US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy should apologize to President Donald Trump after a heated exchange in the Oval Office.
Asked during an interview with CNN whether he believes Zelenskyy owes Trump an apology after the clash, Rubio responded, "I do."
"You guys only saw the end," Rubio, who was present in the meeting, said. "You don't see all the things that led up to this."
He urged Zelenskyy to "apologize for turning this thing into the fiasco for him that it became," accusing him of being "antagonistic".
Asked during an interview with FOX News, Zelenskyy did not directly answer if he owes former Trump an apology and maintained he did not do "something bad."
The heated exchange, which lasted roughly 10 minutes, concluded with Zelenskyy leaving the White House without attending a planned signing ceremony for a deal on critical minerals.
"I think that we have to be very open and very honest. And I'm not sure that we did something bad," Zelenskyy told Fox News. He said he respects Trump and the American people.
Noting Trump's campaign pledge to end the war in Ukraine, Rubio said: "We've explained very clearly what our plan is here, which is we want to get the Russians to a negotiating table. We want to explore whether peace is possible."
"They also understand that this agreement that was supposed to be signed today was supposed to be an agreement that binds America economically to Ukraine, which, to me, as I've explained, I think the President alluded to today, is a security guarantee in its own way, because we're involved," he added.
"The president's been very clear. He campaigned on this. He's trying to bring an end to this conflict."
Rubio claimed Zelenskyy provoked the confrontation by using his visit to Washington to push back against Trump's diplomatic strategy.
"This agreement could have been signed five days ago, but they insisted on coming to Washington," said Rubio. "There should have been a very clear understanding -- don't come here and create a scenario where you're going to start lecturing us about how diplomacy isn't going to work. President Zelenskyy took it in that direction, and it ended in a predictable outcome as a result."
He further argued that Zelenskyy's reluctance to embrace negotiations raised doubts about his willingness to end the war.
"So. you start to perceive that maybe Zelenskyy doesn't want a peace deal. He says he does, but maybe he doesn't," he said.
The top US diplomat also criticized European leaders for a lack of a strategy to end the war.
"One foreign minister told me, and I'm not going to say who it was, but I can tell you what one of them told me, and that is that the war goes on for another year, and at that point, Russia will feel so weakened that they'll beg for a peace," he said. "That's another year of killing, another year of dying, another year of destruction."
"Tonight, people will die in Ukraine," he said, "We're trying to bring an end to this conflict, which is unsustainable."
