JD Vance’s VP nomination will cause chills in Ukraine

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s pick of Sen. JD Vance as his vice presidential running mate will have sent chills down spines in Kyiv Tuesday morning.

Ohio Republican Vance is a staunch proponent of Trump’s “America First” policy vision and is generally ambivalent over U.S. intervention in foreign affairs. He has also strongly opposed more aid for Ukraine.

To add to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s concerns as he contemplates the likelihood of another Trump presidency, Vance has argued that the U.S. should encourage Ukraine to strike a peace deal with Russia, and that Kyiv should be prepared to cede land to its invader.

“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 told reporters in December, adding, “no one can explain to me how this ends without some territorial concessions relative to the 1991 boundaries.”

Vance, who once served in the Marines, has also been dismissive of concerns that territorial concessions by Ukraine — an unthinkable notion for Kyiv — would not be enough for Russian President Vladimir Putin and that the rest of Europe could be at risk.

“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, NBC News reported.

In February, Vance penned an opinion piece for the Financial Times in which he suggested that Europe had been over-reliant on the U.S. and that the region should shoulder the burden of defending its neighbor Ukraine.

He also echoed the Trumpian view that NATO members in the region were not spending enough on defense — a valid accusation in the past, analysts say. However the record is getting better and NATO said last week that 23 out of 32 allies are now meeting the 2% of GDP (gross domestic product) defense spending goal.

“The United States has provided a blanket of security to Europe for far too long,” Vance wrote in the FT.

“As the American defence budget nears $1tn 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,” he said, adding that America has been “asked to fill the void at tremendous expense to its own citizens.”