RFK Jr. Says He’d End Russia–Ukraine War If Elected

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., nephew of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy, speaks to people gathered under the Victory Column in the city center to hear speeches during a protest against coronavirus-related restrictions and government policy, in Berlin, Germany, on Aug. 29, 2020. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says that he'd end the Russo–Ukrainian conflict as soon as possible if he were elected president.

Asked how he would handle the war, Kennedy said quickly, “I would end it. The Russians want to end it.”

To do this, Kennedy said he'd call for enforcement of the Minsk Accords, which sought to provide a peaceful settlement of territorial disputes between Russia and Ukraine.

The Minsk agreements, and the larger Russo–Ukrainian War, center around the status of Donbas, a pro-Russian separatist region in Eastern Ukraine that declared independence from Kyiv in 2014 following the fall of the previous pro-Russian regime.

The region, which is heavily populated by ethnic Russians, has been the focal point of the conflict since 2014.

A man walks in front of a destroyed school in the city of Bakhmut, in the eastern Ukranian region of Donbass, on May 28, 2022, on the 94th day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. (Aris Messinis/AFP via Getty Images)

“The Russians were pushing us for a settlement that would keep Donbas as part of Ukraine,” Kennedy told The Epoch Times. “Donbas voted 90 [percent] to 10 [percent] to leave and go into Russia. And the Russians said, ‘No, we don’t want you. We just want you to be making sure the ethnic Russians in Donbas are safe and not being murdered by the government that the U.S. put in,” a reference to allegations that U.S.-backed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is part of a larger anti-Russian geopolitical strategy.

The reason Zelenskyy won, Kennedy opined, was due to his backing of the Minsk Accords.

“He ran on a peace platform,” Kennedy said. “And then he was bullied by the neocons in the White House and by some ultra-fascists in Ukraine, who insisted on going to war against Russia.”

‘Geopolitical Machinations’

Kennedy argued that the “Revolution of Dignity,” the 2014 Ukrainian political revolution that toppled the pro-Russia regime, was backed by the United States in pursuit of holistic “geopolitical machinations” in the region.

U.S. funds helped back the anti-Russian movement, and the movement was backed by visits from prominent Americans like the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland expressing support for the movement. Leaked phone calls between Nuland and the ambassador to Ukraine revealed the two discussing who would inhabit leadership positions in the new government.

In view of these concerns, Kennedy blasted the conflict as a “proxy war” orchestrated by “neocons” like Nuland, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, all former members of President Barack Obama’s administration.

FBI Director Christopher Wray (right), CIA Director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Director of the National Security Agency Gen. Paul Nakasone, and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier testify during a House Select Committee on Intelligence hearing concerning worldwide threats, on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 9, 2023. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

After the boondoggle of the Iraq War, which Kennedy emphasized cost the United States $8 trillion and cost Iraq hundreds of thousands of innocent dead, Kennedy said these figures were “exiled” before “somehow finding their way back into the Biden administration.”

Kennedy blamed the current conflict on the drive of “neocons ... to do regime change in Russia.”

“President Biden has now admitted that, he said that our goal is regime change in Russia,” Kennedy said. He cited a comment in the same strain from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who said the goal is to “degrade” Russia’s ability to fight anywhere else in the world.

“That’s not a humanitarian mission,” Kennedy said. “And it’s not good for Ukraine. We’re killing all these Ukrainian kids for these geopolitical machinations.”

‘End the Warfare State’

Kennedy tied his opposition to the conflict to larger concerns about the U.S. foreign policy of the past two decades, which he said has caused increasing debasement of U.S. currency, calling on the United States to “end the warfare state” and focus its efforts on domestic concerns.

“The Ukraine War is part of the scheme of things that we’re doing with our foreign policy that’s ... causing our currency to lose the faith and credit of other nations,” Kennedy said.

“The root of inflation is that we print money, and we don’t have a base currency,” he said. “And fiat currency—which is paper money—was invented so that we could, so nations could go to war without really getting permission to go to war because, otherwise, they'd have to go raise taxes and people would be making sacrifices.”

He pointed to both Iraq and Ukraine as examples of this.

“It cost us $8 trillion in Iraq. Ukraine is costing $113 billion. We have to print that money. We have to borrow $6 billion a day from the Chinese and Japanese in order to pay that debt. We don’t have that money.”

The solution, Kennedy said, is to “end the warfare state” and look inward.

“We need to end the warfare state. We need to close the bases. We’ve got 800 bases abroad. We have to print $1.3 trillion a year to pay for our military budget and for the security state that we’ve created because of the military,” he said.

Heading off challenges that this would mean a less safe homeland, Kennedy said, "The military adventures abroad are not making us safe at home. They’re making it more dangerous to be an American. It’s the opposite of what everybody wants.

“And so we need to bring those, we need to bring that money home and we need to rebuild our infrastructure in this country. We need to rebuild our industrial base. We need to protect our borders. We need to make America again.”