U.S. Vice President Jay D. Vance described the failure to reach an agreement to end Russia’s war against Ukraine as the biggest disappointment of his first year in office.
This is reported by Kyiv24
Discrepancies Between Expectations and Reality
In an interview with NBC News, Vance explained that the issue of the Russian-Ukrainian war has become “a source of constant disappointment for the entire White House.” According to the Vice President, the U.S. administration initially believed that achieving peace in this conflict would be easier than in the Middle East, but reality turned out to be different.
“The Russian-Ukrainian situation has been a source of constant disappointment for the entire White House. We truly thought – and you’ve heard the President say this a million times – that this would be the easiest war to resolve. And if you called peace in the Middle East easier to achieve than peace in Eastern Europe, I would tell you that you’ve lost your mind,” Vance shared about the discrepancies between expectations and reality in the NBC News interview.
Despite the challenges, Jay D. Vance expressed optimism about the future, noting that some progress has been made in negotiations, although a final agreement has yet to be reached. He expressed hope that positive news regarding the resolution of the situation would emerge in the coming weeks.
Contacts Between Ukrainian and American Negotiators
Vance’s interview was released amid the visit of Ukrainian negotiators to Florida. The delegation was led by Rustem Umerov, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, and Andriy Hnatov, Chief of the General Staff. According to Alexander Bevz, an advisor to the President’s Office, the key goal of the visit was to gather information about the results of U.S. President’s Special Envoy Steve Vitkoff and Jared Kushner’s trip to Moscow, as well as to discuss these results with U.S. President Donald Trump and his team.
On the evening of December 2, negotiations between American representatives Vitkoff and Kushner and Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding possible parameters for a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine concluded in Moscow. Putin’s assistant, Yuri Ushakov, stated that a compromise solution for peace has not yet been found, but some American proposals appear acceptable to the Russian side.
Subsequently, Putin confirmed that during the meeting on December 2, the Russian side did not agree with some points of the American plan to end the war. He noted that the parties discussed each point of the peace initiative in detail, although, according to Ushakov, a detailed analysis was not conducted and the conversation was more about the overall concept.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sibiga emphasized the “positive significance for the peace process” of the negotiations in Moscow. He stated that U.S. representatives invited the Ukrainian delegation to continue negotiations in the United States in the near future.