Cousin of US Vice President Fought for Elite Ukraine Unit, Says JD Vance Was Wrong to Attack Zelensky

A close relative of JD Vance, the US vice president who is an outspoken critic of Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky, fought for nearly three years as a member of an elite Ukrainian infantry unit and thinks his cousin is a tool of the Kremlin.

Nate Vance, 47, in comments to the French major publication Le Figaro, said he has known Donald J. Trump’s designated replacement for leadership of the United States since childhood. Trump and JD Vance last week in White House meetings conducted “an ambush of absolute bad faith” against Zelensky, he said.

Nate Vance said his younger cousin is smart and speculated that JD’s “heart is in the right place,” but condemned the US Vice President for misreading Ukraine and insulting Zelensky.

“JD is a good guy, intelligent...When he criticized aid to Ukraine, I told myself that it was because he had to please a certain electorate, that it was the game of politics. But what they did to Zelensky was an ambush of absolute bad faith,” he said.

Nate Vance told the US vlog, The Real Jim Morris Show, that he had not spoken to his politician cousin in some time but had attempted to contact him.

The vice president has not responded to repeated offers of an unbiased eyewitness account from the war’s front lines, and, according to Nate Vance, the junior JD Vance is making willfully uninformed US foreign policy toward Ukraine.

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“His own cousin was on the front lines. I could have told him the truth, without pretense, without personal interest.” Nate Vance said. “He never tried to find out more.”

The two Vances are related by a common grandmother and are first cousins. Nate Vance, at 47 the elder cousin by six years, in a 78-minute January interview with The Real Jim Morris Show said that he and the vice president knew each other well from family summer vacations.

Both served in the United States Marine Corps (USMC) but at different times. The more senior Nate Vance, per his account, joined the famous American amphibious infantry formation in 1995 as a 17-year-old. At the time, USMC units were not deployed into heavy combat. Nate Vance, in public comments, said his USMC training taught him strong infantry skills.

Vice President Vance per his official biography served as a USMC military journalist. In 2005 he served in a non-combat role, in Iraq, as an official content creator and escort to civilian media.

JD Vance famously went to university and ultimately Yale Law School following his military service. JD Vance’s West Virginia-branch of the family was less well-off, and the future US Vice President’s childhood was “tough…probably tougher than what’s out in public,” Nate Vance said in the Jim Morris interview.

Once an obscure politician from Ohio, JD Vance became well-known and, to some extent, notorious in Ukraine for comments made on Feb. 21, 2022: “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”

JD Vance made the remarks on Steve Bannon’s War Room Vlog less than 96 hours before Russia invaded Ukraine in a surprise attack with hundreds of thousands of men and armored vehicles. He was subsequently elected to the US Senate on a ticket of stronger protection of US borders and less US foreign engagement.

Nate Vance was a Texas-based oil industry technician when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, after which he traveled to Kyiv out of curiosity and a desire to help Ukrainians if he could.

Images recorded at that time show him working as a volunteer expert in explosives and explosives disposal in the vicinity of the north Kyiv Hostomel suburb.

He later recalled encountering average Ukrainians and being inspired by their willingness to fight for their country.

“It’s real people, it’s not (pixels) on a news screen, they have kids, and dreams and hopes, and they’re in the fight of their lives right now,” Vance said.

Chris Garrett, a longtime volunteer working with Ukrainian forces, in a March 10 post on X, called Nate Vance: “A fantastic guy to work with and a proper team player…No make-up, no eyeliner, just a 100% real man, unlike his cousin.”

Critics of JD Vance have accused the US Vice President of wearing eyeliner. Vance has not commented on the accusations directly. His wife Usha Vance in comments to Times of India on Aug. 9 said her husband’s dark-lined eyes are all natural and the result of “notable lashes.”

Per the elder Nate Vance’s account, he served two years in 2022-2023 in frontline fighting and saw heavy infantry combat. For some of his service he was an operator of an M2 .50caliber machine gun and an M40 automatic grenade launcher, both heavy weapons long in use with US Marine infantry companies. Other sources confirmed he was deployed to forward positions and saw combat in battles in the Kupiansk, Avdiivka, and Pokrovsk sectors.

Vance’s closest call was, per his account, an under-normal-circumstances lethal mortar strike a few meters away that, luckily, detonated behind building rubble that absorbed otherwise deadly splinters.

Kyiv Post confirmed most details of Nate Vance’s combat service with two Ukrainian military sources, one a long-time volunteer and one a fellow service member. Both described him as a professional fighter skilled at tactics and weapons operation.

Kyiv Post researchers found a Facebook account registered to one Nate Vance, a resident of San Antonio, Texas, employed with the energy company Freedom Oilfield Services. The same Nate Vance was identified on LinkedIn as a completions consultant – i.e., an oilfield engineer – with the Plugerville, Texas petroleum-industry company Rockstim, and having worked as a consultant for GE, Marathon Oil, and four other oil patch firms, mostly in Texas.

An X account identified as @VanceNate on March 10 published three snaps seeming to place JD Vance and Nate Vance together at three family holidays over about ten years. Nate Vance had not, by the time this article was published, responded to Kyiv Post requests for comment.

Ukrainian military information platforms confirmed that much of Nate Vance’s service was with an assault unit called Da Vinci Wolves, a former paramilitary unit formed in 2014 by volunteers joining to fight Russia’s original invasion of Ukraine.

By the time Nate Vance became a member of the unit, the formation had become an infantry battalion trained for assault and special operations work as part of the 67th Mechanized Brigade. The unit, on March 10, published a confirmation of the Le Figaro report.

The unit took crushing losses during the Battle of Bakhmut in the first half of 2023, which pitted Ukrainian forces against months of relentless assaults by infantry heavily recruited from Russian prisoners and fielded as shock troops by the Kremlin-linked Wagner mercenary group.

Nate Vance said he left Ukraine and returned to the US in early 2025 primarily to decompress from years of combat but also to avoid risking falling into Russian hands and becoming a liability for his cousin, now in office at Number One Observatory Circle (the US VP’s official residence). Le Figaro reported he spent weeks driving about the US West in a camper van. In Vlog comments, the elder Vance said he had almost completed a memoir of his combat service and was looking for a publisher.   

Vice President Vance on March 8 took to Elon Musk’s X to complain he had been confronted by pro-Ukraine demonstrators while walking with his three-year-old daughter and complained it was inappropriate for him to be forced to defend US policy while in public with his child. In that exchange he defended a recent US cut-off of arms and military intelligence to Ukraine as wise and in the interests of peace.

The Vice President’s account drew a firestorm of anger from Ukrainian users on X. Activist and volunteer Serhii Sternenko shot back hours later: “Look at what you support. By your actions, you are condoning the killing of children. Your actions will lead to even more victims. Tell the parents of the murdered Ukrainian children how uncomfortable you are.”