JD Vance wields threat of sanctions, military cction to push Putin into Ukraine deal
The US will hit Moscow with sanctions and potentially military action if Vladimir Putin doesn’t agree to a peace deal with Ukraine that guarantees Kyiv’s long-term independence, Vice-President JD Vance has warned.
The US will hit Moscow with sanctions and potentially military action if Vladimir Putin doesn’t agree to a peace deal with Ukraine that guarantees Kyiv’s long-term independence, Vice-President JD Vance has warned.
Mr Vance said the option of sending US troops to Ukraine if Russia failed to negotiate in good faith remained “on the table”, striking a far tougher tone than did Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who on Wednesday suggested the US wouldn’t commit forces.
“There are economic tools of leverage, there are of course military tools of leverage,” Mr Vance said.
Only hours after Donald Trump said he would start negotiating with Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine, Mr Vance said: “I think there is a deal that is going to come out of this that’s going to shock a lot of people.”
His remarks, coming a day before a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, offered the Trump administration’s strongest-yet support for Kyiv in the face of Russian demands that it disarm and replace the current government.
“The President is not going to go in this with blinders on,” Mr Vance said.
“He’s going to say, ‘Everything is on the table, let’s make a deal’.” Mr Trump earlier said Ukraine would be a party to talks with Russia, a key demand of Mr Zelensky’s. But he also said that Russia should be allowed back into the G7 club of wealthy countries and that Ukrainian membership of NATO was something Russia couldn’t allow.
Mr Vance was scheduled to speak on Friday local time at the Munich Security Conference, where he intended to tell European leaders that they were stifling free speech and democracy by not working with populist parties.
European officials jostling to secure bilateral meetings with Mr Vance hoped that the first top-level visit from the Trump administration would initiate a new level of co-operation with the US at a time of global turmoil, and would offer details on the plan to end the war in Ukraine.
Instead, Mr Vance said he would tell leaders that Europe must embrace the rise of antiestablishment politics, stop mass migration and curb progressive policies. He said he would call for a return of traditional values and ending migrant crime.
“It’s really about censorship and about migration, about this fear that President Trump and I have, that European leaders are kind of terrified of their own people,” he said. He would urge German politicians to work with all parties including the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party.
On Ukraine, Mr Vance said it was too early to say how much of the country’s territory would remain in Russian hands or what security guarantees the US and other Western allies could offer Kyiv. He said those details would need to be worked out in the peace talks.
“There are any number of formulations, of configurations, but we do care about Ukraine having sovereign independence,” he said.
Mr Trump has said Putin wants to end the conflict, which the Russian leader launched three years ago with an attempted full-scale invasion that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed swaths of Ukraine. Russian forces control nearly 20 per cent of Ukraine’s territory.
Mr Vance said the Trump administration would aim to persuade Putin that Russia would achieve more at the negotiating table than on the battlefield.
Mr Vance offered to reset the relationship with Russia after a successful agreement over Ukraine, saying that Moscow’s current isolation from Western markets made it Beijing’s junior partner.
“It’s not in Putin’s interest to be the little brother in a coalition with China,” he said.
At a NATO meeting on Wednesday in Brussels, Mr Hegseth said borders for Ukraine were unlikely to be as they were before Russia initially invaded in 2014, negotiations wouldn’t end with Ukraine as a NATO member and non-Americans would have to provide security guarantees.
Mr Hegseth clarified his comments on Thursday, telling reporters in Brussels that “what concessions will be made or what concessions will not be made” will be up to Mr Trump.
Mr Vance agreed that Mr Trump could change his mind depending on how the negotiations unfold.
“President Trump could say, look, we don’t want this thing, we might not like this thing, but we’re willing to put it back on the table if the Russians aren’t being good negotiating partners, or there are things that are very important to Ukrainians that we might want to take off the table,” he said.
Speaking of European politics, Mr Vance attacked the continent’s mainstream politicians, saying they used Soviet-style vocabulary such as disinformation or misinformation to dismiss viewpoints with which they disagree. Russian interference in Western democracy has been overstated in the US and Europe, Mr Vance said. He said refusing to curb migration was a much greater threat to democracy than Moscow’s meddling in elections.
“If your democratic society can be taken down by $200,000 of social media ads, then you should think seriously about how strong your grip on or how strong your understanding of the will of the people actually is,” Mr Vance said.
Keeping far-right parties that campaign against migration out of government coalitions is curtailing the will of the people, who have repeatedly been asking for more border control, he said. “I think, unfortunately, the will of voters has been ignored by a lot of our European friends,” he said.
In his address, Mr Vance will also back Elon Musk, the billionaire businessman and Trump ally. Mr Musk’s political campaigning in Europe, including for the Alternative for Germany party – a group under surveillance for extremism – has drawn near-universal criticism from European leaders such as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron. Both men will be in the audience listening to Mr Vance’s speech.
Mr Vance said Mr Musk doesn’t speak for Mr Trump. But he said he agreed with Mr Musk that European countries needed to stop letting in large numbers of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere. He also said that European leaders were wrong to criticise Musk for speaking out.
The Wall Street Journal
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