Dennis Kucinich: the US engineered a coup to drag Ukraine into a conflict

by Donald A. Smith, PhD

In this April 2, 2024 interview with Judge Napolitano, Dennis Kucinich says: “What’s happened is that the U.S. State Department and U.S. Government basically engineered a coup in Ukraine and used that to drag Ukraine into a conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas and ignited this war which Russia has been horrible in the way they have come in and attacked. There’s been six hundred thousand people, the flower of Ukraine, who have been killed. This thing is heartbreaking. But we cannot ignore the role that the U.S. has played in helping to impel it, and we cannot ignore the fact that, as you point out, there was a chance to resolve this two years ago.”  (He’s referring to how in March of 2022 the U.S. forced the Zelensky government to step back from a peace deal that was being negotiated with Russia.) https://www.youtube.com/embed/UqCwdN5Lf4g

Kucinich says that it will be impossible for the U.S. and NATO to defeat the Russian military.  “There needs to be an end to this war, an effort to repair Ukraine.”  Stop this “vainglorious effort to build up NATO.” Napolitano said that the neocons Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken, Jake Sullivan and Joe Biden think they can use Ukraine as a battering ram to weaken Russia, but Putin is popular and the Russian economy is thriving.  Napolitano says, “The war was started in 2014 by the United States with the coup, as you pointed out.”  

For more details about how the U.S. engineered the war, see this.  The CIA was deeply involved and allied with far right militias attacking Russian speakers in the east. Numerous senior U.S. diplomats warned that aggressive NATO expansion would lead to a war. RAND Corporation recommended arming Ukraine as the best way to weaken Russia. Would the U.S. allow Russia to overthrow the government of Canada and install an armed client state that restricted use of English? The U.S. government always lies about its wars.

Napolitano asks Kucinich why all the Dems in Congress are behind the war in Ukraine. Kucinich replies that it’s partly due to the desire not to be shunned by their caucus and partly due to a desire to support the incumbent Democratic president.

Kucinich said that Senator Biden supported the disastrous war in Iraq, and the same sort of thinking that led to that war exists in the U.S. government today. Indeed, many of the same people are making  policy. They’re leading us to war with Russia and in the Middle East (Gaza and possibly Iran) and are preparing for war with China. “It’s madness. It’s against the interest of the American people. It’s against the taxpayers of this country. It’s driving our national debt. It’s leading to the collapse of America, not the collapse of Russia, not the collapse of China.” Instead of trying to rule the world by military force, we should take care of our own needs.

Kucinich also condemns U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza and calls what Israel is doing “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide.” Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Syria, also a crime according to international law.  On the one hand, President Biden  says Israel should not invade Rafah and should respect Palestinian lives. On the other hand, Biden gives billions of dollars of weapons. Netyanahu has got the “Biden government over a barrel because of the politics of this. And he knows that and will keep going on.”  “You can’t give someone a gun who has a record of killing innocent people and say, ‘Don’t kill innocent people'” (without being complicit).

“We cannot afford to be the policeman of the world”  with a $34 trillion debt.

Naopolitano (who has been interviewing a lot of lefty peace activists) ends by calling Kucinich a “fierce defender of civil liberties, constitutional government and peace.”

For more about this topic see Senior U.S. diplomats, journalists, academics and Secretaries of Defense say: The U.S. provoked Russia in Ukraine.