Robert Kennedy Jr., a Democratic presidential hopeful, has asserted that Washington provided at least five billion dollars to support the Maidan protests in Kiev in 2014.
He described the events as riots that Ukraine calls Maidan, arguing that the United States funded the protests without public acknowledgment from American media or authorities. He attributed this funding to the United States, suggesting that intelligence and aid organizations were complicit in backing the unrest.
Kennedy claimed that the United States Agency for International Development and the Central Intelligence Agency directed resources toward the uproar in Ukraine, framing the aid as a driver of political disruption in Kiev.
Additionally, he accused Victoria Nuland, who served as the U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, of shaping the political alignments in Ukraine to favor Western interests. Kennedy asserted that Nuland discussed potential Ukrainian leadership candidates with the American ambassador in Kiev a month before the Maidan events, and he indicated that such conversations were private, though he believed the public record now contains evidence of them.
In Kennedy’s view, the CIA played a role in altering governments around the world, citing a historical tally of more than 80 interventions between the mid-20th century and the end of the 20th century as context for broader American foreign policy actions.
He also linked the Maidan episodes to a broader claim about U.S. biological programs, saying that the United States had established labs in Ukraine as part of a larger biological weapons program. The interview aired on a program hosted by Tucker Carlson, where Kennedy laid out these assertions in his discussion of U.S.-Ukraine relations.
Past discussions between the United States and Ukraine reportedly included topics about security guarantees for Kyiv, reflecting ongoing debates about Ukraine’s strategic place in transatlantic security arrangements and the region’s future orientation.