🔗 Share this article

America's Army Secretary, Dan Driscoll, was an unlikely diplomat for the Trump administration latest proposal to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. Driscoll's strong relationship with JD Vance has placed a key ally of the Eurosceptic vice-president at the center of President Trump's latest effort to conclude the conflict.

Prior to his recent visit to Kyiv, Driscoll was not known as a negotiator or diplomat, and his early attempts to sell the deal to European policymakers were labeled chaotic.

Driscoll's strong relationship with Vance, with whom he studied and shares a close friendship, indicate the rising influence of the non-interventionist vice-president in negotiations to end the Ukraine crisis.

The VP's Role in Peace Efforts

It was Vance who intervened during Volodymyr Zelenskyy disastrous initial visit to the Trump White House in March and demanded he show Trump more respect. Now, Ukraine is once again pushing back against demands from the US to agree to a swift deal that Ukrainian leaders have described as a surrender.

After a tumultuous initial year in office, international decisions in the White House are said to be shaped by a handful of Trump's key aides, such as chief of staff Susie Wiles, rightwing advisor Stephen Miller, diplomat Steve Witkoff, State Department head Marco Rubio, and of course Vance.

Vance has been a vocal advocate of the recent proposal, which was developed by Witkoff and Trump's relative Jared Kushner, together with the Kremlin envoy Kirill Dmitriev.

“Every objection of the ceasefire plan the administration is working on either misinterprets the framework or misrepresents some critical situation on the ground,” the VP stated.

Early Attempts and EU Reactions

Vance's early efforts at hammering out a peace deal with Russia, while simultaneously seeking to restore relations with Moscow, were fruitless and left his team feeling disappointed with their Russian interlocutors. Leaders in Europe, in turn, were irritated by his early speeches, in which he accused them of ignoring their voters, who Vance said held anti-immigration and conservative views close to those of Trump's own constituency.

However, the new peace deal closely resembled his stances, and he has been one of the most assertive spokespeople for the agreement in the government, even as the US has been criticized for accepting a ceasefire plan that largely resembles Vladimir Putin's extreme demands.

In social media updates this weekend, Vance asserted that a peace deal would have to produce a ceasefire that respected Ukrainian sovereignty, be acceptable to both sides, and stop the war from restarting.

“A ceasefire won’t be made by unsuccessful negotiators or politicians living in a fantasy land,” he continued. “It could be made by smart people living in the real world.”

Additionally, 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 obtaining a agreement on the peace deal before Thanksgiving this Thursday in the United States.

The Secretary of State's Reaction and Internal Doubts

That was a distinctly more full-throated support of the proposal than that given by the secretary of state and national security adviser, Marco Rubio, a more traditional hawk in the government who has gone from a shaky stature inside the administration to more stable standing.

Rubio was a member of a US team that traveled to Geneva this past weekend to meet with Ukrainian leaders to help refine the original 28-point ceasefire proposal in order to make it more palatable to authorities in Kyiv.

But, his initial reaction to the deal was tepid:

“Stopping a complex and violent war such as the one in Ukraine demands an thorough discussion of serious and pragmatic ideas,” Rubio wrote over the weekend. “Furthermore, securing a lasting peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions. That is why we are and will continue to develop a set of potential ideas for resolving this war drawing from feedback from both sides of this conflict.”

Behind closed doors, he was said to be much more skeptical of the proposal. The Republican senator Mike Rounds stated recently at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia that Rubio had contacted lawmakers to clarify that the agreement was just a initial offer from the Russians and not an initiative advocated by the White House.

“The Secretary made a phone call to us this day and I think he emphasized to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was presented to one of our representatives,” said Rounds. “The document is not our suggestion, it is not our peace plan.”

Rubio acted swiftly to align himself. “The peace proposal was written by the US,” he subsequently wrote. “The framework is presented as a solid structure for continuing discussions. It is derived from input from the Russian side. But, it is additionally informed by previous and ongoing contributions from Ukraine.”