Potential Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is speaking out against the U.S. support of Ukraine as that country fights against a Russian invasion. 

It has been reported that DeSantis has been privately exploring the possibility of running for president in the 2024 elections.

The U.S. military has spent nearly $50 billion in 2022 in aid to Ukraine. But according to DeSantis, protecting Ukraine is not a “vital” national interest for the U.S. His stance, while in line with former President Donald Trump, is in opposition of the majority of GOP politicians.

“While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Communist Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them,” DeSantis wrote in a questionnaire response Fox New’s Tucker Carlson posted on his Twitter feed, NBC News reported. The questionnaire was sent by Carlson to all major prospective Republican presidential candidates.

DeSantis’ statement was broadcast on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” on Fox News.

“The Biden administration’s virtual ‘blank check’ funding of this conflict for ‘as long as it takes,’ without any defined objectives or accountability, distracts from our country’s most pressing challenges,” DeSantis continued.

He stressed that “peace should be the objective” for the U.S. and said he was against sending “F-16s and long-range missiles” to help Ukraine defend itself.

DeSantis’ statements seem to agree with a January poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 40 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning independent voters thought the U.S. was giving too much support to Ukraine, The New York Times reported.

The support the U.S. has been giving to Ukraine has left others to wonder if the aid is part of a proxy war strategy on the part of the U.S.

A proxy war is a conflict in which a third party intervenes indirectly in a pre-existing war in order to influence the strategic outcome in favor of its preferred faction, as defined by the Oxford Dictionary. They are often used as tools by great-power rivalry because they allow one side to “bleed the other without a direct clash of arms,” according to a Bloomberg analysis.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently stated that the war in Ukraine isn’t just a conflict between Moscow and Kyiv. He outright called it a “proxy war” in which the world’s most powerful military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), is using Ukraine as a way to devastate the Russian state, Bloomberg reported.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis answers questions from the media in the Florida Cabinet following his State of the State address during a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives, March 7, 2023, at the Capitol in Tallahassee, Fla. Advocates for open government are ringing alarms about plans by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration that could make it harder to learn what public officials are doing and to speak out against them. (AP Photo/Phil Sears, File)