OAN Staff Blake Wolf
12:34 PM – Sunday, August 24, 2025
Vice President JD Vance said that Russian President Vladimir Putin made several “significant concessions” in his demands to end the war in Ukraine during his recent meeting with President Donald Trump.
Vance made a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker,” in which he discussed the concessions Putin reportedly made during his recent meeting with President Trump in Alaska.
“I think the Russians have made significant concessions to President Trump for the first time in three-and-a-half years of this conflict,” Vance stated.
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“They’ve recognized that they’re not going to be able to install a puppet regime in Kyiv. That was, of course, a major demand at the beginning. And importantly, they’ve acknowledged that there is going to be some security guarantee to the territorial integrity of Ukraine,” he continued.
In the interview, host Kristen Welker asked Vance if he was “enraged” by a recent Russian strike that hit an electronics factory owned by a U.S.-based company.
“I don’t like it. But this is a war, and this is why we want to stop the killing. The Russians have done a lot of things that we don’t like. A lot of civilians have died. We’ve condemned that stuff from the get-go and, frankly, President Trump has done more to apply pressure and to apply economic leverage to the Russians, certainly, than Joe Biden did for three-and-a-half years, when he did nothing but talk, did nothing to bring the killing to a stop. So you asked me what I’m enraged by? What I’m enraged by is the continuation of war,” Vance responded.
Vance went on to suggest that Ukraine may have to concede some of the territory it lost in the war in exchange for peace.
“This is how wars ultimately get settled. If you go back to World War II, if you go back to World War I, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation,” the Vice President added.
Welker then asked Vance if sanctions are off the table in response to a recent comment made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who suggested that sanctions would not force Putin into agreeing to a ceasefire.
“No, sanctions aren’t off the table. But we’re going to make these determinations on a case-by-case basis. What do we think is actually going to exert the right kind of leverage to bring the Russians to the table? Now, you said sanctions were not going to lead to a ceasefire. I think that’s obviously correct. If you look at the way the Russians have conducted themselves, they don’t want a ceasefire,” Vance responded.
“They don’t want a ceasefire for complicated reasons. We, of course, have pushed for a ceasefire. But again, we don’t control what Russia does. If we did, the war would’ve been over seven months ago. What we do believe though is that we continue to have a lot of cards. The president of the United States has a lot of cards left to play to apply pressure to try to bring this conflict to a close, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Vance’s comments follow an earlier Sunday “Meet the Press” interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who stated that Russia will allow security guarantees from a joint coalition of China, Russia, France, Britain, and the United States.
Lavrov also revealed that Moscow is demanding the annexation of the eastern Donbas region, including the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, as part of a peace agreement.
On Ukrainian security guarantees, Vance stated: “The president has been very clear. There are not going to be boots on the ground in Ukraine. But we are going to continue to play an active role in trying to ensure that the Ukrainians have the security guarantees and the confidence they need to stop the war on their end and the Russians feel like they can bring the war to a conclusion on their end.”
“There are hills and valleys to the negotiations,” the vice president added. “We sometimes feel like we’ve made great progress with the Russians, and sometimes, as the president has said, he’s been very frustrated with the Russians. We’re going to keep on doing what we have to do to bring this thing to a close. I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight. I think that we’re going to continue to make progress. But, ultimately, whether the killing stops, that determination is going to belong to whether the Russians and Ukrainians can actually find some middle ground here.”
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