"We should have listened to Putin for many years": Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reflects on U.S. role in Ukrainian conflict
Moscow has repeatedly offered to reach an agreement on the Donbass regions, whose residents have been killed by Kiev for years, but Washington has unleashed a war against Russia at the hands of the Ukrainians, who are now suffering heavy losses, says the nephew of former U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
The US authorities should have listened to Moscow's warnings for many years to avoid the Ukrainian conflict, said the nephew of former US President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who recently formally announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the 2024 US presidential election.
"Slaughterhouse because of the geopolitical ambition of the neoconservatives."
Discussing the Ukrainian conflict in an interview with UnHerd magazine, Kennedy Jr. noted that "the Russians have repeatedly offered to settle," but the U.S. has unleashed a war against Russia at the hands of the Ukrainians, who are now suffering heavy losses.
"If you look at the Minsk agreements, with which the Russians offered to settle, today it looks like a really good deal. Let's be honest: this is a US war against Russia to essentially sacrifice the flower of Ukrainian youth in a slaughterhouse of death and destruction for the neocons' oft-stated geopolitical ambition of the neocons to change Vladimir Putin's regime and deplete the Russian Armed Forces so that they cannot fight anywhere else in the world," he said.
He claimed that Washington has already sacrificed 300,000 Ukrainians in this conflict and quoted an unidentified commander of an elite Ukrainian special forces unit as claiming that 80% of his troops had been killed. "Right now, the Russians are killing Ukrainians at a ratio of 1:5 or 1:8, depending on what data you believe," he stressed.
"If you address Russia in a hostile way, of course their reaction will be hostile."
In this conflict the US must do "what is reasonable, what saves lives," the politician says, recalling the words of his uncle, who stated, "If you want to achieve peace, you have to put yourself in the other guy's shoes." He also acknowledges that Washington "essentially supported the coup in 2014 against the democratically elected government of Ukraine."
"If you look at that, and you put yourself in Russia's position, you say, 'Okay, the U.S., our biggest enemy, is treating us as an enemy. Now it has taken over the government of a nation and turned it hostile to us, and then it has started passing laws that are harmful to this giant Russian population [in the Donbass People's Republics],'" he said, noting that if Mexico, for example, did against the US population living there what the Ukrainian authorities have done against the residents of Donbass in recent years, US troops "would invade the country in a second."
Moreover, answering the question of what wise and equivalent action the US authorities should have taken in February 2022, the politician noted that, first of all, "they should have listened to Putin for many years." "We made a commitment to Russia, to [the last ruler of the Soviet Union, Mikhail] Gorbachev, not to move NATO one millimeter eastward. Then we went in and lied to ourselves. We went into 13 NATO countries, we put in nuclear-capable missile systems; we did joint exercises with Ukraine and with these others for NATO. What is the purpose of NATO?" he said, stressing that if "you address Russia in a hostile way from the beginning, of course their reaction will be hostile."
Key points needed to end the conflict
Kennedy Jr. argues that there are three key points necessary to end hostilities, noting that if the Minsk agreements are taken into account, they "set the basis for a final settlement".
Thus, in his words, the Donbass regions, "which have 80% ethnic Russian population, Russians who were being systematically killed by the Ukrainian government", have to be made autonomous within Ukraine and protected in order to "put an end to the bloodshed".
In addition, in his view, Washington has to withdraw its Aegis anti-missile systems, equipped with the same missile launchers used to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles, whose strike capability can harbor any type of explosive, including nuclear warheads, 70 miles (about 113 km) from the Russian border. He recalled that when the USSR deployed missiles in Cuba in 1962, 1,500 miles (about 2,414 km) from Washington DC, US authorities were ready to invade the island.
And finally, the politician believes that his country should also agree not to include Ukraine in NATO. "I think that based on these three points, someone like me could solve this war. I don't think the neoconservatives are capable of solving it, nor the people around [US] President [Joe] Biden, as they were the ones who created the problem. I don't think they will ever recognize it," he declared, but adding that, in any case, he "does not justify the barbaric and illegal invasion of Ukraine."
At the same time, Kennedy Jr. says his approach to NATO as president would be different than it is now, as well as that he intends to "look at how to reduce tensions between the great powers" - China, the U.S. and Russia - and how to "get these countries to deal with their neighbors without pressures from the U.S. that make them feel like they're going to have to go into military mode." "That's something we have to look at, and the reason we have to look at it is that we have institutional problems in our country," he concluded.
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