Vance Suggests Trump Administration Won’t Be ‘Shipping Off Money to Ukraine’

In a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, on Sunday, US Vice President JD Vance criticized the assistance the United States provides to Ukraine.

“We help older Americans in retirement, including by ending taxes on Social Security, because we believe in honoring your father and mother rather than shipping all of their money off to Ukraine,” Vance said.

He was performing for a crowd organized by Turning Point USA, a conservative movement led by the widow of assassinated right-wing pundit, Charlie Kirk.

Kirk was fatally shot in September in Utah, and was a consistent critic of aid to Ukraine. He regularly, falsely claimed that Crimea was always part of Russia and therefore would never be returned to Ukraine.

He preached to his young, MAGA followers, mostly born after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that US funds should not be used in a “kinetic conflict against Russia” that Ukraine could “never win.”

Vance led his speech on Sunday by saying that “the best way to honor Charlie is that none of us here should be doing something after Charlie’s death that he himself refused to do in life.”

The vice president has himself been anti-Ukraine since his tenure as a Republican US Senator from Ohio, quipping in 2024 that he didn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other.”

But after his childish Oval Office outburst in February, telling a visiting President Volodymyr Zelensky that he was not grateful enough for America’s help, Vance has been conspicuously absent from the grown-up’s table to discuss peace in Ukraine.

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While US special envoy Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner were invited o Miami to meet with Ukrainian and European officials and Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, Vance was sent to charge up the right-wing base in the desert, spending about one half of his speech talking about Christianity, claiming that “we always have been, and by the grace of God, always will be, a Christian nation.”