going into detail.
He said that security guarantees are a problem "that we can solve in a way that is acceptable to everyone," but "we have bigger challenges that we need to understand, whether that is even possible in the short term."
He said it was clear that a peace agreement would be difficult to achieve, but that there must be signs that it could be achieved soon.
"Nobody is saying it can be done in 12 hours. But we want to see how far away it is and whether those differences can be narrowed down at all, whether it is even possible to achieve movement in the time frame that we have in mind," he said.
Neither the French presidency nor the foreign ministry immediately responded to requests for comment.
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