Putin mocks Tucker Carlson over his failed attempt to join CIA
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Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has released his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who started with a long diatribe on Russian history and its relationship with Ukraine.
The two-hour, seven-minute interview was recorded on 6 February and released in full shortly before 6pm ET on Thursday. Carlson travelled to Moscow for Putin’s first interview with a Western media figure since the invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
Putin repeated his argument that Ukraine wasn’t a real country which was shaped by the “will” of Soviet leader Josef Stalin.
When Carlson requested that jailed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich be allowed to return to the US with Carlson and his crew as a show of “goodwill” from Putin, the Russian leader said that his “goodwill” had run out, complaining about the lack of reciprocity from the West.
Asked why he doesn’t call President Joe Biden and work out a solution in Ukraine, Putin asked: “What’s there to work out?”
“Stop supplying weapons and it will be over within weeks,” he added.
Putin also claimed that peace talks had at one point “reached a very high stage of coordination of positions ... they were almost finalized”.
'De-Nazification' means whatever we say it means
Putin, alongside many Russian propogandists, has long claimed that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was about “de-Nazifying” the country. He repeated those claims at length in Thursday’s interview.
However, despite repeated probing from Carlson, he never quite managed to define exactly what “de-Nazification” would mean or why it justified an armed invasion.
He described how some Ukrainian nationalists collaborated with the Nazi occupation during the Second World War, and claimed that the country remains a hotbed of neo-Nazism today.
(He did not mention the Soviet general Andrey Vlasov, who led a brigade of Russian collaborators against Stalin’s forces, or the fact that Putin’s Russia has served as an inspiration for numerous neo-Nazis in the US and Europe.)
Hence, Putin claimed, Russia’s war in Ukraine cannot end because such ideologies have not yet been stamped out, and nor has the Ukrainian government agreed to do so as part of a peace process.
VIDEO: Putin calls Ukraine an ‘artificial state shaped at Stalin’s will’
Russia could test NATO’s Article 5 within five years
No plans to release jailed US journalist
Carlson’s interview with Putin offered slim hope for Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist for The Wall Street Journal who has been imprisoned in Russia on charges of espionage for nearly a year.
“I want to ask you directly,” said Carlson, “without getting into the details of what happened, if as a sign of your decency you would be willing to release him to us, and we’ll bring him back to the United States.”
After a long pause, and a heavy sigh, Putin refused. He claimed that Gershkovich was “caught red handed” receiving classified information, “and doing it covertly”.
He also suggested that Gershkovich was “working for the US special services” and was “essentially controlled by the US authorities”.
The Journal has insisted that Mr Gershkovich is innocent and that his activities fell strictly under the umbrella of legitimate journalism.
Carlson, a fellow journalist, nevertheless seemed at least somewhat sympathetic to Putin’s framing, saying: “The guy’s obviously not a spy, he’s a kid. And maybe he was breaking your laws in some way, but he’s not a super-spy.”
Putin claims Boris Johnson shot down peace attempts
Throughout the interview, Putin insisted that Russia is willing to negotiate and that Ukraine and the USA, rather than the country that invaded Ukraine, are the main barriers to peace.
“[Zelensky] put his signature and then he himself said, ‘we were ready to sign it and the war would have been over long ago’. However, Prime Minister Johnson came talk to us out of it, and we’ve missed that chance,” Putin said.
“Where is Mr Johnson now? And the war continues.”
Johnson himself has denied those claims, calling them “total nonsense” and “Russian propaganda”.
And while his opposition to negotiations with Putin is a matter of public record, the idea that he was the deciding factor in Ukraine’s decision – or that he shot down a peace deal that would otherwise have been viable – is far from proven.
‘The interview was targeted as much at the Russian audience as at the Western one'
Former Ukrainian MP Anton Geraschenko wrote on X after the interview that “Putin’s main message was ‘Russia wants peace, Ukraine and the West don’t’.”
“Let’s not forget that the interview was targeted as much at the Russian audience as at the Western one (Tucker’s arrival to Moscow for the interview was broadcast in Russian media better than Putin’s public appearances),” he noted.
