United States President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, is “well aware of the role of the Republic of Cyprus”, President Nikos Christodoulides said on Friday.

Speaking on the sidelines of an Energy symposium in Nicosia, he said the government knows Rubio “very well”, and pointed out that Rubio had been a co-signatory to the law which ended the US’ arms embargo on Cyprus in 2019.

“He is well aware of the role of the Republic of Cyprus, the cooperation we have with all the states in the region, and I am sure that our cooperation, just as it has developed in recent years, will continue to develop even further,” he said.

He added that he had “recently” held a telephone conversation with Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, though Trump had explicitly stated in a social media post on Sunday that Pompeo would not be invited to return to government after he takes office in January.

Additionally, he said, he will speak to other members of the Republican Party in the coming days, including senators Jerry Moran, Susan Collins, John Boozman and John Cornyn, who all visited the Andreas Papandreou air base in Paphos last month.

Rubio has long been at the fore of US foreign policy, having entered the Senate in 2011. One of his most notable interventions regarding Cyprus was when he and 13 other senators penned a letter to US President Joe Biden in 2021, urging him to threaten Turkey with sanctions over the opening of Varosha.

“You have rightly centred US foreign policy on principles of human rights and the rule of law. Any attempt by President Erdogan and Turkey to resettle or reopen Varosha would represent a gross violation of those principles,” he wrote.

He and his 13 colleagues said they urged Biden to work in tandem with the European Union, “to make clear … that any attempt by Turkey to support the resettlement or reopening of Varosha will be met by multilateral sanctions.”