President Trump is looking forward to a fundamentally productive negotiation with Russia’s Putin and Ukraine’s Zelensky, Vice President JD Vance has said, in comments mischaracterised by the Wall Street Journal as a threat of war.
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.
The WSJ appears to have seriously mischaracterised the conversation as one fundamentally warlike in tone, but this was quickly dispelled on Friday morning as Vance’s team published transcripts from the actual interview demonstrating President Trump’s position that while walking into a negotiation nobody would take options away from the President, peace is the priority.
Breitbart news understands the team around JD Vance is furious at the framing of the WSJ of his conversation with the paper.
The expanded quotes reveal VP Vance told the WSJ that: “there are instruments of pressure, absolutely and again, if you look at President Trump’s approach to this, the range of options is extremely broad, and there are economic tools of leverage. There, of course, military tools of leverage. There’s a whole host of things that we could do. But fundamentally, I think the President wants to have a productive negotiation, both with Putin and with Zelensky.”
While the original bellicose WSJ framing was acknowledged in the Kremlin, there was apparently some attempt at moderation in response, with Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying merely that the story had surprised him and Russia would seek to clarify what was actually meant by them in subsequent talks between Moscow and Washington.
Vance’s broader comments, if fairly represented, 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 may not like either. Not least among them is a potential future reality that Ukraine may not be able to fully return to its 1990s borders, a point of view also expressed by Pete Hegseth to Breitbart News this week, 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 is reported to have said 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.
Vance said, per the transcripts released by his time, that : “I think the President has been very clear that he doesn’t like the idea of moving Ukraine into NATO. He’s been very clear about that. I also think the President is very clear that whenever he walks in a negotiation, everything is on the table.”
What Ukraine’s “sovereign independence” looks like after a future peace deal 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”.
Editor’s note 14/02/25: This story was amended to better reflect the remarks of VP JD Vance as revealed by his team after the WSJ article was published.
