RFK Jr.'s Big Lie on Ukraine

His parroting of Putin may be the worst part of his fraudulant campaign

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the Connor Roy of American politics. Connor is the eldest son of the fictional billionaire and media magnate, Logan Roy, in the superb HBO series, Succession. Like Connor, RFK Jr. is running for president of the United States based on a delusional ego, a famous father and a family fortune. Like Connor, he has no chance of actually winning but could play a spoiler role. 

Kennedy is currently polling at 20 percent of Democratic voters. This is likely to fade as people realize that he is nothing like his illustrious father or uncles. The greater danger is the Big Lie on Ukraine that he is spreading as one of the core messages of his campaign. 

Kennedy is most famous for his anti-vaccination crusade. He claims the Covid vaccine is a vast government conspiracy that did nothing to stem the pandemic death toll. Washington Post columnist Matt Bai compares him to Donald Trump as “someone trying to run for president with the same cynical mix of star power and misinformation that fueled a nationalist uprising in 2016.”

Central to his campaign is a pro-Putin narrative of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He may be the most prominent Democrat pushing this line, popular among the far right isolationists and the far left anti-imperialists. If he gains traction, he could jeopardize needed aid for Ukraine, once Congressionally authorized funding ends later this year. 

Kennedy spreads Putin’s view of the war, slightly modified for an American audience. In this fantasy, Russia is the victim, America the aggressor. Putin was provoked into invading Ukraine by years of NATO expansion. Putin is just doing what any great power would do, defending his country from US and NATO aggression. The only reason the war continues, in this narrative, is that Neocons in the US and NeoNazis in Ukraine are prolonging the war in order to weaken Russia and overthrow Putin. 

It is worth rebutting just two points from this fairy tale in some detail. 

In an interview this week, Kennedy excused or ignored Russia’s culpability:    

Let’s be honest: It’s a US war against Russia, to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in an abattoir of death and destruction for the geopolitical ambition of the neocons, oft-stated, of regime change for Vladimir Putin and exhausting the Russian military so that they can’t fight anywhere else in the world.

Kennedy claims that Zelensky cozied up to NATO, bowing to alleged pressure from “NeoCons in the Biden White House” and “fascist elements” in his own government. 

Like many who promote this view, Kennedy blames NATO in a long Twitter thread:

It is true that some US officials thought that NATO had no need to expand after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I and many others opposed NATO expansion in the 1990’s believing that the newly liberated European nations could better be incorporated into the European Union. There was little need for NATO to continue, we believed.

The “former Soviet satellites” had other thoughts. Kennedy denies the agency of smaller nations. He and others assume a Great Power logic, that only the big nations matter. Rep. Jamie Raskin calls this the “colonialist reflex.” But in this case, the security imperatives of smaller nations determined the policy. I critiqued a similar line promoted by Chicago University professor John Mersheimer for Harvard University’s Russia Matters last year:

The key driver of NATO expansion was one that I underestimated and that Mearsheimer specifically ignores: Eastern Europeans wanted protection from a historic foe. They pushed to join NATO; America did not pull them into an anti-Russian pact. Centuries of invasions instilled a genuine fear of Russia into their collective memories. Putin’s numerous nuclear threats since the beginning of the war remind all that however weakened Russia’s army may be by its battles in Ukraine, its nuclear weapons can destroy any nation it targets.

This is true of Sweden and Finland today. The U.S. is not manipulating them into joining a crusade to conquer Russia. These nations fear that Putin’s goals go far beyond those Mearsheimer describes. That is why they are abandoning decades (in Sweden’s case, three centuries) of neutrality. If they followed Mearsheimer’s logic, surely these countries would see that their national interests would be best served by assuaging Russia’s security concerns and continuing to remain free of military alliances.

Could the NATO enlargement been done better? Absolutely. The same for the unnecessary deployment of missile interceptors in Romania and Poland. But these are not genuine security threats, as former US Ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer lays out in his Brookings Institution brief.

In May 2002, Putin met NATO leaders in Rome and agreed to a joint declaration on deepening and giving a new quality to NATO-Russia relations. In his address at that NATO-Russia summit, Putin expressed no concern about NATO enlargement, even though the Alliance planned a second summit later that year, and the Russian president had to know that NATO then would invite additional countries, quite probably including the Baltic states, to join.

Kennedy’s key point is straight out of Putin’s frequent rants about the supposed US “coup” in 2014.

There is no truth to this whatsoever. Kennedy is repeating an integral part of Putin’s effort to discredit Ukraine’s government as illegitimate and to erase the idea of an independent Ukrainian nation. For Putin (and Kennedy), the only way Ukraine could have a government that he did not support is if it was “hand-picked” by the United States - or in this case, by a single assistant secretary of state.

Nor was the new government “unelected.” It was elected by the Ukrainian parliament and then changed leadership peacefully and democratically in numerous popular elections since.

Yes, during the mass uprising in 2014 in Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, then an assistant secretary of state (another RFK mistake: Nuland is now undersecretary of state but was not then), was taped (likely by Russia) in a phone call where she hubristically criticized the European Union for its mediation efforts and strongly stated her preference for certain officials to be part of a new government. But there is no evidence that the US fomented a coup or picked its leaders. There have been many coups staged by the United States - most famously the 1954 overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosadegh - but this was not one of them.

Supporters of EU integration are seen at a rally at Independence Square in central Kyiv, December 8, 2013.

