Trump administration threatens to walk away from efforts to broker Russian-Ukrainian peace without visible progress in next few days

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in Paris on Friday that President Donald Trump is perhaps days from abandoning his administration’s efforts to broker a peace deal between Moscow and Kyiv. 

“We're not going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end. So we need to determine very quickly now, and I'm talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable in the next few weeks,” Rubio told reporters in France, as reported by Reuters. “If it's not possible, if we're so far apart that this is not going to happen, then I think the president is probably at a point where he's going to say, ‘Well, we're done.’” 

In a barb apparently aimed at Washington’s allies across the Atlantic, Rubio added that lifting European sanctions would be crucial to any settlement in Ukraine.

While in Paris, Rubio met with representatives from Ukraine and the European “coalition of the willing” before speaking separately with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Earlier this week, President Trump said he was expecting a response from Russia “this week” to his ceasefire proposal. Russia’s Permanent Representative to the U.N., Vasily Nebenzya, called any talk of a truce “unrealistic at this stage.”