Knowledge Fight’s #898 dissects Tucker Carlson’s February 6, 2024 Kremlin interview with Putin, where Tucker’s shallow pivots—like NATO conspiracies and Zelensky’s "neo-Nazi" ties—clashed with Putin’s unshakable historical justifications, from 8th-century claims to 2004 election distortions. Dan and Jordan expose Tucker’s performative demands (e.g., releasing Gershkovic) and Putin’s evasions, like blaming U.S. media dominance for pipeline evidence or framing Ukraine as an "artificial state." The episode ends with both sides failing to advance narratives, leaving only right-wing propaganda and Putin’s unbroken authoritarianism intact—proving even Kremlin interviews yield little beyond spectacle. [Automatically generated summary]
Every time he was like, alright, so what we gotta do is we gotta put the thing together with the other thing and then everybody puts it all in the face.
I get the deflation, because the people that would wish to push this really hard, I think didn't get what they wanted out of it, and it doesn't really work.
Like, I mean, and we can describe, you know, similarities in terms of an interview with George W. during, you know, the height of our horrors, but even then, it's like, he's technically a civilian.
You know, he's not the dictator of the United States.
I'm thinking about doing some shows, too, where I run the whole thing myself, just hit record, and sit in the dark with just a few candles and candlelight.
And talk about the nature of the world universe.
I mean, you know, a big old juicy ribeye, folks, is as good as, you know, sex with your wife.
I mean, let's just get down to reality here.
unidentified
I'm gonna go Donkey Kong, King Kong crazy in about 45 days.
The following is an interview with the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin, shot February 6, 2024 at about 7 p.m. in the building behind us, which is, of course, the Kremlin.
The interview, as you will see if you watch it, is primarily about the war in progress, the war in Ukraine, how it started, what's happening, and most presently, how it might end.
One note before you watch.
At the beginning of the interview, we asked the most obvious question, which is, why did you do this?
Did you feel a threat, an imminent physical threat?
And that's your justification.
And the answer we got shocked us.
Putin went on for a very long time, about half an hour, about the history of Russia going back to the 8th century.
And honestly, he thought this was a filibustering technique and found it annoying and interrupted him several times.
And he responded he was annoyed.
But we concluded in the end, for what it's worth, that it was not a filibustering technique.
There was no time limit on the interview.
We ended it after more than two hours.
Instead, what you're about to see seemed to us sincere, whether you agree with it or not.
Vladimir Putin believes that Russia has a historic claim to parts of Western Ukraine.
So our opinion would be to view it in that light as a sincere expression of what he thinks.
They've built him up as this championing anti-woke icon, so they want to hear him do some juicy dunks on cancel culture and LGBTQ folk, not a dissection of history.
Second, you see how unprepared Tucker was for this interview and how poorly he handled it.
Which is something he's trying to get out in front of.
Putin went off on a rant about history that Tucker decided might be a stalling tactic, so he decided to push past it, which annoyed Putin.
Tucker is trying to preemptively explain a bit of frostiness between him and the subject, which is notable.
He and the folks in his media sphere have spent years making excuses for and rationalizing Putin's invasion as secretly being about the things they want it to be about.
The whole time they've denied that Putin was motivated by wanting to seize this land because recognizing that means you have to be opposed to his actions and have to realize that Ukraine isn't the only place that he thinks is rightly Russia.
But now Tucker has gone to see this man himself and has heard directly from him that he believes Russia has the right to Ukraine.
And Tucker's saying Western Ukraine, no less.
And Tucker's reaction is kind of to feign confusion.
In the real world, he needs to fake that confusion because the alternative is to present this interview by saying, guys, we were wrong about Putin.
Yeah, absolutely.
I know it felt like we could use him to push our social bigot narratives and project our hopes for a strongman leader onto, but he is not who we pretended to be.
Tucker would never do that, primarily because the audience he's cultivated is largely pro-Putin, and something minor like wanting to take over a neighboring country, it's not going to shake that.
So, it's so...
I don't know, the framing of this disclaimer is so strange to me.
One, Tucker believes himself to be able to straddle the line between bullshit and reality.
And if you live too long in bullshit, you're not.
You're just not.
You're eventually going to buy your own bullshit at least enough that you will believe you're right about some things that you are absolutely not right about.
So there are some things I'm sure he believed about Putin that he was like...
Oh, fuck, I lied to myself.
I got tricked the same way I tricked bullshit people.
