Vance reveals one condition for US to give | Political News

The war-beleaguered president of Ukraine left a White House assembly with President Donald Trump on Friday empty-handed, having failed to secure the promise that the United States would provide Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles for its ongoing conflict with Russia.

Further, Trump reportedly handled President Volodymyr Zelensky to shouting and vitriol, a repeat of his and Vice President JD Vance’s public spectacle of humiliation and bullying of Zelensky in February. Trump even recycled calls for from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who he had spoken to the prior day, claiming Putin would “destroy” Ukraine if Zelensky didn’t agree to give up components of its japanese Donbas area.

When requested by pool reporters on Sunday about Trump’s calculation in declining to present missiles to Ukraine, Vance claimed that Trump felt he needed to prioritize the availability of important weapons systems to his own navy. He “is attempting to guarantee that America’s security is taken care of first,” Vance said.

It was unclear if Vance meant his assertion to imply that he and the president believed the U.S. couldn’t concurrently present weapons to both an ally and its own troops.”We need to have the critical weapon systems for our own military, for our own troops. So that’s what the president is focused on,” Vance added.

“And as with all the choices that he is made associated to Russia–Ukraine, he’s trying to bring peace because he thinks that’s what’s in America’s best interest,” added Vance. “If he thinks it is in America’s best interest to sell additional weapons to Europe, he will do that. But right now, he hasn’t made that decision with regard to Tomahawks.”

The reportedly hostile assembly with Zelensky was the latest swing in the president’s pendulous stance on the Russia–Ukraine conflict, an ongoing three-year battle that he claimed during his 2024 marketing campaign he would personally end on his first day back in workplace.

Since then, Trump has oscillated between parroting Putin’s threats and calls for toward Ukraine — chief among them being the cessation of Ukrainian land as a needed precursor to peace talks — and supplying weaponry to Kyiv. Trump has acknowledged, including in his United Nations speech to world leaders, that he thought a decision to this battle can be “the easiest” because he has had a good relationship with Putin, who in 2016 waged a disinformation effort to increase Trump’s presidential marketing campaign.

DON’T MISS:

But Putin has ignored Trump’s repeated ultimatums to stop its assaults or face the wrath of extreme sanctions, threats that Trump largely has not backed up. Trump appeared to have come around on a number of of Putin’s concepts during his assembly with Zelensky on Friday, even some that contradicted his own latest assertion about Russia‘s financial instability, according to the Financial Times.

Prior to assembly with Zelensky, President Trump had spoken to Putin on the telephone. Zelensky visited the White House during a second in which the Trump administration had expressed renewed frustration at Moscow for its refusal to interact in peace negotiations with Ukraine, hoping to persuade the president to provide long-range Tomahawk missiles.

Trump refused, however, instead threatening Ukraine‘s destruction if it didn’t agree to Russia‘s maximalist calls for to give up components of its japanese Donbas area. Trump at one level during the assembly reportedly threw battlefield maps to one aspect, telling Zelensky he was “sick” of seeing photos of the frontline.

“This red line, I don’t even know where this is. I’ve never been there,” Trump said during the assembly that many occasions devolved into a “shouting match” with “cursing all the time,” according to one official. During the assembly, the president also claimed Russia‘s financial system is “doing great,” a U-turn of his latest remarks in which he called Russia a “paper tiger” and urged Putin to negotiate because his “economy is going to collapse.”

Shortly after his peace summit in Alaska with Putin, Trump first floated the Russian-backed concept of territory cession. Then, last month, he said he instead believed Ukraine may win back all of its territory misplaced to Russia since its full-scale invasion in 2022.