U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, commenting on whether the meeting in Jeddah with Ukraine discussed the issue of territorial concessions, said that Ukraine discussed not specific conditions, but rather the timing and steps of the negotiation process. He said this to journalists in Ireland on Wednesday, UNN writes.
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When asked if "they actually talked about territorial concessions," U.S. Secretary of State Mike Rubio replied: "We had conversations... (...) As far as the conversations that were yesterday, yeah, when you sit down with a counterpart like Ukraine, you know, we're not going to negotiate this publicly. We're not going to actually put out there sort of what we talked about because in any negotiation there's certainly an element where you don't want one side to be giving away all this leverage".
"From a public perspective, we had a broad conversation about, but I think the bulk of our conversation was what a negotiation process would look like in terms of not the specific conditions, but rather the timing of it, sort of the steps they would like to see taken," Rubio said.
According to him, "Ukrainians made very clear that this isn't just about ending a war".
"They need to get their prisoners of war back, they need to get the children back. They'd like to see an exchange of prisoners of war, they'd like to see their children back. So there's all sorts of things tied to the... Humanitarian assistance is important as well. There are areas of Ukraine that have been badly damaged that require immediate assistance, - Rubio said. - So these are the sorts of things that we talked about as being inclusive in the negotiation process. So really the bulk of our conversation when we got to that stage of it was discussing the kinds of items that need to be on a negotiation agenda even when we hopefully get there".