Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has a concrete proposal to end the Russia-Ukraine conflict, his running mate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, has claimed.
Trump has repeatedly said he would stop the fighting “in 24 hours” if elected, most recently at Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ candidate to succeed President Joe Biden.
To end the war, “you need somebody that first of all people are terrified of,” Vance told former US Navy SEAL and CIA contractor Shawn Ryan, in a podcast interview. “You need to be worried that if Donald Trump – or God forbid, Kamala Harris – says something, that they actually mean it. But you believe it with Donald Trump, you don’t believe that with Kamala Harris. That’s deterrence.”
Asked about what a Trump peace proposal would look like, Vance outlined a scenario he considered probable. The current line of contact would become a demilitarized zone, “heavily fortified so Russia doesn’t invade again,” he told Ryan.
Ukraine would get to keep its independence and sovereignty, but “Russia gets a guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine – it doesn’t join NATO” or other similar institutions, Vance said. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s reconstruction would have to be funded primarily by Germany and EU countries, whom Vance accused of underwriting Kiev’s war effort.
“I think that’s ultimately what this looks like,” he said, because “they’re scared of him [Trump] in Russia. They are worried about him in Europe, because he actually means what he says.”
According to Vance, Moscow, Kiev, and the EU all want the conflict to end, but the fighting continues because Biden is “asleep at the wheel” and Harris “doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing.”
“Their policy is ‘throw money at this problem, hope the Ukrainians are able to achieve a military victory’ that even the Ukrainians are saying ‘we can’t achieve’,” while Trump’s position is to be both strong and smart and negotiate an end to this, Vance argued.
Later in the show, Vance said he was “sick of wasting American lives being the policeman of the world” and called the current US policy toward Russia “stupid.”
Vance has been on the record opposing further US funding of Ukraine’s war effort, accusing the White House of having “no viable plan” for Kiev’s victory. In a New York Times op-ed in April, he argued that winning would require more troops than Ukraine could possibly draft and more weapons than the US is able to produce.
Russia has declared Ukrainian neutrality as one of its main objectives. Meanwhile, Kiev has ruled out any talks not based on Vladimir Zelensky’s ‘peace formula’, a list of maximalist demands that Moscow has ridiculed as detached from reality.