J.D. Vance’s Opposition to U.S. Support for Ukraine: In His Own Words

Donald J. Trump’s pick of Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, to be his running mate on Monday, amplified doubts about continued U.S. support for Ukraine should the former president be returned to the White House next year.

Mr. Vance has been one of Congress’s most vocal opponents of U.S. aid for Ukraine, admonishing the Biden administration for its continued monetary and material support and leading an unsuccessful campaign in the Senate to block a $60 billion package.

A conservative, Mr. Vance has argued that American support of Ukraine in its war against Russian invaders is needlessly costly and called a return to Ukraine’s pre-invasion borders “fantastical.”

Mr. Vance contends that Ukraine should stop offensive maneuvers in its war with Russia and begin negotiating a settlement because the West will never be able to produce enough weapons to make victory feasible.

Ultimately, in a podcast interview in 2022, he told Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump adviser now serving a four-month prison term for contempt of Congress, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.”

Here’s a look at Mr. Vance’s past comments about U.S. support for Ukraine.

The ‘math’ makes Ukraine’s war unwinnable.

The Biden administration, he has said, failed to calculate just how much money and how many resources it would take to defeat Russia.