Russian President Vladimir V. Putin repeated one message over and over again during a meandering two-hour interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson: Russia is on the terms of the Kremlin. However, he wants to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine.
The message appeared to be aimed at the American right and Republicans in Congress with the goal of undermining support for aid to Ukraine. If so, then the day after your long-awaited interview, you seem to have lost your way.
The Russian leader’s discursive historical diatribes, which delved into everything from the Rurik dynasty to the Golden Horde, dominated commentary about the interview online and overshadowed the message he was trying to convey.
On Friday, experts and even some of Mr. Putin’s allies in Russia pointed to the main ideological similarities he shares with Mr. Karlsson’s followers: opposition to LGBTQ rights and other liberal social causes. I was confused as to the reason for the disrespect.
Margarita Simonyan, director of Russian state broadcaster RT, lamented that Putin had failed to promote Russia as a “safe place for people who are not ready to be raised by LGBT people.”
“This is the only thing Russia can and should do to build its ideology externally,” Simonian said, criticizing Carlson for not asking the right questions. “Just as the Soviet Union once built its state on the idea of social equality.”
Instead, Mr. Putin spent much of the interview lecturing a bewildered Mr. Karlsson in a revivalist lecture about 1,000 years of Eastern European history, which, by his own admission, left the former Fox News host “shocked.” .
As a result, Russian leaders felt they had missed an opportunity.
“I think he just didn’t try very hard,” Grigory Golosov, a political science professor at the European University in St. Petersburg, said in a telephone interview. “If his goal was really to explain himself, and it appears that it was, it is unlikely that he reached that goal.”
Mr. Golosov said Mr. Putin’s main tactical objective was to force the West to reach a favorable deal to end the war, which would consolidate Russia’s control over Ukrainian territory already occupied and possibly He said it would lead to more wars. A pro-Russian government located in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
“President Putin feels that now is the best time to believe that the West is the natural way out of this situation,” Golosov said. “And that means negotiating directly with Russia, without Ukraine’s participation, on how to end the conflict on Russia’s terms.”
Even during historical condemnation, that intention was clear.
Now that the West has finally realized that Russia will not suffer a “strategic defeat” on the battlefield in Ukraine, Mr. Putin has offered negotiations on his terms as a way out.
“That will never happen,” Putin said. “It seems to me that the powers that be in the Western world are now aware of this. If that is the case, and that realization is emerging, then they have to think about what to do next. We are ready for this conversation.”
At another point he asked, “Wouldn’t it be better to reach an agreement with Russia?”
His pitch came at a particularly difficult time for Ukraine.
Kiev faces ammunition and manpower shortages, massive opposition to additional aid in Washington and the prospect of pro-Russia former President Donald J. Trump returning to the White House. A Western-backed counteroffensive planned to retake territory last year failed, leaving the military leadership in turmoil.
Putin offered an alternative plan to double aid to Ukraine.
Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, said: “He is clearly aligning himself with the right wing of the Republican Party, trying to expand the number of votes against aid to Ukraine, and pushing for a negotiated solution in this country on his terms.” “We were trying to cultivate or cultivate support.” , a political risk consulting firm. That said, it was clearly not Putin’s “best performance,” he added.
In Ukraine, officials have been deeply skeptical of Putin’s desire for dialogue in recent months as Russian missiles continue to bombard cities across the country. The proposal was rejected as frivolous.
“Mr. Karlsson’s interview with Mr. Putin is a two-hour marathon of delusions and fabrications,” Ukraine’s government agency Strategic Communications Center said in a statement.
Ukrainian officials and commentators say Mr. Putin’s overtures are not a compromise, but an attempt to undermine support for military aid in Congress by suggesting the war could end quickly through negotiations. He said he sees that there is.
In the interview, Putin directly conveyed a message about possible reconciliation to “the masses of President Trump’s voters” regarding suggested that the aim was to influence the country’s Ukraine policy. By echoing Republicans who oppose aid.
The argument that concessions to Russia could end the war “dovetails perfectly with President Trump’s claims,” she said.
Mr. Putin may see this year as the time to forge a deal that would later allow him to regroup and pursue larger goals in Ukraine. Although Russia has taken the lead on the battlefield, it still faces significant limitations, as well as a heavily fortified front in Ukraine. As a result, it is unlikely that Russian troops will sweep through Ukrainian territory and capture new large cities in the near future.
Mr. Putin’s historical accusations were aimed at portraying Ukraine as a false country without an independent identity and did not suggest that Russia was ready to compromise.
The Ukrainian government has maintained that Mr. Putin has not backed down from his own extremist demands and has set the goal of “demilitarizing” and “non-Nazification” of Ukraine, halting Western military aid, and establishing a pro-Russian government in Kiev. He pointed out that he interpreted it as something to do.
“We have previously completely sidestepped his historical perspective and the fact that Ukraine became an internationally recognized country with sovereign borders in 1991,” said Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group. That’s how I’ve seen this movie,” he said. “He truly believes that Ukraine is his, is his, and will always be his.”
Andrew E. Kramer, Milana Mazaeva and Neil MacFarquhar contributed to this report.