 "Why is JD Vance, Donald Trump's pick for VP, bad news for Ukraine?")
Donald Trump’s new vice-presidential pick is seemingly bad news for Ukraine.
JD Vance, who Trump announced as his running mate for November on Monday, does not appear too sympathetic to Ukraine and Europe in general.
The Ohio Senator has made some remarks that are sure to disquiet Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders who are already apprehensive about Trump possibly returning to power.
But what has Vance said? And what do experts think?
Let’s take a closer look:
What is Vance’s stance on Ukraine?
Vance has taken a negative stance on Ukraine from the beginning of the war.
As per The Conversation, just days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Vance said, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
Vance, who has also touted Trump’s ‘America first’ vision, has increasingly turned up the temperature of his remarks on Ukraine in 2023 – as Ukrainian forces saw their morale sink as Russian president Vladimir Putin has racked up win after win.
According to Politico, when Congress was fighting over aid to Ukraine in April, Vance tried to spike the bill.
“We were able to make it pretty clear to Europe and the rest of the world that America can’t write blank checks indefinitely,” Vance was quoted as saying.
The Senate ultimately passed a $95 billion dollar package for Ukraine after a long, painful battle between the Democrats and the Republicans.
The funding impasse, which lasted months, dated back to August 2023 when Biden made his first emergency spending request for Ukraine.
Impact Shorts
More Shorts“There’s still this fundamental inability to deal with the limits of American power in the 21st century,” Vance told NBC News after the passage of the bill.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had delayed the aid package for months as members of his party’s far right wing, including Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Thomas Massie of Kentucky, threatened to move to oust him if he allowed a vote to send more assistance to Ukraine.
Vance in an op-ed in the New York Times in April wrote that he remained “opposed to virtually any proposal for the United States to continue funding this war.”
In February, Vance in an interview at the Munich Security Conference told Politico, “We simply do not have manufacturing capacity to support a ground war in Eastern Europe indefinitely. And I think it’s incumbent upon leaders to articulate this for their populations.”
“How long is this expected to go on? How much is it expected to cost? And importantly, how are we actually supposed to produce the weapons necessary to support the Ukrainians?”
The conference came in the backdrop of Ukraine withdrawing troops from the eastern city of Avdiivka after months of intense combat.
Vance said the problem in Ukraine … is that there’s no clear end point” and that the US doesn’t make enough weapons to support wars in eastern Europe, the Middle East and “potentially a contingency in East Asia.”
If the package goes through, “that is not going to fundamentally change the reality on the battlefield,” Vance, pointing to limited American manufacturing capacity, claimed.
“I think what’s reasonable to accomplish is some negotiated peace,” Vance said.
He claimed that Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the US all have an incentive to come to the table and that the two-year-old war will at some point end in a negotiated peace.
Vance in a piece in Financial Times in February argued the United States has provided Europe with a ‘safety blanket’ for too long.
“As the American defence budget nears $1 trillion per year, we ought to view the money Europe hasn’t spent on defence for what it really is: an implied tax on the American people to allow for the security of Europe.”
“Nothing in recent memory demonstrates this more clearly than the war in Ukraine. There is frankly no good reason that aid from the US should be needed,” Vance wrote.
He said that Europe should have been able to handle Ukraine but for the fact that it has become far too weak.
“America has been asked to fill the void at tremendous expense to its own citizens,” Vance argued.
‘Ukraine is going to have to cede territory’
Vance in December 2023 also denied that Putin has displayed any imperialistic ambitions towards Europe.
“If you look at the size of the Russian armed forces, if you look at what would be necessary to conquer all of Ukraine, much less to go further and further west into Europe, I don’t think the guy’s shown any capacity to be able to accomplish these, these imperialistic goals, assuming that he has them,” Vance said.
The remarks came ahead of Zelenskyy’s trip to Washington.
He also argued that Ukraine has to concede some of its land to Russia.
It ends the way nearly every single war has ever ended: when people negotiate and each side gives up something that it doesn’t want to give up,” Vance said.
“No one can explain to me how this ends without some territorial concessions relative to the 1991 boundaries,” he added.
Vance told CNN a day earlier that it was in “America’s best interest … to accept Ukraine is going to have to cede some territory to the Russians.”
What do experts think?
Many European leaders have long been nervous that a second Trump term would mean decreased US support for Ukraine and NATO.
The European anxiety was heightened in February when Trump in a campaign speech warned NATO allies that he “would encourage” Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to countries that don’t meet defence spending goals if he returns to the White House.
A senior EU official told Politico that Trump picking Vance was “a disaster for Ukraine.”
Timothy Ash, emerging markets strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, told CNBC, “God help Ukraine.”
Ash in February, in a rebuttal to Vance’s op-ed, argued, “…the stark reality is that without very immediate military backing and supplies from the US, Ukraine could lose the war, or at least significantly more territory sufficient to question its own viability as a state.”
“Vance et al should ask themselves what that would then mean for Europe and the US, in terms of transatlantic security,” Ash wrote.
Zelenskyy, meanwhile, has kept a neutral position.
“In Utah we met with the Republicans’ senators, and they respect Ukraine and me. I am aware of Trump’s view about how to end this war. If he becomes a president, we will continue the work. Most of the [Republican] party supports us,” Zelenskyy said.
Analysts see no end to the fighting anytime soon.
“Russia recently set out its demands for any kind of ceasefire which are very maximalist, there wouldn’t be much room for negotiation there, and I think that sends a signal that negotiations are not imminent or something being looked at by either side in the short or medium-term,” Anna Gilmour, head of Country Risk and Geopolitics at Verisk Maplecroft told _CNBC’_s Squawk Box Europe.
“I see that, and ongoing NATO support for Ukraine, as a sign that we’re not going to see an end to the fighting.”
With inputs from agencies
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