Vice President JD Vance gave a preview of his expectations for President Donald Trump’s planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.
“Look, it’s actually very simple,” Vance said during a Fox News interview with “Sunday Morning Futures” anchor Maria Bartiromo. “If you take where the current line of contact between Russia and Ukraine is, we’re going to try to find some negotiated settlement that the Ukrainians and the Russians can live with, where they can live in relative peace, where the killing stops.
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He continued, “It’s not going to make anybody super happy. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians, probably, at the end of the day, are going to be unhappy with it. But I don’t think you can actually sit down and have this negotiation absent the leadership of Donald J. Trump.”
Trump announced on Truth Social that he would meet Putin in Alaska on Friday. He also told reporters that a potential deal would include “some swapping of territories” to end the years-long conflict, although Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy later rejected the idea of giving up land.
Vance contended that he did not believe a meeting between Putin and Zelenskyy before Trump’s expected meeting with Putin would be “that productive” to the peace effort.
“I think, fundamentally, the president of the United States has to be the one to kind of bring these two together,” Vance said, adding that “fundamentally, this is something where the president needs to force President Putin and President Zelenskyy really to sit down to figure out their differences.”
Vance said Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff have been helping the Trump administration reach a breakthrough. He noted that one of the “most important logjams” was Putin saying that he would never sit down for a conversation with Zelenskyy.
“And the president has now got that to change,” Vance said. “We’re at a point now where we’re now trying to figure out, frankly, scheduling and things like that around when these three leaders could sit down and discuss an end to this conflict.”
