By Gram Slattery
SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan, Oct 19 (Reuters) – Ukraine and Russia should be focused on ending the war between them, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on his visit to Uzbekistan on Monday.
Asked about a possible meeting of US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to negotiate an end to the four-year-old Ukraine conflict, Rubio said: “There’s been talks of a meeting. I don’t know whether it’s been finalized, but the president has been clear. He’d like the war in Ukraine and Russia to end.”
Rubio landed in Samarkand on Sunday night to meet top officials of the C5+1 grouping that brings together the United States and the Muslim-majority post-Soviet states of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
Trump hosted C5 leaders at the White House last November.
“We see nothing good coming from this war,” Rubio said. “We see a lot of downside to it, including the very real risk of escalation and spread of this thing… into another country because of a failed sabotage attack, because of drones that are hit with electronic warfare and they wander into a neighbouring country.”
The US has been trying to mediate a peace deal to bring the Ukraine war to an end and Trump has since clinched a diesel import deal with Russia and waived some sanctions on Moscow, which he said should keep the Kremlin at the negotiating table.
The moves were criticized by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. A fresh Russian air strike killed a woman in Ukraine’s Kyiv overnight while also hitting a subway station and damaging a 25-storey residential building.
(Reporting by Gram Slattery in Samarkand, Uzbekistan; Writing by Jekaterīna Golubkova in Tokyo; Editing by Tom Hogue and Edwina Gibbs)
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