Lies behind US-backed wars and ‘disgraceful’ Zelensky: Trump’s VP pick on the Ukraine conflict

Senator JD Vance, the Ohio Republican nominated to be Donald Trump’s running mate in the November US presidential election, has made his mark on Capitol Hill by lambasting Washington’s open-ended commitment to funding Kiev.

Trump announced his nomination for vice-president on Monday evening, on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Vance, the best-selling author of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’, elected to the Senate in 2022, is known for seeing US support for Israel, where he remains a hawk, and Ukraine, in very different lights.

“I certainly admire the Ukrainians who are fighting against Russia, but I do not think that it is in America’s interest to continue to fund an effectively never-ending war in Ukraine,” Vance said in May, in a speech at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

In late April, when the Senate approved a $61 billion package of new military aid to Ukraine, Vance invoked his experience in the military to rebuke his colleagues.

“I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to,” he said on the Senate floor, adding that “the promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”

US has ‘no viable plan’ for Ukraine

The US insistence on not negotiating with Russia is “absurd” and Vladimir Zelensky’s goal of restoring Ukraine’s 1991 borders is “fantastical,” Vance wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times. He has urged Kiev to hold on until some kind of peace can be brokered by Washington.

Vance argued that the White House’s math on Ukraine just doesn’t add up. President Joe Biden “failed to articulate even basic facts” about the reality on the ground, Vance wrote, and the Biden administration “has no viable plan for the Ukrainians to win this war.”

“Ukraine’s challenge is not the GOP; it’s math,” the Ohio Republican wrote. “Ukraine needs more soldiers than it can field, even with draconian conscription policies. And it needs more matériel than the United States can provide.”

“The notion that we should prolong a bloody and gruesome war because it’s been good for American business is grotesque. We can and should rebuild our industrial base without shipping its products to a foreign conflict,” he wrote, taking aim at the White House’s argument that funding Kiev was good for the US military industry.