News24 | Ukraine and Russia should be focused on ending the war, says Rubio

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has called for peace between Russia and Ukraine.

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• Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State,has urged Ukraine and Russia to prioritise bringing their war to an end.
• The US has been trying to mediate a peace deal to bring the Ukraine war to an end
• Rubio’s statement comes soon after the latest Russian air strike in Ukraine killed a woman and also damaged a subway station and a residential building.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Ukraine and Russia should focus on ending their war

“The president’s been clear. He’d like the war in Ukraine and Russia to end. He wants that war to end. He has said that when he was a candidate, he said it never would have happened if he’d been president at the time. But it did happen. And, and now we’re we’ve done everything we can and will continue to do everything we can to help facilitate the end of that war. No one’s winning that war. People are dying every day. Things are being blown up every day. Things are being destroyed every day.”

“We want the war to end. We see nothing good coming from this war, and we see a lot of downside to it, including the very real risk of escalation and the spread of this thing spreading into another country because of a failed sabotage attack, because the drones that are, hit with electronic warfare and they wander into a neighboring country, we see that every night.”

READ | Zelensky warns against normalising deals with Russia after Trump’s diesel accord

Rubio landed in Samarkand on 18 October to meet top officials of the C5+1 grouping that brings together the United States and the Muslim-majority post-Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

Trump hosted C5 leaders at the White House last November.

The US has been trying to mediate a peace deal to bring the Ukraine war to an end and Trump has since clinched a diesel import deal with Russia and waived some sanctions on Moscow, which he said should keep the Kremlin at the negotiating table.

The moves were criticized by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. A fresh Russian air strike killed a woman in Ukraine’s Kyiv overnight while also hitting a subway station and damaging a 25-story residential building.