‘Get Americans Out of Ukraine’: J.D. Vance Assails the Ukrainian Government as the ‘Most Corrupt’ in Europe

Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) assailed the Ukrainian government as the “most corrupt” in Europe in speech delivered at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th Anniversary Celebration summit on Thursday.

A longtime skeptic of U.S. involvement in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Vance professed not to “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another” shortly before the former launched an unprovoked invasion of the latter in February 2022.

In his remarks Thursday, Vance addressed recent intelligence leaks revealing that U.S. military personnel were on the ground in Ukraine. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby responded to the leak — which suggested that 14 members of U.S. special forces were in the country — by explaining that “there is a small U.S. military presence at the embassy in conjunction with the Defense Attaché’s Office to help us work on accountability of the material that is going in and out of Ukraine.”

Vance nevertheless made the leak a focus of his speech, dramatically calling for the Biden administration to “get Americans out of Ukraine,” and declaring that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his cabinet constituted “the most corrupt leadership in Europe.”

Heritage itself, once a bastion of Reagan-esque American assertiveness, has lurched toward isolationism since Kevin Roberts took over as its president in October 2021. Heritage opposed a $40 billion supplemental aid package to Ukraine in May 2022, even demanding that Luke Coffey, then its lead analyst on Ukraine, delete a tweet expressing support for the bill.

After its passage, Roberts remarked that “Congress this week approved $40 billion in spending for Ukraine but did nothing to address the crisis on our southern border or the fentanyl epidemic in our own country.”

Vance argued on Thursday, as he has in the past, that U.S. support for Ukraine undermines its ability to compete with China. “That’s what worries me: That the focus on Russia comes at the expense of [attention on] China,” Vance told Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade in January.

But Vance has alternated between making a cold case about resource allocation and insisting that Ukraine is corrupt and unworthy of U.S. support, as he did on Thursday.

In February, Vance endorsed former president Donald Trump –whose endorsement of Vance revived his struggling primary campaign in 2022 — to reprise his old role.

“While others want to foolishly march us into WW3 over Russia and Ukraine, Trump is the only candidate running with the courage to stand up to the corrupt bipartisan foreign policy establishment,” asserted Vance at the time.

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