J.D. Vance has criticised European leaders for publicly backing Volodymyr Zelensky while privately calling for the war in Ukraine to end – as the US suspends all military aid to Ukraine and ramps up the pressure on Kyiv. The Telegraph has more.
The US Vice President claimed allies had privately expressed dread about the war with Russia dragging on for years, and warned them against dragging out the conflict by “puff[ing] up” the Ukrainian leader.
European leaders are privately pushing for Mr Zelensky to build bridges with Donald Trump, the US President, after he threw his Ukrainian counterpart out of the White House last week following an explosive meeting.“Sometimes you will have European heads of state who in public will puff up their chests and say, ‘we’re in it with President Zelensky for the next 10 years,’” Mr Vance told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Wednesday evening.
“And then in private, they will pick up the phone and say, ‘This can’t go on forever. He has to come to the negotiating table.’”
He continued: “Honestly, I don’t care what the Europeans say in public. What I care [about] is what they say in private. And what they need to be saying to President Zelensky is, ‘This can’t go on forever.’
“The bloodshed, the killing, the economic devastation, it’s making everyone worse off.”
Mr Trump’s plan for a peace deal was the only “realistic” means to bring an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine, Mr Vance insisted.
“That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years,” he said, seemingly referring to British and French plans to install a peacekeeping force in Ukraine to ward off Russian invasions.In an apparent reference to the Ukraine summit in London hosted by Sir Keir Starmer over the weekend, Mr Vance said: “Zelensky… goes to Europe, and a lot of our European friends puff him up. They say you’re a freedom fighter, you need to keep fighting forever.”
However, European leaders are said to have told the Ukrainian President to patch up relations with Mr Trump at the meeting over the weekend.
“That was pretty much unanimously shared by all of the leaders there,” an official briefed on the talks told the Telegraph, acknowledging: “We can’t do this without the US.”
Elsewhere in the Fox News interview, Mr Vance denied that he had planned to ambush Mr Zelensky to harm relations between the US and Ukraine.
The event was intended to be the “ceremonial” signing of a minerals deal between the two countries before “the tough talk of negotiating peace”, he said.
Worth reading in full.
The idea that Trump and Vance deliberately sabotaged their own Oval Office press conference to humiliate Zelensky has become the orthodox opinion among European pro-Ukraine elites, parroted by incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, among others. But it’s obviously false: why would they do that when they’re trying to get their deal over the line? Anyone who’s watched the whole press conference can see there was no effort to move it in that direction and a lot of effort on the part of Trump to keep it civil. It once again shows how those who claim to care so much about countering ‘misinformation’ are prone to conspiracy theories of their own when it comes to Trump.
The picture for Ukraine is looking bleak if it tries to fight on now Trump has suspended military aid. The Telegraph‘s Connor Stringer sums up Kyiv’s problem:
Trump’s decision to pull military aid is a crippling blow to Zelensky’s war effort and threatens Kyiv’s ability to fight in the crucial Spring months ahead.
Russia has launched spring offensives when the harsh winter conditions improve, attempting to push deeper into Ukrainian territory before it receives new Western aid.
Ukraine relies on the US provided Patriot and NASAMS air defense systems to help protect cities and infrastructure from Putin’s missile and drone attacks.
The air defence system, which depends heavily on American support, could find itself without enough interceptors to protect its military.
Putin may choose this time to push for more territory, which Russia may argue to keep in a peace deal, before Kyiv can find alternative sources of support.
Europe will scramble to fill the gaps in the supply, a task they will not be able to do quickly.
The prospect of a peace deal in the Belgian capital on Thursday, where European Union leaders, and Mr Zelensky will gather, seems all the more pressing.
Stop Press: Vance has denied that his comments yesterday referring to the European peacekeeping force as involving a “random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” were a snipe at Britain and France. He wrote on X:
This is absurdly dishonest. I don’t even mention the UK or France in the clip, both of whom have fought bravely alongside the US over the last 20 years, and beyond. But let’s be direct: there are many countries who are volunteering (privately or publicly) support who have neither the battlefield experience nor the military equipment to do anything meaningful.
