A reader asked us to fact-check a four-minute “history lesson” posted by presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on YouTube. International events — and the causes of war — are often open to interpretation. But Kennedy’s lecture, about how the United States allegedly provoked the Ukraine war, was filled with so much misinformation and Russian talking points that it seems worthy of a detailed look.
Here’s a line-by-line dissection of Kennedy’s history. The Kennedy campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
“You know, Putin every day says, ‘I want to settle the war. Let’s negotiate.’ And Zelensky has said we’re not going to negotiate. But Zelensky didn’t start that way. I don’t want to belabor the history. But Russia was invaded three times through Ukraine. The last time Hitler killed one out of every seven Russians. They don’t want to have Ukraine join NATO.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin started the war by invading Ukraine, and he’s shown little sign of wanting to end it unless Ukraine accepts losing territory Russia has seized. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Russian atrocities during the war make it imperative for the country to win back all of its territory.
It’s unclear how Kennedy counts three invasions of Russia through Ukraine, though he says the “last time” was World War II. The previous prominent attack on Russia was by French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812, but Napoleon aimed his attack on Moscow and did not invade through Ukraine.
In World War II, about 27 million Soviet citizens died, approximately one-seventh of the population; there were 8.7 million military dead, according to Russian calculations.
“When the wall came down in the Soviet Union and Europe, [Soviet President Mikhail] Gorbachev destroyed himself politically by doing something that was very, very courageous. He went to [President George H.W.] Bush. He said, ‘I’m going to allow you to reunify Germany under a NATO army. I’m going to remove 450,000 Soviet troops. But I want your commitment. After that, you will not move NATO one inch to the east.’ And we solemnly swore that we wouldn’t do it.”
Kennedy is echoing Russian propaganda here. By every account of the 1990 negotiations for the unification of Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, including Gorbachev’s, the conversation claimed by Kennedy never happened.
“The topic of ‘NATO expansion’ was not discussed at all, and it wasn’t brought up in those years,” Gorbachev said in a 2014 interview. “I say this with full responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either.”
The context of these talks played a role. No world leader, let alone Gorbachev, expected the Soviet Union would soon collapse. The negotiations at the time focused mostly on the question of stationing NATO forces in a unified Germany, with Secretary of State James Baker at first suggesting in one meeting that NATO forces would not move an inch into East German territory, a position that was later walked back. Twice at a White House meeting, to the distress of his aides, Gorbachev stated that European nations were free to ally with others as they saw fit, according to then-Undersecretary of State Robert Zoellick. Records show that at least one Soviet official, the foreign minister, tentatively raised the question of NATO expansion, but the issue was not substantially addressed.
The final agreement on a unified Germany stipulated that at least temporarily, no nuclear weapons and no NATO forces of other countries would be stationed in the eastern part of the country. The Soviet Union’s finances were in crisis and Gorbachev was under pressure to reach a deal. At the time, there were 380,000 Soviet troops in East Germany, according to a 1991 CIA estimate. In exchange for allowing Germany to unify, Gorbachev received 12 billion German marks to construct housing for departing troops, 3 billion in interest-free credit and a four-year grace period to remove the troops.
After the Soviet Union collapsed and Boris Yeltsin became president of Russia, Yeltsin in 1993 conceded Poland’s right to join NATO, even while complaining bitterly about President Bill Clinton’s push to expand. In 1997, he tried to win a commitment from Clinton that NATO at least would not accept any former Soviet republics as members. But Clinton put him off, saying that would “violate the whole spirit of NATO,” according to a transcript of the conversation.
Three former Warsaw Pact nations — the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland — joined NATO in 1999. In 2004, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were among seven more countries that joined. They remain the only former Soviet republics in the alliance.
Some analysts, Gorbachev among them, argue that the NATO expansion was unnecessarily provocative. “I called this a big mistake from the very beginning,” he said. “It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990. With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are being observed.”
“Well, then in ’97, Zbigniew Brzezinski, he was the first of the neocons, said, ‘We’re going to move NATO a thousand miles to the east and take 15 countries into it and surround the Soviet Union.’”
Brzezinski was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser and was a foreign policy realist and a hawk on Russia. Calling him a neoconservative, let alone the first, betrays a misunderstanding of the term, as it is originally associated with former Democrats who moved to the right.
We can’t find any such provocative quote by Brzezinski, though he certainly supported NATO expansion. In 1995, he wrote an article for Foreign Affairs arguing that the Clinton administration needed to stop debating the expansion and act. He said the administration should explicitly make clear the basic criteria for admission to NATO. “These criteria would strengthen the emerging consensus that in the foreseeable future only four Central European countries — the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia — are likely to be considered seriously. It would leave open the possibility for others, including theoretically Russia itself,” he wrote.
