JD Vance on Monday struck back at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s comments that the vice president was “somehow justifying” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine, calling his remarks “absurd.”

In an interview with British website UnHerd, Vance said that in order to bring an end to the war, one has to understand the strategic objectives of both Russia and Ukraine.

“That doesn’t mean you morally support the Russian cause, or that you support the full-scale invasion, but you do have to try to understand what are their strategic red lines, in the same way that you have to try to understand what the Ukrainians are trying to get out of the conflict,” Vance said.

In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” broadcast on Sunday, Zelenskyy criticized Vance’s approach toward Russia.

“It seems to me that the vice president is somehow justifying Putin’s actions. I tried to explain, ‘You can’t look for something in the middle. There is an aggressor and there is a victim. The Russians are the aggressor, and we are the victim,’” Zelenskyy said, according to a translation by CBS.

The two men sparred during the infamous Oval Office meeting, with Vance accusing the Ukrainian leader of taking foreign officials who visit his country on “propaganda” tours, and calling him “disrespectful” to Trump after Zelenskyy said Putin can’t be trusted.

Vance characterized Zelenskyy’s last comments to CBS as “not productive.”

“I think it’s sort of absurd for Zelensky to tell the [American] government, which is currently keeping his entire government and war effort together, that we are somehow on the side of the Russians,” Vance told UnHerd.

The Trump administration, however, has at times echoed Russian talking points.

President Donald Trump blamed Zelenskyy and former President Joe Biden for the conflict breaking out on Truth Social.

“President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin,” he wrote on Truth Social. “There were so many ways of preventing it from ever starting. But that is the past. Now we have to get it to STOP, AND FAST. SO SAD!”

Trump doubled down on that sentiment in remarks to reporters in the Oval Office alongside Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador.

He also, however, named Putin as one of the people responsible for the death toll of the war.

“That’s a war that should have never been allowed to start, and Biden could have stopped it, and Zelenskyy could have stopped it, and Putin should have never started it,” Trump said. “Everybody is to blame.”

Trump has also previously called Zelenskyy a “dictator without elections,” even though elections were suspended due to the war in accordance with the Ukrainian Constitution.

During the interview, Vance called for Europe to no longer rely on the U.S. for its defense, saying, “most European nations don’t have militaries that can provide for their reasonable defense.”

“The British are an obvious exception, the French are an obvious exception, the Poles are an obvious exception,” he said. “But in some ways, they’re the exceptions that prove the rule, that European leaders have radically underinvested in security, and that has to change.”