Ron DeSantis says ‘real risk’ Nikki Haley would send U.S. troops to Ukraine

Ron DeSantis is drawing a distinction between himself and a leading 2024 rival on the question of Ukraine.

In Iowa, the Florida Governor argued that Nikki Haley would support an American troop deployment to help counter Russian efforts in the ongoing proxy war.

“I think there’s a real risk that she would send American troops to Ukraine to fight,” DeSantis said, adding that he is “the only veteran in the race” and that it is “not in our interest to be getting involved in a war there.”

During a November debate with other Republican candidates, Haley stressed the importance of “partnerships,” calling Ukraine a “freedom loving, pro-American country that is fighting for its survival and its democracy” and saying the U.S. should “give them the equipment and the ammunition to win.”

Though she did not call for a troop deployment, her position was clearly more attuned to what the Volodymyr Zelenskyy regime wants than DeSantis’.

The Governor has called the Russian war a “territorial dispute” and has urged for months a “settlement” in the conflict, and his comments Monday jibed with that.

“If I could snap my fingers, I give the territory back to Ukraine. But the reality is we cannot get suckered into a land war there,” DeSantis said.

The Governor also discussed decades of military futility by the American government, by way of contextualizing being “concerned about what could happen in terms of American troops being involved.”

“Having served in the Iraq conflict, we’ve done a lot since the end of the Cold War of putting people in these conflicts. And then we don’t win victories. We basically, since 9/11, we haven’t really won a clear-cut victory,” DeSantis said.

“Like in Iraq, everything we were told to do we would accomplish. But the overall mission of there being a pro American democracy, that just didn’t happen. Afghanistan was a basket case for so long. And so as Commander-in-Chief, if you’re going to put people in harm’s way, you only do it if it’s serving a vital interest of this country.”