Conservative American journalist Tucker Carlson has released an interview he conducted with with Russian president Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on Tuesday. You can watch the conversation here.
Western media outlets “lie to their readers and viewers” by promoting Kiev’s position while downplaying Russia’s, Carlson claimed. “That’s wrong. Americans have the right to know all they can about a war they are implicated in,” he said in a video on X on Tuesday.
Carlson added that he wanted to talk to Putin because it is his “duty to inform people,” especially with regard to the Ukraine conflict, since the US is Kiev’s biggest military backer.
News of Carlson’s visit to Moscow triggered criticism in Western media, while some politicians have called for the former Fox News host to be slapped with sanctions. However, an EU Council source told the Russian TASS news agency that sanctions against Carlson are off the table for now.
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09 February 2024
Zelensky was elected president on a platform of peace, but allied himself with “neo-Nazis and nationalists” after taking office, Putin says. He sees two reasons for this.
The first is that people like this are “aggressive and… you can expect anything from them,” and the second is that “the US-led West supports them and will always support those who antagonize Russia.” It was “beneficial and safe” for Zelensky, but obviously betrayed the promises he made to voters.
It was “ridiculous and very sad” that Kiev listened to then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and refused to sign a draft truce with Russia that was agreed on during peace talks in 2022, Putin believes. The war continues on, while Johnson himself is no longer in office, he noted.
Asked why Johnson would interfere in the first place, Putin says: “I don’t understand it myself.”
“Everyone [in the West] had the illusion that Russia could be defeated on the battlefield. Because of arrogance, because of a pure heart, but not because of a great mind.”
Russia would only engage in a military conflict with a NATO nation such as Poland or Latvia if it is attacked, Putin says. Any Western claims to the contrary are “just threat mongering.”
Speculation that Russia would use nuclear weapons against Ukraine or cause some kind of escalation of the conflict are “just horror stories for people in the street in order to extort additional money from US taxpayers and European taxpayers in the confrontation with Russia,” he claims.
Here are some more key points from the interview:
Unlike the US, Russia is not afraid of the rise of China, Putin says, calling Carlson’s suggestion that BRICS risks being “completely dominated by the Chinese economy” a “boogeyman story.”
“We are neighbors with China. You cannot choose neighbors, just as you cannot choose close relatives,” according to Putin, who added that Russia has learned to coexist with China. He went on to say that Beijing’s foreign policy is aimed at finding compromises, not aggression.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev wrote on Telegram that Carlson “didn’t chicken out and didn’t falter.”
He added that Putin “meticulously and comprehensively explained to the Western world why Ukraine has never existed, doesn’t exist and will not exist.”
Medvedev currently serves as the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council and oversees military production.
The Washington Post’s Russia correspondent, Francesca Ebel, wrote that one of the reasons the Russian president had agreed to talk to Carlson was “to appeal to the more MAGA reaches of the Republican Party during an election year.”
The interview could “boost Donald Trump’s chances of reelection and convince Republicans to continue to block U.S. military aid to Ukraine,” Ebel argued.
According to the Russian media, Putin gave Carlson the copies of letters of Bogdan Khmelnitsky to the Russian tsar. Khmelnitsky was a 17th-century Cossack chief who led a rebellion against Poland and later asked Moscow for protection.
Putin mentioned Khmelnitsky’s letters when talking about the centuries of shared history between Russia and Ukraine.
US conservative talk show host and filmmaker Matt Walsh compared Putin’s answers to Biden’s latest press conference.
“Tonight as Putin gave intelligent, scholarly answers that delved into a thousand years of Russian history, President Biden was babbling incoherently about how the president of Egypt is actually the president of Mexico,” Walsh wrote on X.
Biden confused the leaders of Mexico and Egypt when speaking to reporters at the White House on Thursday.
According to Carlson, Putin gave him a thick folder full of “documents.”
“I got my nighttime reading,” the journalist said, without describing the contents of the folder.
