Ramaswamy differed with some of his opponents on the issue of Ukraine, arguing the United States should limit its support for the country in its fight against Russia.

“The reality is just because ... Putin's an evil dictator does not mean that Ukraine is good. This is a country that has banned 11 opposition parties,” Ramaswamy said.

That’s accurate. But it needs context.

Ukraine banned 11 pro-Russian parties — the largest of which occupied 44 out of 450 seats in parliament, according to Radio Free Europe. The leader of the party, Viktor Medvedchuk, is aligned with Putin. Putin is the godfather of Medvedchuk's daughter, Radio Free Europe reported.
-Analysis by Aaron Sharockman, PolitiFact

Burgum gets a question for the first time in a while — on farmers — and turns it into a long foreign-policy answer. He’s trying to remain relevant but always seems to be late to the party on a topic that has already been talked out. According to The New York Times, he has spoken the least tonight: just five minutes and 49 seconds. By contrast, Ramaswamy has spoken the most: nine minutes, 25 seconds.

—Analysis by Nathaniel Rakich of 538

Christie criticized the idea that the president could cozy up to Vladimir Putin, noting that all recent presidents have failed to engage Putin by not being tough enough. He then hit Trump for having said that Putin was "brilliant and a great leader." As the night has worn on, Christie continues to be really the only candidate who is bothering to attack the guy who is 40 or more points ahead of every other candidate in national GOP primary polls.

— Analysis by Geoffrey Skelley of 538

Ilia Calderón is asking about sending U.S. troops to Mexico. In a late August/early September survey by Morning Consult, 41 percent of Republicans said they thought that sending U.S. troops to fight cartels in Mexico would be “very effective” at limiting the supply of illegal drugs in the United States. Other strategies had more support among Republicans, such as sending more resources to the U.S.-Mexico border (54 percent), empowering U.S. law enforcement to combat opioids (45 percent), and punishing drug violators in the United States (43 percent).
—Analysis by 538

At PolitiFact, this is our fifth presidential cycle. We’ve published more than 23,000 fact-checks since launching in 2007, all using our Truth-O-Meter, which rates claims on a scale from “True” to “Pants on Fire” false.

If PolitiFact is new to you, there are a couple of rules of the road. First, we don’t fact-check every claim every candidate says. We couldn’t … we’d be dead. We focus on claims that are particularly interesting, in the news or obviously potentially wrong. Our grading scale tries to measure both the literal truth and how voters might interpret a politicians’ words. So if Pence tonight claims that he and Trump “achieved energy independence” in their first three years of office, it can be more complicated to fact-check than you think.

In Pence’s case, yes, the United States did produce more energy than its citizens consumed during the Trump-Pence administration, but that was built on more than a decade of improvements in shale oil and gas production, as well as renewables. And the U.S. did not produce more gasoline than it consumes (which is maybe what you were thinking about). And if that’s not enough, even though the U.S. didn’t use all the energy it produced, it still imported a substantial amount of energy to serve domestic markets.

So far in this cycle, we’ve published more than 50 fact-checks of the GOP candidates. Our checks tend to follow the polling of the race. We'll be drawing on those previous fact-checks, as well as the thousands of other claims we've vetted, throughout the night.
—Aaron Sharockman, PolitiFact