Marco Rubio warns of Ukraine war stalemate as US pushes for peace deal

United States secretary of state Marco Rubio says Russia's war in Ukraine is at a dangerous stalemate and the US will keep working toward a settlement to end the conflict.

"We'd love ‌to see a negotiated settlement to this war that is permanent, enduring and fair. And that's what we're committed to continuing to do," Rubio told reporters during a visit to Portugal on Friday AEDT.

US President Donald Trump's administration in ‌recent weeks has ‌sought to ⁠revive talks to end the four-year-old conflict, with Ukrainian negotiators set to visit the US for talks on Saturday and Sunday.

Russia spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying on Friday that Russia agreed with Rubio that the Ukraine conflict was in a stalemate.

"Yes, we agree with him," Russian news agencies quoted Peskov as saying on the sidelines of a meeting of leaders of ex-Soviet states in Turkmenistan.

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State news agency RIA quoted Peskov as saying it was up to diplomats to find ways of moving towards peace.

"The art of diplomacy precisely involves finding some way out that would allow moving onto a peaceful track," Peskov was quoted as saying.

Mutual drone attacks by Russia and Ukraine this year have gradually spread across the economy, hitting targets from energy facilities ⁠and refineries to ports and vessels ‌carrying oil and grain, e-commerce warehouses and, most recently, data centres.

On Thursday, Russian ‌technology and AI company Yandex said ‌it could not yet determine whether equipment at ‌a data centre hit by a Ukrainian drone attack could be restored.

Yandex said earlier the attack on its Sasovo hub, one of ‌its five ‌large ⁠data centres, caused a fire and forced it to suspend operations at the site, which hosts tens of thousands of servers.

"The scale of the damage to the infrastructure ⁠is still being ‌assessed," Yandex said in a statement. "For the moment, we cannot confirm ‌whether it is possible to restore the data centre equipment in Sasovo."

The company earlier said some of its services were unavailable and specialist teams were at the site ‌assessing the damage.

Two of Yandex's three supercomputers, used to develop its AI model, are housed at the Sasovo data centre. Yandex has not said whether they were damaged.