Vice President JD Vance made “significant progress” in meetings with European officials ahead of President Donald Trump’s upcoming meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
According to a source familiar with the matter, at the request of the United States, Vance met with United Kingdom Foreign Secretary David Lammy and other officials to discuss the war in Ukraine ahead of Trump’s Friday meeting in Alaska.
“Saturday’s hours-long meetings produced significant progress toward President Trump’s goal of bringing an end to the war in Ukraine, ahead of President Trump and President Putin’s upcoming meeting in Alaska,” a United States official told The Daily Wire.
On Friday, Vance met with Lammy at Chevening House in Kent, England, and on Saturday met with Lammy and others to discuss the war in Ukraine, the situation in the Middle East, and economic and technology goals.
The meetings come as Trump makes another effort to bring the over 3-year-long war in Ukraine to an end.
Last week, Trump said that there will “be some swapping of territories, to the betterment” of both Russia and Ukraine. Russia currently occupies about a fifth of Ukrainian territory.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for more sanctions and pressure to be exerted on Russia in a video posted to X on Sunday.
“Everyone sees that there has been no real step from Russia toward peace, no action on the ground or in the air that could save lives,” he said. “That is why sanctions are needed, pressure is needed. Strength is needed — of the United States, of Europe, of all nations in the world that want peace and stability in international relations. If Russia does not want to stop the war, then its economy must be stopped.”
Zelenskyy has pushed to join the meeting, though he has not been formally invited.
Vance said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that the United States is working on setting up a meeting that includes Zelenskyy, but does not believe it should happen until after Trump meets with Putin.
“One of the most important logjams is that Vladimir Putin said that he would never sit down with Zelenskyy, the head of Ukraine, and the president has now got that to change,” Vance said.
Zelenskyy has not met with Putin since the war began.
On Saturday, the Russian government issued a statement praising the location of the meeting.
“Russia and the United States are close neighbours, they share borders. So it does make sense if our delegation simply crosses the Bering Strait and if such an important and expected meeting between the two leaders takes place specifically in Alaska,” the statement reads. “However, the presidents will undoubtedly focus on discussing ways to reach a sustainable settlement to the Ukraine crisis.”
The statement added that the next meeting should take place in Russia.
“An invitation to that effect has already been made to the President of the United States,” the statement adds.