Exclusive | JD Vance Wields Threat of Sanctions, Military Action to Push Putin Into Ukraine Deal - WSJ
Vance said the option of sending U.S. troops to Ukraine if Moscow failed to negotiate in good faith remained “on the table,” striking a far tougher tone than did Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who on Wednesday suggested the U.S. wouldn’t commit forces.
Vance said the U.S. could pursue a range of measures, giving President Trump ample negotiating flexibility with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“There are economic tools of leverage, there are of course military tools of leverage” the U.S. could use against Putin, Vance said. “There’s a whole host of things that we could do. But fundamentally, I think the president wants to have a productive negotiation, both with Putin and with Zelensky.”
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal hours after Trump said he would start negotiating with Putin to end the war in Ukraine, Vance said: “I think there is a deal that is going to come out of this that’s going to shock a lot of people.”
The vice president’s remarks, coming a day before a meeting with Zelensky, offered the Trump administration’s strongest-yet support for Kyiv in the face of Russian demands that it disarm and replace the current government.
“The president is not going to go in this with blinders on,” Vance said. “He’s going to say, ‘Everything is on the table, let’s make a deal.’”
On Thursday, Trump told reporters that Ukraine would be a party to talks with Russia, a key demand of Zelensky’s. But Trump also said that Russia should be allowed back into the Group of Seven club of wealthy countries and that membership for Ukraine in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was something Russia couldn’t allow.
Vance is scheduled to speak Friday at the Munich Security Conference, a gathering of global leaders to discuss shared threats. He said he intends to tell allied European leaders that they are stifling free speech and democracy by not working with populist parties.
European officials jostling to secure bilateral meetings with Vance hoped that the first top-level visit from the Trump administration would initiate a new level of cooperation with the U.S. at a time of global turmoil, and would offer details on the plan to end the war in Ukraine.
Instead, Vance said he would tell leaders that Europe must embrace the rise of antiestablishment politics, stop mass migration and curb progressive policies. He said he would call for a return of traditional values and ending migrant crime.
“It’s really about censorship and about migration, about this fear that President Trump and I have, that European leaders are kind of terrified of their own people,” Vance said. He said he would urge German politicians to work with all parties including the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party.
As policymakers began arriving Thursday in Munich, German police said an Afghan migrant drove a car into a crowd of labor union demonstrators in the city, injuring more than two dozen.
On Ukraine, Vance said it was too early to say how much of the country’s territory would remain in Russian hands or what security guarantees the U.S. and other Western allies could offer Kyiv. He said those details would need to be worked out in the peace talks.
“There are any number of formulations, of configurations, but we do care about Ukraine having sovereign independence,” he said.
Trump has said Putin wants to end the conflict, which the Russian leader launched three years ago with an attempted full-scale invasion that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed swaths of Ukraine. Russian forces control nearly 20% of Ukraine’s territory.
Vance said the Trump administration would aim to persuade Putin that Russia would achieve more at the negotiating table than on the battlefield.
Vance offered to reset the relationship with Russia after a successful agreement over Ukraine, saying that Moscow’s current isolation from Western markets made it Beijing’s junior partner. “It’s not in Putin’s interest to be the little brother in a coalition with China,” Vance said.
At a NATO meeting Wednesday in Brussels, Hegseth said borders for Ukraine were unlikely to be as they were before Russia initially invaded in 2014, negotiations wouldn’t end with Ukraine as a NATO member and non-Americans would have to provide security guarantees.
Hegseth clarified his comments Thursday, telling reporters in Brussels that “what concessions will be made or what concessions will not be made” will be up to Trump.
Vance agreed that Trump could change his mind depending on how the negotiations unfold.
“President Trump could say, look, we don’t want this thing, we might not like this thing, but we’re willing to put it back on the table if the Russians aren’t being good negotiating partners, or there are things that are very important to Ukrainians that we might want to take off the table,” he said.
Speaking of European politics, Vance attacked the continent’s mainstream politicians, saying they used Soviet-style vocabulary such as disinformation or misinformation to dismiss viewpoints with which they disagree. Russian interference in Western democracy has been overstated in the U.S. and Europe, Vance said. He said refusing to curb migration was a much greater threat to democracy than Moscow’s meddling in elections.
“If your democratic society can be taken down by $200,000 of social-media ads, then you should think seriously about how strong your grip on or how strong your understanding of the will of the people actually is,” Vance said.
Keeping far-right parties that campaign against migration out of government coalitions is curtailing the will of the people, who have repeatedly been asking for more border control, he said. “I think, unfortunately, the will of voters has been ignored by a lot of our European friends,” he said.
In his address, Vance will also back Elon Musk, the billionaire businessman and Trump ally. Musk’s political campaigning in Europe, including for the Alternative for Germany party—a group under surveillance for extremism—has drawn near-universal criticism from European leaders such as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron. Both men were registered to attend but their representatives said they wouldn’t be present at Vance’s speech. Macron won’t come to Munich and Scholz will only arrive later, according to French and German officials.
Vance said Musk doesn’t speak for Trump. But he said he agreed with Musk that European countries needed to stop letting in large numbers of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere. He also said that European leaders were wrong to criticize Musk for speaking out.
Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com and Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com
The War in Ukraine
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