🔗 Share this article

The US Army Secretary, Dan Driscoll, was an unlikely diplomat for the Trump administration newest initiative to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. His strong relationship with JD Vance has placed a key ally of the Euroskeptic vice-president at the center of President Trump's recent push to conclude the conflict.

Before his recent visit to Kyiv, Driscoll was not known as a negotiator or statesman, and his initial attempts to sell the deal to officials in Europe were described as turbulent.

His close ties with Vance, who he attended Yale and shares a close friendship, signal the resurgence of the non-interventionist VP in talks to resolve the Ukraine war.

The VP's Involvement in Peace Negotiations

It was Vance who intervened during Volodymyr Zelenskyy disastrous first trip to the Trump White House in March and demanded he show Trump more respect. Currently, Ukraine is again pushing back against pressure from the US to accept a quick deal that local officials have described as a surrender.

After a tumultuous first year in power, international decisions in the White House are reportedly influenced by a handful of Trump's top aides, such as top aide Susie Wiles, rightwing adviser Stephen Miller, diplomat Steve Witkoff, State Department head Marco Rubio, and of course Vance.

Vance has been a outspoken supporter of the recent plan, which was developed by Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, alongside the Russian diplomat Kirill Dmitriev.

“Every criticism of the peace framework the administration is working on either misinterprets the proposal or misrepresents some critical reality on the ground,” the VP stated.

Early Efforts and EU Reactions

Vance's early attempts at negotiating a ceasefire agreement with Russia, while also attempting to renew relations with Moscow, were fruitless and left his team feeling frustrated with their Russian interlocutors. European officials, in turn, were irritated by his initial remarks, in which he charged them of ignoring their constituents, who Vance claimed held restrictionist and right-leaning views close to those of Trump's own supporters.

However, the recently published peace deal mirrored his positions, and he has been one of the most forceful spokespeople for the agreement in the administration, even as the US has been under fire for accepting a peace framework that mostly resembles Vladimir Putin's extreme terms.

In posts this weekend, Vance argued that a ceasefire agreement would have to produce a ceasefire that honored Ukrainian independence, be acceptable to each party, and stop the conflict from restarting.

“A ceasefire won’t be made by failed negotiators or politicians living in a dream world,” he added. “It might be made by smart people operating in the actual situation.”

It was Vance who followed up on the introduction of the ceasefire proposal in a conversation with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump had mainly tasked his staff with securing a signature on the ceasefire accord before Thanksgiving this week in the United States.

The Secretary of State's Reaction and Private Concerns

That was a distinctly more full-throated support of the plan than that given by the top diplomat and security advisor, Marco Rubio, a more conventional hawk in the government who has transitioned from a shaky stature inside the White House to more stable standing.

Rubio was part of a US delegation that went to Geneva this past weekend to confer with Ukrainian officials to help moderate the original 28-point peace plan in order to make it more acceptable to leaders in Kyiv.

However, his first response to the agreement was tepid:

“Stopping a complex and deadly war such as the one in Ukraine requires an thorough exchange of substantive and pragmatic proposals,” Rubio wrote over the weekend. “And, achieving a durable peace will necessitate both sides to agree to difficult but essential concessions. This is the reason we are and will persist to create a set of possible solutions for ending this war based on feedback from each party of this war.”

In private, he was said to be much more skeptical of the plan. The GOP lawmaker Mike Rounds stated last week at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia that Rubio had called lawmakers to explain that the agreement was merely a preliminary proposal from the Russians and not an plan pushed by the administration.

“Rubio did make a phone call to us this afternoon and I think he made it very clear to us that we are the receivers of a offer that was presented to one of our representatives,” said Rounds. “It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan.”

Rubio moved quickly to fall in line. “The peace proposal was written by the US,” he later wrote. “It is presented as a solid structure for continuing negotiations. The proposal is derived from feedback from the Moscow. But, it is additionally based on previous and ongoing contributions from Ukraine.”