The Vladimir Putin Interview - Part One
Part One: The Genealogy of a Civilizational Power
On February 6, 2024, Tucker Carlson, a popular American conservative journalist and polemicist, was granted an interview with Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin. The interview — a two-hour-long marathon by American sound-bite / talking-point standards – was broadcast two days later.
It was initially published on Carlson’s website, and was then posted to the X social media platform. The X post alone has tallied ~200 million views. We may confidently assume that the interview video on Carlson’s website has been viewed by several million more.
It is reasonable to conclude that this interview of Vladimir Putin has been seen by a larger global audience than has ever previously watched an interview of a major national leader.
The reactions of the viewing audience have varied greatly. Western media and political leaders have almost universally condemned the interview as nothing more than what they characterize as typical Russian propaganda and mendacity. These same people have excoriated Tucker Carlson as a “Putin puppet” and a “useful idiot” who never should have afforded Putin the opportunity to speak from such a bully pulpit.
Some western political leaders and commentators even proposed to deny Carlson reentry to the United States, to deprive him of the privilege of traveling in the European Union, to sanction him in punitive ways, and even to charge him with espionage and treason.
Others who watched part or all of the interview considered it boring and tendentious.
Yet others — and my sense is that this category comprises the majority — found the interview surprisingly enlightening and came away from it with a favorable impression of President Putin.
I have now watched the video of the interview twice in its entirety, and have carefully read the transcript twice in full, and some parts additional times.
I have also, over the past two decades, viewed and/or read literally hundreds of Putin speeches, interviews, press-conferences, etc.
In my carefully considered opinion — given its context in this period of unprecedented global tensions and what is indisputably a major proxy war being waged by the United States and its NATO allies against Russia — I regard the interview as arguably the single most important such event of the post-Cold War era.
I submit further that, in my estimation, Vladimir Putin is, by a substantial margin, the single most intellectually potent and personally charismatic world leader of the past century. His knowledge and understanding of history, international relations, macroeconomics, and his manifest talent as an extemporaneous speaker are utterly unparalleled among all the national leaders of whom I have been aware over the course of my lifetime.
The interview commenced, much to my surprise and chagrin, with a mendaciously framed and deliberately disingenuous query by Carlson:
Tucker Carlson: On February 24, 2022, you addressed your country in your nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States through NATO might initiate a quote, “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?
The premise of this question is patently false. Putin’s speech of February 24, 2022 makes no mention whatsoever of the threat of a “surprise attack on our country” from the United States or its NATO allies. Carlson claimed it to be a direct quote. No such statement is present in the speech, nor anything like unto it.
At no point in the speech does President Putin attempt to justify the coming “Special Military Operation” on the threat of an imminent attack from the western powers.
Simply put, Carlson invented this quote ex nihilo, and apparently sought to bait Putin into a response which, presumably, Carlson then intended to take advantage of in some fashion.
I was frankly shocked that he had done this. I was immediately aware that the question was built upon a falsehood, for I am extremely familiar with both the major speeches Putin gave in the days preceding the launch of the Russian “Special Military Operation”.
Why did Tucker Carlson do this? Hard to say. But it evoked from Putin a brilliant reply which immediately turned the tables on whatever Carlson’s motivations were for posing a question built upon a lie.
Vladimir Putin: 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 a serious conversation?
This pointed response disarmed Carlson’s ill-intentions for the time being, and knocked him back on his heels.
Putin then started a “serious conversation” on his terms, and according to his agenda. And what he did first — although it no doubt befuddled a large proportion of his audience — was not only an exhibition of erudition, but more importantly, it was a type of thing one simply does not see in our day and age, although in ancient times it would have been considered entirely normal, and even de rigueur for a great national leader to do precisely what Putin did: present, as it were, the Russian nation’s Letters Patent; its genealogy dating back over a thousand years; its historical bona fides.
Vladimir Putin is the current leader of a great “civilizational power” — a nation whose history stretches back over a millennium, and whose voluminous archives document that history. And, given the fundamental importance of that fact in the context of what is in many respects a civil war taking place in Ukraine, it was imperative that certain elements of evidence be presented as a preface to the eventual discussion of the illegitimacy and demonstrable falsehoods of Ukraine’s presumptuous claims upon portions of the longstanding “Russian nation”.
