Florida’s Republican governor and wannabe presidential candidate Ron DeSantis mentioned Tuesday he supported the thought of a ceasefire in Ukraine — a transfer lengthy opposed by Kyiv, which has set reclaiming its misplaced territory as a precondition for any talks with Russia.
“It’s in everybody’s interest to try to get to a place where we can have a ceasefire,” DeSantis said in an interview with the Japanese, English-language weekly Nikkei Asia.
“You don’t want to end up in like a [Battle of] Verdun situation, where you just have mass casualties, mass expense and end up with a stalemate,” he added, referring to the longest battle of World War I, in which round 700,000 had been killed.
The thought is prone to get the chilly shoulder from Kyiv, the place President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said a ceasefire would solely enable Russia to regroup its forces, and make the conflict last more.
In his 10-point peace plan introduced final November at a G20 summit, Zelenskyy set the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity as a precondition for peace, stressing that time was “not up to negotiations.”
DeSantis’ remarks are the newest in a sequence of controversial feedback made by the Florida governor — who has but to formally announce his bid for the 2024 presidential election — on the conflict in Ukraine.
Last month, he sparked fury even inside his personal Republican Party after calling the battle a “territorial dispute,” and mentioned changing into “further entangled” in Ukraine was not a part of the U.S.’s “vital national interests.”
