Vice President JD Vance expressed optimism that Ukraine and Russia have agreed to resume U.S.-mediated peace talks, but he poured cold water on the idea that a deal would be signed soon.
Vance spoke to reporters on the tarmac in Cincinnati on Thursday morning ahead of a campaign trip to Nebraska.
The vice president, when asked about the latest round of negotiations, said that a deal still hasn’t been signed — despite nearly two years of talks mediated by U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff — “because they’ve just been too apart on some of the details of that negotiation.”
Witkoff “feels optimistic,” Vance said, after speaking with both Ukrainian and Russian leaders in recent days.
“The nature of these things is you take a swing at it, you see how much progress you can make, and then you go back at it, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t,” he continued. “One of the things I really admire about Steve, but also the entire diplomatic team and the president, is we try to do the hard things, knowing that we have a very tall mountain to climb. We still try to do them anyway.”
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump seemed to be shifting U.S. policy to favor Ukraine after the defending country proved capable of building out a top global drone defense industry and launching long-range strikes into Russia. Trump specifically granted Ukraine a license to begin constructing its own Patriot missile systems, a longtime ask of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
However, in recent weeks, the president has again swung his position back toward Russia.
This month, Trump signed a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to make Russian diesel available again on the global market and signed an executive order exempting Russia from the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, a bill Trump had signed into law in September.