The Interview

What Tucker Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin says about the war in Ukraine, the US government and Putin himself

Tucker Carlson seemed put off and somewhat confused by many of Vladimir Putin’s answers during their two-hour interview. (Screenshot: Tucker Carlson Network)

Düsseldorf, 15 February 2024
Filed under: War, Politics

Last week, conservative US journalist Tucker Carlson¹ released his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The interview is over two hours long. Legacy media commentators have called it “rambling”. They have also, both in the US and here in Europe, done their utmost to marginalise its importance and to dissuade people from viewing it. Why? On the eve of ten years of war in Ukraine, an interview with the man who started it all surely is the political event of the year — even if the year isn’t even two months old. At least that’s what I think. Therefore, I decided to see the whole thing for myself and I spent a day analysing this interview (taking quite a lot of notes in the process). Here’s what I think.

The interview certainly isn’t “rambling”. Carlson seems to be well prepared and asks very relevant, and poignant, questions. However, Putin asserts his dominance over the the conversation right away. After Carlson asks him to elaborate on the “threat from NATO” that Putin quoted as the reason for his renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Putin mentions the journalist’s education in historical science and asks to take “30 seconds or a minute” to elaborate on the history of the conflict. He then takes over half an hour to explain his view of Russian history when it comes to Ukraine.

This does three things: It throws Carlson off balance for the rest of the interview, establishes Putin’s dominance over the conversation and makes the Russian President look very well prepared and rather intelligent. One does not have to agree with Putin on his viewpoint of history — I personally mostly don’t — but his display of soft-spoken, thoughtful analysis is nonetheless impressive. I can’t recall when I last saw an interview with a head of state who came across this smart. It certainly wasn’t during the last twenty years.

How Putin comported himself bears no relation to the picture of him as a Hitlerian bogeyman that has been painted in US and European media over the last few years. He might have seemed a bit too confident, almost arrogant at times, but he also laughed and acted like a perfectly normal human being. This is not a man who rants and raves like Hitler, nor does he seem to be afraid of losing the war in Ukraine or power over his government. He also looked like he was in good health, contrary to many reports in the legacy media. He seemed calm, smart and in control. Sometimes, his obvious cold-heartedness came through and I think he probably scared viewers a bit. But this might have also been calculated.

Putin seemed self-assured and supremely confident throughout the interview. This is not what a weak leader who is afraid of losing a war or the grasp over his government looks like. (Screenshot: Tucker Carlson Network)

All of this might be the reason a lot of my colleagues in the media have been giving their best to dissuade people from watching this interview, mostly by marginalising it or by attacking Tucker Carlson. The fact is that this interview puts a lie to almost everything that they’ve been writing about Putin in the last two years. And it makes him look human, which is not a desired outcome if your goal is war at all costs by trying to eradicate even the idea of a peace agreement from people’s minds.

Putin’s View of Ukraine and the War

Putin, who came to power first as the director of the FSB and later as Prime Minister of Russia largely because of his hard line against separatists that culminated in the Second Chechen War, unsurprisingly blames the conflict in Ukraine on the Ukrainians, NATO and the EU. In his view, it all started when NATO opened up the prospect of NATO membership to Ukraine in 2008. He asserts that the US and the EU had a hand in the Maidan Revolution in 2014, which he calls a coup d'état, and that the actions of the then-instated Ukrainian government forced him to start the war in 2014 to “protect” what he sees as Russian citizens in Crimea. He sees the 2022 invasion of Ukraine as an attempt “to end the war.”

Why I tend to agree that NATO and the EU have a significant hand in this crisis by trying to pull Ukraine into their sphere of influence without considering how Russia might react, the simple fact is that all hostilities in this war have started on the Russian side. Considering this, I have a lot of doubts about Putin’s professed willingness to negotiate a peace. He says such a peace was almost reached in Istanbul a few months into the second invasion, which is what made him pull back Russian troops from Kiev, but that seems to be misdirection to me. The troops were obviously pulled back because the badly planned advance on the Ukrainian capital had failed. But at the very least, Putin is saying he is open to negotiate — something that cannot be said about the Ukrainian side under Zelensky.

During the interview, Putin spent a lot of time reiterating his theories about Ukraine not really being a state, but an integral part of Russia. Interestingly, he did seem open to the idea of countenancing continued independence for Ukraine, but seems to tie this to continued good relations with Russia. To me, this is a point of view on a very complex issue. I do not agree with Putin, but neither do I agree with the theories of Ukrainian national identity and, more hilariously, linguistic distinction which have been suddenly advanced in the West since the invasion in 2022. Scientific consensus on what constitutes a language as opposed to a dialect was suddenly being ignored when it came to the differences between Ukrainian and Russian — because of political considerations, it seems. So we in the West have our own propaganda theories that rival Putin’s in their silliness.

