U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met on Friday, following President Donald Trump’s call with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the announcement of talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine.
“It’s important for us to get together and start to have the conversations that are going to be necessary to bring this thing to a close,” Vance said.
“Fundamentally the goal is as President Trump outlined it. We want the war to come to a close. We want the killing to stop. But we want to achieve a durable, lasting peace, not the kind of peace that’s going to have Eastern Europe in conflict just a couple of years down the road.”
Zelenskyy likewise described the meeting as the first of many to come and said that the conversation was productive.
Zelenskyy and Vance are both attending the 61st Munich Security Conference, a three-day annual gathering of political leaders, military officers, and diplomats in the German city.
Britain, Germany, France, Poland, Italy, Spain, and the European Commission’s (EC) top foreign representatives said that only a fair agreement with security guarantees would ensure lasting peace and an acceptable resolution to the conflict.
In a joint statement, they said, “Our shared objectives should be to put Ukraine in a position of strength. Ukraine and Europe must be part of any negotiations. Ukraine should be provided with strong security guarantees. A just and lasting peace in Ukraine is a necessary condition for a strong transatlantic security.”
Trump described the call with Putin as “highly productive” and, shortly after that conversation, he briefed Zelenskyy.
The Ukrainian president cautioned world leaders against “trusting Putin’s claims of readiness to end the war.”
Vance, as a senator, was skeptical about American support for Ukraine. At last year’s Munich conference, he said Washington’s strategic priorities lay primarily in Asia and the Middle East.
“There are economic tools of leverage, there are of course military tools of leverage” the U.S. could use, he told the paper, adding that “we do care about Ukraine having sovereign independence.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was due to take part in the meeting with Zelenskyy as well, but it was not immediately clear whether he would make it after his U.S. Air Force plane was forced to return to Washington due to a mechanical issue.
Vance began his day in the Bavarian city by meeting NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, during which he reiterated the Trump administration’s call for members to spend more on defense.
Ahead of the meeting with Rutte, he told reporters, “We’re going to talk, of course, about the Ukraine-Russia conflict and how to bring it to a negotiated settlement.”
At present, just 23 of the 32 NATO nations are hitting the alliance’s target of spending 2 percent of the nation’s GDP on defense.
“NATO is a very important military alliance, of course, that we’re the most significant part of,” Vance told Rutte. “But we want to make sure that NATO is actually built for the future, and we think a big part of that is ensuring that NATO does a little bit more burden sharing in Europe, so the United States can focus on some of our challenges in East Asia.”
Rutte agreed that Europe needs to step up, saying: “We have to grow up in that sense and spend much more.”
Trump said on Thursday that U.S. and Russian officials would also meet in Munich on Friday and that Ukraine had been invited. Kyiv said it did not expect to hold talks with Moscow’s representatives in the city.
No Russian officials were invited to the three-day conference held at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, but this would not prevent a meeting elsewhere in Munich.
