There is no prospect right now of a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine.
That's the US Secretary of State talking, in an interview with the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, published a few hours ago.
He called the war a strategic stalemate. And he said a stalemate like this only ends two ways. Either a deal gets done. Or the fighting spreads past where it already is.
Right now, he said, there's no sign of a deal.
So what's actually stuck? The same thing that's been stuck this whole time. Russia wants full control of Donetsk, in Ukraine's Donbas region. Ukraine says absolutely not.
Rubio said this war now looks set to run into a fifth year. And he said that was never Vladimir Putin's plan.
He also pointed to something that just happened in the Black Sea. Two days before his interview, drones hit two cargo ships in Bulgaria's economic waters. One of them, the Togo-flagged Alfa Watan, sank. Search teams looked for survivors from its crew. They found none. Nobody has said who sent the drones.
Rubio says that's exactly the kind of thing that shows how easily this war could spread even further.
And here's the part that should worry Ukraine the most. Rubio said Russia looks set on using this coming winter to finish off what's left of Ukraine's power grid. The goal, he said, is to force Ukraine to give in.
Ukraine isn't just sitting there either. Rubio said Ukraine has built up its own ability to hit deep inside Russian territory.
So that's Washington's top diplomat saying the war is frozen, and naming exactly one side as the reason why.
But here's the thing. On the very same day, Ukraine's government said something that doesn't quite fit that picture.
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Flat, fertile plains stretch northward from the Black Sea in Ukraine and southern Russia, showing the agricultural heartland of both nations. File photo. NASA image created by Jesse Allen, Earth Observatory, using data provided by Inbal Reshef and information provided by Assaf Anyamba as part of the Global Agricultural Monitoring Project between NASA, USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), and the University of Maryland. More data and information · Public domain
Andrii Sybiha, Ukraine's Foreign Minister, said Kyiv has just received four separate ceasefire proposals. One from India. One from Turkiye. One from Egypt. One from the United States.
None of them tries to end the whole war. Each one is smaller than that. A halt on hitting energy sites. Or ports. Or ships in the Black Sea.
The American plan reportedly covers three things. Stop hitting energy targets, on both sides. Reopen a grain corridor. And hold a three-way meeting between Ukraine, Russia and the US, possibly in Abu Dhabi.
That meeting was supposed to happen in early October. It's now been pushed to late October. People close to the talks say Russia is the reason for the delay.
And there's more. Washington has invited Vladimir Putin to the G20 summit in Miami in December. Rubio says he hopes Putin accepts.
So in one breath, the US is saying there's no path to peace. And in the next, it's still running an active plan to try to build one.
Rubio said Washington is ready to play a constructive role if a real opening shows up. He said it has tried this before, and it hasn't worked yet.
Ukrainian officials say Russia's demands actually go further than just Donetsk. They say Moscow wants all of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. That includes land Russian forces have never even taken.
A Ukrainian official told the Kyiv Independent that Russia has privately turned down India's proposal. Russia hasn't said that in public. And Russia hasn't responded to Rubio's comments at all.
So what don't we know? Whether Rubio's statement means the US is stepping back from these efforts, or just being blunt while it keeps pushing anyway. And nobody knows why he chose to say this now, to a Greek newspaper, instead of through Washington's normal channels.
For now, both Russia and Ukraine say in public that they're open to talks.
Neither one has agreed to the one condition that would actually end the war.
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