Vice President J.D. Vance revealed on Wednesday a moment he attempted to “break the ice” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ahead of his high-profile encounter with President Donald Trump.
The two world leaders met in the Oval Office earlier this week to discuss ending the Ukraine-Russia war, months after a previous meeting in Washington, D.C., derailed into an explosive argument between Trump, Zelensky, and Vance that was captured for the world on television cameras.
Vance said this week that as he waited with Zelensky to meet with Trump again in the Oval Office, he cracked a joke about the viral quarrel that garnered some laughs from the Ukrainian president.
“So President Zelensky walked into the Oval Office,” Vance said during an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on The Ingraham Angle. “I was chatting with him, with the president, with some of the senior Ukrainian delegation. I said, ‘Mr. President, so long as you behave, I won’t say anything.’ And he just chuckled a little bit. It was a good little icebreaker.”
In further comments detailing the behind-the-scenes of the high-profile meeting, which ended cordially this time around, Vance argued that the personal encounter between Trump and Zelensky, which followed a similar summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska last week, was necessary if the countries wish to see an end to the Ukraine war. The vice president said the meetings helped distinguish “two big questions” about negotiations.
“Number one is, Ukraine wants to know that it’s not going to get invaded again by Russia — wants to know that it’s got territorial integrity long into the future,” he said. “[And] the Russians want certain pieces of territory, most of which they’ve occupied, but some of which they haven’t.
“So that is really where the meat of the negotiation is,” Vance continued. “The Ukrainians want security guarantees. The Russians want a certain amount of territory. Again, we finally got the details. We’re working on them, but we haven’t figured everything out, and I don’t think that we should force — we shouldn’t say that they can’t sit down until you’ve figured out every little detail. Sometimes them sitting down is what facilitates figuring out those details.”
The vice president also reflected on Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., which the White House has characterized as an effort to crack down on crime in the country’s capital. Violent crime in Washington has dropped 35% due to federal intervention, while robberies have dropped 55%, Vance claimed.
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“I hope the American people just recognize that you don’t have to live with lawlessness,” he said. “You don’t have to live with third-world murder rates. If you just take control of these cities, you can make them safe places to live again.”
“If you’ve got the political will to enforce the law, you can make even cities like D.C. safe again,” Vance concluded. “And that’s what we’re demonstrating.”