That might well be, but I think an alternative explanation can easily be that you have built up this image of this guy, and you want him to comport to it, and he doesn't.
On February 22nd, 2022, you addressed your country in a 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.
So if you don't mind, I will take only 30 seconds or one minute to give you a short reference to history for giving you a little historical background.
Let's look where our relationship with Ukraine started.
Where did Ukraine come from?
The Russian state started gathering itself as a centralized statehood and it is considered to be the year of the establishment of the Russian state in 862 when the townspeople of Novgorod invited a Varangian prince Rurik from Scandinavia to reign.
In 1862, Russia celebrated the 1000th anniversary of its statehood.
And in Novgorod, there is a memorial dedicated to the 1000th anniversary of the country.
In 882, Rurik's successor, Prince Oleg, who was actually playing the role of regent at Rurik's young son...
So this is not the kind of interview Tucker wanted to have, and I'll go ahead and throw myself on that pile, too.
This is not the kind of interview I particularly wanted.
I think it can be very interesting to know about history and understand the forces that shaped how we got from there to here, and even people's...
Maybe iffy interpretations of some things.
But I don't care if Ukraine was part of Russia in the 800s.
That doesn't mean you get to take it now.
We aren't going to necessarily go blow for blow as Putin lays out his version of the history of Russia because there's an easy way to encapsulate the point he's making.
And Tucker said it himself in the disclaimer.
He thought this was a stalling tactic, so he's not in any position to engage with anything Putin is saying about history.
It's a long, intellectualized pitch for his form of Russian nationalism, which essentially includes claims to areas that were formerly part of Russia.
Here, Putin is in the middle of making an argument that way back in the past, the Polish were trying to convince the people who lived in what is now Ukraine to see themselves as a distinct people from the Russians.
The people who were in power wanted Orthodox and Russian leaders in the area there in Ukraine, which is evidenced by this letter from Bogdan Helminski.
It's worth noting that Helminski was a Cossack who led a rebellion in that area, which was largely predicated on anti-Semitism.
His uprising, which culminated in the Perisov agreement that made eastern Ukraine part of Russia, included the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of Jewish people.
Obviously, the point of the story in these documents here is to present an analog to the present day.
Back then, these folks wanted...
A Russian and Orthodox ruler.
They called out to Warsaw to try and get it.
They didn't get it, so they called out to Moscow, and Moscow fulfilled their desire.
Today, the people in the Donbass region, and apparently all of Ukraine, want to be part of Russia and call out for Moscow's protection.
This is supposed to be a historical antecedent to illustrate that Putin's actions in the present day are no different than what's always been done through Russian history.
Areas around the fringes become decadent.
Their people call out for Moscow to install Russia.
Righteous leaders, and Moscow begrudgingly, in heavy quotes, comes to their aid.
It's strange that Tucker seems to not get this dynamic of what Putin is saying.
It feels like he would have to be pretty checked out or really convinced that there was no meaning to what Putin was saying for this context to slip by him.
But here we are.
I think he really just wanted to pile around and complain about Bud Light cans with Putin, and this is where we've ended up.
Like, I get it to be surprised by Putin going into a lengthy treaty.
Sure, sure.
But to imagine he's doing it for no reason is silly.
I guess there is sort of a distorted relationship that comes from Tucker's engagement with Putin is largely around the, I can use him for this in my stories.
And then Putin's relationship with Tucker is probably like, I could probably use that guy.
Exactly.
So there's a potential use that Putin has for Tucker, and there's a narrative use that Putin serves for Tucker, and those things aren't really the same.
Yeah, so long as they are separate in terms of one is in Russia and one is the United States, so long as they are in separate media environments, it doesn't matter if the Putin you have created is it all related to the real one.
He had to basically just stammer out, I don't see how this is relevant, almost under his breath.
And I don't think he's wrong to be a little embarrassed to say that, because it's really clear how this history lesson is relevant to Putin's ambitions and motivations.
The issue is that it's not very relevant to the fantasy version of Putin that the right-wing media has built up.
They've got a million culture war-adjacent reasons that Putin is fighting off the villains in Ukraine, basically trying to save the West from godlessness and low birth rates.
And if those are the issues that you really think he's fighting about, the history of Russia from the 800s onward is not really that relevant.
Focusing on it is actually counter to the version of his motivations that you've built It's not about seizing.
People who say that that's what he's interested in are warmongers and liars who hate the West.
