Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis weighed in on President Joe Biden’s unannounced visit to Ukraine on Feb. 20, criticizing the President’s “blank check” promise to the European nation and noting that the communist regime in China is greater threat to the values that the United States and its global allies uphold at this time.
DeSantis was speaking to hosts of Fox News’s “Fox and Friends,” which aired around the time the governor spoke at a pro-law enforcement event held in a catering hall in Staten Island, New York, this morning.
“They have effectively a blank-check policy with no clear, strategic objective identified, and these things can escalate, and I don’t think it’s in our interests to be getting into a proxy war with China, getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea,” DeSantis said, referring to Biden’s exchange with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, during which the U.S. president pledged an additional half-billion dollars.
“So I think it would behoove them to identify what is the strategic objective that they’re trying to achieve, but just saying it’s an open-ended blank check, that is not acceptable,” he continued.
According to a January report by the non-profit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the U.S. Congress approved more than $113 billion of military and non-military assistance to Ukraine in 2022—more than half of Ukraine’s Gross Domestic Product before the war. This amount included $67 billion for defense-related items and $46 billion for humanitarian and economic aid.
The governor added that the scenario of Russia “steamrolling” into NATO countries “has not even come close to happening,” adding that Russia has shown itself to be a “third-rate military power.”
“I think they’ve suffered tremendous, tremendous losses,” DeSantis said, referring to Russia.
The governor added that he believes a major factor causing the war in Ukraine was Russia’s perception of the Biden administration’s “weakness,” and took a swipe at the administration’s handling of the border crisis and its response to China’s surveillance balloon that flew over the United States.
By Gary Bai