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I wonder why European leaders feel the need to lie to the public. (Assuming Vance’s claim is accurate and I am inclined to believe it.)
Virtue signalling? Peer pressure from other political elites? They’re afraid of being lumped together with Orban? The establishment media will savage them? They’re spineless duplicitous weasels?
All of the above?
The obvious explanation would be they’re seeking a certain outcome but would like to avoid being held responsible for it.
OTOH, let’s assume someone told something to Vance with the expectation that it would be dealt with discreetly, that he could count on behind-the-scenes support for Trumps proposal provide European politicians can get some face-saving maneuver without them having to humiliate themselves in public by having to crawl back from the positions they claim to have held dearly for years. And next, Vance holds a press conference and tells everyone about it. That’s certainly playing hardball and communicates two things:
This comes on top of his wrong statement about countries who haven’t fought a war in 30 – 40 years as the second and third gulf wars fall within this period plus the operations in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan and numerous smaller military operations with all major European allies of the USA having been involved in all or some of them.
Is he just spectacularly clueless about anything which ever happened eastwards of the eastern seaboard of the USA, or simply intentionally ignoring the truth for reasons of political convenience?
I too am inclined to believe it.
All the above I think.
They’ve spent years bigging up the war, and while they now probably realise they have to back down a fair bit or spend billions they don’t have, it’s probably awkward for them to admit that they are not up for more fighting and have to follow the Americans.
They spent years and considerable expenses both military and civilian (How many Ukrainian refugees did the USA take and feed?) dancing to the tune of the Biden administration which forced all other NATO members to play ball and partake in both military support of Ukraine and the economic warfare (‘sanctions’) against Russia to their own detriment and for the benefit of the USA (eg, replacing cheap Russian gas with expensive US LNG). It’s certainly awkward for them to realize that the Trump administration now wants to treat them like a bunch of dogs who deserve a good kicking despite all they have done to serve US interests (this smells strongly of Putin, BTW, whose propaganda tactics have been alternating between nuclear threats and whining about the innocent victims of the war all the time) but maybe, they’ll learn something from it. This is not just about a bunch of politicians. It’s also about the people who have had (and still have) to pay the bills of this.
Well, I guess the new US executive have a different view of “US Interests”, and Europe has been somewhat left in the lurch. They were hoping Trump would lose and didn’t have much of a Plan B it seems.
I don’t buy that the Europeans were forced into it by the Americans. The speed and determination with which every European government jumped on the Ukraine war bandwagon was astonishing. The establishment machinery mobilised at such a speed, putting up Ukraine flags everywhere, passing sanctions, ensuring all media coverage was rabidly pro-ukrainian. These were not the actions of governments that were being dragged into anything but rather diving in enthusiastically.
Moreover, if they were so reluctant, now is there chance to back out. Strangely though, European governments are.literally the only force still pushing for more war.
May I please ask what was/is the European leaders’ motivation for wholeheartedly supporting Ukraine?
My reading is that they need a distraction and a pantomime villain, but I am a terrible cynic. It has been known for domestic politicians wishing to distract from their failings like to get involved in foreign adventures. I guess it depends if you take at face value what our “leaders” say on the subject. They may be telling the whole truth, part of it, or none of it, but my default instinct is to assume they are not being completely honest.
I agree. The timing was very interesting. Inflation started after the Covid fiasco and then there was war. All of a sudden they could blame the inflation on the war and rising energy prices.
Clearly, I am getting more cynical by the day…
They want a European Army
Nailed it, Katy!
The people who want a European Army have chosen this opportunity to crawl out of the woodwork once again. I read about this yesterday in a German news source. That’s certainly going to be a European army under French leadership as France is the most if not the only significant military power in continental Europe. But I think that’s just a side effect of announcements to increase military spending in Europe drastically. This will cause every armchair expert or person with an pre-exisiting agenda in this area to offer his advice/ opinion on what should really be done here.
