Of all the candidates former President Donald Trump could have chosen to be his vice presidential nominee, there are few more adamant about cutting off further military assistance to Ukraine than Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH).
In 2022, while campaigning for his Senate seat with Trump’s blessing, Vance famously told Steve Bannon on his Real America’s Voice podcast, “I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”
Once elected, Vance became the most powerful voice arguing Ukraine had no path to victory and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was emboldened to continue a futile and costly war only because he was being egged on and armed by President Joe Biden’s administration.
Vance’s hard-line views were on full display in February at the Munich Security Conference, where alone among the members of the U.S. congressional delegation, he skipped a meeting with Zelensky and instead argued during a panel discussion that the U.S. problem with Ukraine is “there’s no clear endpoint.”
At the time, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was blocking a vote on $95 billion foreign aid and border security legislation, which included just over $60 billion for Ukraine.
“I have to be honest to you, that is not going to fundamentally change the reality on the battlefield,” Vance said, arguing the real problem is “not money, it’s munitions.”
He argued that the United States simply doesn’t have the industrial capacity to keep sending arms and ammunition to Ukraine, especially when a future war with China is becoming a frightening real possibility.
“What is realistic to accomplish in Ukraine?” he said. “Can we send the level of weaponry we’ve set for the last 18 months for the next 18 months? We simply cannot.”
“I’m not sure he understands what’s going on here,” Zelensky told CNN when asked about Vance’s comments.
“To understand it is to come to the front line to see what’s going on,” Zelensky said, insisting the end of U.S. aid would be catastrophic for his people. “He will understand that millions … will be killed. It’s a fact.”
Vance did not take up the invitation to visit the front lines, pretty much for the same reason he did for not meeting with Zelensky in Munich.
“I didn’t think I would learn anything new,” Vance said.
Vance has argued that the only realistic goal is to push for a negotiated peace. In an appearance on Fox News just hours after he was named the vice presidential nominee at the just-concluded Republican National Convention, he told host Sean Hannity that he has little doubt that Trump, the master dealmaker, can pull it off.
“I think what President Trump has promised to do is go in there, negotiate with the Russians and Ukrainians, bring this thing to a rapid close so that America can focus on the real issue, which is China,” Vance said. “That’s the biggest threat to our country. And we’re completely distracted from it.”
That kind of talk is music to the ears of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who’s hearing a clear message: Hang on until November, and Trump will force Zelensky, under threat of a cutoff of U.S. aid, to make major territorial concessions at the bargaining table.
“They are celebrating that choice both in Milwaukee tonight and in Moscow,” former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an implacable Trump critic and one of two Republicans who served on the Jan. 6 Committee, said in an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
“J.D. Vance is aggressively parroting actual Russian talking points,” added Kinzinger, who represented exurban Chicago and rural Illinois districts in the House from 2011 to 2023.
With polls showing Trump leading in the key states that decide a presidential election and riding a wave of goodwill following his narrow escape from an assassin’s bullet, the feeling of foreboding in Kyiv is palpable, even as Zelensky puts on a brave face.
“I am not afraid,” Zelensky said when asked if he was worried Trump would curtail or completely cut off military assistance, but he was rattled by reports that a Washington think tank headed by former Trump advisers was drafting a plan to do just that.
“It would be fair if Trump knows how to end this war, he should tell us today, because if there are risks to Ukraine’s independence, there are risks that we will lose statehood, we want to be prepared,” Zelensky told Bloomberg Television earlier this month.
“We want to understand whether in November we will have the powerful support of the U.S., or we’ll be all alone.”
Zelensky is adamantly opposed to making a deal with Russia because he says Putin never honors his commitments.
Recall that Ukraine, in 1994, gave up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons in return for assurances from the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Russia its territorial sovereignty would never be violated.
“We must understand that Russia would be using the ceasefire to simply accumulate equipment on the territory, our territory, that they’ve occupied,” Zelensky said. “They can accuse us of breaking or breaking the ceasefire and start another invasion.”
“I think it’s going to be very bad for Ukraine,” former Trump national security adviser John Bolton said on MSNBC after Vance was nominated. “What Vance has said about [Ukraine] is wrong in many material respects. I don’t think he appreciates the American national security interests in protecting Ukraine against this unprovoked Russian aggression.
“There seems to be this idea that we’re doing this out of the goodness of our hearts, it’s an act of charity, we’re nice people,” Bolton said. “Although we are, we’re doing it because there’s an American national security interest in peace and security in Europe.”
“I’m not worried at all,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said on CNN. “I know J.D. Vance believes in a strong and confident America. The thing that J.D. Vance is concerned about, that we should all be concerned about, is that we’ve let our manufacturing base in this country atrophy to the point where we may have to start making hard decisions.”
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“He’s concerned, as am I, as are many Republicans,” Cotton said, “that if we have war in Europe with Ukraine, if we have war in the Middle East with Iran and all of its proxies from Hamas and Hezbollah and outlaw rebels in Yemen, and we have China threatening war in Taiwan, that our current defense industry and our manufacturing base cannot support all of those wars and our defense as well. That’s something that we have to fix. It’s something I know that President Trump will fix.”
“It is the case that China is the existential threat this century, but it’s forming an axis with Russia,” Bolton counters. “These conflicts are connected. I think there’s a real disconnect here. But the bottom line is that these are candidates who do not fundamentally understand that a strong American presence in the world is good for us here at home.”
