WASHINGTON – Vice President JD Vance suggested he wasn’t looking to goad Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into an Oval Office shouting match back in February, but he thinks the testy exchange helped shed light on the administration’s concerns with Ukraine.
“Sometimes people disagree,” Vance said Wednesday, Aug. 27, in a wide-ranging interview with USA TODAY that covered topics including President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to fight crime, the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce engagement, and the president’s controversial efforts to oust a Federal Reserve governor. “Do I wish that we had had a blowup in the Oval Office in public? Not necessarily.”
But, he added of the shocking televised throw-down, “I think that was useful for the American people to see.”
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The Feb. 28 Oval Office confrontation between Vance, Zelenskyy and President Trump took place as Zelenskyy visited the White House to sign a deal for the United States to receive revenue from Ukraine’s minerals in exchange for military assistance against Russia’s invasion.
The meeting started with Trump taking a dig at Zelenskyy’s wardrobe (a black sweatshirt, black slacks and boots) and went way downhill from there.
Tempers flared, and the meeting devolved into a shouting match that played out for nearly than an hour in front of television cameras.
Vance lectured Zelenskyy and argued the wartime leader hadn’t shown proper gratitude for the billions of dollars in military assistance the United States has given to his country. Vance suggested better “diplomacy” could have prevented the Russian invasion, accused Zelenskyy of being “disrespectful.”
The blowup led to speculation that Vance had deliberately set up Zelenskyy for public ridicule.
Vance blames Biden’s Ukraine policy
In the interview with USA TODAY, Vance acknowledged that labeling the meeting contentious would be “to put it mildly.”
“There are a lot of issues of agreement between the United States and Ukraine,” Vance said. “There are occasionally some issues of disagreement between the United States and Ukraine.”
Vance said his real concern was not with the Ukrainian leader, but with the administration of former President Joe Biden, which had committed $128 billion to help defend Ukraine.
“What always really bothered me about this relationship was not the Ukrainians as much as it was the American side, specifically the Democratic administration of Joe Biden,” he said.
When Biden was in office, Zelenskyy would come to Washington and leave with billions of dollars “without any real goal, any real diplomacy, any real sense of what we were going to buy with that a hundred billion dollars,” Vance said.
“And that was always what frustrated me far more than Zelenskyy was asking for help from Washington,” he said. “It was that the Biden administration had no plan for how to end the war.”
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Ukraine “just felt like this weird money pit where we’d throw money after the problem without any real plan to solve the problem,” Vance said. “That always really frustrated me.”
Vance said he and Trump have had a number of “good conversations” with Zelenskyy, and “we’re going to keep on working for peace.”
“On this issue, we’re pretty aligned with President Zelenskyy,” he said. “Even though we have some disagreements, we, of course, want to protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity. We don’t want Russia to conquer the entire country.”
Trump has pushed the idea of a “land swap” that would see Ukraine give up Russian-occupied territory as part of a deal to halt the war.
The administration thinks the war has reached a point “where the Russians aren’t really accomplishing anything by continuing to fight (and) the Ukrainians aren’t really accomplishing anything,” Vance said.
“What’s best for everybody, including the United States,” he said, “would be to stop the killing and bring this thing to a peaceful settlement.”
Francesca Chambers covers the White House. Follow her on X @fran_chambers. Michael Collins is a former White House reporter who writes about the intersection of politics and culture. Follow him on X @mcollinsNEWS.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Vance on blowup with Zelenskyy: ‘Sometimes people disagree’
