JD Vance clashed again with Volodymyr Zelensky as Russia was raising objections to a Ukraine peace deal.
The US vice-president branded “absurd” the suggestion from Mr Zelensky that he had somehow sought to “justify” Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago.
Ukraine’s president also accused Washington of falling for an “altered reality” being pushed by the Kremlin over the war which Putin launched in February 2022.
He told CBS: “I tried to explain, ‘You can’t look for something in the middle. There is an aggressor and there is a victim. The Russians are the aggressor, and we are the victim,’” he added, referring to the bust-up in the Oval Office at the White House in February between him, Donald Trump and JD Vance.
But Mr Vance hit back, stressing he had condemned Russia since 2022, though, had since tried to understand the strategic objectives of both sides to find a solution.
“That doesn’t mean you morally support the Russian cause, or that you support the full-scale invasion, but you do have to try to understand what are their strategic red lines, in the same way that you have to try to understand what the Ukrainians are trying to get out of the conflict,” he said.
“I think it’s sort of absurd for Zelensky to tell the (US) government, which is currently keeping his entire government and war effort together, that we are somehow on the side of the Russians.”
Mr Zelensky has accepted a ceasefire, being pushed by Trump, but this has so far been rejected by Putin as his troops have been grinding forward for months in eastern Ukraine, while suffering heavy losses.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that it was not easy to agree with the US on the key parts of a possible peace deal to end the war in Ukraine.
Trump, who says he wants to be remembered as a peacemaker, has repeatedly said he wants to end the “bloodbath” of the war in Ukraine, though a deal has yet to be agreed.
“It is not easy to agree the key components of a settlement. They are being discussed,” Mr Lavrov said in an interview with the Kommersant newspaper.
“We are well aware of what a mutually beneficial deal looks like, which we have never rejected, and what a deal looks like that could lead us into another trap,” he added.
The Kremlin on Sunday said that it was too early to expect results from the restoration of more normal relations with Washington.
Mr Lavrov said that Russia’s position had been set out clearly by Putin in June 2024, when the president demanded Ukraine must officially drop its NATO ambitions and withdraw its troops from the entirety of the territory of four Ukrainian regions claimed by Russia.
Russia currently controls a little under one fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and parts of four other regions Moscow now claims are part of Russia - a claim not recognised by most countries.
More than 900,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in Putin’s war, according to western officials, with Ukraine’s military also suffering high casualties, and thousands, if not tens of thousands, of civilians also killed, often in indiscriminate Russian air strikes.
