Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has accused US President Joe Biden of disrupting peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, because Washington “wanted the war.”
Kennedy made the allegation on Friday during a speech in Arizona, where he announced the suspension of his third-party campaign for the White House in the swing state and endorsed Republican Donald Trump.
According to Kennedy, Washington had deliberately drawn Moscow into the Ukraine war with the objective of regime change in Russia.
“President Biden sent [then-UK Prime Minister] Boris Johnson to Ukraine to force President [Vladimir] Zelensky to tear up a peace agreement that he and the Russians had already signed, and the Russians were already withdrawing troops,” said the son of the 1960s-era Democratic US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of President John F. Kennedy.
Moscow has previously blamed London for blocking the Ukraine peace deal. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in April that Kiev abandoned a proposed peace treaty with Russia, approved by negotiators in Istanbul, in 2022 under British pressure. Boris Johnson visited Kiev in April of that year, and reportedly told Zelensky to “just fight,” prompting the latter to pull out of the discussions. The former prime minister has since denied derailing the peace talks.
Kennedy also accused the US government of staging a coup against the democratically-elected government of Ukraine in 2014 and rejecting the Minsk Agreements, a series of peace protocols negotiated between Ukraine, Russia and the European nations in 2019, pushing Kiev into a conflict with Moscow.
“The Biden White House repeatedly spurned Russia’s offers to settle this war peacefully,” Kennedy claimed.
The US has sought to exhaust the Russian Army and degrade its capacity to fight, he added, arguing that the objectives of the US government “had nothing to do” with protecting Ukraine’s sovereignty.
Kennedy has described Ukraine as a “victim of the West” and “a proxy in a geopolitical struggle initiated by the ambitions of the US neocons for American global hegemony.”
He went on to explain that Trump’s promise to reopen negotiations with Russia and end the war as soon as he takes office were among the reasons for him to endorse the former president’s campaign.
Kennedy made clear that he wasn’t formally ending his bid for the White House and called on his supporters to continue to back him in other states where their votes are unlikely to sway the outcome.