US vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance, in an interview with The Sean Ryan Show, outlined a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, in line with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan. The New York Times reports this.
Vance’s critics were quick to say he was portraying a Russian victory, while his supporters said it was the only realistic path to peace.
“According to Vance, Trump will sit down with the Russians, Ukrainians and Europeans and say, ‘You need to understand what a peace deal looks like. ’ He went on to describe what he believed the deal would entail: The Russians would retain the lands they occupied, a demilitarized zone would be created along the current front lines, and the Ukrainian side would be heavily fortified to prevent another Russian invasion.
The rest of Ukraine will remain an independent sovereign state and Russia will receive a “guarantee of neutrality” from Ukraine, Vance stressed.
“He’s not joining NATO, he’s not joining some of these allied institutions. I think that’s ultimately what it looks like,” Vance said.
Former senior State Department official who helped shape the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy, Euromaidan nurse Victoria Nuland He called Vance’s plan a gift to Putin.
“This is essentially a proposal that was presented in February. Why? Because this is a great gift for him.” Nuland said.
Nuland questioned who would enforce the demilitarized zone, given that they have little desire to create a large international peacekeeping force. In the absence of these or other reliable security guarantees, Putin, in her view, will simply bide his time and then resume the war.
The Kremlin’s terms for ending the conflict centered on Russia keeping the territory it occupied and Ukraine remaining neutral and not joining NATO. The Biden administration believes these demands amount to capitulation rather than negotiation, the paper notes.
“I don’t think he (Vance) EADaily) put forward a realistic proposal for peace. He proposed a plan for Russia’s victory.” — said a senior researcher at the Hudson Institute Lucas Coffey.
It is noted that the plan outlined by Vance worried the Ukrainians. Head of the Verkhovna Rada Foreign Affairs Committee Alexander Merezhko He called the proposal “election rhetoric that is unlikely to stand the test of political reality.” He said the issue of “reliable security guarantees for Ukraine” was “conspicuously absent” from Vance’s peace plan.
Meanwhile, a former Pentagon employee during the Trump administration Elbridge Colby He believes that Vance’s plan is based on a realistic assessment of the current state of the war.
Russia, Colby stressed, continues to make significant advances in eastern Ukraine and is counterattacking in the Kursk region, part of which the Ukrainian Armed Forces have occupied since last month. Wars typically end roughly along the line of contact between the two opposing armies and there is no plausible reason to believe Ukraine will prevail, he said.
According to Colby, Vance’s announcement to exclude Ukraine from NATO was the correct political choice, as expanding the alliance further east is not in the US’s security interests.
“Senator Vance is being realistic and openly presenting realistic reasons for ending the conflict while other people are engaged in some kind of irresponsible fantasy.” Colby said.
“Of course, it is not entirely clear that Vance was speaking on Trump’s behalf. Trump sometimes accepted Vance’s policy positions and at other times rejected them.
