Vice President Vance said Russia must “wake up and accept reality” in its ongoing war against Ukraine.
“We want peace here,” Vance said Sunday on Fox News. “We have been actively pursuing peace from the very beginning of the administration, but the Russians have got to wake up and accept reality here.”
Earlier this week, President Trump said that Ukraine could win the war and referred to Russia as a “paper tiger.”
“After getting to know and fully understand the Ukraine/Russia Military and Economic situation and, after seeing the Economic trouble it is causing Russia, I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform Tuesday.
The president met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly earlier in the day. He has previously suggested that Ukraine would have to accept territorial concessions as part of a peace agreement.
Russia currently occupies all of Luhansk and Crimea — the latter of which it annexed in 2014, and parts of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
The death toll has continually risen in the conflict, which began when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said in June that more than 250,000 Russian soldiers and between 60,000 and 100,000 Ukrainian troops have died since the war began. The U.N. said Sept. 10 that more than 14,100 Ukrainian civilians have died in the conflict. In May, the independent Moscow Times, based in Amsterdam, reported that more than 620 Russian civilians have died since the war began.
Vance, noting the mounting death toll, said that Russian President Vladimir Putin has refused to meet with Trump and Zelensky. After a meeting with Zelensky and European leaders at the White House last month, the president expressed optimism that a trilateral meeting would occur.
“A lot of people are dying,” Vance said. “They don’t have a lot to show for it. How many more people are they willing to lose? How many more people are they willing to kill for very little, if any, gain in the military advantage on the ground there?”