Vice President JD Vance suggested that negotiations for a Russia-Ukraine peace deal with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have not broken down permanently.
“I think Zelenskyy wasn’t there yet, and I think, frankly, now still isn’t there, but I think he’ll get there eventually. He has to,” Vance said.
“We are pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing to a solution,” a White House official said.
The pause comes days after the Feb. 28 Oval Office meeting. Zelenskyy had been expected to sign a rare earth mineral deal with the United States that same day but was asked to leave the White House soon after the contentious exchange.
Several minutes before the blowup, the Ukrainian leader questioned bilateral talks between the United States and Russia and challenged the president’s understanding of conditions on the ground in Ukraine, suggesting that “maybe it’s Putin that’s sharing this information” with Trump.
After Vance told a journalist that former President Joe Biden’s rhetoric about Russian President Vladimir Putin was ineffective and that “the path to peace and the path to prosperity is maybe engaging in diplomacy,” Zelenskyy asked the vice president why the United States had not significantly challenged Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and referenced a 2019 ceasefire in eastern Ukraine that Russia quickly breached, calling into question Vance’s talk of diplomacy.
The vice president told Zelenskyy it was “disrespectful to come into the Oval Office and try to litigate this in front of the American media.”
The conversation continued to spiral.
At one point, Trump told Zelenskyy he was “gambling with World War III.”
During his March 3 interview with Hannity, Vance confirmed that the Ukrainians “made at least one request to come back and continue the conversation” after the incident.
“The president was like, ‘Look, first of all, they were disrespectful. And second of all, what are we even going to talk about?’ They’ve shown a clear unwillingness to discuss the peaceful settlement that President Trump is trying to bring to this situation,” he added.
Vance said that Ukrainian and European leaders have told him privately that “this cannot go on forever. There aren’t enough Ukrainian lives, there isn’t enough American money, and there isn’t enough ammunition to fund this thing indefinitely.”
“The only realistic pathway to bring this thing to a settlement is President Trump’s pathway. We encourage both President Zelensky and President Putin to follow that path,” Vance added.
The vice president also spoke about the benefits of any mineral deal, now in limbo, for Ukraine. The proposal could tie American business interests to the Eastern European country.
“If you want real security guarantees, if you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine,” Vance said.
The vice president also appeared to question the value of military deployments from other countries to Ukraine, a likely matter of contention in negotiations with Russia.
The Kremlin has suggested it opposes such a peacekeeping force, part of a plan that Starmer said on March 2 would require U.S. backing.
An American economic deal “is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years,” Vance said.
