Putin tells Carlson: ‘If you really want to stop fighting, you need to stop supplying weapons. It will be over within a few weeks’

Vladimir Putin used his interview with former Fox host Tucker Carlson in Moscow, which was broadcast Thursday, to lavish praise on Donald Trump and even provide the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination with some free publicity. “We have been the recipients of numerous insults and slurs going back a few generations of politicians. Mr. Trump was a refreshing break from that. He is very popular in Russia. Perhaps that won’t do him any good,” he said in reference to President Joe Biden calling his Russian counterpart a “killer” in March 2021. “Should he win again our lines of communication would open up instantly, whereas right now we have no dialogue with President Biden.”

The interview, which lasted for more than two hours, included rhetorical questions and several monologues from Putin, with Carlson displaying a somewhat subliminal Republican message, in a display of publicity and propaganda that visibly satisfied both sides.

The first block of the interview concerned the war in Ukraine. The two staged what appeared to be a previously agreed joke about the lead-up to the invasion of Ukraine and the motives that led Moscow to invade at the end of February 2022. Carlson asked if Russia had felt threatened, reminding Putin that he had addressed the nation at the beginning of the war about a “surprise attack” by the U.S. through NATO. “It’s not that the United States was going to launch a surprise strike on Russia, I didn’t say so. Are we having a talk show or serious conversation?” Putin replied to Carlson’s complacent laughter. “That was a good quote,” said the interviewer.

The spark and the supposed spontaneity of the encounter were extinguished when Putin, invited to explain the reasons for the invasion, launched into a long historical monologue, justifying Moscow’s inalienable right over Ukrainian territory. Putin’s review, stretching back to the 9th century, did not deviate an inch from what the Kremlin has previously stated: Ukraine is an artificial construction, without historical roots. “In 1922, when the USSR was being established, the Bolsheviks started building the USSR and established the Soviet Ukraine, which had never existed before,” Putin stated.

Putin spent over an hour on the historical chapter, from the Ukrainian Rus to the policy of President Leonid Kuchma or the Maidan Revolution of early 2014. “When did you decide [to invade Ukraine]?” Carlson asked. “Initially, it was the coup in Ukraine that provoked the conflict.” Putin replied, adding that Moscow was not willing to allow “neo-Nazism” next door. One of the pretexts for the “special military operation,” as Russia officially calls the war, is the “denazification” of the elements that, in in the Kremlin’s opinion, have dominated the “Kyiv regime” since the Maidan.

Carlson threw in another rhetorical question: “Why didn’t you make this case for the first 22 years as president, that Ukraine wasn’t a real country?” Putin replied: “The Soviet Ukraine was given a great deal of territory that had never belonged to it, including the Black Sea region,” which includes Crimea, illegally annexed by Moscow in 2014. “At some point, when Russia received them as an outcome of the Russo-Turkish wars, they were called “New Russia” or Novorossiya. But that does not matter. What matters is that Lenin, the founder of the Soviet State, established Ukraine that way. After World War II, Romania and Hungary had some of their lands taken away and given to the Ukraine and they still remain part of Ukraine. So in this sense, we have every reason to affirm that Ukraine is an artificial state that was shaped at Stalin’s will.”

On “the threat” posed by NATO, he cited the bombing of Belgrade in 1998, “in violation of international law and the UN Charter. It was the United States that let the genie out of the bottle.” He also said he asked former U.S. president Bill Clinton about the prospect of joining NATO, and had proposed a joint missile defense system involving the United States, Russia and Europe. “I suggested working together. They said it was very interesting. They asked me ‘are you serious?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’”

“If [Clinton] had said yes [to Russia applying to join NATO], the process of rapprochement would have commenced, and eventually it might have happened if we had seen some sincere wish on the side of our partners. But it didn’t happen. Well, no means no, okay, fine.”

On the hypothetical existence of contacts with Washington for a negotiated end to the war, the Russian president’s message to the White House was clear: “If you really want to stop fighting, you need to stop supplying weapons. It will be over within a few weeks,” he said, adding he could not remember the last time he had spoken with Biden. All in all, he was more candid than usual about how an end to the war may be decided: not necessarily with a military victory, but with an agreement with the West. Russia “has never rejected negotiations,” he said, and would welcome any effort by Washington to discuss a peace deal for Ukraine. “We have contacts through various agencies,” Putin said, adding that peace talks were “almost finalized” in the early stages of the invasion, when Russia “withdrew” its troops from around Kyiv, but that Ukraine “threw away all these agreements and obeyed the instructions of Western countries, European countries and the United States to fight Russia to the bitter end.”

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