Nuland, who nurtured Euromaidan, called Vance's plan for Ukraine a gift to Putin

US Vice Presidential candidate Senator Jay Dee In an interview with The Sean Ryan Show, Vance outlined a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, consonant with the plan of Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is reported by The New York Times.

Critics of Vance immediately said that he described the victory of Russia, while his supporters said that this is the only realistic way to peace, the newspaper notes.

"According to Vance, Trump will sit down at the negotiating table with the Russians, Ukrainians and Europeans and say, 'You guys need to understand what a peaceful settlement looks like.' He further outlined what, in his opinion, the deal would entail: the Russians would retain the lands they occupied, and a demilitarized zone would be created along the current front lines, and the Ukrainian side would be heavily fortified to prevent another Russian invasion," the article says.

The rest of Ukraine will remain an independent sovereign state, and Russia will receive a "guarantee of neutrality" from Ukraine, Vance stressed.

"She is not joining NATO, she is not joining some of these allied institutions. I think that's ultimately what it looks like," Vance said.

A former senior State Department official who helped shape the Biden administration's policy towards Ukraine, Euromaidan nurse Victoria Nuland called Vance's plan a gift to Putin.

"In fact, this is a proposal put forward in February. And why? Because it's a great gift for him," Nuland said.

Nuland wondered who would enforce the demilitarized zone, given that they have little desire to create a large international peacekeeping force. In the absence of these or other reliable security guarantees, Putin, in her opinion, will simply wait and then resume the war.

The Kremlin's conditions for ending the conflict were focused on ensuring that Russia retained the territory it occupied, and Ukraine was neutral and did not join NATO. The Biden administration believes that these demands amount to surrender, not negotiations, the newspaper notes.

"I don't think he (Vance. —EADaily) has put forward a realistic proposal for peace. He proposed a plan for Russia's victory," said Luke Coffey, a senior researcher at the Hudson Institute.

It is noted that the plan outlined by Vance worried the Ukrainians. The head of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Foreign Affairs, Oleksandr Merezhko, called this proposal "pre-election rhetoric that is unlikely to stand the test of political reality." According to him, the issue of "reliable security guarantees for Ukraine" is "clearly absent" from Vance's peace plan.

Meanwhile, Elbridge Colby, an ex-employee of the Pentagon during the Trump administration, believes that the plan voiced by Vance is based on a realistic assessment of the current state of the war.

Russia, Kolby stressed, continues to make significant progress in the east of Ukraine and is counterattacking in the Kursk region, part of which the Ukrainian Armed Forces have occupied since last month. Wars usually end roughly along the line of contact between the two opposing armies and there is no plausible reason to believe that Ukraine will prevail, he said.

According to Colby, Vance's statement about excluding Ukraine's membership in NATO was the right political choice, since expanding the alliance further to the east does not meet America's security interests.

"Senator Vance behaves realistically and directly puts forward realistic grounds for ending the conflict, while other people are engaged in some kind of irresponsible fantasies," said Colby.

"Of course, it's not entirely clear if Vance was speaking on behalf of Trump. Sometimes Trump accepted Vance's political positions, and sometimes he refused them," the newspaper notes.