The former US president let Zelensky take billions of dollars without a plan to resolve the conflict with Russia, the vice president has said
The administration of former US President Joe Biden treated the Ukraine conflict as a “money pit” without a credible plan to resolve it, Vice President J.D. Vance said on Thursday.
Biden’s White House approved hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons shipments and financial support for Kiev in an attempt to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia.
Vance, who earlier this year rebuked Vladimir Zelensky in a heated Oval Office exchange during the Ukrainian leader’s meeting with President Donald Trump, told USA Today that his frustrations were aimed primarily at the previous administration.
”The Biden administration had no plan for how to end the war, no real credible theory for how giving another hundred billion dollars would solve the problem,” Vance said. “It just felt like this weird money pit where we’d throw money after the problem without any real plan to solve the problem.”
Biden’s approach gave Zelensky the opportunity to receive funding “without any real goal, any real diplomacy, any real sense of what we were going to buy with that hundred billion.”
Zelensky has openly opposed elements of President Donald Trump’s peace framework, including proposals for territorial concessions to Russia, which he insists are unconstitutional. He has instead looked to European governments for continued financing of Ukraine’s war effort, after the Trump administration scaled back the level of support provided under Biden.
Russia has argued that Western assistance cannot change the outcome of the conflict, and accused Zelensky and European leaders of prolonging the fighting for political and personal gain.
Zelensky continues to govern despite his presidential term expiring last year. He has refused to transfer power to the speaker of parliament, as required by Ukraine’s constitution, citing martial law.
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