The war in Ukraine took a brief diplomatic turn Thursday in Manila, where US Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat down with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov for the first high-level bilateral meeting since the Iran war pushed Ukraine off Washington’s front burner.
The meeting lasted roughly 30 minutes, on the sidelines of the ASEAN foreign ministers’ gathering. The US State Department described it in a single sentence: “They discussed the U.S.-Russia relationship and the need to end the Russia-Ukraine war.”
But the two sides came with sharply different agendas.
Russia’s terms
Moscow’s foreign ministry said Lavrov “reaffirmed Russia’s readiness for a political and diplomatic settlement of the conflict”, language that sounds conciliatory until you read the condition attached. Lavrov emphasized to Rubio “the unacceptability of further arming” Ukraine and condemned “the destabilizing policies of European countries, which continue to seek a ‘strategic defeat’ for Russia.”
In other words: Russia is ready to talk, provided the West stops supplying the weapons that have allowed Ukraine to survive.
Lavrov also confirmed Russia’s commitment to proposals agreed upon at the Putin-Trump summit in Alaska in August 2025, a meeting that produced much fanfare but little visible progress on the ground.
America’s diminished focus
Rubio was candid about the state of US diplomatic engagement. He acknowledged that efforts to broker an end to the war have “kind of fallen off a little bit over the last few months”, a diplomatic way of saying that the Iran war has consumed Washington’s attention and bandwidth.
The US remains open to playing a role, Rubio said, “if that opportunity presents itself.” But the conditional phrasing tells its own story. The US is not actively driving a peace process. It is showing up to meetings and seeing if anything happens.
“We have to have a relationship with the Russian government, even though we have areas of disagreement,” Rubio said, noting that the two countries are the largest nuclear-armed powers in the world.
The wider Manila context
The Rubio-Lavrov meeting was one piece of a broader diplomatic puzzle in Manila. ASEAN ministers spent three days discussing the resurgent Iran war, the Ukraine conflict, and a fresh South China Sea clash between Chinese and Philippine ships at Second Thomas Shoal that flared on the same day.
Rubio also met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, calling the new South China Sea incident “escalatory” and warning that “a conflict, be it economic or otherwise, between the U.S. and China would have a dramatic global impact.”
Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong used the forum to condemn China’s recent submarine-launched missile test, which she called “provocative and destabilizing,” noting the missile flew over the Philippines with minimal notification.
What was not on the table
There was no mention of a ceasefire framework, no discussion of territorial concessions, no public hint of a timeline. The meeting was, at best, a restart of diplomatic contact after months of silence. At worst, it was a 30-minute procedural conversation that changes nothing.
Ukraine was not in the room. President Zelenskyy has said he spoke with US envoys in a bid to revive stalled talks, but there is no sign that Kyiv’s interests were directly represented in Manila.
The Alaska summit between Trump and Putin produced optimism. The months since have shown how far that optimism is from a real settlement. Thursday’s meeting in Manila may mark the beginning of renewed US engagement, or it may be remembered as a brief conversation between two men with nothing new to offer each other.