The vice president said Putin had demanded Ukraine surrender territories that Moscow had failed to occupy or capture.
Russian leadership is seeking unrealistic concessions in exchange for initiating a cease-fire with Ukraine, according to Vice President JD Vance.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on May 7, Vance said that Moscow’s first proposals for beginning negotiations to end its war in Ukraine were non-starters.
“Certainly, the first peace offer that the Russians put on the table, our reaction was, ‘You’re asking for too much.’ But this is how negotiations unfold,” Vance said.
He said that during a May 9 interview with Fox News that Russian President Vladimir Putin had demanded that Ukraine surrender some territories that Russia has thus far failed to occupy or capture.
Despite Russia’s overreach, Vance said the Trump administration anticipated that both sides of the conflict would initially set unrealistic goals with the hopes of achieving a more favorable outcome when real negotiations began.
“We knew that Russia would ask for too much because the Russian perception is that, on the ground, they’re winning,” Vance said.
“We don’t want Ukraine to collapse. We obviously want Ukraine to remain a sovereign country. But Russia can’t expect to be given territory that they haven’t even conquered yet, and that’s one of the things that they put down in that initial peace plan.”
That territory likely refers to the provinces of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhia, which Putin claimed to have annexed in 2022 but which Russia still does not completely control.
Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas and Luhansk regions initially rebelled against the Ukrainian government in 2014, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
That uprising began a brutal guerrilla war that lasted until Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in 2022.
Vance said that it was all right if Putin began negotiations with unrealistic demands so long as the Trump administration felt that legitimate progress was being made toward ending the war.
To that end, he said that both sides could begin by asking for too much but that Washington would walk away from peace talks if it determined that either side was acting wholly in bad faith and unwilling to engage in the process.
Vance added that Washington would continue to issue demands to both sides every few weeks and would expect both Moscow and Kyiv to comply.
The next step in that process, he said, was getting Moscow and Kyiv to agree to terms for initiating direct talks between the two warring nations.
“It’s very important for the Russians and Ukrainians to start talking to one another,” the vice president said.