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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Methinks there’s an agenda to emphasise nurture over nature because reasons.
Diminish the significance of the parents, let the State raise the kids. A recurrent theme of the Scottish Government.
Indeed – and many others.
Obviously. It’s supposed to support the origin-of-xen¹ theory of the so-called progressive left which basically states that humans are not animals but something made of featureless clay which can be formed in whatever way someone desires to form it. Unsurprisingly, they’re again repurposing well-known Christian myths here.
¹ Politically correct way to refer to hairless and sexless hindleg-walking creatures killing the planet by burning stuff said to have brains capable of independent thought despite no evidence for this could be found so far.
“Reject your parents, they are of a world now dead.”
I’m an ignoramus – who said that?
“Not like their parents”
Mine are from a different fecking dimension !
What would you expect from the Times these days. They parted company from reality sometime ago.
$cience TM.
Sounds like a low quality study interpreted by low IQ ‘journalists’ looking for a headline. What a time to be alive!
Men are women.
Girls are boys.
Ineffective vaccines are effective.
Unsafe vaccines are safe.
Global warming = our heating bills are far higher than ever.
Children are more like their parents than we thought = children are less like their parents than we thought.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master——that’s all.”
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy.”
Is this not precisely what the transgender hullabaloo is all about?
A man can be a woman.
A woman can be a man.