Vice President J.D. Vance predicted a negotiated peace deal to end the war between Ukraine and Russia would not leave either side “super happy.”
Mr. Vance also said the Trump administration is working to arrange face-to-face talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“We’re going to try to find some negotiated settlement that the Ukrainians and the Russians can live with, where they can live in relative peace, where the killing stops,” Mr. Vance said in a Fox News interview recorded Friday. “It’s not going to make anybody super happy.”
“Both the Russians and the Ukrainians, probably, at the end of the day, are going to be unhappy with it,” Mr. Vance said. “But I don’t think you can actually sit down and have this negotiation absent the leadership of Donald J. Trump.”
Mr. Vance’s comments, which aired on “Sunday Morning Futures,” came a day before he met with Ukrainian and European officials Saturday in London, and ahead of President Trump’s scheduled face-to-face meeting Friday in Alaska with Mr. Putin.
Mr. Vance said the high-stakes meeting represents a “major breakthrough for American diplomacy.”
“One of the most important logjams is that Vladimir Putin said that he would never sit down with [President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, the head of Ukraine,” Mr. Vance said. “And the president has now got that to change.
“We’re at a point now where we’re now trying to figure out, frankly, scheduling and things like that around when these three leaders could sit down and discuss an end to this conflict,” he said.
Asked whether the White House wanted Mr. Putin and Mr. Zelenskyy to meet before the Alaska summit on Friday, Mr. Vance said, “I actually don’t think it would be that productive.”
“I think, fundamentally, the president of the United States has to be the one to kind of bring these two together,” he said. “This is something where the president needs to force President Putin and President Zelenskyy really to sit down to figure out their differences.”
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.