Senator JD Vance, the Ohio Republican nominated to be Donald Trump’s running mate in the November US presidential election, has made his mark on Capitol Hill by lambasting Washington’s open-ended commitment to funding Kiev.
Trump announced his nomination for vice-president on Monday evening, on the first day of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Vance, the best-selling author of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’, elected to the Senate in 2022, is known for seeing US support for Israel, where he remains a hawk, and Ukraine, in very different lights.
“I certainly admire the Ukrainians who are fighting against Russia, but I do not think that it is in America’s interest to continue to fund an effectively never-ending war in Ukraine,” Vance said in May, in a speech at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
In late April, when the Senate approved a $61 billion package of new military aid to Ukraine, Vance invoked his experience in the military to rebuke his colleagues.
“I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to,” he said on the Senate floor, adding that “the promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”