It’s Von der Lyin”s dream of being Commander of the EU Army, and Empress of Europe.
She gives me the creeps.
Flintenuschi¹ was complimented into a position in the EU commission where she can talk as much as she wants but doesn’t really have anything to say because she is/ was politically too important in her party (CDU) to ignore her and so catastrophically incompetent that she had proved intolerable in an actual government position. That’s the typical ‘qualification’ of German members of the EU comission and I suspect that’s not much different for other countries, as the commission is, after all, not that important. Just a bunch of pencil pushers supposed to turn directives from the European council (heads of government) into detailed proposals for EU regulations which are then voted on by the Council of the European Union (government ministers or heads of government) and the EU parliament.
¹ German nickname of her dating back to the time when she was secretary of defence – Uschi is a colloqiual abbreviation of Ursula and Flinte means musket.
I would be more inclined to take our “leaders” at face value if I hadn’t noticed what seems like a pattern of fabricated, exaggerated or government-caused “threats” and “crises” which are then used as an excuse to remove freedom and extend state power. The “climate crisis”, “bat flu”, the “war on terror”, the “war on drugs”, the “rise of the far right”, the “boat people” – all either not really a problem, or directly caused by or acquiesced in by governments, whose proposed remedies are usually worse than the solution.
There is a major geopolitical restructuring going on.
Europe has been leeching off US power for 80 years. The US under Trump is trying to put an end to it and the Europeans are resisting it. A war with Russia that draws the US in would be a way to keep the US bound to Europe.
In a way it’s a repeat of WWI, WWII and the cold war where the US got drawn in to defend western European supremacy. This time around though the US might have realised it doesn’t serve them at all.
Once the US withdraws from Europe, Europe as a global force of any kind is finished, be it economic or cultural.
Of the four essential things that give power to nations – land, population, natural resources and culture – Europe only has one going for it; the last. The software if you want to call it that is the best. A culture of solid laws, strong education, good order. But even that is managing to undermine with its disastrous efforts to compete with population by bringing in droves of immigrants.
The prospects for Europe are really not good at all.
Europe has been leeching off US power for 80 years. The US under Trump is trying to put an end to it and the Europeans are resisting it.
Keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down was a British political maxime, not a European one. In contrast to this, France withdrew from the military structures of the NATO in the 1960s and still de facto controls a sizable part of northern Africa where French troops guard the local rulers. Putin’s propagandists are either not quite up-to-date by about 60 years or plain lying, as usual.
During the so-called Cold War, Western Germany, officially under a military occupation government until 1991, was required to maintain a standing army of about 600,000 soldiers with a mobilization strength of about 2,000,000 million solely for the purpose of enable the American and British occupation troops to withdraw hastily after a Russia invasion. Further NATO plans called for its territory to be turned into a radioactive desert to stop the Russians from advancing into the more important countries westward of it. The German chancellor Helmut Schmidt spilled the beans on this in the late 1970s and insisted – until driven out of office in favour of the much more docile Helmut Kohl – on a strategy of defending Germany instead.
Since 1991, Germany has been under treaty obligations to maintain an army of at most 345,000 (including air force) NATO/ UNO mercenaries supposed to be ready for international deployments at the demands of either organization. This led – on demands of the USA – to the first combat missions on foreign soil for German soldiers since the second world war during the ultimately abortive American Afghanistan adventure.
The Biden administration was still ardently supportive of the war in Ukraine and still forced all its European allies into it, especially Germany which paid huge amounts money for this, either directly for the Ukrainian military efforts or indirectly to support so-called Ukrainian refugees, and provided a lot of weapons from its not exactly abundant military arsenals.
Interesting remaining question: Is Putin’s position still really so weak that this barrage of not very cleverly thought-out lies is considered necessary or at least helpful?
The EU thought it would become a Global Power block, to rival America.
They’re now learning a very hard lesson. All they have are Toy Town Armies; pretty uniforms and no munitions. Its industry is collapsing, it is massively indebted and it has a major problem with more and more of “the plebs” voting for the wrong people.
