Vice President JD Vance offered a blunt assessment of prospects for a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, saying there is "a good chance we will" reach an agreement and "a good chance we won't."
"We're gonna try to get this thing solved," Vance told UnHerd in an interview published Monday. "We're going to keep on trying to negotiate. And I think that we've made progress, but sitting here today, I wouldn't say with confidence that we're going to get to a peaceful resolution.
"I think there's a good chance we will, I think there's a good chance we won't."
Vance's outlook echoed Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who told reporters Friday, "I think we've made progress, but we have a ways to go, and obviously the hardest issues are always the last issues."
U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, adviser Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law, and White House senior adviser Josh Gruenbaum held talks in Florida over the weekend with Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, and separately with a Ukrainian delegation and key European national security advisers.
Witkoff wrote Sunday on X that the talks with Ukraine and Europe were "productive and constructive."
"There are challenges with all three groups," Vance said. "I actually got an update from our negotiators this morning.
"So, the breakthrough that I do feel that we've made is that all of the issues are actually out in the open. There's [initially] a little bit of a game of obfuscation, of hiding behind fake issues, not actually revealing your hand.
"And you see that with everybody in tough negotiations. And what we've seen from the Ukrainians [and] the Russians over the past couple of weeks is there is this real sense of what's non-negotiable [and] what's very negotiable.
"I think the Russians really want territorial control of the Donetsk. The Ukrainians understandably see that as a major security problem, [even as] they privately acknowledge that eventually, they'll probably lose Donetsk, but, you know, eventually, it could be 12 months from now, it could be longer than that.
"So that territorial concession is a significant hold-up in the negotiations, that terrible territorial concession, I should say."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has dangled the possibility of placing 15% of the Donbas region, Donetsk and Luhansk, that Ukraine still controls into a neutral free economic zone, a proposal Russia has rejected.
Negotiations over a ceasefire and a broader peace deal have accelerated in recent weeks as the Trump administration seeks to broker an end to the conflict, which began in February 2022.
Vance said some of the remaining issues include control of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine, which is currently seized by Russian forces, as well as the fate of ethnic Russians in Ukraine and ethnic Ukrainians in Russia.
"And then there's, of course, a question about reconstruction, which I think the Ukrainians are understandably very focused on, and the Russians are somewhat less focused on," Vance said.
"And we're just trying to work through all these things. And so, I would say that any particular group right now is a barrier. I do think that everybody has participated, at least in the last few months, in the negotiation in good faith.
"Obviously, some of this stuff gets played out in the press because people are trying to push their PR leverage. I tend to see that as just the nature of the game.
"I don't hold that against anybody for selectively leaking or sort of saying, 'This provision is too pro-Russia' or 'This provision is too pro-Ukraine.' I just sort of see it as inherent in the nature of the negotiation."
Michael Katz ✉
Michael Katz is a Newsmax reporter with more than 30 years of experience reporting and editing on news, culture, and politics.
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