Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended President Donald Trump on Sunday from those who criticized the president for meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Many consider Putin a war criminal for his invasion and subsequent war against Ukraine and other geopolitical aggressive incidents in the past.
Rubio suggested it would be impossible to negotiate any peace deal without speaking to Putin, and it only happened because of Trump’s astute brilliance. He also lauded the president as the only world leader who could even get Putin to discuss “serious things.”
“The President is the only leader in the world that could get Putin to a meeting to talk about serious things,” Rubio said, during an interview on Sunday on ABC News’s This Week with Martha Raddatz.
Rubio also rejected criticism that Trump overdid it in welcoming Putin, with the “pomp and circumstance,” red carpet, and “warm handshake.”
“Critics of President Trump will say the pomp and circumstances – the pomp and circumstance, the red carpet, the warm handshake – that President Trump simply lost that, that Putin gained there just by being on the world stage and walking down a red carpet with the President,” Raddatz said. “Your reaction to that?”
“Well, I mean, critics of President Trump are always going to find something to criticize. I don’t pay attention to it anymore,” Rubio said. “But I will tell you this: Putin is already on the world stage. He’s already on the world stage. The guy’s conducting a full-scale war in Ukraine; he’s already on the world stage. He has the world’s largest tactical nuclear arsenal in the world, and the second largest strategic nuclear arsenal in the world. He’s already on the world stage.”
“When I hear people say that – oh, it elevates him – well, all we do is talk about Putin all the time,” the secretary of state added. “All the media has done is talk about Putin all the time for the last four or five years. That doesn’t mean he’s right about the war. That doesn’t mean he’s justified about the war. Put all that aside. It means you’re not going to have a peace agreement without – between Russia and Ukraine, you’re not going to end a war between Russia and Ukraine, without dealing with Putin. That’s not – that’s just common sense. I shouldn’t even have to say it.”
Rubio also discussed the fact that establishing peace between Ukraine and Russia is not as easy as many of the critics make it sound, and applauded Trump for his time and effort in trying to end the war. He also highlighted that the war did not start under Trump’s watch, but Biden’s. Yet, Trump is still trying to end it.
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“Ultimately, at the end of the day, we have to get the Russian side to agree to things that they don’t want to agree to if we’re going to have peace,” Rubio said. “If not, there’ll just be a war, they’ll keep killing each other, and life will go on in America and in the rest of the world, but not for Ukraine.”
“So the President has invested a lot of time in trying to bring an end to this war. He deserves credit for doing that,” Rubio added. “He gets criticism for doing that. He could have just let this war go on. The President could have just said, this is Biden’s war, it started under him, we’ll do what we can for Ukraine, but we’re going to focus on other things. He could have easily said that.”
