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America's Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll, emerged as an unlikely diplomat for the White House's latest proposal to end the conflict in Ukraine. Driscoll's strong connection with Vice President Vance has placed a close associate of the Euroskeptic VP at the center of President Trump's latest push to settle the conflict.

Prior to his recent trip to Kyiv, Driscoll was not known as a negotiator or statesman, and his early attempts to promote the deal to officials in Europe were described as turbulent.

His close relationship with Vance, with whom he studied and maintains a personal bond, signal the resurgence of the non-interventionist vice-president in negotiations to end the Ukraine war.

Vance's Involvement in Ceasefire Efforts

It was Vance who intervened during Ukraine's president's rocky first visit to the White House in March and demanded he show Trump more courtesy. Now, Ukraine is once again resisting demands from the US to accept a swift settlement that local officials have described as a surrender.

Following a chaotic initial year in power, international actions in the White House are said to be influenced by a small group of Trump's key advisers, including top aide Susie Wiles, conservative advisor Stephen Miller, envoy Steve Witkoff, secretary of state Marco Rubio, and of course Vance.

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

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

Initial Efforts and European Responses

Vance's initial attempts at negotiating a ceasefire agreement with Russia, while simultaneously seeking to restore relations with Moscow, were fruitless and left his team feeling disappointed with their Russian counterparts. Leaders in Europe, meanwhile, were angered by his initial remarks, in which he charged them of ignoring their constituents, who Vance claimed held anti-immigration and conservative positions close to those of Trump's own supporters.

However, the new ceasefire proposal closely resembled his positions, and he has been one of the most forceful advocates for the agreement in the government, even as the US has been under fire for endorsing a peace framework that largely echoes Vladimir Putin's extreme demands.

In posts this past weekend, Vance argued that a peace deal would have to produce a truce that respected Ukrainian sovereignty, be agreeable to both sides, and stop the war from resuming.

“A ceasefire will not be made by unsuccessful diplomats or politicians residing in a fantasy land,” he continued. “An agreement could be made by intelligent people living in the real world.”

It was Vance who followed up on the presentation of the peace plan in a conversation with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Trump had mainly tasked his staff with obtaining a agreement on the ceasefire accord prior to Thanksgiving this Thursday in the United States.

The Secretary of State's Response and Private Doubts

That was a notably more enthusiastic endorsement of the proposal than that given by the top diplomat and national security adviser, Marco Rubio, a more conventional hardliner in the administration who has transitioned from a shaky stature inside the administration to more firm footing.

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

However, his first response to the agreement was lukewarm:

“Ending a complex and violent war such as the one in Ukraine demands an thorough discussion of serious and realistic proposals,” Rubio wrote recently. “Furthermore, securing a durable peace will require both sides to consent to challenging but necessary compromises. That is why we are and will persist to develop a set of possible ideas for resolving this conflict based on input from each party of this war.”

In private, he was reportedly much more skeptical of the plan. The Republican senator Mike Rounds said last week at the Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia that Rubio had called legislators to explain that the deal was just a initial proposal from the Russians and not an plan pushed by the White House.

“Rubio did make a phone call to us this afternoon and I believe he emphasized to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was presented to one of our officials,” stated Rounds. “The document is not our recommendation, it is not our ceasefire proposal.”

Rubio moved quickly to align himself. “This ceasefire plan was authored by the US,” he later stated. “It is presented as a strong framework for continuing discussions. It is based on feedback from the Russian side. But, it is also based on earlier and ongoing contributions from Ukraine.”