“So then we not only move it into 14 new nations, but we unilaterally walk away from our two nuclear weapons treaties with the Russians.”
Kennedy has the number of new NATO members correct, though it did not happen all at once. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland joined NATO in 1999, followed by Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 2004. Croatia and Albania joined in 2009, Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in 2020.
Since Russia attacked Ukraine, membership has also been granted to Finland and Sweden.
Kennedy is correct that the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 under George W. Bush and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019 under Donald Trump. In the first instance, Bush argued that the treaty limited development of a missile defense system. In the second instance, the Defense Department cited “Russia’s sustained and repeated violations of the treaty over many years.”
“And we put Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland, twelve minutes from Moscow. When Russians did that to Cuba in ’62, we came this close to nuclear war until they removed them. So the Russians don’t want nukes 400 miles from Moscow.”
Kennedy is comparing apples to oranges. Aegis is a missile defense system and is not a nuclear weapon. The Soviets installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles off the U.S. coast, which is what prompted the Cuban missile crisis.
Russia complained that Aegis could be modified to neutralize its nuclear deterrent by targeting its intercontinental ballistic missiles. In response to those concerns, Barack Obama in 2013 scrapped a phase of the program that would have done so.
“We then overthrow the Ukraine government, in 2014, their elected government, and put in a Western sympathetic government.”
As Kennedy speaks, the screen flashes a 2014 article in Foreign Affairs by John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago that also endorses Putin’s claim of a “coup.” But few analysts agree with Mearsheimer.
Then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who leaned toward Russia, used force to halt demonstrations, and police killed scores of people in Kyiv. Parliament then removed him in a unanimous vote. The United States was not involved, though Putin often faults U.S. financial support for democracy efforts in the country.
“Russia then has to go into Crimea because they have a port. It’s their only warm-water port, and they know the new government that we just installed is going to invite the U.S. Navy into their port.”
In 1783, Catherine the Great achieved Russia’s longtime goal of having a warm-water port, Sevastopol, by seizing Crimea from the Ottoman Empire. With today’s technology, however, St. Petersburg and Vladivostok are functionally warm-water ports and kept free of ice with thermal power plants.
When Putin illegally seized Crimea, Sevastopol was no longer a Russian asset. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became an independent country, Ukraine leased the Sevastopol port to Russia, with a limit on the number of troops that could be stationed. Ukraine also used it as the port for the Ukrainian navy. There’s no evidence the new Ukrainian government planned to turn over the port to the U.S. Navy.
“So Russia then went into Crimea without firing a shot as the people of Crimea are Russian.”
Russia already had at least 12,500 troops at Sevastopol, and the interim government in Kyiv ordered Ukrainian service members in Crimea to leave without firing a single shot. But people who protested were detained and tortured, with at least three killed, including Crimean Tatar protester Reshat Ametov, whose body was stripped naked and his eyes poked out. A Russian soldier also shot dead a Ukrainian naval officer, while an unknown gunman shot and killed a Ukrainian serviceman while he was working at a tower in Simferopol.
Crimea was populated mostly by Tatars until Russian dictator Joseph Stalin deported the whole population in 1944. According to the last official Ukrainian census, in 2001, 60 percent of Crimea’s population was Russian, 24 percent Ukrainian and 10 percent Tatar.
Despite a majority Russian population, Crimea voted to join Ukraine after the Soviet Union collapsed, though it was approved by a relatively narrow majority (54 percent) compared with other areas of Ukraine.
“Then the new Ukrainian government we installed started killing ethnic Russians in Donbas and Luhansk, and they voted to leave and join Russia.”
Kennedy has it backward. Russia took advantage of the chaos after Yanukovych fell to send Russian troops into the resource-rich eastern section of Ukraine, falsely claiming that these were self-organized “separatist” groups. Within three weeks, the Russian troops had seized the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk — or the Donbas region — and claimed the establishment of new breakaway states. Before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the conflict led to at least 15,000 people being killed and 30,000 wounded. No elections held under Russian supervision can be trusted as accurate.
“Putin said, ‘I don’t want them. Let’s give them protection and semi-autonomy and make an agreement to keep NATO out of Ukraine.’ That treaty was written by Germany, France, Russia and England — the Minsk Accords. And the Ukrainian parliament, which is controlled by ultra-rightists — and that’s a nice way of talking about them — refused to sign it.”
