Tucker Carlsen Interviews Vladimir Putin

Last week my wife and I watched Tucker Carlsen’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The interview lasted a little over two hours, and it took us two nights to get through it, but it was well worth the effort. So far, the interview has received over 18 million hits on YouTube although the American media seems reluctant to mention it.

Credit must go to Tucker Carlsen not only for scooping the rest of the journalistic world, but also for allowing us to see Putin unfiltered by media bias. Carlsen limited himself to a few questions and then just let Putin respond with hardly any interruption. It was a breath of fresh air. In the beginning Putin asked if it was going to be an interview or a talk show, and for the most part Carlsen was content to hear him out, and not engage in incessant back and forth.

I did not take notes but here is my recollection of some of the insights provided by the Russian leader. Putin came across as extremely articulate, experienced, and levelheaded with a deep grounding in Russian history, as well as in current world affairs. Indeed, he prefaced his response to Carlsen’s first question on the Ukraine war with an almost 30-minute disquisition on the history of Russia in which he went all the way back to its ninth century origins. In that discussion he included an historical analysis of the origins of what is now known as Ukraine, a word that means fringes or borderlands in Russian. Indeed, he believes that Ukraine has always been a part of Russia, and that the Ukrainians are Russian, and not a separate ethnic group. 

To Putin the war in Ukraine is a Civil War and not an invasion of a foreign country. He traced the current conflict in Ukraine back to 1991 with the demise of the Soviet Union. In the West, we call it the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he regards it as an attempt by the then Soviet leaders to normalize relations with the West and usher in an era of mutual security and prosperity. He even stated that he had asked President Clinton if Russia could join NATO. Initially, Clinton seemed agreeable but after consulting with his security advisors, the offer was rejected. Instead of a partner, the US would continue to regard Russia as an adversary.

Moreover, he claims that after 1991 Russia received assurances that the NATO alliance would not extend any further east, but that the promise was subsequently broken, especially during the Obama administration when the door seemed to be opened to Ukrainian membership in NATO.  Putin traced the start of the war in Ukraine to 2014 when a coup in Kiev overthrew the then pro-Russian government. He believes that the coup was engineered by Western security services, and that the new government in Ukraine then began to seek close ties with NATO. He also believes that the new Ukrainian leadership contains many who had fought with the Nazis against Russia during WWII.

Nevertheless, he insisted that he is open to a negotiated settlement of the war and argued that he had agreed to one only months after the fighting started. At a meeting in Istanbul both sides had agreed to a settlement but at the last minute, Boris Johnson, the then British Prime Minister, had stepped in to quash the deal, obviously with the backing of his NATO and US allies. 

Johnson has retired but the war goes on. Putin claims to be still open to a negotiated settlement. He also believes that the war is hurting the West more than Russia. Western sanctions have not hurt Russia whose economy is now the largest in Europe, but they have forced Europe to pay exorbitant prices for imports of liquified natural gas. Speaking of that, Putin did not claim to know who blew up the Nordstream gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea, but pointed out that the culprit would have to have had both a motive and the capability to pull it off.

These are just a couple of the issues that Putin discussed with ease and calmness, but I would like to end with Carlsen’s last question concerning a reporter from the Wall Street Journal who has been imprisoned by the Russians for espionage. Actually, Carlsen asked if Putin, as a goodwill gesture, would release the jailed reporter to him for return to the USA claiming that everyone knew that the reporter was not a spy. Putin responded that the man had been caught red-handed with classified documents but that he would prefer to leave his fate to the negotiations currently going on between the security agencies of both countries. 

In this interview Putin did not appear as a madman or a Hitler out to dominate the world. As mentioned above, he spoke with calm, self-assurance. He knows his geo-politics. He is aware that China has overtaken the US economy, and that India is in third place. It is a new world, and the West must learn to live with it. Tucker Carlsen has been criticized for even conducting this interview. Some have even called him a traitor, but we are not at war with Russia, and Carlsen deserves great credit for letting us see the Russian leader with our own two eyes.

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Note: By now it is difficult to find the whole interview on YouTube but it is well worth viewing in its entirety. Here is a link.