Vance Says Ukraine Peace Deal Unlikely to Satisfy Either Side
He said the U.S. is aiming for a settlement both countries can accept.
'It's not going to make anybody super happy. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians, probably, at the end of the day, are going to be unhappy with it,' he said on Fox News' Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin on August 15 in Alaska to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.
Trump said Russia and Ukraine were close to a ceasefire deal that could end the three-and-a-half-year-old conflict, possibly requiring Ukraine to surrender significant territory.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, however, said on Saturday that Ukraine cannot violate its constitution on territorial issues, adding, 'Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupiers.'
In the Fox News interview recorded on Friday, Vance said the United States was working to schedule talks between Putin, Zelenskiy and Trump, but he did not think it would be productive for Putin to meet with Zelenskiy before speaking with Trump.
'We're at a point now where we're trying to figure out, frankly, scheduling and things like that, around when these three leaders could sit down and discuss an end to this conflict,' he said.
A White House official said late on Saturday that Trump was open to a summit with both leaders, but that right now the White House was planning for the bilateral meeting requested by Putin.
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The Mainichi
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Yomiuri Shimbun
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According to two people with knowledge of the process, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, career State Department staff pushed back on some of the proposed language in the South Africa report. There were specific concerns, these people said, about use of the word 'genocide,' which carries significant legal implications for U.S. policy under domestic and international law. One person with knowledge of the process said the administration wanted not just to strip down the South Africa draft left by the prior administration but reshape it entirely, highlighting claims of persecution against Afrikaners despite doubts about their veracity. A Trump political appointee, Samuel Samson, led the draft's rewriting after Africa subject matter experts in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor refused to continue their involvement, citing the inclusion of false and misleading information, this person said. Samson later visited South Africa in July to conduct research, according to local media reports. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In Brazil's draft report, the State Department accused the country's left-wing government of 'disproportionately suppressing the speech of supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro,' who is accused of attempting to stay in power with a violent coup. Bolsonaro has denied the charge. The draft report specifically mentions Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, stating that he 'personally ordered the suspension of more than 100 user profiles on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter)' in a way that impacted Bolsonaro's supporters on the far right. The Trump administration expanded U.S. sanctions on Moraes last month, with Rubio alleging the judge had committed 'serious human rights abuse, including arbitrary detention involving flagrant denials of fair trial guarantees and violations of the freedom of expression.' Moraes has pledged to ignore the sanctions and continue his work. Bolsonaro and his allies have appealed to Trump for help as he faces a variety of charges related to the 2022 attempted coup, which occurred roughly two years after Trump's supporters, hoping to overturn his election defeat in 2020, carried out a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. 'I always talked about the prosecutions that Trump suffered. If he wants to say something about me, he'll decide to speak,' Bolsonaro told The Post this year. Administration officials have defended the shift in U.S. human rights priorities, and it's not unusual for a new administration respond to different trends, such as perceived attacks on freedom of expression in Europe and other democracies. The State Department human rights reports are the most comprehensive on the subject compiled by any single body in the world, and they are widely used in both U.S. and international courts. In particular, they are often used in immigration court during hearings on asylum and deportations. Appearing in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May, Rubio clashed with Democratic lawmakers, who asked why the State Department had canceled long-standing refugee programs but started a new program that focused specifically on Afrikaners from South Africa. Rubio said that the South Africans who arrived in the United States 'thought they were persecuted' but acknowledged there were millions of others facing persecution around the world who would not be resettled as refugees in the U.S.