And yet here Putin is basically saying exactly that and defending his position with a lengthy treatise on why he's right to take territory.
Tucker's question, why didn't you do it immediately is really dumb and isn't designed to go anywhere.
Putin may have not been in a position Yeah.
And then they invaded Crimea.
The question from Tucker just seems like him wanting to throw out something to reassert some kind of control over the conversation, which he has none.
I'm not sure whether they should go back to the 1654 borders.
But given Stalin's time, so-called Stalin's regime, which, as many claim, saw numerous violations of human rights and violations of the rights of other states.
In this sense, you can't speak about it, but you have no right to say that they have no right to One may say that they could claim back those lands of theirs while having no right to do that.
But many nations feel frustrated by the redrawn borders of the wars of the 20th century and wars going back a thousand years, the ones that you mentioned.
But the fact is that you didn't make this case in public until two years ago, February.
And in the case that you made, which I read today...
You explain at great length that you felt a physical threat from the West in NATO, including potentially a nuclear threat, and that's what got you to move.
He's been very clear in the past that he doesn't think that Ukraine is actually a country.
There's reporting on this going back years, and he famously told George W. Bush, quote, You have to understand, George, that Ukraine is not even a country.
Tucker should have every reason to know that this is Putin's position and something that he said pretty regularly, so it's a meaningless question to ask him why Putin only started saying this stuff in 2022.
The premise of the question is a lie, meant to force Putin into a hollow gotcha moment.
But there is no gotcha, except in terms of Tucker's unpreparedness for the conversation.
And of course Putin talked about being under threat from NATO in the West.
That's how he made his aggressive action a situation where he was actually the victim, which is a narrative that Tucker is consistently pushed on his own.
Yeah.
It's just not fun in the moment.
And to that point, I made the point on our last episode that I think Tucker is a willing participant in Putin-glorifying propaganda, and he's not being a useful idiot in this whole thing.
I stand by that, but I don't think he was expecting this.
He was expecting a pro-Putin interview that stayed mostly in the territory that relates to the curated version of Putin that plays well to the American right-wing audience.
This is the version that Tucker is desperately trying to get to with questions about being under threat from NATO.
He's trying very hard to pivot this conversation into territory he knows will fly.
Meanwhile, Putin's just being himself.
Blunt, kind of a dick, and making no secret that he feels like he has the right to seize most, if not all, of Ukraine because it's not really a country.
And Tucker's like, when I say serious, what I mean is the other one, but I can't, because I have too much pride, I can't say I'm a fucking hack clown.
But man, it is like, how is it possible?
That Putin's people didn't go, okay, well, ultimately, if we put all of the future of this put together, Trump needs to be in the White House for us to have complete and free reign to take whatever we want, right?
So the idea behind this interview has to be...
Galvanize the right wing in the United States.
That's the strategic move for Russia right now.
How do you not know...
How do you not have people being like, here's what the right wing fucking loves.
And many in America thought that relations between Russia and the United States would be fine with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, that the opposite happened.
But you've never explained why you think that happened, except to say that the West fears a strong Russia, but we have a strong China the West does not seem very afraid of.
Is Tucker saying that the U.S., or at least a wide swath of it, is not afraid of China?
Tucker and his buddies scream about China all the time, and Congress has been holding bizarre hearings to try to ban TikTok because of fears of connections to the Chinese government.
false premise, namely that the U.S. as an entity isn't afraid of China.
This is based on a further false premise, which is that Putin has never spoken of why relations didn't get better between the U.S. and Russia post-Cold War, other than to say that the U.S. is afraid of a strong Russia.
As you might get the sense from the beginning of this interview, Putin has a lot of thoughts about history, and he isn't really shy about sharing them.
If Tucker thinks that Putin hasn't talked about this stuff, it's because Tucker has avoided learning about the subject.
And that's a bad position to be in.
Because when you say this kind of shit, and you're like, well, no one's afraid of strong China, Putin's gonna be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
The West is afraid of strong China more than it fears a strong Russia.
Because Russia has 150 million people and China has 1.5 billion population.
And its economy is growing by leaps and bounds.
Over 5% a year.
It used to be even more.
But that's enough for China.
As Bismarck once put it, potentials are the most important.
China's potential is enormous.
It is the biggest economy in the world today in terms of purchasing power parity and the size of the economy.
It has already overtaken the United States quite a long time ago, and it is growing at a rapid clip.
