Appearing on the most-watched US news show, the presidential candidate called Kiev’s casualties unsustainable
FILE PHOTO. A wounded Ukrainian soldier waits for treatment at a military hospital in Zaporozhye, on March 31, 2022. © Emre Caylak / AFP
Many Ukrainians are dying for the sake of a US proxy war against Russia, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said, shortly after announcing he would challenge President Joe Biden for the presidential nomination as a Democrat.
“We’re killing a lot of Ukrainians as pawns in a proxy war between two great powers,” Kennedy told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight on Thursday evening. “Nobody talks about this. There’s 14,000 Ukrainian civilians that died, but 300,000 troops. Russians are killing Ukrainians at a 7:1 to 8:1 ratio. They cannot sustain this. What we’re being told about this war is just not true.”
Kennedy did not cite a source for his casualty figures. He did, however, say that his own son had fought in Ukraine as a machine-gunner in the special forces, and took part in the Ukrainian offensive in Kharkov last year.
RFK Jr. is the nephew of the 35th president, John F. Kennedy, and the son of Robert Kennedy, JFK’s attorney general who went on to become a senator. Both brothers would end up being assassinated – JFK in 1963, and RFK in 1968 during the presidential primaries.
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After a long career as an attorney, environmentalist, and health advocate, RFK Jr. announced his presidential bid on Wednesday in a three-hour speech in Boston. During one part in which he denounced the trillions of dollars being spent on foreign wars, someone tried to disrupt the speech by pulling a fire alarm at the venue.
In his five-minute appearance on Carlson’s show, Kennedy repeated that the US is fueling inflation by printing money so it could send $130 billion to Ukraine, while “we have 57% of American citizens [who] could not put their hands on $1,000 if they had an emergency.”
While commending the valor and courage of the Ukrainians, Kennedy wondered if the US is involved in the conflict for the right reasons. He cited several foreign policy scholars who say the West has created a geopolitical nightmare by driving Russia closer to China.
According to the ‘Pentagon Leaks’ from earlier this month, US military intelligence has estimated that Russian casualties are roughly double that of Ukraine’s, though this appears to be based entirely on Kiev’s claims.
