Volodymyr Zelenskyy on 8 October 2026 rejected Marco Rubio's assessment that the war has reached a "strategic stalemate" with no current path to a negotiated settlement. Zelenskyy spoke to reporters in Pryluky, where he and UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband had come to honour victims of a Russian missile strike on the town.
Zelenskyy said the United States could not discuss future business with Russia while telling Ukraine that diplomacy had run out. "You cannot negotiate future economic projects with Russians on the one hand and, on the other, claim that we are in some kind of diplomatic stalemate," he said. "We are not in a diplomatic stalemate." The Kyiv Independent described the remark as a hint at secret US-Russian economic talks.
Rubio gave his assessment to the Greek daily Kathimerini during a visit to Athens, where he opened the sixth round of the Greece-US Strategic Dialogue with Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis on 7 October. "Right now, there don't seem to be prospects of a negotiated settlement," he said in the interview, published on 8 October. Rubio said the main obstacle is Russia's demand for full control of Donetsk Oblast without having to fight for it, a condition he said Ukraine cannot accept. He said strategic stalemates end either in a settlement or in escalation that spreads beyond the original war, and that the United States remained prepared to help broker a deal.
Zelenskyy said the way out was more pressure on Russia. He asked the US government to shut down Russia's economy, stop feeding Russia through trade and impose sanctions on its weapons industry. "Open Starlink for Ukraine," he said.
Starlink currently serves Ukraine's forces over Ukrainian territory, including occupied areas, while SpaceX restricts its use over Russia. Zelenskyy raised the issue with Donald Trump at the White House on 28 July, asking for help winning Elon Musk's permission to use the service to guide drone strikes on Russian ballistic missile launchers, The Atlantic reported. Trump said he would consider the request. Musk declined Zelenskyy's request for a meeting, according to The Atlantic's source.
US Senator Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican, told reporters after meeting Zelenskyy that Ukraine needs long-term Starlink access to make its long and medium-range weapons more accurate, the Associated Press reported. Patriot interceptors are in short supply because of the US-Israeli war with Iran, which began on 28 February. Trump appeared to step back from a commitment to let Ukraine produce the interceptors, the Associated Press reported.
China is close to finishing its own Starlink-like system and is likely to share it with Russia, Zelenskyy said in Pryluky. He said European partners are developing several systems but are not yet near the capability Ukraine needs to protect its skies. "The United States has this capability," he said, according to Ukrinform.
Rubio told the US House Foreign Affairs Committee in May 2026 that the invasion had become a strategic disaster for Russia, that Russia would not achieve the goals it set at the start and that Ukraine had grown more effective at long-range strikes on critical nodes of the Russian economy. He also told the committee that negotiations had reached an impasse.
Ukrainian forces struck a Yandex data centre on 8 October, causing a major internet outage in Russia, Ukrinform reported. Ukrinform also reported, citing media, that Ukraine had hit Russia's largest oil refinery, about 2,500 kilometres from the border. The UK government announced new sanctions on Russian oil, the shadow fleet and supply chains feeding the war on the same day.
Russian forces killed 30 people and injured 20 when they struck two buses and pedestrians in Kramatorsk on 8 October, Ukrinform reported. A strike on a shop in Kyiv killed three people the same day. On 7 October, Vladimir Putin's 74th birthday, Russian missiles and drones killed at least 30 people across Ukraine, including five children, the Kyiv Independent reported.
Rubio told reporters in Sweden on 22 May that trilateral talks between Ukraine, Russia and the United States had stalled, European Pravda reported. The talks had stalled after the US-Israeli war on Iran began. The first round was held in Abu Dhabi on 24 January, followed by a second in February and further discussions in Geneva, the Kyiv Post reported.
Zelenskyy said Ukraine's negotiating team would be in the United States on 9 October for two days of meetings with Trump's envoys, and that he was counting on a European team to join it.