Let's not talk about who is afraid of whom.
Let's not reason in such terms.
And let's get into the fact that after 1991, when Russia expected that it would be welcomed into the brotherly family of civilized nations, nothing like this happened.
You tricked us.
I don't mean you personally when I say you.
Of course, I'm talking about the United States.
The promise was that NATO would not expand eastward.
Putin just took down his whole the U.S. isn't afraid of China premise.
These two men are at odds about what propaganda game they're trying to play, and that tension is hurting the end product.
And Putin's just wrong about NATO expansion.
It's been very well documented and explained that in the proper context, the agreement not to expand was in relation to East and West Germany, not about other countries.
That said, this is finally a point that he's making that Tucker is likely to want to engage with.
He has talking points on this.
The audience is primed to understand it through their lens.
So hopefully you would think that this is where you get the ball rolling a little bit.
If he had said yes, the process of rapprochement would have commenced, and eventually it might have happened if we had seen sincere wish on the other side of our partners.
The moment that a guy got poisoned on a plane and they made a documentary about it and then the idiot went back and they put him in a prison forever, you're like, well, this guy, I don't think he's going to give up power ever.
And you can see there's the seeds of something that Tucker is really going to enjoy in that story, which is that Bill Clinton, the elected leader, was like, hey, maybe this is possible.
And then his team said no, which is the deep state.
I repeatedly raise the issue that the United States should not support separatism or terrorism in the North Caucasus.
But they continue to do it anyway.
And political support, information support, financial support, even military support came from the United States and its satellites for terrorist groups in the Caucasus.
Yeah, he's talking about the U.S. supporting groups fighting back against Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia.
In reality, Putin was the one who was supporting separatists in the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions as a pretext to invade, just as he has with the Donbass region in the case of the current war with Ukraine.
It's almost like there's a pattern, but I'm sure there's some good explanation involving something that happened in the 900s that'll make this all okay.
I propose that the United States, Russia and Europe jointly create a missile defense system that we believe, if created unilaterally, threatens our security, despite the fact that the United States officially said that it was being created against missile threats from Iran.
That was the justification for the deployment of the missile defense system.
I suggested working together, Russia, the United States and Europe.
It was also something that Putin suggested many other times, and the sticking point is generally that Putin wanted a guarantee that the missile defense systems would never be used against Russia's missiles.
This has been a non-starter for obvious as well as practical reasons, like a treaty like that would need to be ratified by the Senate, which would be an enormous hurdle that probably would never get cleared.
But you can see in that clip there's two dynamics really at play.
Putin is airing out these grievances and coming off a little bit complainy.
Meanwhile, Tucker is trying to do whatever he can to inject his business into the conversation, as he did there, trying to weave in a point that would bring things into this deep state.
Yeah, because our elected leader isn't the one who's making the decision, as you're saying, unilaterally.
It's these deep state people.
Putin acknowledged Tucker's point, but then carried on with his own line of thought, which goes to show that someone who is boring and has actual power will beat someone flashy who has pretend power every time.
The US supported it and the winner of the third round came to power.
Imagine if in the US something was not to someone's liking and the third round of election, which the US Constitution does not provide for, was organized.
Further, poll watchers from Yushchenko's side were expelled from many polling stations on the eastern side of the country, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said that there were more violations of election law than they could list off in the time that they had in a press conference.
Public outcry led to a challenge of the results of the runoff that got to the Ukrainian Supreme Court, who threw out the results and ordered a new runoff, which you Yushchenko would go on to win.
So it is true that a third round of voting did happen, but it was done according to Ukrainian law and because there were massive problems with the runoff election.
But it's fun to see how Putin is essentially poking at Tucker here with the, can you imagine if someone didn't believe the results of the election in the U.S.?
Tucker probably had a rough time figuring out if he should agree or disagree with that.
The interesting thing here is that Putin would have had no problem if Yanukovych had won that election, and in fact congratulated him on the win before it was overturned, because he knew that Yanukovych would be friendly to Russian interests.
Ukraine isn't a country to Putin, so he can't possibly care about the integrity of the voting system.
He just cares that whoever is leading the non-country is beholden to him and not the West.
That is so interesting because I think we're going to have an almost identical situation here.
Not identical.
I mean a similar situation wherein essentially the Supreme Court will come down to decide the election.
Right?