“Ukraine” is a sovereign polity created in 1991. Its geographic footprint is an artificial construction effected by exogenous powers over the course of the twentieth century. Its origins are a relatively limited and historically ill-defined cultural area previously known as “The Ukraine” — a region “on the outskirts” of its mother nation: Russia.
One needn’t search hard to discover that nineteenth century maps and encyclopedias are perfectly consonant with this reality. In the Chambers Encyclopedia my great-grandfather purchased in 1888, the following map of European Russia appears:
A smaller crop of that map which includes the area crafted into “Ukraine” in 1991 appears below:
And the encyclopedia entry for “Ukraine” reads as follows:
UKRAINE (Slavic, a frontier country or March), the name given in Poland first to the frontiers towards the Tatars and other nomads, and then to the fertile regions lying on both sides of the middle Dnieper, without any very definite limits. The Ukraine was long a bone of contention between Poland and Russia. About 1686 the part on the east side of Dnieper was ceded to Russia (Russian Ukraine); and at the second partition of Poland, the western portion (Polish Ukraine) also fell to Russia, and is mostly comprised of the government of Kiev. The historic Ukraine forms the greater part of what is called Little Russia (a name which first appears about 1654), which is made up of the governments of Kiev, Tchernigov, Poltava, and Kharkov.
- Chambers Encyclopedia, Volume VII, 1888 (abbreviations expanded)
But, as it has done in many other regions of the world, the Anglo-American empire, beginning as early as the immediate post-WW2 period, and accelerating in the post-Cold War period, sought to methodically cultivate violent national aspirations among portions of the populace of this region in order to effect a stratagem to weaken its long-time nemesis in Russia.
The western powers focused their nefarious project upon those portions of Ukraine wherein resided the heirs to the German-collaborating Ukrainian nationalists who, in direct affiliation with the Nazi SS formations, had proven to be reliable and particularly ruthless executioners of Jews, Poles, and Russians during the Second World War.
These historical facts are beyond dispute — at least in the realms of the informed. But the highly propagandized people of the so-called “western democracies” are not well-informed, and it is precisely for this reason that Vladimir Putin no doubt felt compelled to expound upon these questions in his lengthy but essential opening remarks in the interview with Tucker Carlson.
Carlson attempted multiple times to interrupt and redirect Putin’s train of thought, but to no avail. He even had the temerity to once again make reference to his initial deceptively constructed question:
Tucker Carlson: … many nations feel frustrated by their re-drawn borders after the wars of the 20th century, and wars going back a thousand years, the ones that you mention, but the fact is that you didn’t make this case in public until two years ago in February, and in the case that you made, which I read today, you explain at great length that you thought [there was] a physical threat from the West and NATO, including potentially a nuclear threat, and that’s what got you to move. Is that a fair characterization of what you said?
It is NOT a “fair characterization” of what Putin said. In fact, it is emphatically a FALSE characterization of what he said.
And yet Carlson was determined to extract an answer to this tortured misrepresentation of Putin’s own words.
Nevertheless, Putin refused to take the bait, and once again parried Carlson’s disingenuous query:
Vladimir Putin: I understand that my long speeches probably fall outside of the genre of an interview. That is why I asked you at the beginning: “Are we going to have a serious talk or a show?” You said — a serious talk. So bear with me please.
And then he proceeded to conclude his exposition of the essential historical facts.
I will, in subsequent installments of my commentary on this important interview, highlight multiple additional instances of Tucker Carlson posing ill-formed and disingenuous questions to President Putin, and then examine how Putin skillfully countered these curious attempts to “put words in his mouth”.
Coming up in Part 2: Tucker Carlson himself, along with many other western commentators and state-controlled propaganda organizations (such as Reuters, as seen above), have attempted in the aftermath of the interview to advance the demonstrably false narrative that Putin expressed a desire to negotiate a ceasefire and a mutually acceptable end to the ongoing war. Of course, that is a highly deceptive misinterpretation and misrepresentation of what really happened.
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— Will Schryver