DeSantis Breaks From Most Republicans to Side With Trump on Ukraine, Calling Russian Invasion a ‘Territorial Dispute’

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has finally outlined, to some extent, his position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, dismissing the brutal war as a “territorial dispute” and breaking with most of the Republican Party to side with former President Donald Trump’s view of the conflict.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired the results of a foreign policy questionnaire he sent to the Republican Party’s 2024 candidates, including potential candidates like DeSantis, on Monday night. Carlson observed that for a long time, no one could definitively say where DeSantis stood on Ukraine.

The DeSantis statement shows the Florida governor dismissing the violent and aggressive invasion of a sovereign nation as a “territorial dispute” and arguing the U.S. should focus on its borders first:

While the U.S. has many vital national interests – securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party – becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them. The Biden administration’s virtual “blank check” funding of this conflict for “as long as it takes,” without any defined objectives or accountability, distracts from our country’s most pressing challenges.

Without question, peace should be the objective. The U.S. should not provide assistance that could require the deployment of American troops or enable Ukraine to engage in offensive operations beyond its borders. F-16s and long-range missiles should therefore be off the table. These moves would risk explicitly drawing the United States into the conflict and drawing us closer to a hot war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. That risk is unacceptable.

Carlson posted DeSantis’ full statement on Twitter.

The New York Times notes that DeSantis has largely tried to keep his position on Ukraine ambiguous, even as reporters have tried to ask him about it amid speculations of his presidential campaign. In a recent interview with Murdoch-owned paper Times of London, DeSantis grew irritable when a journalist tried to ask him how he would have handled Ukraine differently than President Joe Biden.

DeSantis answered by declaring Biden “weak on the world stage” and failing at deterrence, but he was pressed to explain how else he would have handled the situation.

“Perhaps you should cover some other ground? I think I’ve said enough,” he said.