Eurasia note #85: The Vladimir Putin-Tucker Carlson Interview

Probing, insightful but key questions missed

• Russia can’t be defeated in Ukraine, says Putin on 2nd anniversary of war

• ‘We have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. Why would we do that?’

• War with Poland would happen ‘only in one case: if Poland attacks Russia’

• U.S. policy ‘is not about the leader. It is not about the personality of a person’

• ‘If you really want to stop fighting, you need to stop supplying weapons’

• Back channel talks with U.S. continue, in particular on missile systems

• First individual interview with representative of Western media since 2019

• Media flips, says Carlson asked ‘softball’ questions - as it does of Zelenskiy

• Can it break the ice and avert escalation? You decide

(2,700 words or about 13 minutes of your company.)

Feb 9, 2024

Tucker Carlson's interview with president Vladimir Putin is a bombshell. Not because it tells much new to Russia observers, or to coddled Western telly watchers who won't see it. [1]

It is a large nail in the coffin of Western media's pretence to deliver intelligent, meaningful analysis.

The state corporate media is jealous of its (fading) control of what the public hears. As Mika Brzezinski said in 2020: “It's our job to control exactly what people think.”

For comparison, here is Megyn Kelly's 2018 interview for NBC, headlined “Confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin.”

Billed as a no-holds barred interview, she spewed fiction after fiction:

• Russiagate, which many people knew at the time to be a hoax given the fingerprints of the FBI, CIA and Britain's MI6. [2]

• Allegations that Syria's president gassed his own people, discredited by the exposure of the BBC's own fakery and an OPCW cover up. [3]

• Hacking the Democratic National Committee server [4]

• Creating bots to spread misinformation on Twitter and Facebook [5]

Regardless of the fictions, to which some people like Rachel Maddow still cling, such posturing and aggression is intended to push neo-liberal talking points aimed at the domestic audience: American propaganda for Americans.

Megyn Kelly was obnoxious: “c’mon, c’mon.” More telling were the frequent cuts to people like Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations: you were guided to listen to him not the interviwee, Putin.

Carlson's interview by contrast is a fact-seeking interview and not the point-scoring slap-down typical of so many television journalists. It was still adversarial but intelligently so.

Tucker could have been a bit better prepared. Certainly he should have studied the political leadership in Ukraine in the period 2008-2014. It’s that kind of independent research that should set him apart from a Christine Amanpour, let alone a Kelly.

Ukraine's pro-Russian president Victor Yanukovych had agreed to an early election in 2014 which he was destined to lose, said Putin, so why the need for a coup, the attacks on civilians of Donbas, and why threaten the centuries old Russian warm water port in Crimea?

If better briefed, Carlson could have asked how Ukrainian politics got to the point where it could be so easily captured. One answer is the paradox that Russian gas historically transited, and still does, through Ukraine and that those fees helped fatten the wallets of compliant politicians. The scale of corruption would make a Moscow mayor blush.

The CIA went ahead with the coup costing the U.S. $5 billion initially, and later much more: a drawn out bloody conflict. This included burning down a trades union headquarters in Odesa with nearly 50 pro-Russian protestors inside. It continued through eight years of bombing of the Russian population in Donbas, and the assassination of ethnic Russian leaders, killing more than 14,000 people.

Legacy media ignores this, beginning with the invasion of Feb 2022, just as they think Gaza came into being on Oct 7, 2023. History and context do not interest lazy commentators.

Complaints about Carlson's interview include that he did not talk enough about Ukraine. In fact, it dominated most of the interview's two hours and six minutes.

What legacy commentators mean is that Carson did not spend at least half the time chanting a Ukrainian version of “Do you condemn Hamas.”

A Russian president is not going to condemn his own military operation in Ukraine, nor reveal military planning. Instead he explained the rationale:

• social and economic ties that bind Russia and Ukraine

• economic logic against integrating Ukraine in the European Union

• Russia's overtures to the West after the USSR’s dissolution

• West's promise that NATO would not expand to the east

• Putin's own good relations with George W Bush

• Western intel's promotion of extremism in Chechnya

• West's aggressive response to losing economic dominance

• CIA's actions to provoke Ukraine and Russia

• Germany and Poland's role in provoking Ukraine

• CIA's bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipeline

Carlson could have asked Putin to expand on his comment that the foreign policy establishment, not presidents, determine relations with Russia, and who this establishment represents.

The international bankers targeted Russia's resources in the 1990s, just as they launch resource wars around the globe. The Western banks advised Boris Yeltsin's government on the privatisation of state enterprises, and Western-linked oligarchs used criminal means to seize them, while taking control of the media and moving into politics.

Putin's ultimatum to the oligarchs was “stay out of politics and keep your money.” One of the oligarchs who defied him, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was imprisoned and his oil company Yukos was broken up. Others like Boris Berezovsky chose exile.

The Yukos case was exactly the moment when Russia's relations soured and it is not difficult to conclude that Western bankers were those who felt most sour about Putin.

It would have been great to hear from this former Russian intelligence officer who he thinks runs Western intelligence agencies and to whom do they answer.

Carlson could have asked Putin how long he plans to stay in power: a presidential election takes place in mid-March that would see him secure a fifth term in office. He is bound to face a caterwaul of criticism from the flying monkeys who pass for Western politicians — it was an obvious question.

The insightful follow up would be to ask if the Putin's permanent presence is not a sign of strength but of the vulnerability of the Russian political system.

The cheeky kicker would be to raise the Western establishment’s insistence that they want Putin gone — and their assumption that whoever replaced him would be a push over.

Putin casually referred to his discussions with president Bill Clinton, showing that he has outlasted five U.S. leaders. That would have been the time to slip in the question.

In fairness to Carlson, Western media has a lot of catching up to do. It has kept its audience in the dark about Russia for three decades; it covered the Soviet Union more often during the Cold War.