Almost Everything RFK Jr. Said to Sean Hannity Was Wrong

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, July 26, 2023

 

On Tuesday, Democratic presidential aspirant Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined Fox News host Sean Hannity for an interview before a live audience. During one exchange, the candidate expanded on how his understanding of recent history informs his hostility toward America’s support for Ukraine’s defense against Russian invaders. Kennedy’s monologue inspired wild applause from his audience, and it has been celebrated by right-leaning media figures for its searing candor. It seems of no consequence to Kennedy’s admirers that almost everything he said wasn’t just wrong but wrong in hilariously lazy ways.

 

Kennedy’s ill-considered soliloquy was prompted by questions he refused to answer — why won’t Western Europe commit more resources to its own defense, and why has Joe Biden’s support for Ukrainian sovereignty been halting and contradictory? Kennedy rejected Hannity’s premise and substituted his own, which is that Europe and Biden aren’t on the defensive side of this conflict at all. They are, in fact, the aggressors:

 

On two occasions, the Russians tried to sign a peace agreement with Zelensky. Because of our pushing Ukraine into the war on two occasions . . . in 2019, France, Germany and Russia all agreed to the Minsk accords. That year, Zelensky ran for president. He was a comedian; he had no political experience. Why did he win? Because he ran on one issue: signing the Minsk accords. As soon as he got in there, Victoria Nuland in the White House told him he couldn’t do it. Putin sends 40,000 troops in. That’s not enough to conquer the country. Clearly, he wanted us to come to — he wanted somebody to come to the negotiating table. Zelensky came to the negotiating table. Signed a new agreement that was Minsk accords II in 2022, and that would have allowed Donbas to stay — and Luhansk — to stay and remain as part of Ukraine. Putin signed it, Zelensky initialed it, and Putin in good faith began withdrawing troops from the Ukraine. What happened? We sent Boris Johnson over there to torpedo it. Because we don’t want peace with — we want the war with Russia.

 

The audience erupted in an ovation, but Kennedy’s tidy narrative was almost entirely fictional.

 

The first occasion in which the West supposedly pushed “Ukraine into the war” in Kennedy’s fevered imagination was the first Minsk agreement. The Minsk protocol was established in September 2014, not 2019. That agreement was little more than a cease-fire establishing the “line of contact” in the Donbas, where Russian-aligned forces operating under Moscow’s control had been engaged in an insurgency against Kyiv following the invasion of the Crimean Peninsula by Russian regular forces earlier that year.

 

That agreement wasn’t worth the paper on which it was written. Russia’s irregulars in the Donbas routinely violated the cease-fire and, in November 2014, Russian-sponsored separatists held elections in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (which together constitute the Donbas region) — a Moscow-backed action the United States and its European allies called a violation of the terms of the Minsk protocol. The Minsk protocol was functionally defunct before the end of the year.

 

On February 12, 2015, a successor — deemed “Minsk II” — replaced the inoperative accords and imposed even more obligations on Ukraine. It required that Kyiv create a “special status” for Russia’s puppet states in the country’s east. Under pressure from its Western sponsors, Ukraine conceded to these terms, though Kyiv declined to grant the same “special status” to territories in Donbas still under its control. But hours after that agreement was signed, Russian-backed forces mounted an assault on the town of Debaltseve and captured it, shifting the agreed-to “line of contact.” At no point after this were the terms of Minsk II observed by either party, though the West clung for years to the notion that the “Minsk process” was more valuable than the outcomes it produced. There was no cease-fire — the “line of contact” was always hot. Foreign forces were not withdrawn from Donbas, as the U.S. mission to the OSCE routinely documented.

 

All this happened long before 2019, which is a year of some significance to Kennedy for unknowable reasons. Zelensky campaigned for the presidency that year on a broad platform, one aspect of which was revisiting the Minsk agreements by scrapping the multilateral format and negotiating directly with Moscow. He did strike a conciliatory tone toward Moscow — Zelensky was critical of the Poroshenko government’s efforts to deny Russian cultural envoys entry into Ukraine, for example. And by the end of 2019, Zelensky met directly with Putin, securing a narrow agreement on principle to implement a cease-fire as certain preconditions (such as the withdrawal of Russian forces from Donbas) were met. But those preconditions were not met.

 

It’s entirely unclear what State Department veteran Victoria Nuland has to do with any of this. She did not hold public office in 2019 because, at the time, Donald Trump was president. Who knows where Kennedy got the figure “40,000 troops” from? Maybe he’s thinking about an aborted Russian buildup on Ukraine’s borders in April 2021, but Western estimates suggested Russia had amassed about 100,000 soldiers, which to the West at the time looked like a prelude to invasion. Indeed, in retrospect, the estimated 150,000–200,000 Russian troops that did invade Ukraine (again) in February 2022 turned out to be insufficient to seize and occupy most of the country, but the three-axis, combined-arms invasion was no peace overture. Kennedy’s claim that Putin began “withdrawing troops from Ukraine” and did so “in good faith” is utterly ponderous. No such thing occurred, especially not in 2022 — a year in which Putin only committed ever more Russian forces to his folly.

 

Lastly, this notion that the West assigned former British prime minister Boris Johnson to “torpedo” some imagined peace agreement seems to derive from a misreading of a May 2022 item in Ukrainska Pravda that has become an article of faith in left-wing blogs. The piece alleged in the vaguest of language that “the structure of a future possible agreement in general terms” was hammered out in spring 2022 in a back channel between Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich and Kremlin negotiator Vladimir Medinsky. At this point, Johnson parachuted into Kyiv, where, according to an unnamed Zelensky associate, he expressed skepticism that Putin would do anything other than “screw everyone over” by failing to abide by whatever terms are struck behind closed doors — as the Russian president’s past practice suggests.

 

The obstacle to an agreement wasn’t Johnson, however, as the same source close to Zelensky added: “Moscow would like to have a single agreement in which all the issues are resolved.” This was unacceptable to the Zelensky government, which sought distinct terms with Russia on its security guarantees, including Ukraine’s European sponsors, and, separately, an agreement with Russia establishing the terms of mutual coexistence. That is where things broke down, and this wasn’t due to Johnson’s belligerent force of will.

 

Kennedy continues in his interview with Hannity to spout popular revisionist histories that set the West up as his fable’s antagonist, somehow recklessly bullying Russia into a disastrous war of territorial expansion. His narrative rests on the notion that Secretary of State James Baker guaranteed Mikhail Gorbachev that Washington would not support NATO’s expansion into the former Warsaw Pact states. If anyone would be able to confirm or deny the existence of such guarantees, it would be Gorbachev. “The topic of NATO expansion was not discussed at all,” Gorbachev himself confirmed. All that was discussed “in that context” were terms around the permanent deployment of NATO forces and military structures into the former East Germany. “Everything that could have been and needed to be done to solidify that political obligation was done,” the last Soviet general secretary added. “And fulfilled.”

 

Kennedy seems wholly convinced of the fictions he is retailing, but they are fictions, nonetheless. If we were being charitable, we could grant the dispensation that Kennedy isn’t just making stuff up on the fly, but that’s hardly exculpatory. Either he is wildly misinformed and cares so little about the subject matter that he hasn’t bothered to verify his misapprehensions, or he lives in a fantasy world. Neither is comforting, and it is the responsibility of media professionals to correct the record Kennedy is so recklessly distorting. If not for the sake of their credibility, then at least for posterity.