On February 6th, Tucker Carlson spent over two hours interviewing President Vladimir Putin. The interview was later broadcast on the website of Karlsson, one of Russia’s main state television channels, and on the Kremlin website, in a dubbed version by what appears to be a Kremlin-provided interpreter.
What Tucker Carlson saw in his interview with President Vladimir Putin
Carlson seemed more surprised than anything. He was able to interview Putin in the Kremlin and film himself giving his impressions after the interview in a room full of lacquer and gold leaf. Because of what President Putin said during an interview. And by the person himself. Putin used the interview to deliver a long lecture on the history of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and its aftermath, aimed at convincing viewers that Ukraine never had the right to exist. At the end of his speech, Putin continued a litany of complaints about the West, where generations of presidents, prime ministers and secretaries of state have let him down or forced him out. After the interview, an incredulous Carlson held up a gray cardboard folder tied with a small rope. President Putin gave him copies of documents supporting his historical claims. Carlson hadn’t opened it yet. “I thought he was filibustering,” he said, still seeming reeling from his history class. “But after looking at all this, I concluded: No, that was a prerequisite for his answer.The history of this region and the formation of this country and its connections with Ukraine It’s part of the basis of policy.”
The content of Putin’s conversations with Karlsson was almost indistinguishable from Putin’s rare speeches and so-called press conferences and hotlines, hours of highly tuned television programs each year. . President Putin’s obsession with history is real, as is his belief in the narrative that justifies, and indeed makes Russia’s war against Ukraine inevitable. To Mr. Carlson’s surprise, either Mr. Carlson had not watched Mr. Putin’s previous appearances in preparation for the interview, or, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that a man named Putin had been accepted into the role, viz. This suggests that he imagined that he would fit the role of a dictator who murders and murders his opponents. Imprisoned and Invading Neighboring Nations should be larger than life, terrifying to watch, and certainly not boring.
Carlson emerged from the interview shaking his head. “Russia is not an expansionist power,” he said. “Are you an idiot for thinking that?” Indeed, the invasion and de facto control of about one-fifth of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the continued occupation of about one-fifth of Ukraine Looking at the evidence, such as the occupation and continued offensives there, one might conclude: Russia is an expansionist power. During the interview, Putin gave every indication that he considered the former imperial possessions to still rightfully belong to Russia. This will include not only the former Soviet Union countries, but also Finland and Poland. “Professional liars in Washington…this man is Hitler and is trying to convince you that he is trying to take over the Sudetenland or something like that,” Carlson continued. “There’s no resemblance at all!” In fact, during the interview, Putin channeled Hitler more clearly than ever before. This is what a tyrant looks like. Full of small and boring grudges.
What Putin saw in the Tucker Carlson interview
There was a simple mark here. Mr. Carlson meekly tried to interrupt Mr. Putin several times to ask questions on which Mr. Putin seemed stuck. “Why weren’t all these historical and territorial issues brought up in 2000, when Putin first became president?” It was an ill-informed question — Putin had been peddling historical revisionism from the beginning. , became increasingly obsessed with Ukraine after the 2004 Orange Revolution — and it was an easy question for Putin to ignore. This seemed to indicate that Mr. Karlsson was not as well briefed as Mr. Putin, who introduced biographical trivia about Mr. Karlsson into the conversation, a trademark blackmail tactic of KGB agents. He said, for example, that Carlson tried to join the CIA but failed.
Mr. Carlson did not interrupt or challenge Putin on countless occasions when he lied about Ukraine’s history, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and Russian-Russian relations. NATOPerhaps the conversations with former U.S. leaders, and perhaps most damning of all, will be the withdrawal of Russian troops from the outskirts of Kiev after a month-long invasion in 2022. President Putin claimed this was a gesture of goodwill aimed at achieving a quick negotiated agreement. Peace; in fact, it was a military defeat. This would also have been a good opportunity for Carlson to ask Putin about the well-documented war crimes allegedly committed by Russian soldiers during the occupation that month. He missed this opportunity.
Most importantly from Putin’s perspective, Karlsson seemed to share two of the basic premises. The idea is that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war with the United States, and that any negotiations will likely take place between the Kremlin and the White House, bypassing Kiev. . Mr. Carlson even urged Mr. Putin to call President Biden and say, “Let’s solve the problem.” In response, President Putin replied that the message Russia wants to send to the United States is “to stop supplying arms.” It will be over within a few weeks. ”
What Russian TV viewers saw
President Putin repeats his history lectures over and over again. Most Russians who watched the entire interview likely did so out of professional obligation. Their job as propagandists or political appointees is to spread and affirm the leader’s message. Ordinary Russians probably only saw the outtakes and commentary. What they saw was that something important had happened. When one of America’s most popular journalists came to interview President Putin, he looked like a deer caught in headlights. Channel 1 highlighted both Carlson’s popularity and Americans’ apparent interest in Putin’s comments. Carlson’s promotional video itself, which preceded the interview, was viewed over 100 million times. It is not unreasonable for Russians to see Mr. Carlson as a representative of a future Trump administration, a harbinger of a coming America in which pro-Ukraine liberals will eventually be ousted.
What Tucker Carlson viewers saw
It’s hard to imagine an American audience finishing the first 10 minutes of Putin’s monotonous history lecture. (In the interview, Putin referred to this as one of his “dialogues,” betraying his ignorance or idea of what dialogue is.) (It was translated as “My long speech.”) The interpreter generally cleaned up Putin’s sentences. In prose, I smoothed out sentences that made no sense in Russian. For example, in response to Carlson’s question about a possible invasion of Poland, Putin said in Russian: “Because we have no interests in Poland or Lithuania or anywhere. What do we need it for? We just have no interests, only blackmail.” was translated as follows. “Because we are not interested in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. Why would we do that? We are not interested at all. It’s just blackmail.”