Exclusive — Derrick Van Orden: 'This War Has to Be Contained to Ukraine'

“This war has to be contained to Ukraine,” Derrick Van Orden, a retired Navy SEAL and Republican candidate running to represent Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District, said of U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with special guest host Jerome Hudson.

Van Orden remarked, “If Vladimir Putin steps one inch into a NATO country, we destroy any military unit that did that – 100 percent – we bring forward the full spectrum of all NATO power and stop that stuff. We have to understand – the world has to understand –  that Article 5 is immutable. That is not changing.”

A NATO-imposed no-fly zone over Ukraine would excessively escalate the Russia-Ukraine war, Van Orden held.

He stated, “Unfortunately, we have a lot of chickenhawks in Washington, D.C. now calling for a no-fly zone, and you know what? When an aircraft violates a no-fly zone, you don’t cast disparaging remarks at the pilot over the guard frequency, you shoot him down. So that’s NATO aircraft shooting down Russian aircraft, and that is something that we really do not want to see. The reason being that Vladimir Putin has the second-largest or the largest nuclear arsenal in the entire world, but we cannot allow him to intimidate us by encroaching and dictating what we can and cannot do.”

He continued, “Vladimir Putin has made it really clear: Do not put a no-fly zone out here. And we are still being unclear with Vladimir Putin with the whole NATO thing. They’re trying to say that if he gets into a NATO country, that that’s a showstopper for us, and I applaud the world body for saying that, but we have to make sure that Vladimir Putin knows that is the hard line for real.”

“We should continue to arm the Ukrainians,” he added. “Sending a jet to Ukraine is equivalent to sending a surface-to-air missile, with these caveats: they don’t launch from NATO airfields; they’re not piloted by NATO pilots; and they’re serviced by NATO ground crew.”

He concluded, “If you give the aircraft to the Ukrainians, let them fly them. This war has to be contained to Ukraine, and they’re doing a remarkable job. President Zelensky is showing true leadership in the harshest circumstances possible, and the United States has to continue to support them. But we do not want to escalate the conflict any farther than it already is, and the chickenhawks in D.C. who are calling for no-fly zones and to directly attack Russia are not doing anybody a service by doing that.”