The 2014 Maidan Uprising was a mass protest of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians over weeks and months that forced the pro-Putin President Victor Yanukovych from office. You cannot stage this. Yanukovych had rejected the popular association agreement with the European Union, arrested his political opponent Yulia Tymoshenko (who had pushed unsuccessfully for Ukraine membership in NATO in 2008) and bent to pressure from Putin to align with Russia rather than the West. Infuriated Ukrainians took to the streets. After Yanukovych’s police killed scores of them, the protests intensified and Yanukovych fled to Russia.

Details, like Kennedy’s claim that the US spent $5 billion on the “coup” come straight from Russian propaganda. In this case, it is a Russia Today posting from 2014 that claimed “US foreign aid agencies paid for Kiev street violence…it’s invested $5 billion so far in the uprising.”

The truth is more prosaic. The U.S. State Department said that the $5 billion represented the total of US aid to Ukraine since its independence in 1991. Much of this aid was for the promotion of democracy through the National Endowment for Democracy. But Putin sees such aid as fomenting revolts against his rule and that of his authoritarian allies. He has long vilified it, and now, too, does Kennedy.

The true history is not hard to find. NPR, for example, has an excellent, objective summary of the 2014 protests and Putin’s subsequent invasion of Crimea and the Donbas. But you have to want to know the truth, not just parrot Putin’s claim.

Here is NPR’s summary:

2014: The Maidan revolution and Crimea's annexation

November 2013 through February 2014

Just days before it is to be signed, Yanukovych announces that he will refuse to sign an association agreement with the European Union to bring Ukraine into a free trade agreement. He cites pressure from Russia as a reason for his decision.

The announcement sparks huge protests across Ukraine — the largest since the Orange Revolution — calling for Yanukovych to resign. Protesters begin camping out in Kyiv's Maidan, also known as Independence Square, and occupy government buildings, including Kyiv's city hall and the justice ministry.

In late February, violence between police and protesters leaves more than 100 dead in the single bloodiest week in Ukraine's post-Soviet history.

Ahead of a scheduled impeachment vote on Feb. 22, Yanukovych flees, eventually arriving in Russia. Ukraine's parliament votes unanimously to remove Yanukovych and install an interim government, which announces it will sign the EU agreement and votes to free Tymoshenko from prison.

The new government charges Yanukovych with mass murder of the Maidan protesters and issues a warrant for his arrest.

Russia declares that the change in Ukraine's government is an illegal coup. Almost immediately, armed men appear at checkpoints and facilities in the Crimean Peninsula. Putin at first denies they are Russian soldiers but later admits it.

Putin has been promoting his “coup” lie since 2014, repeating it constantly. For example, in what is now clearly part of his preparation to invade Ukraine, he said in a major oped in June 2021, “Why did the United States organize a coup, and why did the countries of Europe weakly support it, provoking a split in Ukraine itself and the withdrawal of Crimea?”

Notice that Putin puts his illegal annexation of Crimea in the passive voice, a technique copied by his apologists. Thus a brutal invasion becomes “the withdrawal of Crimea.” Similar, RFK Jr. and other supporter’s of Putin’s narrative rarely talk about Putin’s war crimes, the murders, tortures, systematic rapes, millions of refugees and the forced deportations of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children. The whole point is to shift the focus to the United States. It is a classic distraction and diversion tactic.

RFK Jr. is not the only one doing this. There is a drumbeat on the right and left insisting that Russia’s invasion was defensive while Ukraine’s resistance is war.

Some go at it hard, such as the full page ad in The New York Times May 16 (above) from Jeffrey Sachs and a dozen retired experts. Some peddle it more softly, such as my former colleagues at the Quincy Institute, who support the Sachs ad and are sponsoring Sachs for a talk later this month on “Searching for a Ceasefire in Ukraine.”

The key tells are the airbrushing of Russian actions, the avoidance of any criticism of Putin beyond a brief condemnation of his invasion before pivoting back to the U.S. role. (Note the use of the passive voice in the ad copy, as if all the devastation of the war just happened, or that the blame is equal.) Most of all, it is the focus on an immediate ceasefire that would leave Russia controlling 20 percent of Ukraine and millions of Ukrainians.

Those who promote Putin’s line while posturing as opponents of U.S. militarism should learn from another presidential candidate, Marianne Williamson. She writes passionately and eloquently on Substack about why she supports Ukraine.

For those of us who have spent years opposing the influence of the military industrial complex on U.S. foreign policy, the situation poses a peculiar challenge. It’s possible to believe that the undue influence of the U.S. war machine - aided in Washington by “the Blob” of foreign policy experts - is very real, and at the same time believe the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a criminal venture that cannot be tolerated by the world. 

To those who mask their support for Putin in the cloak of diplomacy or those who may earnestly believe that the main objective at this point must be to simply end the war, to press for an immediate cease-fire, Williamson has the realistic retort.

The United States should support diplomatic solutions to any dispute, in Ukraine as well as anywhere else. On that point we should never waver. But in the case of the war in Ukraine, Russia would meet any such overture with nothing but further aggression until such time as military conditions made it difficult for him to refuse the offer. Why would he do otherwise, when in his mind he is winning the war? His brutal, autocratic rule in Russia and the atrocities committed by his troops in Ukraine give us a vivid picture of what his conquest of Ukraine would mean. Any withdrawal of U.S. support for Ukraine at this point means only one thing: the end of Ukraine.

There are many more errors in RFK Jr.’s claims, including his assertion that the U.S. deployed nuclear-capable missiles in Ukraine, one he has since retracted. This is the problem with relying on Russia as your information source. Some of the lies are just too blatant.

But the entire construct is like water-damaged plywood - a few determined probes exposes the rot. We just have to want to look.