Ron DeSantis continues to recalibrate his position on the Ukraine War.
During an interview Friday at Iowa’s Family Leadership Summit with Tucker Carlson, DeSantis took issue with Carlson saying he changed his position from telling Carlson that the Russian invasion was a simple “territorial dispute,” rejecting Carlson’s restatement of DeSantis’ position as changing his view “to describe Putin as a war criminal and say that it was central to America’s foreign policy.”
“So the last part I did not say,” DeSantis said, leaving it unclear whether Carlson meant the “war criminal” statement (which he made in March while walking back his statement to Carlson) or the idea that defending Ukraine was “central to America’s foreign policy.”
DeSantis reiterated his critique of the Joe Biden administration’s “blank check” policy in Ukraine, though he stopped short of telling Carlson that Putin was a “war criminal,” describing him somewhat more amorphously as a “bad guy.”
“You dissent from the DC foreign policy elite, they then try to smear you and say, ‘Oh, you must be for Putin.’ I’ve always thought Putin is a bad guy. I still think he’s a bad guy. But that’s a separate question for a leader who’s got to look at the world in very clear-eyed glasses. You know that it’s not all peaches and cream out there and you have to make a judgment about what’s in America’s national interest,” DeSantis said.
DeSantis reaffirmed the “territorial dispute” framing soon thereafter.
“And the dispute at this point or the war at this point is not whether Ukraine’s government is going to fall. They’re fighting over territory on the far eastern part of the country between Russia and Ukraine. And that’s kind of where this is at. So the question is OK, how do you get that to where we can stop this and also from our national interest,” DeSantis said.
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