U.S. Vice President JD Vance said a negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine is unlikely to satisfy either side, and any peace deal will likely leave both Moscow and Kyiv “unhappy.”
He said the U.S. is aiming for a settlement both countries can accept.
“It’s not going to make anybody super happy. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians, probably, at the end of the day, are going to be unhappy with it,” he said in a Fox News interview that aired Sunday.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 15 in Alaska to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.
Trump said Russia and Ukraine were close to a ceasefire deal that could end the three-and-a-half-year conflict, possibly requiring Ukraine to surrender significant territory.
Zelenskiy, however, said Saturday that Ukraine cannot violate its constitution on territorial issues, adding, “Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupiers.”
In the Fox News interview recorded on Friday, Vance said the United States was working to schedule talks between Putin, Zelenskiy, and Trump, but he did not think it would be productive for Putin to meet with Zelenskiy before speaking with Trump.
“We’re at a point now where we’re trying to figure out, frankly, scheduling and things like that, around when these three leaders could sit down and discuss an end to this conflict,” he said.
(Reporting by Nandita Bose in Washington Editing by Matthew Lewis and Deepa Babington)