DeSantis joins Trump in opposing cluster bombs for Ukraine

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who is running for president in 2024, spoke out Wednesday against the Biden administration’s decision to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions, joining former President Trump in opposing the move.

“Would you support sending cluster bombs to Ukraine, like some of the other Republican candidates, or are you opposed to it?” host Howie Carr asked DeSantis in an interview on “The Howie Carr Show.”

“I don’t want to do anything that’s gonna escalate this conflict. I think that right now you have an open-ended blank check. There’s no clear objective for victory. And this is kind of dragging on and on,” DeSantis said, adding that the danger is this could escalate or “end up just going on for years.”

“So, yes or no to cluster bombs if you were president?” Carr pressed the Florida governor.

“I would not do that, no. I think it runs, I think it probably runs a risk of escalation. Basically what I said from the beginning is no weapons that could lead to attacks inside Russia or escalating the conflict. We cannot become involved in this directly,” DeSantis said.

The administration last week announced plans to provide Ukraine with the controversial weapons. The bombs contain several submunitions that can lay dormant after they’ve been deployed, posing risks to civilians.

President Biden, who is running for reelection in 2024, defended the call, saying it was a “very difficult decision” and explaining that a factor is “the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition.”

Trump, who lost his reelection bid to Biden in 2020 and is running for another four years in the White House in 2024, said this week that Biden “should not be dragging us further toward World War III by sending cluster munitions to Ukraine.”

DeSantis, who has been polling as a top Republican contender after Trump, also raised concerns in the Wednesday interview that sending the weapons to Ukraine could “diminish our own stockpiles and prevent us from being able to respond to exigencies around the world.”

“What if something happens in the Indo-Pacific? What, we just don’t have an ability to respond? So there’s a whole host of things around the world that we’ve got to be concerned with and I think Biden is ignoring a lot of other threats,” DeSantis said.

Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence has backed the Biden administration’s move. He told Fox News‘s “America’s Newsroom” that he welcomes the decision to send cluster munitions, and that the U.S.’s interest is “to give the Ukrainian military the means to repel Russian aggression.”

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