Ukraine has lost its last friend in Trump’s regime

A sign of hard times to come: Little Marco Rubio was supposed to be the reassuring one. But now Rubio has succumbed to Trump's view: Ukraine is a burden that can be shed.

BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN

He was meant to be the traditional Republican hawk in a room full of opportunists and Trumpist weirdos - the man whose presence in Trump’s foreign policy team would signal that, whatever the chaos, there would still be an adult in the room who understood what Russia’s war against Ukraine actually is.

That illusion is now dead.

Marco Rubio’s extraordinary attack on Volodymyr Zelensky Friday - accusing the Ukrainian president of lying, and openly floating the diversion of U.S. weapons away from Ukraine to another the Middle East war theater - is not just another Washington spat. It is a marker of something much larger and more consequential:

Ukraine has now lost its last residual supporter inside the Trump regime.

And if even Marco Rubio is now talking this way, then the argument is over, the doubt, the hope is gone. Folks, this is big.

From ‘hawk’ to enforcer

Rubio’s political identity for years was built on a familiar Republican script: toughness abroad, confrontation with dictators, support for American alliances, and explicit criticism of adversarial powers like Russia and Iran. Rubio was never some kind of Rand Paul-style isolationist. He came up through the old GOP tradition that at least claimed to believe American power should be used to deter aggression.

That is precisely why his turn on Ukraine is so important.

Because Rubio has not merely adjusted to Trump. He now seems to have submitted to Trump’s worldview.

And Trump’s worldview has never been about Ukraine. It has never been about sovereignty, deterrence, the sanctity of borders, or stopping a revanchist Russia. Trump’s instinct has always been simpler and more primitive: Ukraine is a nuisance, Zelensky is out to skim the U.S. taxpayer for easy cash, and ‘his’ war is an irritation that keeps getting in the way of things that are more important to Donald J. Trump, the U.S. President, namely making money and scoring a Nobel Peace Prize.

We all remember the little Marco Rubio from one year and one month ago, during the visit of the Ukrainian President to the Oval Office. Among all the ‘tremendous’ Trump video clips, this one is still top of the list: as the U.S. President and his attack dog slash V.P. were assaulting the Ukrainian President and the Ukrainians for being dodgy skimmers - playing with World War Three, having no cards and being ungrateful and not even wearing a suit - little Marco Rubio did, as one newspaper put it, “not merely stay silent. He looked like a man trying to sink through the upholstery.”

Saturday Night Live even immortalized him in their sketch the following week. he screen shot is ‘President Trump’ speaking about Rubio not being keen to participate in the attack on Zelensky. As you can see from a snap of the real Little Marco at that very meeting, the satirists got it spot on.

Little Marco Rubio in the SNL version and the real Little Marco Rubio during the assault on the Ukrainian President in the Oval Office, 28 February 2026

Rubio being so obviously uncomfortable during the roasting of Zelensky gave rise to a grave misunderstanding among us pro-Ukrainians. A misunderstanding we only today realise the depth of: That Marco Rubio really was a friend of Ukraine who was simply playing the long, quiet game, but would eventually come through for us. Aha.

But today, exactly 13 months from that day, Rubio sounds like a man who has accepted Trump’s premises on Ukraine entirely.

A couple of days ago, Zelenskyy said the United States was pressing Ukraine over Donbas before meaningful postwar security guarantees were settled - on Friday, Rubio did not merely deny that. He called it “a lie” and said it was “unfortunate” that Zelenskyy would say such a thing. That is not the language of an ally that disagrees with you. It is the language of a government beginning to treat Ukraine not as a partner under invasion, but as a problem to be disciplined, done away with.

Then came the more revealing line: Rubio said that while no U.S. weapons had yet been diverted from Ukraine, but “that could happen” - if Washington needed them elsewhere. In other words, Ukraine’s war effort is no longer being treated as a strategic priority in its own right. It is now openly being discussed as a resource pool for whatever Trump considers more urgent that week.

That is not a tactical shift on Ukraine. It is a demotion of Ukraine.

The real meaning of Rubio’s change

There are always two temptations when interpreting Marco Rubio in the Trump administration.

The first is to say: he doesn’t really believe this - he’s just saying what he has to say to survive in the Trump administration.

The second is to say: he’s been captured, transformed, and ideologically remade.

Rubio’s shift shows how the Trump regime works: it does not require everyone inside it to begin as true believers. It only requires that they eventually learn what must not be said. And what must not be said, in Trump’s White House, is that Ukraine is an independent strategic cause.

Rubio’s role is no longer to advocate for Ukraine, or even to preserve room for Ukraine. His role is to translate Trumpism into the language of official American diplomacy - to take a deeply personal, grievance-driven, anti-alliance worldview and dress it up as statecraft.

That is why his comments matter so much. Because Rubio is not a Tucker Carlson-style propagandist screaming from the outside. He is the U.S. Secretary of State. When a figure like that turns on Zelenskyy, he is not freelancing. He is signaling the internal consensus.

And the consensus is this: Ukraine is no longer viewed in Trump’s Washington as a country to be defended. It is viewed as a file to be closed.

Why this happened

This did not happen because Rubio suddenly discovered some new strategic truth about the war: It happened because Ukraine’s interests and Trump’s political instincts were always on a collision course.

Ukraine needs time, arms, pressure on Russia, and security guarantees that mean something, that are real, and may cost a lot (money, steady political commitment, ‘boots on the ground’, maybe even worse). Trump, on the other hand, wants quick optics, a ‘deal’, ‘24 hours’, de-escalation on his own terms, and, above all, freedom from responsibility.

Those two things are fundamentally incompatible.

