COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Vice President JD Vance was dismissing Ukraine long before he upended an Oval Office meeting Friday by calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “disrespectful” and asking if he had ever thanked the U.S. for its support.
When Vance was a candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio in 2022, he said on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast that he thought it was ridiculous that the U.S. was focused on the border between Ukraine and Russia. “I gotta be honest with you,” he told the host, a Trump ally. “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”
“I think that there are a lot of democracies in the world,” he told The Associated Press that March, shortly after Russia launched its invasion. “And every time that one of them gets into a conflict now, at the end, it can’t be our concern.”
Vance continued to voice similarly isolationist stances throughout the Senate race, which he won with Donald Trump’s help, and as he ran as Trump’s running mate in last year’s presidential election. Last May, Vance said that his two biggest objections to sending U.S. aid to Ukraine were that the war had “no strategic end in sight and it’s not leading anywhere that’s going to ultimately be good for our country” and that it amounts to “subsidizing the Europeans to do nothing.”
The vice president’s argument with Zelenskyy on Friday illustrated the sharp shift in mainstream GOP politics away from an expansive view of protecting democracies abroad. An Iraq War veteran who is widely expected to run for president in 2028, the 40-year-old Vance leads a younger generation of the party that is skeptical of foreign wars and scornful of neoconservatives, following Trump’s lead.
Vance has largely been overshadowed by Elon Musk and his government-cutting effort in the first six weeks of Trump’s presidency. Vance has several key roles, including serving as a liaison to Congress and overseeing the potential sale of TikTok, but had been more in the background.
That all changed in Friday’s meeting, which had been cordial until Vance spoke up to criticize former President Joe Biden and laud Trump for seeking a diplomatic solution to the war.
Zelenskyy — a critic of direct talks between Washington and Moscow — responded with his view that Russia was untrustworthy and then challenged Vance.
“What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about?” he said. “What do you mean?”
“I’m talking about the kind of diplomacy that’s going to end the destruction of your country,” Vance responded before tearing into the Ukrainian leader. “Mr. President, with respect, I think it’s disrespectful for you to come into the Oval Office to try to litigate this in front of the American media.”
The meeting quickly turned into a shouting match. Trump accused Zelenskyy of deliberately not seeking peace in favor of another world war, while Zelenskyy suggested the U.S. would “feel it in the future.” Trump eventually ordered Zelenskyy out of the White House, canceling a lunch and a press conference.
Vance’s comments Friday highlighted the role he’s been given by Trump to amplify the president’s aggressive new approach to diplomacy, said Christopher McKnight Nichols, an Ohio State University professor of history specializing in isolationism.
“It’s an empowered vice presidency with Vance in this role,” Nichols said. He said Trump and Vance seemed to want Zelenskyy to come to Friday’s meeting “as a supplicant,” which has not traditionally been how the U.S. greets its allies.
Vance rebuked European leaders about the state of democracy and free speech across the continent at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, then tangled with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer at a White House meeting alleging the same trend in the United Kingdom.
Even traditional Republican defenders of Ukraine got behind Trump and Vance on Friday.
“I have never been more proud of President @realDonaldTrump and Vice President @JDVance for standing up for America First,” wrote Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina on X.
Republican U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, a longtime friend of Vance’s who was appointed to his former Senate seat in January, treaded a bit more carefully.
“Putin invaded Ukraine under President Barack Obama, and then again under President Joe Biden — neither of them had a strategy to win a war or bring peace to the region,” he said in a statement. “America under President Trump is working to bring peace. It is very easy to start a war but incredibly hard to end one. President Zelensky did not help himself with the comments he made in the Oval Office today.”
But U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, took umbrage with Vance on X, formerly Twitter.
“Answer to Vance: Zelenskyy has thanked our country over and over again both privately and publicly,” she tweeted. “And our country thanks HIM and the Ukrainian patriots who have stood up to a dictator, buried their own & stopped Putin from marching right into the rest of Europe. Shame on you.”
And former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican long associated with neoconservatism who campaigned against Trump last fall, went further, casting Trump’s and Vance’s pushback against Zelenskyy as being pro-Russian.
“Generations of American patriots, from our revolution onward, have fought for the principles Zelenskyy is risking his life to defend,” she posted. “But today, Donald Trump and JD Vance attacked Zelenskyy and pressured him to surrender the freedom of his people to the KGB war criminal who invaded Ukraine. History will remember this day — when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for.”
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Associated Press writer Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.
