Florida’s Republican governor and wannabe presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said Tuesday he supported the idea of a ceasefire in Ukraine — a move long opposed by Kyiv, which has set reclaiming its lost 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 around 700,000 were killed.
The idea is likely to get the cold shoulder from Kyiv, where President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said a ceasefire would only allow Russia to regroup its forces, and make the war last longer.
In his 10-point peace plan presented last November at a G20 summit, Zelenskyy set the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity as a precondition for peace, stressing that point was “not up to negotiations.”
DeSantis’ remarks are the latest in a series of controversial comments made by the Florida governor — who has yet to formally announce his bid for the 2024 presidential election — on the war in Ukraine.
Last month, he sparked fury even within his own Republican Party after calling the conflict a “territorial dispute,” and said becoming “further entangled” in Ukraine was not part of the U.S.’s “vital national interests.”