Like, in the situation that the Supreme Court chose, the Supreme Court had to say that the results of the election are thrown out because it's bullshit, right?
Now, here's what I find fascinating about that, comparatively, is that if you hear the arguments at the Supreme Court for keeping Trump on the ballot, the Supreme Court justices are all like, hey, listen.
If we stop this, you don't know what's going to happen.
Anybody could get fucking thrown off the ballot.
You know what I'm saying?
If you fuck with me!
You know, like that kind of thing.
And it is, in essence, if Ukraine was like, well, we would throw out the results of these elections, but we're worried people will be mad.
And then throw out the results of that election next time, you know?
So we'll not do our job.
Then in that essence, then yeah, it would have been...
No, we haven't achieved our aims yet, because one of them is denazification.
This means the prohibition of all kinds of neo-Nazi movements.
Tell me more about that.
And it was not our initiative, because we were told by the Europeans, in particular, that it was necessary to create conditions for the final signing of the documents.
My counterparts in France and Germany said, how can you imagine them signing a treaty with a gun to their heads?
The troops should be pulled back from Kiev.
I said, all right, we withdrew the troops from Kiev.
As soon as we pulled back our troops from Kiev, our Ukrainian negotiators immediately threw all our agreements reached Istanbul into the bend and got prepared for a long-standing armed confrontation with the help of the United States and its satellites in Europe.
Istanbul negotiations took place on March 29th and 30th, 2022.
This is over a month into the war, and maybe pulling out of Kiev was part of creating conditions where there could be a negotiation, or it might have been because they couldn't hold Kiev and Ukraine was putting up counteroffenses.
It's not like they had a comfortable control of Kiev and graciously moved out.
They were repelled.
But here we kind of have the difficulty of Tucker doing this interview.
Putin has presented himself as someone whose actions are about trying to end this war, and Tucker has said as much in his show.
Maybe not literally those exact words, but that's the messaging.
However, in the course of this interview so far, Putin has said that Ukraine isn't a real country and that he should be able to seize it as part of his historical version of Russia.
That motivation runs...
to how Tucker has presented this in the past, and it creates a little bit of tension that is unresolved.
This is an optics problem for Tucker that he's been trying to rectify by attempting to steer things towards red meat-type talking points for his audience, and Putin's just not playing ball.
But here we have, in this instance at least, we have that there was a coup in 2004 and 2014, and this war started in 2014 because they threw out Yanukovych, and then there was a not-Russia-friendly power in place, and that starts the war.
After gaining independence, Ukraine began to search, as some Western analysts say, its identity.
And it came up with nothing better than to build this identity upon some false heroes who collaborated with Hitler.
I have already said that in the early 19th century when the theorists of independence and sovereignty of Ukraine appeared, they assumed that an independent Ukraine should have very good relations with Russia.
But due to the historical development, those territories were part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Poland, where Ukrainians were persecuted and treated quite brutally as well as were subject to cruel behavior.
There were also attempts to destroy their identity.
All this remained in the memory of the people.
When World War II broke out, part of this extremely nationalist elite collaborated with Hitler, believing that he would bring them freedom.
The German troops, even the SS troops, made Hitler's collaborators do the dirtiest work of exterminating the Polish and Jewish population.
Hence this brutal massacre of the Polish and Jewish population as well as the Russian population too.
This was led by the persons who are well known: Bandera, Shukiewicz.
It was those people who were made national heroes.
That is the problem.
And we are constantly told that nationalism and neo-Nazism exist in other countries as well.
Yes, there are seedlings, but we uproot them.
And other countries fight against them.
But Ukraine is not the case.
These people have been made into national heroes in Ukraine.
Monuments to those people have been erected.
They are displayed on flags.
Their names are shouted by crowds that walk with torches as it was in Nazi Germany.
So I'm struck by this explanation of denazification, and the thing that it brings to mind is the attempt to take down statues of Confederate generals in the United States.
Honestly, I would think that anyone on the far right hearing Putin's explanation of denazification, I would think they would think it sounds like woke bullshit.
Leaving aside that Putin's version of this is not accurate, based on the political inclinations of the American far right Putin-supporting crowd, they should really oppose this denazification.
At very least, they should reject it as a pretext for justifying a war.
If we're on the subject of looking up to problematic people, Putin was just trotting out a letter from Bogdan Helmensky earlier as evidence for the historical desire by people in modern-day Russia to be ruled by Orthodox and Russian leaders, not by the Polish power in the time.
