WASHINGTON DC – In a series of forthright interviews across Sunday’s news shows, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration was pushing for a permanent peace deal to end the war in Ukraine, even as a temporary ceasefire remains a possibility.

Top diplomat Rubio, who attended US President Donald Trump’s high-stakes summit with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Alaska, appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” ABC News show “This Week,” and NBC’s “Meet the Press” to outline the path forward for negotiations.

The need for concessions

Rubio consistently stressed that a resolution would require concessions from both sides. “If one side gets everything they want, that’s called surrender,” he told CBS. “And that’s not what we’re close to doing, because neither side here is on the verge of surrender or anything close to it,” he emphasized.

He elaborated on the reality of the situation, stating: “In order for there to be an end [to] the war, there are things Russia wants that it cannot get, and there are things Ukraine wants that it’s not going to get. Both sides are going to have to give up something in order to get to the table.”

He added that this may be “distasteful” and “we may not like it,” but it is “just the way it is.”

Rubio also addressed the emotional difficulty of this position: “It’s very difficult because Ukraine obviously feels, you know, harmed, and rightfully so, because they were invaded. And the Russian side, because they feel like they got momentum on the battlefield, and frankly, don’t care, don’t seem to care very much about how many Russian soldiers die in this endeavor.”

Simple question to Russia

When asked about Putin’s demands for a peace agreement to address the “root causes” of the conflict, Rubio said the US would not get bogged down in historical grievances. He said the focus is on a simple question: “Are they going to stop fighting or not?”The top diplomat also described the nature of the conflict, calling it a “meat grinder” where Russia is willing to “churn through” its soldiers.

He noted that in July alone, 20,000 Russian soldiers were killed, which he said “tells you the price they’re willing to pay.” He added that the Russian economy has been “turned into a full-time wartime economy.”

Asked whether the US accepted everything Putin laid on the table during the Alaska summit, Rubio told CBS’s Face the Nation: “The United States is not in a position to accept anything or reject anything, because ultimately, it’s up to the Ukrainians. They’re the ones that Russia has to make peace with.”

He added: “We have to make enough progress so that we can sit down President Zelensky and President Putin in the same place, which is what President Zelensky has been asking for, and reach a final agreement that ends this war. Now, there were some concepts and ideas discussed that we know the Ukrainians could be very supportive of in that meeting”

Defending the administration’s strategy

Rubio defended the Trump administration’s decision not to impose new sanctions on Russia at this time, arguing that doing so would halt the current peace talks. “The moment the president puts those additional sanctions, that’s the end of the talks,” he told CBS.

On NBC, he added, “The minute you issue new sanctions, your ability to get them to the table, our ability to get them to the table, will be severely diminished.”

He also pushed back on the “stupid media narrative” that European leaders are traveling to Washington to prevent President Zelensky from being bullied into a bad deal. “They’re not coming here tomorrow to keep Zelensky from being bullied...We’ve been working with these people for weeks, for weeks on this stuff,” he told CBS. He added that the Europeans “chose to come here tomorrow. We invited them to come. The president invited them to come.”

On ABC’s “This Week,” Rubio clarified that Trump’s approach is not to force a surrender. “The president’s position is not that we should bully or force Ukraine into a bad deal,” he said.

“The president’s position is that we need a deal, and the only way to get a deal is to have a negotiation between the two sides.”

He stressed that the US role is to “get the parties to the table” and that a deal is “only possible if both sides feel they can live with the results.”

The path to a peace deal

While the Trump-Putin summit did not produce a ceasefire or a final deal, Rubio said enough progress was made to justify the next round of high-level meetings.

“I’m not saying we’re on the verge of a peace deal, but I am saying that we saw movement, enough movement to justify a follow up meeting with Zelensky and the Europeans, enough movement for us to dedicate even more time to this,” he said.

He emphasized the administration’s goal is a deal that “ends this war so Ukraine can go on with the rest of their lives and rebuild their country and be assured that this is never going to happen again.”

He added that peace deals are not built on trust, but on “verification, have to be built on facts, have to be built on action, have to be built on realities.”

He also said that Trump “deserves a lot of credit for the amount of time and energy that his administration is placing on reaching a peace agreement for a war that’s not a war that started under him.”

Rubio then noted that the path to a final agreement would not be quick or easy. “Ultimately, one phone call does not make peace. One phone call does not solve a war as complex as this one,” he said. “There’s a lot of work to be done. But… even the longest journey begins with the first step. So we’ll see what happens from here, hopefully good things.”

He also admitted that the US has to work to “narrow the gap between the two sides” and that the final deal would require “verifiable” agreements. “It isn’t real until it’s real,” he said. “One thing is what you say you might be willing to consider, another thing is your willingness to do it.”

He added that if a peace deal isn’t possible and the war continues, people will continue to die by the thousands. “We may unfortunately wind up there, but we don’t want to wind up there,” he said on “Face the Nation.”

Speaking about the nature of the talks on NBC, Rubio said, “We made progress in the sense that we identified potential areas of agreement, but there remain some big areas of disagreement. So we’re still a long way off.”

He concluded by adding that the goal is to get the two sides close enough so the “ultimate closer,” Trump, can get involved and “make it happen.”