United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for a second time in two days on Friday, with the war in Ukraine the focal point of their huddle. They had met for 50 minutes on the sidelines of the ASEAN summit in Malaysia on Thursday.
While campaigning for re-election, US President Donald Trump had promised to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office.
But more than four months later, the prospects of a ceasefire appear as remote as ever, with Russia launching a fierce bombardment of Ukraine in recent days.
After the Thursday meeting, Rubio told reporters that Trump was “disappointed and frustrated that there’s not been more flexibility on the Russian side” to bring an end to the war in Ukraine.
So has Trump’s view of the war changed – and what are his next options?
Has Trump’s position on Russia shifted?
Rubio’s comments come at a time when Trump has increasingly been publicly critical of Putin, after previously accusing Ukraine of not wanting peace.
“We get a lot of b******t thrown at us by Putin. He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless,” Trump said on Tuesday.
Since February, the US has held separate talks with Russia and Ukraine, and brokered direct talks between them in May in Istanbul for the first time since the early months of Russia’s full-fledged invasion in 2022.
But while Putin has offered brief pauses in fighting, he has not accepted the US proposal for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire. Ukraine has accepted that proposal. Russia argues that Ukraine could use the truce to remobilise troops and rearm itself.
When asked by reporters this week whether he would act on his frustration with Putin, Trump responded: “I wouldn’t be telling you. Don’t we want to have a little surprise?”
However, experts caution against concluding that Trump was ready to act tough against Russia.
“Western media is full of commentary on what it calls Trump‘s ‘changing stance’ on Putin. But as yet, there is no reason to think that anything has changed at all,” Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow at the London-based Chatham House think tank, told Al Jazeera.
“There is a wave of optimism across the world that this might finally lead to a change in US policy. But, on every previous occasion, this has not happened.”
Indeed, after the Thursday meeting between Rubio and Lavrov, both sides suggested that they were willing to continue to engage diplomatically.
Arming Ukraine to fight off Russia
In early July, the Trump administration announced a decision to “pause” arms supply to Kyiv. A week later, he reversed this decision.
“We’re going to send some more weapons. We have to. They have to be able to defend themselves. They are getting hit very hard now,” said Trump on July 8.
On Thursday, Trump told NBC that these weapons would be sold to NATO, which will pay fully for them. NATO will then pass them on to Ukraine.
“We’re sending weapons to NATO, and NATO is paying for those weapons, a hundred percent,” Trump told NBC, adding that the US will be sending Patriot missiles to the alliance.
Trump said this deal was agreed on during the NATO summit in The Hague in June.
Trump had also frozen aid to Ukraine in February, after a falling out with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a rancorous meeting in the White House. Trump accused Zelenskyy of talking the US into “spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won”.
Trump resumed the supplies weeks later. Between January 2022 and April 2025, the US has provided Ukraine with about $134bn in aid, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
Trump’s MAGA [Make America Great Again] base has been critical of the funding that the US provides Ukraine.
Following Trump’s announcement that the US will resume sending weapons to Ukraine, several conservative Americans have responded with disappointment.
“I did not vote for this,” wrote Derrick Evans on X on July 8. Evans was one of Trump’s supporters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 and was arrested, to be pardoned by Trump in January this year.
Conservative social media duo Keith and Kevin Hodge wrote on X on July 8: “Who in the hell is telling Trump that we need to send more weapons to Ukraine?”
Sanctioning Russia
When asked on July 8 about his interest in a Congress bill proposing additional sanctions on Russia, Trump responded, “I’m looking at it very strongly.”
Since the war in Ukraine started in 2022, the US and its allies have imposed at least 21,692 sanctions on Russian individuals, media organisations, and institutions across sectors such as the military, energy, aviation, shipbuilding and telecommunications.
However, while these sanctions have hit Russia’s economy, it has not collapsed the way some experts had predicted it would in the early months of the war.
In recent months, Zelenskyy has repeatedly requested his allies in the West to tighten sanctions on Russia, to put pressure on Putin to end the war.
Most recently, Zelenskyy posted on X on Friday following a Russian drone attack in Kharkiv: “Sanctions must be strengthened. We are expecting the adoption of a new sanctions package. Everything that will put pressure on Russia and stop it must be implemented as quickly as possible.”
A bipartisan Senate bill sponsored by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham aims to levy tariffs on countries that import oil, gas and uranium from Russia.
In 2023, crude petroleum, petroleum gas and refined petroleum constituted nearly 54 percent of total Russian exports, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC).
According to the OEC, China and India buy a bulk of Russia’s oil and gas products.
In 2024, Russian oil accounted for 35 percent of India’s total crude imports and 19 percent of China’s oil imports. Turkiye also imports Russian oil, with as much as 58 percent of its refined petroleum imports sourced from Russia in 2023.
But the West has not weaned itself off Russia, either.
In 2024, European countries paid more than $700m to buy Russian uranium products, according to an analysis by Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, based on data from the European Union’s statistical office, Eurostat.
In late March this year, Trump expressed anger with Putin and threatened “secondary tariffs” on any country that buys Russian oil if a ceasefire deal is not reached, but these tariffs were not imposed.
“If a new sanctions bill does pass, and the United States does impose costs on Moscow for the first time during the current administration, this would be a radical departure from Trump’s consistent policy,” Giles said.
“It remains to be seen whether Trump will in fact allow this, or whether his deference to Putin will mean he continues to resist any possible countermeasures against Moscow.”
Walking away from the conflict
On April 18, US Secretary of State Rubio said his country might “move on” from the Russia-Ukraine war if a ceasefire deal is not brokered.
“We are now reaching a point where we need to decide whether this is even possible or not,” Rubio told reporters in Paris after talks between American, Ukrainian and European officials.
“Because if it’s not, then I think we’re just going to move on. It’s not our war. We have other priorities to focus on,” Rubio continued.
On the same day, Trump echoed Rubio’s statements to reporters. However, Trump did not say that he is ready to walk away from peace negotiations.
“Well, I don’t want to say that, but we want to see it end,” Trump said.
More diplomacy
The second day of talks between Rubio and Lavrov, however, suggests that the US has not given up on diplomacy yet.
Rubio told reporters on Thursday that the US and Russia have exchanged new ideas for peace in Ukraine. “I think it’s a new and a different approach,” Rubio said, without offering any details of what the “new approach” involved.
“I wouldn’t characterise it as something that guarantees a peace, but it’s a concept that, you know, that I’ll take back to the president,” Rubio added.
Following Rubio and Lavrov’s meeting on Thursday, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a news release that the US and Russia had “a substantive and frank exchange of views on the settlement in Ukraine” and will continue constructive dialogue.
The statement added: “[Russia and the US] have reaffirmed mutual commitment to searching for peaceful solutions to conflict situations and resuming Russian-US economic and humanitarian cooperation.”
