On Wednesday, May 7th, at the Munich Leaders Meeting in Washington, Vice President JD Vance spoke about the negotiations with Russia and Ukraine about a possible ceasefire deal. Vance said the talks are stalling because both sides are listing their demands and are not willing to move to compromises.
“For too long the Russians and the Ukrainians have been fighting … it’s absurd you’ve had this war going on for too long and the two sides aren’t even talking constructively about what would be necessary for them to end the conflict,” Vance said.
Talking about what he called Trump’s “strategic realism,” Vance explained:
You don’t have to agree with the Russian justification for the war, and certainly both the President and I have criticized the full-scale invasion, but you have to try to understand where the other side is coming from to end the conflict. And I think that’s what the President has been very deliberate about, forcing the Russians to say, “here is what we would like in order to end the conflict.”
When the Russians put their first peace offer on the table, Vance said, “our reaction to it was ‘you’re asking for too much’—but this is how negotiations unfold.”
“I wouldn’t say that the Russians are uninterested in bringing this thing to a resolution,” he said. “What I would say is right now the Russians are asking for a certain set of requirements, a certain set of concessions, in order to end the conflict. We think they’re asking too much.”
When talking about the next steps in the negotiations, the vice president said, “We would like both the Russians and the Ukrainians to actually agree on some basic guidelines for sitting down and talking to one another.”
The statements of JD Vance echo the approach of conservative European leaders. Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán has been telling his European counterparts that listening to the Russian demands—as well as the Ukrainian ones—is crucial to being able to start forging a peace deal, but was shut down as “pro-Russian” by liberal EU leaders.
