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While Donald Trump’s public statements on how he would, if re-elected President, resolve the war in Ukraine have been (to be diplomatic) light on details up until now, his running mate JD Vance has just gone public on what Trump’s pledges to “end this in 24 hours” actually mean.
(Spoiler alert: the “plan” is a non-starter. It is simplistic, unrealistic, and not based in the realities of this war or the reasons for it.)
The Trump “plan” was laid out by his VP pick in an interview with The Shawn Ryan Show on YouTube. The interview was wide-ranging, and over the course of an hour touched on a variety of topics. This article limits itself to an analysis of the discussion regarding Ukraine only, timestamped from 12:45 to 22:20.
“You didn’t have the war that’s of course going on in eastern Europe” while Trump was President, Vance proudly states as one of his first factual errors in the interview. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war started by Russia in the Donbas region has been ongoing, albeit with lower intensity, since 2014. It was the failure of the West to grasp the seriousness of the war that was already underway that emboldened Putin to expand the scope of the war, and for having done nothing about Ukraine during his four years in office, Trump is as culpable as anyone else for this state of affairs.
Another foundational pillar for the argument Vance then goes on to try to advance is that world leaders are terrified of Trump, the strong man of MAGA mythmaking only. To state the obvious, which we all witnessed, Trump was laughed at in the United Nations General Assembly by world leaders for trying to lie to their faces about his supposed successes in office.
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Vance then puts forward as fact the notion that the Russians want an end to this war, the Ukrainians want an end to this war, and the Europeans want this war to end too. It is to be expected that figures like him will try to win sidebar political points with tangential comments, but Vance can’t do that without his second falsehood, that the Europeans have not done as much to support Ukraine as the US.
This is factually untrue. The EU and EU member states outstrip the US in the volume of aid provided by a factor of about 1.5.
What Vance then ventures to share is his view of how this war probably ends. It is truly remarkable that that blueprint is very closely aligned, whether Vance knows this or not, with how the Kremlin would, at this stage, like to see the war end.
The Vance Plan
In a nutshell, Vance suggests:
- Freezing the conflict where the frontlines are currently.
- Giving Russia a guarantee of Ukraine’s neutrality.
- Germany paying Ukrainian reconstruction costs.
Point one. Why? Why there? Because Russia has fought their way to that point on the map (currently a place called Pokrovsk, population 60,000) they should be rewarded for their aggression by being handed lands that they have no right to be occupying? This is only point one.
Point two is equally sophomoric. The only logic that this gift to Russia can be rooted in is the false claim, debunked many times, that Russia was motivated to invade Ukraine because Ukraine sought membership of NATO.
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This is poppycock. We know that Russia doesn’t actually see a threat from NATO because their reaction (after promising much) when Finland and Sweden recently became members of the alliance was to move troops away from the borders with those countries. The Russian demands to NATO in the winter of 2021 amounted to a demand for NATO withdrawal from NATO countries in central Europe.
As for Germany paying for the costs to rebuild Ukraine, why them? Germany is not responsible for the damage, Russia is. The cost of reconstruction is estimated at between $650 million and $1 trillion. Offering to get Germany to pay for this instead of Russia is obscene, illogical, and is an idea that will go no further than those utterances from Vance’s lips. No doubt champagne corks were let off in the Kremlin at this notion, but there’s no way that Germany will acquiesce to such a demand.
Then, after an extended internal advertising period (selling behind-the-scenes access to the show for the low price of only $15 per month) we go back to the conversation between Ryan (a former Navy SEAL) and Vance, which is prefaced by stating that such things are often presented as humanitarian causes and that neither of them buys that premise, we get to the question of “what are we [the US] there [in Ukraine] for?” Vance reacts, “Man, it’s a tough question” before going on to once again say that this is definitely not a humanitarian question.
It’s not a “tough question”. Russia invaded, Russia is intent on genocide, and Russia tortures the people who live in the lands that they have occupied. What the US is doing here is not a tough question, unless universal values of basic human decency are being abandoned.
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The Corruption Gambit
Vance goes on to tell us that “maybe, the point is, that while Russia shouldn’t have invaded, but the Ukrainians have got a lot of corruption problems, so it’s a little bit more complicated than that.”
A candidate for the Vice Presidency of the US has just justified Russia’s invasion of a sovereign nation on his perception of corruption in Ukraine.
Mr. Vance. There was a revolution a decade ago. It happened, by and large, due to the corruption of the Moscow-aligned Yanukovych clan and in the interim period the fact is that Ukraine has vastly cleared up corrupt practices. The other important point to make here is if corruption is a problem for anyone, they should absolutely want the far more corrupt, by orders of magnitude, country of Russia to lose this war.
Before Vance then passes from being wrong about Ukraine to proffering his thoughts about Israel and Iran, he and his host meander around a discussion about gas deposits in Crimea, with the question of whether it is worth “sticking it out” until Ukraine regains control over Crimea so that the US would have access to those resources.
Two things… The US, like any other country, can access Ukraine’s natural resources in the future on commercial terms like anyone else. Maybe more worrying was that Vance’s response to the idea of “sticking it out” was that this would be a question of “the number of American lives lost”, with “zero” being the point that he is out.
Narratives that have built up on the right of the political spectrum in the United States very often, too often in the last decade, are based on fabrications rather than realities. One of the ways in which they have drummed up opposition to the war in Ukraine is by falsely claiming that American citizens would be sent to fight in it.
In fact, Trump himself said this at a rally in Las Vegas that Vice President Harris is “already talking about bringing back the draft, she wants to bring back the draft and draft your child” which is an entire fabrication. In talking about his red line (zero American lives lost) over Crimea, Vance only succeeded in shooting down a strawman argument that is being advanced by his own boss. That’s not a basis for sound policy, obviously.
Lastly, and of huge importance, is that Ukraine will not be signing up for the Trump deal as it was presented by Vance. Diplomats will say this more politely, but as Ukrainians have shown time and time again in this phase of the war, they have agency in this matter. What Trump proposes may satisfy Putin, but he’s not the only party in this war.