And if you recall, that dude killed tens of thousands of Jewish people in his uprising.
This presents a problem, because Helmensky wasn't around during World War II times, but was a vicious anti-Semite who was considered by parts of Ukraine to be a folk hero for his role in the uprising that would throw off.
Right.
So it's fine there.
Putin is upset about people like Bandera and Chekhovich being considered national heroes despite their involvement with the Nazis in World War II, but he has no problem with Helmetsky because this isn't actually about denazification.
It's about opposition to actual sovereignty for Ukraine, and the Nazi stuff is just a really good excuse.
And I'm not going to pretend there isn't a lot of history in Ukraine that's fucking messy, and many national heroes have some bad baggage.
It doesn't do any good to ignore those historical issues, but at the same time, this is not a cause for war.
But I mean, the idea of Russia being like, hey man, Ukraine's history is problematic for us, so we're not going to deal with it, and we're going to head over there.
Which is, it makes sense for Tucker because this is the first time where he's like, well, at the very least, he's not going to be honest with me about this.
Right?
Like, that is the first thing.
Of course I can ask this question knowing that he will give me the lie.
So, in terms of the evidence presented of this very, very serious, top-level, everywhere Nazi problem, is that guy who got a standing ovation in Canada.
Yes, he was given a round of applause and a standing ovation, only for it to later come out that he fought for the Nazis in World War II.
All of this was due to irresponsibility by the House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota, whose office has claimed that Hunka's son contacted them and asked if he could attend the speech.
Rhoda accepted the request and then took it upon himself to single Hunker out for a round of applause to the surprise of Justin Trudeau, Zelensky, and Hunker's own family.
This was not a matter of Ukraine celebrating Nazis as much as it was an instance of the Speaker of the House of Commons making a grave error which played directly into the propaganda that Putin's regime has used to justify their invasion.
What you see here is pretty interesting though because Tucker has a decent question that he's asking which is going nowhere.
He's asking in essence what does denazification entail?
What are the steps to doing this?
Instead of getting an answer you see Putin ignore the question and continue down his path or generally describe what he sees as the problem with no mention of what the solution is.
The general sense that you get from this interview is two men both not getting what they want.
All of the pieces are right here to be a messaging and narrative bonanza, but it's just not coming together right for either of them.
Putin's too stubborn and boring for Tucker to use correctly, and Putin is entirely off in terms of what the right messaging should be for an interview like this.
It's not adversarial enough to pretend to be real journalism, but on the same page, it's not really potent propaganda either.
Yeah, see, that's kind of, that's just, one of the reasons that this is so strange is that there are only two conversations that can truly be had between them, which is we're lying on the same page or we're telling the truth on the same page.
They can't be both lying and telling the truth on separate pages.
They reached a very high stage of coordination of positions in a complex process, but still they were almost finalized.
But after we withdrew our troops from Kiev, as I have already said, the other side 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.
So that Istanbul agreement wasn't finalized, so there's no going back on it that was done by Ukraine.
They didn't enter into that agreement, in some part because Western countries asserted that they had their support, but equally because they had no faith that Russia would adhere to the terms, and because it would have been impossible for them to actually agree to it.
Zelensky banned Ukrainian citizens from having negotiations, but not with Russia, specifically with Russia while Putin is in charge.
There's no ban that Zelensky can make that would ban other countries from engaging in negotiations, and there's no reason that random citizens should be trying to negotiate with Putin.
It's an absurd complaint for Putin to have here, honestly.
It's the same thing where it's like, if you have no check on yourself for a long enough period of time, you can't keep it together long enough to do something that makes sense.
Again, Putin and Tucker together right now should be working on creating...
The next Trump dictatorship.
So then Russia, China, and the United States are all the three largest powers, all of which have an alliance based upon a fascist false democracy kind of idea.
Right?
That's the idea.
That gives Russia freedom, China freedom, and then the United States has to deal with Trump.
I think the reason why that expectation that you have is not being in any way really fulfilled is that Tucker is trying to weave towards those narratives.
You know, he's there doing an interview about Ukraine, generally, and he's basically doing a history lesson about why he's right to take Ukraine because it's not a country, and then complaining about everybody who's done him wrong in all these talks and this weak denazification excuse.
Well, yes, he funds, but I talked to him before the special military operation, of course.