To support Ukraine seriously is to accept these hard realities:

● that Russia is the aggressor,

● that Putin must be constrained rather than indulged,

● that security guarantees matter because a ceasefire without enforcement is nothing but an invitation to another Russian invasion,

● and that a ‘peace’ produced by coercing the victim into surrender is not peace at all - it is managed defeat, annihilation of Ukraine, in effect.

But Trump has no patience for any of that. He does not think in those terms. He sees wars less as moral or strategic contests than as messy transactions in which one side should eventually just ‘give up something’, so the noise stops.

That is why the Trump camp keeps circling back to the same basic logic: pressure Kyiv to compromise, flatter Moscow into engagement, and call the result brilliant diplomacy, ‘I have ended 9 wars,’ and ‘where is my Nobel Peace Prize?’

Rubio is now defending that logic - in public.

The Rubio arc tells the whole story

What makes Rubio especially revealing is that he once functioned, politically and psychologically, as the answer to a certain kind of Western wishful thinking.

We wanted so much to believe that there were still ‘guardrails.’ We wanted to believe that if Trump returned, serious people around him would prevent the worst. At the very least, we pro-Ukrainians wanted to believe that the old Republican foreign policy muscle memory would somehow survive the MAGA onslaught.

And little Marco Rubio was the main name attached to our dream. Aha. Wake up and smell the coffee, people.

Rubio’s rhetorical movement on Ukraine tracks the broader development of the Trump administration itself: from residual sympathy, to transactional impatience, to overt hostility toward Kyiv whenever Ukraine refuses to play the role assigned to it.

At first, the line was: we support peace, and the Don will get them there in 24 hours, easily. Okay, okay - in a week then. Well, in two weeks. If not, it must be somebody else’s fault. Well, the Don never liked to say nasty or even true things about Putin, ergo it must be Ukraine’s fault. The message became: Ukraine must be realistic. Then soon it was: security guarantees can wait. Then: don’t expect unlimited weapons. Now: don’t contradict Washington, or you’ll be publicly slapped down by America’s top diplomat.

That trajectory is visible in Rubio’s own public posture. Earlier in 2025, he was still describing negotiations in more balanced language, saying both Russia and Ukraine would have to make concessions, calling security guarantees a legitimate issue, and publicly describing U.S.–Ukraine talks as “productive.” But over time the emphasis shifted from supporting a viable settlement to warning that Washington had “other priorities,” and now to openly rebuking Zelensky and hinting that Ukraine aid could be deprioritised.

A far cry - a very, very far cry - from the presidential candidate Marco Rubio (2014) who in this clip was introduced by the BBC presenter as “one of the most outspoken on the issue” (of Russian aggression in Ukraine):

“We cannot accept as an established norm in the 21st century that a country can simply invade its neighbors….”

Here, Rubio is directly naming Russia as the aggressor and concluding that the U.S.must never accept such behavior.”

On his own YouTube channel, Rubio has several clips with titles such as “Rubio discusses Russian aggression against Ukraine.” (At least, those clips are there at the time of me writing this.)

In 2022, when Russia invaded, Rubio gave many interviews pointing to Russia as the aggressor, he pointed to the necessity of stopping Putin and supporting Ukraine’s defense capabilities.

One cannot help wonder what the Marco Rubio of 2014, 2022 and even February 2025 would say to the Marco Rubio of 2026?

Iran made the hierarchy unmistakable

On Friday, if there were any lingering doubts about where Ukraine now sits in Washington’s strategic order, Rubio dispelled them with one sentence.

Weapons for Ukraine, he said, could be diverted if America needed them elsewhere.

That sentence matters because it reveals not just flexibility, but hierarchy.

And Ukraine is no longer near the top of it.

The administration’s priorities are now obvious: Iran, regional military posture, domestic political spectacle, and Trump’s own self-image. Ukraine sits well below all of that. The war that once defined the West’s strategic seriousness has become, in Trump’s Washington, one geopolitical file among many - and not the one that commands emotional or political commitment.

That is devastating news for Kyiv, because wars are not won by abstract sympathy. Wars are won by supply chains, missile inventories, air defense systems, and political stamina. And Rubio has now publicly hinted that all of those things are negotiable.

The hard truth

When Zelensky publicly signaled that the U.S. was effectively pressing Ukraine on territory before locking in hard guarantees, Rubio did not react like a friend trying to calm a dangerous misunderstanding.

He reacted like a (wo)man defending the administration against the client. Very telling. Exactly like his boss so many times has claimed that it was Zelensky that started the war, and now is the main hindrance to peace, and that he, Trump, finds it “easier to deal with Putin.”

It means Ukraine is no longer dealing with a divided U.S. leadership in which some voices can still be counted on to resist the Trump instinct. It is dealing with an administration that is increasingly converging around one conclusion:

Ukraine is expected to absorb the pain necessary to produce Trump’s version of ‘peace.’ And if it resists, it will be blamed for obstructing diplomacy.

Ukraine has not just lost Donald Trump. That was never really in doubt. What it has now lost with little Marco Rubio is more important in practical terms: the internal American constituency that was supposed to try to balance out Trumpism from within.

There may still be pockets of sympathy. There may still be officials who understand the danger of a Russian victory. There may still be people in Trumpistan who privately know that forcing Ukraine into a bad peace would be a historic strategic failure. But private knowledge is worthless if it never becomes policy.

And Rubio’s remarks make the new reality brutally clear:

Ukraine is no longer being treated as a cause to be defended by this White House. It is being treated as a burden to be managed, reduced, and, if possible, offloaded. That is the truth both Ukraine and Europe now has to grasp and plan around.