Putin ‘clearly not feeling very confident'
Political scientist Ian Bremmer noted after the interview that the Russian “economy now is smaller than Canada’s, despite having the largest geographic landmass of any country in the world”.
“All these important resources, more nuclear weapons even than the United States. But [Putin’s] clearly not feeling very confident about that. Hence the need to give a huge history lesson to everyone that is willing to listen. And of course, you know, not much Tucker could do there. It’s not like he’s going to suddenly start interrupting the Russian leader,” he said.
He added that it was “really unclear how much of this would appeal to your typical Tucker Carlson audience. I mean, Putin’s talk of a multipolar world is something I find fairly interesting. I do think that the global economic order is increasingly multipolar. The security order is not. It’s still dominated by the United States. But that doesn’t mean the US wants to be the world’s policeman. And especially given the divisions inside the United States, it’s very difficult for it to do so. And it’s failed on many occasions. But I don’t think that that’s something that’s really going to engage a lot of people that are talking about or listening to this interview”.
'Stop supplying weapons and it will be over within weeks'
Putin had a simple demand for the United States: stop supplying weapons to Ukraine.
That rather ominous statement came in response to Carlson asking whether Putin was doing everything he could to find a diplomatic solution, and why he couldn’t simply get on the phone to Joe Biden to end the conflict – which Carlson has repeatedly described as a proxy war between the US and Russia.
“What’s to work out? It’s very simple,” said Putin. “If you want to stop fighting, you need to stop supplying weapons... what’s easier? Why would I call him?
“What should I talk him about? Or beg him for what?
“‘You are going to deliver such and such weapons to Ukraine – oh, I’m afraid, please don’t’? What is there to talk about?”
Although Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has insisted that his country is not losing the war, some experts are sceptical about his ability to retake the territory still occupied by Russia.
After stunning the world by repulsing Russia’s initial invasion, Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive has stalled, and future support from the US and the European Union is in limbo after objections from sceptical politicians.
Putin doesn't think Ukraine is a real country
Your basic education was in history, as I understand? If you don’t mind, I will take only thirty seconds, or one minute, to give you a little historical background.”
That was how Vladimir Putin, speaking through an interpreter, kicked off what turned out to be a nearly 30-minute lecture on the intertwined history of Russia and Ukraine.
His point? To portray Ukraine as a creation of imperialist powers with no identity of its own and no real claim to sovereignty. (Never mind that Russia itself was created by Eastern Europeans colonising vast swathes of Eurasia.)
Starting with the election of Prince Rurik to the throne of Novgorod in 862 AD, he described how successive empires, including the Soviet Union, shaped the modern boundaries of Ukraine by transferring land from Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Crimea.
“So,” Putin concluded, “we have every reason to affirm that Ukraine is an artificial state that was shaped at Stalin’s will.”
Carlson quickly pushed back, asking the president if he thought that Hungary had the right to take its land back from Ukraine, or that other nations have the right to return to their 17th-century borders.
After a long pause, Putin replied that he wasn’t sure – but that, given the nature of Stalin’s repressive regime, it would be “understandable” if they tried.
He then told a personal anecdote about taking a road trip through the Soviet Union in the early 1980s and encountering Hungarian Ukrainians, who still spoke Hungarian and considered themselves Hungarians.
At least, he clarified, he had never told Hungarian president Viktor Orban to his face that he could annex any part of Ukraine.
Putin’s history lesson was ‘something you do when you’re insecure’
“Substantively, we learned really nothing new. Putin going on a very long history lesson with tangents, going back to Genghis Khan and the Roman Empire. And maybe we should talk about the fact that the Roman Empire is on Putin’s mind, too, just like so many people on Twitter,” he added. “But that if anything was going to lose a large percentage of your audience, that was almost guaranteed to do so.”
“I remember so many trips to Beijing and you’d meet with Chinese leaders, and the first 20 minutes were about Chinese leadership and rightful place in the world back in the 15th century. That’s something you do when you’re insecure,” he said. “As the Chinese were doing better and as they were becoming a larger economy and feeling more comfortable in the rest of the world, and that more countries had to listen to them, they did less of that.”
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2024-02-10 00:56:15Z
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