“A language is a dialect with an army and navy.” — Max Weinreich

In the end, as is always the case in history, the truth is probably somewhere in between the two opposing viewpoints. Is Ukraine a historic part of Russia? Sure. Does it have the right to be its own nation now? I guess. If that will happen in the end is a question of realpolitik, not of who’s view of history is more correct or who’s of superior moral standing. This can be decided by force of arms or at the negotiation table. For the latter, both sides will have to swallow their pride and ignore their propaganda bullshit. I am unsure how willing Putin will be to do this when push comes to shove, but unlike the Ukraine/NATO side he at least openly signals he is willing to try.

Who Can End the War?

Something that’s as much the case as the fact that Putin is the aggressor in the war is his continued assertion that it is obviously very hard to beat Russia on the battlefield. All the propaganda about Ukraine winning “within months” or even the Russian state and the Putin regime being “at the verge of collapse”, that has been repeated in the US and European media for a very long time, was clearly bullshit. For years we were told that the Russian military was badly trained and poorly equipped. It’s numerical superiority was supposed to be no factor because of all of this. Yet, the Russians are now firmly entrenched in Ukraine in the same kind of battle of attrition the Red Army had historically been so good at. In the face of foreign military aid to Ukraine to the tune of 43 billion euros from the US and 17 billion euros from Germany plus another odd billion here and there from other countries.

It’s obvious that Ukraine’s war effort would have collapsed a few months into the war in 2022 without all of this. So when Putin says that the US and countries like Germany are really fighting this war, and could also stop it in a few weeks by cutting off the flow of weapons and money, he is absolutely right. The US, Germany, the UK and EU institutions are fighting this war. The Ukrainian people are simply providing cannon fodder. It is a disgrace that the press in Germany and the US is not shouting this fact from the rooftops and that they, instead, are trying to supress an interview with the enemy leader, because seeing it could make their audience realise the truth they have been hiding from them.

It’s not only Putin’s fault. We are complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Deaths that are financed with our tax money.

Too Long, Did Not Watch

Carlson, by and large, did a good job, I feel. Even though he was put off balance early on in the interview, he seemed to recover and pushed Putin a few times — including on the latter’s ludicrous ideas about de-Nazification of Ukraine. Sure, there are neo-Nazis fighting in the Ukrainian military, but the same is true for the Russian military — the fact that the Wagner PMC was named after Hitler’s favourite composer is no accident. That de-Nazification is a war goal for Putin is completely illusory, aside from providing an easy propaganda justification for an unjustified attack on another country, and Carlson pointed out how unrealistic this goal was at least twice.

Like a good interviewer, Carlson defaulted to letting Putin talk — giving the person you’re interviewing space to talk being the goal of every interview, after all. He showed impeccable journalistic instincts by pursuing, and going through, with this interview in the first place and he was fearless and well prepared. He even brought up Evan Gershkovich and asked Putin directly to release him into Carlson’s custody.

Unfortunately, the results from this interview aren’t very flattering to the rest of my profession. But that is not because of Carlson or Putin, but largely because the propaganda that has been advanced about the President of Russia obviously doesn’t stand up to shining the light of journalism directly at it.

Key Takeaways:

• Putin is human and can’t be easily dismissed as a Hitlerian monster

• He may have very different viewpoints from us who live in the West, some of which are ludicrous to us, but he articulates them calmly and intelligently

• He is prepared, smart and comes across more competent than the current heads of state in the US, Germany, Canada, the UK or most of the EU

• Putin is a scary man who knows what he is doing; if we want to solve this situation, we need to take him seriously

In general, I didn’t agree with much of what Putin said. But at one point, I found myself so much in agreement, it actually shocked me a bit. When talking about the Nord Stream bombings and how much of a sham the German response was, Putin responded to Carlson’s “I don’t understand this response” by saying “I don’t understand it either.” Then Putin suddenly laughed and knocked on the wooden table in front of him three times. “This is what it is like in their heads”, he said, “these are very incompetent people.” That’s the best assessment of the Scholz government I have heard to date.

With people like that in charge, who are no match whatsoever for a man like Vladimir Putin, we have no chance in hell to end this whole unfortunate situation to our advantage. And Putin knows it, too.

1. Tucker Carlson had hosted the most watched show on Fox News, and actually the most watched news show in the whole of US television, until he was fired under mysterious circumstances in April of last year.