Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida this week clarified his description of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” and said that Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, was a “war criminal” who should “be held accountable for that.” .
DeSantis, who is a Republican and who hopes to announce his presidential campaign in the coming months, made his latest comments in an interview he gave to British television station Piers Morgan, which shared them with The New York Post and Fox News, both owned by Rupert Murdoch.
Last week, DeSantis made one of his most significant remarks about the 2024 presidential campaign to date, to influential Fox News commentator Tuck Carlson, who has criticized the Biden administration’s Ukraine strategy.
“While the United States has many vital national interests,” DeSantis said in his statement, “engaging in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.”
DeSantis did not mention Putin at the time and criticized President Biden’s policy as “a blank check” for Ukraine without clear goals, distracting him from America’s problems.
The “territory dispute” claim was heavily criticized by foreign politicians, as well as by Republicans in Congress and privately, by some Republican donors.
It also placed DeSantis’ views more in line with those of former President Donald J. Trump.
Although DeSantis used that lengthy interview with Morgan earlier this week to clarify his statement to Carlson.
“I think he’s a war criminal,” DeSantis said, referring to Putin, for whom the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for war crimes.
“I don’t know about that, but what I think is that he should be held accountable.”
With Morgan, DeSantis insisted that his comment about a “territory dispute” had been “misconstrued,” though he acknowledged that he should have been more clear.
“Obviously, Russia invaded in 2022,” DeSantis said. “That was wrong. They invaded Crimea and they did it in 2014 and that was wrong too.”