The interview has garnered 35 million views on Carlson’s X account and 363,800 views on YouTube. It was also broadcast on the journalist’s personal website.
In a video filmed after the interview, Carlson said that it is insane for the US to expect that Russia will surrender Crimea to Ukraine.
“It’s got a Russian population. They had a referendum [in 2014], they chose Russia,” the journalist said. “You could like that or not, but the fact is that Putin would go to nuclear war if it came down to Crimea.”
“If you really think that a condition [for] peace is that Putin is going to give up Crimea, then you’re like a lunatic,” Carlson said.
When asked whether Moscow is ready to release US journalist Evan Gershkovich, detained on espionage charges in Russia last year, as a gesture of goodwill, Putin recalls that his country has been ready to play ball with the West, but this policy went unreciprocated. However, Putin does not rule out the release of Gershkovich, adding that this will require flexibility from Western intelligence services.
Billionaire Elon Musk who is pushing forward technical progress, including by implanting a neurochip into a human brain, “cannot be stopped,” Putin says, adding that some agreements and regulations on the technology should be agreed.
The president compares recent achievements in artificial intelligence and genetics to the development of nuclear weapons in the 20th century, noting that when nations across the world started to feel the danger, they started to forge agreements to regulate the new technology.
The BRICS economic forum is developing at a fast pace, Putin believes. He adds that since the early 1990s emerging economies that are now part of the group have made strides, and now dwarf G7 in terms of their contribution to global GDP.
According to the president, this development is independent from the Ukraine conflict and is a reflection of general global economic tendencies, and cannot be stopped.
Russia has a balanced trade turnover with China, Putin notes, adding that it hinges on both high-tech, science-driven, and energy products.
The US is making a “glaring strategic mistake” by using the dollar as a foreign policy tool, Putin believes. As Washington prints more money, inflation rises globally, according to the president.
Asked by Carlson who he believed had blown up the Nord Stream gas pipelines linking Russia and Germany through the Baltic Sea, Putin replies: “You,” apparently referring to Western countries. When pressed whether he had any proof of US or NATO involvement, the Russian leader avoids specifics, noting that in such cases one should first look for those who would benefit from such attacks, and who had the capability to carry them out.
Russia and Ukraine were incredibly close to ending hostilities in the early days of the conflict, Putin says. However, once Moscow pulled its troops from near the Ukrainian capital in the spring of 2022, Kiev ditched all diplomacy, caving to Western pressure to fight Moscow until the very end, according to the president. In addition to this, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky signed a decree banning all talks with Russia, making any further engagement very difficult, he recalls.
If the US wants to stop the Ukraine conflict, it should stop sending arms to Kiev, Putin says. According to the Russian leader, if this were to happen, hostilities would end within several weeks.
08 February 2024
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine went on a quest to find its national identity, but found no better option other than promoting “false heroes” that collaborated with the Nazis during WWII, Putin says.
Commenting on the now-defunct 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements that sought to prevent hostilities in Donbass, Putin says that he sincerely believed that the crisis in the region could have been settled if the local population had been convinced to return to Ukraine, and if Kiev agreed to fulfil its social welfare commitments. Policymakers in Kiev, however, wanted to quell the uprising by force, he adds.
Putin brands the Western approach towards Ukraine a colossal political mistake. He clarifies that he is talking about NATO’s 2008 promise to accept the country into the bloc, as well as the Western-supported coup d’etat in Kiev in 2014. The new Ukrainian government’s campaign to persecute those who opposed the coup was a threat to Crimea, forcing Moscow to take it under protection, he adds.
Russia was initially willing to tolerate Ukraine’s push to forge ties with the EU in the 2000s, but Kiev’s desire to sign the Association Agreement with the bloc posed major issues, Putin says. The deal would have opened Ukraine’s borders to the EU, meaning that European goods would have streamed into Russia because Kiev had a free trade agreement with Moscow.
When then-Ukrainian President President Viktor Yanukovich began to doubt the wisdom of such an agreement with the EU, the situation devolved into mass protests and a coup d’etat, supported by the West, Putin adds.
