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Secretary of State Marco Rubio said top diplomats from the Group of 7 allies meeting in Canada should focus on ending the war. And he shrugged off President Trump’s threats to annex Canada.
- March 12, 2025Updated 1:59 p.m. ET
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that he hoped a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine could take place within “days” if Russian leaders agreed, and that he planned to get diplomats from the Group of 7 allied nations to focus on ending the war in a meeting this week in Canada.
“Here’s what we’d like the world to look like in a few days: Neither side is shooting at each other — not rockets, not missiles, not bullets, nothing, not artillery,” he told reporters during a refueling stop in Ireland as he flew from Saudi Arabia to Canada. “The shooting stops, the fighting stops, and the talking starts.”
Mr. Rubio also downplayed any notion that he would encounter hostility from American allies because of President Trump’s recent tariffs. And he said he expected to have cordial talks with Canadian officials, despite Mr. Trump’s threat to annex Canada and make it the 51st state. The president has also imposed coercive tariffs on Canada.
“That’s not what we’re going to discuss at the G7, and that’s not what we’re going to be discussing in our trip here,” he said. “They’re the host nation, and I mean, we have a lot of other things we work on together.”
“It is not a meeting about how we’re going to take over Canada,” he added.
Mr. Rubio and Michael Waltz, the White House national security adviser, met for hours on Tuesday with Ukrainian officials in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to work out how to start a negotiation process with Russia to end the war. Hostilities began in 2014 when Russia invaded and annexed Crimea, and then it launched a full-scale invasion in 2022.
After the meeting on Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said they had agreed to an American proposal for a 30-day interim cease-fire. After berating the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the White House, Mr. Trump withheld U.S. weapons and intelligence aid to the Ukrainians to try to force them into negotiations. U.S. officials said after the Jeddah meeting that aid had restarted.
