Why JD Vance keeps trying to help Russia win the war with Ukraine

Marco Rubio is the only American other than Henry Kissinger to serve as secretary of state and national security advisor at the same time, but he was mostly absent from high-stakes diplomacy over Ukraine.

Trump envoy Steve Witkoff negotiated the recent, Russia-friendly 28-point plan to end the war, and its main advocate in the White House was Vice President JD Vance. Working to help Russia win aligns with Vance’s far-right worldview, and with Trump an aging president who has never prioritized policy, the VP’s views will remain influential.

Witkoff basically repackaged a Russia-written plan, even coaching the Russians on how to talk to Trump and undermine upcoming U.S. meetings with Zelensky.

Trump officials reportedly timed this effort to a domestic corruption scandal in Ukraine, thinking it would force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to swallow unfavorable terms. But instead of sending Rubio or another State Department official, the Trump administration had U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, Vance’s friend and classmate at Yale Law, deliver the plan to Ukraine as an ultimatum.

It didn’t work. When the details came out, European countries were appalled, and with their support, Ukraine responded with a reasonable counteroffer that Russia unsurprisingly rejected because Putin seeks conquest, not peace. Rubio reportedly scrambled to say it was a Russian wishlist the U.S. was factoring in, not an American proposal, before getting roped back in and saying it was a U.S. plan after all. Evidence emerged that Witkoff basically repackaged a Russia-written plan, even coaching the Russians on how to talk to Trump and undermine upcoming U.S. meetings with Zelensky, and the effort fell apart.

But Vance will likely keep searching for ways to get Ukraine to surrender because that’s always been his approach to the war. His online commentary continuously shows sympathy for Russia’s cause, such as by asserting that Russian victory is inevitable no matter what the U.S. does. Sometimes he uses blatant lies, such as claiming that Ukraine-supporting Americans’ position is “Let’s send your kids to die in Russia” (no U.S. troops have been deployed to fight in the war, and virtually no American advocates sending them).

In a late February meeting with Zelenskyy in the Oval Office that was supposed to announce a U.S.-Ukraine mineral mining arrangement, Trump and Vance ambushed the Ukrainian president, with the VP absurdly blaming Zelenskyy for the war Russia started and perpetuates, chastising the Ukrainians as “ungrateful.” 

Vance marinates his brain in the far-right slop of X (née Twitter), the website Elon Musk turned into a swamp of misinformation and propaganda, and engages with the no-longer-fringe users driving it. He follows a little more than 1,000 accounts — a fairly standard amount for active users — and at various times, several of them have been outright supporters of Nazism and fascism. 

And as a recent, quickly reversed X rule change revealed, some prominent right-wing accounts are foreigners posing as Americans. 

The online right pushes a white nationalist conspiracy theory called the “Great Replacement,” which multiple terrorists have cited as motivation for their attacks, including one targeting Latinos at a Walmart in Texas, and another targeting Jews at a synagogue in Pennsylvania. Musk also pushes that extremist theory, and manipulates X’s algorithm to promote it. Vance has pushed variations on it for years, including as vice president, trying to put an intellectual spin on paranoid gutter racism. While Trump fuels and uses the online right, Vance is actually one of them.

And the online right loves Russia, seeing Putin as a culture war champion. To them, Russia’s “manly” military just has to defeat Ukraine’s “they/them” military backed by the “woke” West, both to advance the far-right cause and to validate their worldview.   

Trump has always looked positively at Putin and Russia, and shown sympathy for Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. When Russia invaded in 2022, Trump publicly gushed that it was “savvy” and “genius.” After becoming president again, he shifted U.S. policy in a Russia-friendly direction, cutting military aid to Ukraine, aping Russian propaganda and telling Ukraine to make concessions. But while Trump clearly admires and envies Putin, and prefers a world in which bullies get what they want, his evident top priority is ending the war quickly to get praise and financial benefits.

Taking his information diet and public behavior seriously, Vance’s Russia sympathies appear deeper.

Trump authorized additional arms sales to Europe knowing the weapons would go to Ukraine, has made noise about sanctioning Russia — though never really follows through — and hasn’t taken the more drastic step of directly assisting Russia’s military effort, such as with intelligence sharing on targets in Ukraine.

Vance might. Taking his information diet and public behavior seriously, Vance’s Russia sympathies appear deeper. Trump’s authoritarianism is personalist, centered around a cult of personality, focused on attention, power and money for himself. Vance appears to be a genuine far-right ideologue. He cites aggressively anti-democracy billionaire Peter Thiel, “neo-monarchist” Curtis Yarvin and various self-identified “post-liberals” as intellectual influences. Like the extremes of the online right he hangs out with, the VP defines “us” not as the United States and its allies against authoritarian adversaries like Putin’s Russia, but as a transnational white Christian nationalism against democracy, wokeness and the broadly defined left in their own countries and around the world. It’s a sort of Fascist Internationale.

The most logical explanation for why Vance keeps trying to help Russia win is because he sees Putin as on his “team,” with Ukraine, the European Union, pro-democracy Americans and an international order that values freedom on the other side.