Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) said Sunday that the United States needs to accept that Ukraine will likely need to “cede some territory” to Russia to end the fighting. Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” that he is opposed to sending more aid to Ukraine because he does not believe the country will ever be able to overpower Russia. He questioned why sending billions in aid to Ukraine is going to help the country at this point in its war against Russia, considering previous aid has yet to end the war. “What’s in America’s best interest is to accept Ukraine is going to have to cede some territory to the Russians, and we need to bring this war to a close,” Vance said. “But when I think about the great human tragedy here, hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans innocent have been killed in this conflict. The thing that’s in our interest and in theirs is to stop the killing.”
Up front, I broadly support almost any aid short of NBC weapons to Ukraine. Territorial exchange by invasion needs to be non-negotiable, and Ukraine should be the one who decides if/when they’ve had enough war, not us or Russia
JD Vance is reprehensible and talking out of both sides, but there’s some truth to this idea. If you look back at the deeper history of Ukraine, the Donbas wasn’t a part of Ukraine under Kievan Russ or the precursor dynasty. The area is very ethnically Russian & Russophone (absolutely artificially boosted by prior pseudo-genicidal policy of Russification, as also in Poland) and if you look at the census data, the electoral history, and where the separatists draw recruits from, it’s very split east/south-east of the Dnipro river.
If the government in Kyiv (rightfully) refuses to give territory and end to the war, they are only left with Russian capitulation or a NK/SK style permanent standoff over their own DMZ. The survey data indicates the Ukranian people are willing to go all the way to Crimea, which is mirrored by Kyiv policy, but viable is that for Ukraine militarily? Frontline progress is steady but slow, and Ukraine shares a lot of the skewed age demographics with Russia that make a long term war difficult on manpower alone.