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Secretary Rubio Answers Press Questions at Joint Base Andrews, Feb. 12, 2026

February 12, 2026 · U.S. Department of State · 0:03:10

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Secretary of State Marco Rubio took questions at Joint Base Andrews on February 12, 2026, before departing for Germany, Slovakia and Hungary (the recording was uploaded February 13), according to the State Department broadcast. He called the Munich Security Conference “important, and I think it’s at a defining moment”: “The world is changing very fast right in front of us. The old world is gone — frankly, the world that I grew up in — and we live in a new era in geopolitics, and it’s going to require all of us to sort of reexamine what that looks like and what our role is going to be.”

On Greenland, Rubio said, “I’m sure somebody will raise it. We’re working on that. We feel good about it,” and he expected to meet President Zelenskyy at Munich. On Russia’s winter bombardment of Ukraine, he said: “It’s terrible. It’s a war. That’s why we want the war to end. People are suffering. It’s the coldest time of year… that’s why we have worked so hard for over a year now to try to bring this one to an end.” Asked whether the Orban visit was meant to help him in the polls, Rubio answered that President Trump “said he’s very supportive of him, and so are we,” but that the Slovakia and Hungary stops were reciprocal bilateral visits tacked onto the Munich trip. On Russian energy purchases by the two countries, he said only, “We’ll have those conversations with them.”

Why it matters

The short Andrews gaggle is the on-record preview of the Secretary’s February Europe swing — the framing (“the old world is gone”) that the Munich address then delivered in full, and his pre-trip lines on Greenland, Ukraine and the Central Europe visits.

Sources: U.S. Department of State, “Secretary Rubio Answers Press Questions at Joint Base Andrews” (official upload, embedded above); remarks as delivered 2026-02-12; transcript via state.gov as linked in the upload description and reviewed in the site’s private research store.