They certainly enjoyed being threatened with sanctions if they didn’t cut all their business ties to Russia real quick. After all, who wouldn’t enjoy that?
There’s nothing astonishing here. The big boss said “Jump! Faster!” and everybody Jumped! Faster! The most striking example of this is the German Greens, traditionally a strongly pacifistic “World Peace!” party and which actually went into the last election on a ticket specifically demanding an end to arms deliveries into so-called crisis regions, a traditional policy of theirs they’ve been championing for decades. They abandoned this literally overnight and turned into the hawkiest of all hawks in German domestic politics. This strongly suggests that someone made a really convincing proposal why they must shaft their core voters NOW! to them.
The only thing that’s astonishing here is the true “We’ve always been at war with Eurasia!” dishonesty with which the parties on the other side, ie the Trump-Putin axis, now claim this never happened¹. But maybe, I should just stop being astonished by democratically elected politicians being grossly dishonest. That’s, after all, their core competency.
¹ The Nordstream pipeline blew itself up and never existed anyway!, so to say.
Elected politicians aren’t there to represent the people. They are there to control the people while representing the interests of elites, which don’t align very much with those of ordinary people.
That’s just how it is.
Nail on the head. I was baffled by the way in which the Ukraine situation was utterly stage managed and co-ordinated when it started. It was very similar to the ‘covid show’ where overnight, we were presented with procedures, rules, diktats which the sheeple eagerly lapped up. Clearly the government realised that they could manipulate the same gullible public over other, politically useful issues…
The EU had a strategy to enlarge eastwards (to the Urals according to Cameron) and that meant getting Ukraine in the EU and NATO.
The plan had been a long time in the making, so of course they were ready to jump in when it was (effectively) triggered.
Force of habit.
Distract the home crowd from the ruin they are causing domestically. It’s a well-tried tactic, invent an external threat, rally round the flag everyone, strict censorship and other restrictions needed because “there’s a war on”.
You have described them very well as “spineless duplicitous weasels”!
When I saw them all in their group photo at Starmer’s War Conference, I thought it was a perfect example of a “Rogues Gallery”.
No doubting that ending the slaughter is uppermost in J.D. Vance’s mind.
Doubtful that peace was uppermost in minds in Washington and London two months into the conflict (and three years of slaughter ago), according to this article from September 2022…
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/09/02/diplomacy-watch-why-did-the-west-stop-a-peace-deal-in-ukraine/
“… Diplomacy Watch: Did Boris Johnson help stop a peace deal in Ukraine?”
The new US administration is based on truth and reality. The EU and European nations with some exceptions live in a fantasy world based on Far Left lies. Turbulent Times highlighted how their views of Ukraine are polar opposites. The US knows that the Ukraine has lost the war that they now know was started in 2014 by the CIA and EU in overthrowing President Yanukovych. The fantasists in Europe believe that with just another push or by keeping the Ukranians dying for another year somehow they will prevail, Putin will be overthrown as Russia collapses, and Russia will be forced to negotiate and let Ukraine re-occupy the eastern Peoples Republics, and who knows, go back to randomly murdering the people there by shelling them as before.
In the real world the advance continues with another village liberated and another couple of thousand AFU soldiers and foreign mercenaries they can’t replace eliminated.
The truth is neither Britain nor France, or for that matter the USA has fought a symmetrical war for decades. Falkland in the 1980s for UK, WWII for France. That means where the opponent was substantially equivalent in equipment and manpower.
Fighting the Taliban or an ill-trained, ill-equipped Iraqi Army which has no air power is not a “war” similar to what is happening in Ukraine.
In Ukraine, the European suicide squad will be against battle hardened Russian troops with equipment and tactics adapted after 3 years of hard fighting in that situation.
Nobody has air-superiority over the battle-field, so unlike in other “wars” fought by Euro and US forces they won’t get unchallenged air-cover and be able to call in ground attack planes as and when required to support ground troops.