Kennedy is referring to two failed efforts in 2014 and 2015, known as the Minsk agreements, to arrange a cease-fire in Donetsk and Luhansk. French and German officials were involved in trying to settle the conflict, along with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Ukrainian and Russian representatives signed the deals, along with an OSCE representative, followed by separatist leaders, but no votes were needed in parliament.
Both agreements did not take root because Russia insisted it was not a party to Minsk, just a facilitator. Russian-led forces kept fighting and ignored commitments to have a cease-fire.
“Zelensky runs in 2019. He’s an actor. Why did he get elected with 70 percent of the vote? Because he promised to sign the Minsk accords. He promised peace.”
Zelensky, a comedian who starred in a satirical television series as the Ukrainian president, defeated incumbent Petro Poroshenko in a landslide, winning 73 percent of the vote.
The second Minsk agreement was signed in 2015, but Zelensky said he wanted to “reboot” peace talks and finally conclude a cease-fire. But it’s misleading to say Zelensky won because of this imagined “sign Minsk treaty” platform. He campaigned with a raft of promises, mainly having to do with improving the economy and overhauling government.
“He gets in there and he pivots. Nobody can explain why, but we know why. Because he was threatened with death by ultra-rightists in his government — and a withdrawal of support by the United States by Victoria Nuland, who is the leading neocon in the State Department. We told him he could not sign it.”
This is another fantasy for which there is no evidence. Nuland, often the target of Russian misinformation, left the U.S. government in 2017, during Trump’s first year in office, and did not return until 2021, when she became undersecretary of state. As noted, the second Minsk agreement was signed in 2015.
Zelensky expressed interest in 2019 in pursuing a new iteration of Minsk called the “Steinmeier formula,” developed by the German foreign minister, that would have allowed elections in the breakaway regions. That led to protests by far-right nationalists who claimed this would be a capitulation, though Zelensky insisted that “there won’t be any elections there if the troops are still there.”
In a 2023 interview with the German publication Der Spiegel, Zelensky indicated he viewed the Minsk agreements on the whole as a trap designed to give up a piece of Ukraine to satisfy Russia. He said he focused on specific items, like a prisoner exchange, to buy time.
“Then the Russians go in. They don’t send a big army. They only send 40,000 people. It’s a nation of 44 million people. They clearly do not intend to conquer Ukraine, but they want us back at the negotiating table.”
This is an unusually generous interpretation of Russia’s invasion, which was intended as a lightning strike to decapitate the Ukrainian government.
Three days before invading in 2022, Putin illegally recognized the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic as independent nations and said he was sending troops as peacekeepers. On Feb. 24, 2022, Putin announced “a special military operation,” but Russian forces encountered unexpected resistance. By March 7, 2022, the Pentagon said 190,000 Russian troops were in Ukraine — the largest force since World War II to invade another European country.
“We won’t allow Zelensky to go back. So he goes to Israel and Turkey and says, ‘Will you please help me negotiate a treaty? The Russians just want a guarantee that Ukraine won’t join NATO.’ Zelensky signs the treaty. Putin’s people sign the treaty and Putin starts withdrawing Russian troops in good faith. And what happens? Joe Biden sends Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, over to Ukraine in April and forces him to tear up the treaty.”
This is again largely a fantasy. There was no treaty that was ever signed. Ukrainian and Russian negotiators in April 2022 “appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” according to a report in Foreign Affairs, which included Russia withdrawing to Feb. 23 lines and Ukraine agreeing not to join NATO. But much still needed to be negotiated, and one of the Ukrainian negotiators said the team had lacked the authority to accept Moscow’s terms. One obstacle: Ukraine’s constitution was amended in 2019 to seek NATO membership. Russia, after suffering heavy losses and its advance stalled, withdrew from the Kyiv and Zhytomyr regions — but it was hardly an indication of “good faith.”
Johnson has labeled claims that he intervened to derail the talks “total nonsense and Russian propaganda.”
“And since then, 450,000 kids have died, who — none of them should have died. For every one Russian that dies, five to eight Ukrainians died. And they don’t have any men left. You know, we’re giving him all these weapons, but they don’t have men left. It’s a catastrophe.”
Death counts are uncertain — and neither Ukrainian nor Russian numbers on military casualties can be trusted — but Kennedy’s figures are much too high.
In the first two years of the war, through Feb. 24, the war has killed at least 10,582 civilians and injured 19,875, according to a report by the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine. This number includes 587 killed and 1,298 injured children.
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