The United States has military solutions available if Russia is totally unreasonable at the bargaining table when peace talks come warns Vice President Vance, while also dangling the carrot of rewards for Moscow if it behaves.
U.S. Vice President JD Vance is speaking at the Munich Security Conference — taking place just one day after what is said to have been a terror attack in the city — and meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky today. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal before these engagements, Vance communicated President Donald Trump’s determination to make a peace deal in Ukraine and the incentives on the table for Russia to cooperate if necessary.
The bottom line from Vance was pretty blunt, making clear in the first instance the U.S. would declare economic war on Russia if Vladimir Putin didn’t end the war on mutually agreeable terms, escalating to what may be actual war if not. He said “There are economic tools of leverage, there are of course military tools of leverage” the U.S. could use against Russia.
Zelensky Says He Will Enter Peace Talks on Precondition America Agrees Open-Ended Support for Ukrainehttps://t.co/f3OCCCzjYp
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Nevertheless, Vance’s comments make clear the new U.S. administration is clear-eyed about the fact it has a lot of plates spinning with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and that solving some problems will mean solutions a lot of people in the Western alliance won’t like either. Not least among them is a potential future reality that Ukraine may not be able to fully return to its 1990s borders, and that to prevent Russia being fully subordinated to China it will have to be returned to the club of Western nations, its G7 membership restored after a peace agreement.
“It’s not in Putin’s interest to be the little brother in a coalition with China”, Vance said of the work ahead to be done of getting Moscow out of the orbit of Beijing, once seen as a victory of American Cold War foreign policy but lost under the Biden presidency.
Donald Trump “is not going to go in this with blinders on…He’s going to say, ‘Everything is on the table, let’s make a deal’.”, Vance told the WSJ, stating: “I think there is a deal that is going to come out of this that’s going to shock a lot of people.”
While Russia’s present war against Ukraine is three years old, some parts of the country have been under defacto Russian rule for over a decade, and Vance alluded to the idea — although stopped short of declaring for certain — that some of Ukraine was going to stay under Moscow’s power in a peace deal. He said there are “any number of formulations, of configurations” of what a successful peace deal looks like, but nevertheless the United States does “care about Ukraine having sovereign independence”.
What that “sovereign independence” looks like is naturally a matter of major concern for the Ukrainians, and their President Zelensky has expended a great deal of energy in recent months making clear what Ukraine needs is not a “frozen” conflict, that Russia can return to at a later date when it feels it has sufficiently rebuilt its military to deliver a killing blow. Any peace has to be final, and that means — in Zelensky’s eyes — a Ukraine with a deterrent massive enough to forever put the notion of invasion out of Putin’s mind.
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This could mean a “million” man army, Zelensky has said, stating this would constitute not just Ukrainian troops but major “contingents” from allied nations forward-deployed. On the other hand it could mean Ukraine regaining nuclear weapons — it surrendered its huge arsenal in the 1990s in exchange for guarantees of its sovereignty through the Budapest memorandum — something Zelensky has suggested several times recently.
While this may seem fanciful at first, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not dismiss the idea out of hand this week in exclusive comments to Breitbart News, saying that would be up to President Trump. He said: “That’s the president’s job. He’s the leader, he’s the master negotiator and dealmaker… Some of us are out there to help set certain types of conditions that could make a deal more likely and that’s what I’ve tried to do here in the context of NATO.”
On Ukraine’s borders, Hegseth also articulated the suggestion that in return for peace Ukraine might have to accept some of its lands might remain under Russian control, calling a return to its pre-2014 borders “unrealistic”.