If “peace-keepers” are deployed, it is certain one or more “incidents” will occur, probably engineered by Ukraine, whereby they take fire and suffer casualties = WWIII.
This is NOT our war. The propaganda about Poland being next, then on to Europe if Russia isn’t stopped is from the Covid pandemic and climate change and mass immigration is our strength bunch. Europe is a cesspit and economic ruin – why would Russia or anyone want to invade it?
Of course they need an Evervillain (Russia) in order to prosecute their Everwar.
The truth about both so-called world wars is that the Germans were grossly outnumbered in every possibly category¹, be it people or material, both times. So grossly, actually, that they would have needed to be unusually lucky to have any chance of winning at all. Symmetrical wars these were not.
¹ Erich v. Falkenhayn, chief of the German general staff fall 1914 – summer 1916, gives the following numbers in his book Die oberste Heeresleitung 1914 – 1916 (Mittler und Sohn, Berlin, 1920):
West
October 1914 Entente 2,300,000 soldiers, Germany 1,700,000 (1.4 : 1).
July 1916 Entente 3,840,000, Germany 2,260,000 (1.7 : 1)
East
September 1914 Russia 950,000, Central Powers 563,000 (1.7 : 1)
June 1916 Russia 2,240,000, Central Powers 1,058,000 (2.1 : 1).
Well done to Will Jones and the DS for adding that crucial Stop Press at the end, in contrast to the rest of the media and Nigel Farage, who are stirring up the public by putting words into Vance’s mouth.
When I first heard his original comment, I thought he was referring to any one of the EU countries whose leaders were in that Rogues Gallery photo at Starmer’s Warmonger Summit.
Well, it’s open season on Trump and JD, because they’re not “on message” and are “siding with Putin”, if you get your news from the MSM.
The acceptable view appears to be continuing to chuck billions of dollars/pounds/whatevers into the bottomless black hole which is the continuation of this conflict, when surely the solution is diplomacy and dicussion to find a deal acceptable to all sides. The “approved position” continues to waste the lives of people who have no say in events and perpetuates the destruction of Ukraine.
It would be very interesting to see an audit of the financial aid suppied thus far, which would surely quash “far-right conspiracy theories” surrounding rumours of donated arms being sold off to who knows who and considerable sums of money vanishing under the streets of Zurich or off to random island banks.
It’s almost as if conflict makes certain types of people rich or something.
Yes, Nasty Zelensky is lucky that JD didn’t ask him for the whereabouts of the missing $100 billion Biden donated to Ukraine.
Your final sentence is true, and echoes what another commenter on here said:
“War makes the rich richer, and the poor dead.”
You and your mates are protected by unlimited money. It is difficult to penetrate his security for this reason and for this reason only. When the money stops his life expectancy drops precipitously. It isn’t a philosophical debate class when you are dealing with corrupt vermin.
I gather the U.K. signed a mineral deal with Zelensky a few days before the Oval Office spat. Does anyone know if the UK has given any security guarantees in return?
Of course the European’s and our Marxist government are wanting peace. They are crapping themselves that they cannot deliver on the promises they made Ukraine.
Peace means they can forget about upping military spending and carry on with their woke, ‘green’ agendas.
The British Establishment and EU thought they were getting 4 years of a Trump Presidency, which would, after two years, become a lame duck.
They’ve just realised that they’ve got 4 years of an active Trump Presidency, almost certainly followed by 8 years of President Vance.
The word has gone out to their tame pals in the Media: start denigrating JD Vance NOW.
It’s a real pity that comrade Strong Leader was too afraid of a cold to spare us +2 years of COVID reign of terror which he could well have. But to make up for that, he and his sidekick have now certainly demonstrated that trusting in the United States of Washington and DC is a grave mistake at warp speed.
Can we have a J D over here please!
What does it matter what Vance said, he’s not the US Ambassador to Britain or EU, he’s expressing an opinion, which he is entitled to do, it only upsets Britain and France because it is true, and they hate hearing truth.