NATO promised that it would not expand its territory eastwards, but quickly went on to break this promise by bringing the entire Eastern Europe and Baltic states into the fold, Putin says. The US-led military bloc now even intends to drag Ukraine in, he adds.
Russia has been able to outpace both the US and other countries in the development of hypersonic weapons and intends to continue enhancing its capabilities in this field, Putin says.
The US and its “satellites” supported separatism and terrorism in the North Caucasus in the 1990s by providing political, informational, financial, and military support to insurgents, Putin claims. According to the president, when he confronted his US counterpart on the issue, the latter rejected the accusations.
Later, however, Washington admitted to Moscow that it had been cooperating with the Russian “opposition,” adding that it deemed that policy correct, Putin says, noting that after that Moscow understood that any dialogue on the issue was unlikely to bear any fruit.
Putin recalls that he asked former US President Bill Clinton about whether Russia could join NATO, but the latter said that it was not possible. However, if the US leader had said “yes” at the time, it would have ushered in a period of rapprochement between Moscow and the military alliance, Putin suggests.
Russia accepted the collapse of the Soviet Union and expected that once all ideological differences were eliminated, it could engage in cooperation with the West, Putin says.
Ukraine is an “artificial state” created by the will of the late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Russian President Vladimir Putin tells Carlson. While Ukraine has received many of its territories from neighboring states, including Hungary, those nations have the right to speak about the return of their historic lands.
The Russian leader denies however, that he had ever had a conversation on the matter with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Much-expected interview with Vladimir Putin is being aired on Tucker Carlson’s own network. You can watch it live:
There are “no discussions” to blacklist Carlson over the Putin interview, Peter Stano, spokesman for the EU’s top diplomat Josep Borrell, told reporters.
“It’s not up to us to try to pre-empt or speculate whether someone will be proposed by a member state or group of member states to be put on the sanctions list,” Stano said.
Newsweek had earlier quoted several current and former members of the European Parliament as saying that Carlson should be barred from entering the bloc.
Carlson has interviewed several heads of state in the past, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
His sit-downs with Orban in 2021 and 2023 were criticized by some US media outlets as “doing PR” for Hungary’s prime minister. Carlson responded by saying that mainstream news outlets were hostile to dissenting opinions.
The interview with Putin will not change the way the American public sees the support for Ukraine, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby has said.
“I don’t think the American people are going to be swayed by one single interview,” Kirby said in response to a reporter’s question. “Remember, you’re listening to Vladimir Putin, and you shouldn’t take at face value anything he has to say.”
Carlson is a vocal critic of US President Joe Biden and American foreign policy in Europe and the Middle East. He regularly questions US military aid for Kiev and has criticized Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
“The president of Ukraine arrived at the White House dressed like the manager of a strip club and started to demand money. Amazingly, no one threw him out,” Carlson said on his show on Fox News in 2022.
According to news website Femafor, Carlson met with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in Moscow on Thursday. Snowden has been living in Russia since 2013 and became a Russian citizen in 2022.
Carlson also reportedly recorded an interview with Tara Reade, a former Senate aide who accused President Joe Biden of sexual assault. Biden has denied her allegations. Reade moved to Russia in 2023, citing security concerns.
Putin rarely grants one-on-one interviews to the foreign press. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained that the Russian leader has “no desire” to speak to Western media that has “completely one-sided” opinions and does not try to uphold “even a semblance of impartiality.”
The American journalist recorded the interview during an unannounced visit to Moscow. During his trip to the Russian capital, he attended an international expo and a ballet performance in the Bolshoi Theatre, according to local media.
Carlson was also spotted at a fast food restaurant and a large retail store. He reportedly left Moscow on early Thursday morning.
The interview with Vladimir Putin will be released at 6pm EST (11pm GMT) on Thursday, Tucker Carlson has said. The journalist has posted a first photo from the conversation on his Instagram.