The U.S. vice president, in an Feb. 13 (Thursday) interview with the Wall Street Journal, said that the Trump administration was hopeful about reseting relations with the Russian Federation, and that that Moscow’s deepening alignment with Communist China benefits neither the West nor Russia itself.
Russia began its direct invasion of Ukraine in late February, 2022, a war that incurred heavy sanctions from the West and increased the Kremlin’s reliance on Beijing for trade, particularly to fuel its military industry.
The Trump administration has begun talks with the Kremlin aimed at negotiating an end to the Russo-Ukrainian War.
“It’s not in Putin’s interest to be the little brother in a coalition with China,” Vance said, commenting on the Russian president’s geopolitical situation.
With regard to the Ukraine war, Vance stressed that while the U.S. is eager for a deal, the Trump administration is considering all options should Russia prove uncooperative in negotiations. Vance told the Journal that the U.S. would consider sending troops to Ukraine if Putin does not agree to a peace agreement that preserves Ukraine as an intact and sovereign country.
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While Russia and China have had outwardly cordial relations since the fall of the Soviet Union, observers have pointed to longer-term disagreements between the two as precluding a real alliance. A Russian war game making thinly veiled references to a war with China in Siberia considers a massive nuclear strike at a relatively low threshold should the hypothetical war go badly for Moscow. Chinese authorities have directed cartographers to append the original Chinese names to some Russian cities in the Far East when making new maps — placenames that were used before Russia conquered that territory from imperial China in the 1800s.
Speaking with conservative media personality Tucker Carlson last October, Trump said that one of his foreign policy goals would be “un-unite” the growing Sino-Russian bloc, describing their partnership as a disaster for the U.S. due to the combination of China’s industrial strength and Russia’s vast reserves of oil and other natural resources.
“The one thing you never want to happen is you never want Russia and China uniting,” Trump said.
Also on Feb. 13, President Trump said that the Ukrainian government should be included at the talks with Russia. At the same time, Trump recommended that Russia be let back into the G7 group of affluent, Western-aligned countries, and that Ukraine not be given membership in NATO.
Joining NATO, the Cold War U.S.-led military alliance setup to counter the Soviet Union, has been one of Kyiv’s long-term goals, but one that is anathema to Russia. Both countries were a part of the Soviet Union, and before that, the Russian Empire.
Vance’s remarks to the Journal came the day before he gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference in southern Germany, criticizing European leaders for censorship of free expression and their immigration policies, among other issues.
