Family Feuds Over Ukraine

DW Phillips

Mar 10, 2025

JD Vance’s cousin fought Russians for three years in Ukraine. Now Nate Vance accuses the VPOTUS of willful ignorance and complicity in murder.

My first visit to an active war zone was at the age of twenty-one beside my father. We were in the jungle of Angola gathering intel and assisting U.S.-backed freedom fighters defending against Russian imperialists and their Marxist proxies. Decades later I fight for America and Ukraine beside my own son, not with weapons, but cameras and keyboards as documentary filmmakers and journalists. There is great joy experiencing unity of vision and purpose as family in the field.

There is also an inevitable sobering gravitas.

I was shaken when I learned that my son’s vehicle was targeted by a Russian drone on the last visit to Pokrovsk and other locations, though their very skilled driver took evasive maneuvers. It all ended well. But it does not always end well for those who daily experience the Russian war machine. These are difficult things to discuss. Every Ukrainian lives with life and death reality daily. Even as those, like my son, who go to the Ukrainian front, know exactly what they have signed up for.

As an American there is an objective element to this war – understanding right vs. wrong. Embracing the ethics of freedom over transactional “might makes right” thinking. Recognizing the tight parallels between the Ukrainian cause and our own historic American struggle for liberty. We are observers watching David successfully launch stone from his sling in the Elah Valley at an arrogant Goliath.

My son, Honor Phillips, near the front line in Ukraine

But there is a deeply personal and emotional component also. You meet the victims of Russian warcrimes. You become brothers with young men defending their homes on the ground and in the sky. You ride with the humanitarian workers who have left their normal lives to do everything possible to save the innocent. You fall in love with a people for whom freedom is not an abstraction, but a pulsing truth coursing in their veins. You grieve over the willful ignorance of those selfish souls back in your own county whose inability to rise above partisan infighting has robbed them of humanity and plunged them into an abyss of disinformation and Russian propaganda.

It is no small heartache when families are divided. Even after his son, Conor Kennedy, joined Ukraine’s defense as a soldier, Robert Kennedy Jr.—Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services—famously launched a campaign of pro-Russian talking points aimed at delegitimizing Ukraine’s fight for survival. It was an extraordinary split: the son, an actual defender; the father, an actual propagandist for the enemy.

Meet Nate Vance, Soldier of Ukraine, Cousin to VPOTUS

Understand these sentiments and you can begin to feel the emotions behind the words spoken this week to La Figaro by Nate Vance, former United States Marine, three year military veteran of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and cousin of the Vice President of the United States.

Nate Vance hails from my own hometown in Texas. A lifelong Republican and staunch conservative, he put his beliefs into action when he left home to defend Ukraine in its darkest hour.

From 2022 to January 2025, Nate served in the Da Vinci Wolves First Motorized Battalion, fighting in some of the war’s most brutal battles—Kupiansk, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Pokrovsk. My own son was on the ground at Pokrovsk, gathering intelligence that would later reach Members of Parliament at the European Union.

He left the war in January just days before the Presidential Inauguration for one primary reason – his presence on the battlefield created complications and a security crisis. What if the cousin of the Vice President of the United States was captured by Russians?

His returned was soured by the revelation that his cousin was using the White House to abet the war criminals and their atrocities he had spent three years fighting against.

A Soldier’s Fury at His Own Flesh and Blood

Nate Vance is not just angry—he is stunned, betrayed, and now, outspoken. He once assumed JD’s opposition to Ukraine aid was mere political posturing, an appeal to his voter base.

“We are Vladimir Putin’s useful idiots.”

As Nate sees it, his own flesh and blood is assisting the murder of his friends. In his interview with Le Figaro, Nate Vance didn’t mince words:

“Being your family doesn’t mean I’m going to accept you killing my comrades.”

The breaking point leading up to Nate’s interview with La Figaro was the behavior of JD Vance at the Oval Office to President Zelensky, a guest of the White House, head of state and Commander in Chief of the 6th largest military in the world.

“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 watched, along with the rest of the world, as JD Vance berated and lectured President Zelensky—not from a place of knowledge or experience, but from incoherent conclusions drawn from social media rants and the influence of pro-Russian propagandist Tucker Carlson. The same Tucker Carlson whose son, Buckley Carlson, now writes speeches for the Vice President.

“I was disappointed. When JD justifies his distrust of Zelensky by the ‘reports’ he has seen, I thought I was going to choke.”

To remain willfully ignorant of the facts on the ground, yet wield power in such a way that innocent people die—that, Nate believes, is an unspeakable crime.

“The vice president’s continued distrust of Zelensky is unjustified, as are his views on Ukraine.”

Nate Vance did everything he could to reach his cousin, to tell him the truth directly.

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