US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Thursday morning on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in Manila.
Neither responded to reporters’ questions about whether Russia was supporting Iran by helping attack U.S. troops or whether Moscow planned to stop a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
A State Department report later confirmed that the two envoys discussed “U.S.-Russian relations and the need to end the Russian-Ukrainian war.”
On Wednesday, a reporter asked Rubio if he planned to press Lavrov on Ukraine during their meeting.
“I don’t know if ‘pressing him’ is the term. We’re going to talk about it,” Rubio responded.
“Obviously, the war in Ukraine has in many ways hampered the ability of Russia and the United States to find areas of agreement on other topics, but that does not mean that we will not seek to find other areas of potential cooperation,” he said.
“But at the same time, we would like to see this war come to an end … so we will raise it,” Rubio added.
Asked what role the U.S. plays in ending the Russia-Ukraine war given that talks have broken down, Rubio said, “Perhaps there are new conditions now that will allow this conversation to happen.”
“That’s one of the things we’ll discuss in our conversation tomorrow,” he added.
For context: During the 2023 and 2024 election campaigns, US President Donald Trump said dozens of times that he would end the war in Ukraine either within 24 hours of his return to the White House or even sooner.
More than 500 days into his second term in office, the war is still raging and peace talks have made little progress.
Meanwhile, the US war with Iran has once again turned into days of deadly blows between both sides.