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America's Army Secretary, Dan Driscoll, emerged as an surprising envoy for the White House's newest initiative to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. Driscoll's strong relationship with Vice President Vance has placed a key ally of the Euroskeptic VP at the forefront of Donald Trump latest effort to conclude the conflict.

Prior to his last week's visit to Kyiv, Driscoll was unrecognized as a mediator or diplomat, and his initial efforts to sell the deal to officials in Europe were described as turbulent.

His strong ties with Vance, with whom he studied and maintains a personal bond, signal the rising influence of the isolationist VP in talks to resolve the Ukraine crisis.

Vance's Role in Peace Efforts

This was Vance who intervened during Volodymyr Zelenskyy disastrous first visit to the White House in March and demanded he show Trump more courtesy. Currently, Ukraine is again resisting pressure from the US to agree to a swift settlement that Ukrainian leaders have described as a surrender.

After a chaotic initial year in office, foreign policy actions in the White House are said to be shaped by a handful of Trump's key aides, such as top aide Susie Wiles, conservative advisor Stephen Miller, diplomat Steve Witkoff, secretary of state Marco Rubio, and of course Vance.

Vance has been a vocal supporter of the latest plan, which was crafted by Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, alongside the Russian diplomat Kirill Dmitriev.

“Every criticism of the peace framework the administration is working on either misinterprets the proposal or misstates some critical situation on the ground,” the VP wrote.

Early Attempts and European Reactions

Vance's early attempts at negotiating a peace deal with Russia, while also attempting to renew ties with Moscow, were fruitless and left his team feeling disappointed with their Russian interlocutors. European officials, meanwhile, were irritated by his early remarks, in which he charged them of running from their constituents, who Vance claimed held restrictionist and right-leaning views close to those of Trump's own constituency.

But, the recently published ceasefire proposal mirrored his positions, and he has been one of the most assertive advocates for the deal in the government, even as the US has been under fire for endorsing a peace framework that mostly resembles Vladimir Putin's maximalist terms.

In social media updates this past weekend, Vance asserted that a ceasefire agreement would have to produce a truce that honored Ukrainian independence, be agreeable to both sides, and prevent the war from restarting.

“Peace won’t be made by unsuccessful diplomats or politicians living in a dream world,” he added. “It could be made by intelligent people living in the real world.”

It was Vance who continued on the presentation of the peace plan in a phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump had mainly tasked his staff with securing a agreement on the peace deal before Thanksgiving this week in the United States.

The Secretary of State's Response and Internal Concerns

That was a notably more full-throated support of the plan than that expressed by the top diplomat and national security adviser, Marco Rubio, a more conventional hawk in the government who has gone from a uncertain position inside the administration to more firm footing.

Rubio was a member of a US delegation that went to Geneva this weekend to confer with Ukrainian officials to help moderate the original 28-point ceasefire proposal in order to make it more acceptable to leaders in Kyiv.

However, his initial response to the deal was tepid:

“Ending a complicated and deadly conflict such as the one in Ukraine demands an extensive discussion of substantive and pragmatic ideas,” Rubio wrote over the weekend. “Furthermore, achieving a lasting peace will require each party to consent to difficult but necessary compromises. This is the reason we are and will continue to develop a list of potential solutions for resolving this conflict based on input from both sides of this war.”

Behind closed doors, he was said to be much more doubtful of the proposal. The Republican senator Mike Rounds said last week at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia that Rubio had contacted lawmakers to explain that the deal was merely a initial proposal from the Russians and not an plan advocated by the administration.

“Rubio made a call to us this day and I think he made it very clear to us that we are the receivers of a offer that was delivered to one of our representatives,” stated Rounds. “The document is not our recommendation, it is not our ceasefire proposal.”

Rubio acted swiftly to fall in line. “This ceasefire plan was authored by the US,” he later wrote. “It is offered as a strong structure for ongoing negotiations. It is based on feedback from the Moscow. However, it is additionally informed by previous and current input from Ukraine.”