America's top diplomat told reporters in Mumbai that Washington is done being defensive about its support for Ukraine — because without that support, he said, Ukraine would simply not exist.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the talks a day earlier in Oslo between envoy Steve Witkoff and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were "positive — nothing unexpected, nothing surprising," and that Witkoff would now take those ideas to St. Petersburg and "share them with the Russian side — and let's see if we can make some progress." Then he delivered the line he said the administration will no longer soften.
"If it were not for the assistance of the United States, including under the Trump administration, there would be no Ukraine right now. Ukraine as a sovereign state would not exist."
Rubio was careful to give the fighters their due in the same breath: Ukrainians "have absolutely very bravely fought for their country and done extraordinary things with the aid that's been provided to them, standing up to a much larger country." The forecasts at the start of the war gave Ukraine five days, he noted; it is now approaching five years, on billions of dollars of American assistance "going back to the Biden administration and going through this administration as well." He also shut down suggestions that the White House directed the slowdown in SpaceX's Starlink and Starshield services used by Ukraine: "The president has nothing to do with the decisions that are made by Starlink and Starshield and by Mr. Musk. I'm telling you, there was no foreknowledge."
The stakes of saying it this plainly, this week, are the diplomacy itself. Washington is publicly claiming ownership of Ukraine's survival at the very moment its envoy is carrying Kyiv's ideas into the Kremlin, with the Donbas still the central dispute and no deal in sight. Rubio made no promise that the St. Petersburg trip produces one: "These things are complex, and if this was an easy war to solve, it would have been solved a long time ago." But he left the administration's bottom line standing as the last word: "There would be no Ukraine today were it not for the assistance the United States has supplied Ukraine."