And I said to him then, by the way, I will not go into details, I never do, but I said to him then, I believe that you are making a huge mistake of historic proportions by supporting everything that is happening there, in Ukraine, by pushing Russia away.
From the outside, it seems like this could devolve or evolve into something that brings the entire world into conflict and could initiate a nuclear launch.
And so why don't you just call Biden and say, let's work this out?
And they're trying to intimidate their own population with an imaginary Russian threat.
This is an obvious fact.
And thinking people, not Philistines, but thinking people, analysts, those who are engaged in real politics, Just smart people understand perfectly well that this is a fake.
So while it is true that it may be unlikely that Putin would invade Poland for very clear logistical reasons, there's absolutely zero reason to take what Putin or his administration say at face value.
On January 10th, 2022, his deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabov, nope.
Ryukhov said, quote, there are no plans or intentions to attack Ukraine.
There is no reason to fear some kind of escalatory scenario.
Then Russia invaded Ukraine a little over a month later.
Even closer to the invasion, Putin said himself, quote, the facts are that Americans are artificially whipping up hysteria around an alleged Russian plot for the invasion.
In 2014, just before invading and annexing Crimea, Putin explicitly said he was not going to annex Crimea and, quote, we will not go to war with the Ukrainian people.
There seems to be a bit of a habit of lying, particularly around invasion stuff that creates a credibility gap for Putin on this issue.
And not for nothing, in 2014, it was reported that former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had a private conversation with Putin where he threatened to invade Poland, Romania, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia.
One of our senior United States senators from the state of New York, Chuck Schumer, said yesterday, I believe, that we have to continue to fund the Ukrainian effort or U.S. soldier citizens could wind up.
Wouldn't it be better to negotiate with Russia, make an agreement, already understanding the situation that is developing today, realizing that Russia will fight for its interests to the end?
And realizing this, actually return to common sense, start respecting our country and its interests, and look for certain solutions.
It seems to me that this is much smarter and more rational.
You know, I won't get into details, but people always say in such cases, look for someone who is interested.
But in this case, we should not only look for someone who is interested, but also for someone who has capabilities.
Because there may be many people interested, but not all of them are capable of sinking to the bottom of the Baltic Sea and carrying out this explosion.
If you are a person who wants to lie constantly and never tell the truth and be full of bullshit, you really should run your own country and only talk to people who are afraid you're going to kill them.
I mean, that's the biggest act of industrial terrorism ever, and it's the largest emission of CO2 in history.
Okay, so if you had evidence, and presumably given your security services, your intel services, you would, that NATO, the U.S., CIA, the West did this, why wouldn't you present it and win a propaganda victory?
In the war, propaganda has already been In the war of propaganda, it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world's media and many European media.
The ultimate beneficiary of the biggest European media are American financial institutions.
Don't you know that?
So it is possible to get involved in this work.
But it is cost-prohibitive, so to speak.
We can simply shine the spotlight on our sources of information, and we will not achieve results.
It's never been clearer to me than that exact moment that Putin has no evidence that the CIA or US or NATO was involved in blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.
You say the leader acts in the interest of the voters, but you also say these decisions are not made by the leader, they're made by the ruling classes.
You've run this country for so long, you've known all these American presidents.
What are those power centers in the United States, do you think?
But do you think at this point, as of February 2024, he has the latitude, the freedom to speak with you or your government directly about putting an end to this, which clearly isn't helping his country or the world?
So the implication that Tucker is trying to get Putin to reinforce here is the idea that Zelensky is being forced to continue the war by Western forces who just want to fuck with Russia.
Putin does a good job of his non-answers here, but it seems like the general takeaway is yes.
Zelensky does have that power.
He just doesn't want to stand up to Nazis because it's too hard.
And this is supposed to be more like deep state kind of stuff.
And he's saying, no, Zelensky, he was elected.
He's got the power there.
He can do what he wants.
And you start to notice, like I said, I brought this up before, but there's this manner of speaking that's a habit of telling a private conversation that he's had with someone and then gets to the point where someone else...
I think you nailed it right on the head that is like...
When Russia expanded and absorbed other nations who profess Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism, Russia has always been very loyal to those people who profess other religions.
The main values are very similar, not to say the same in all world religions I've just mentioned, which are the traditional religions of the Russian Federation.
By the way, Russian authorities were always very careful about the culture and religion of those people who came into the Russian Empire.
You know, when I remember my Cossack history, I seem to recall them being very open and honest about their feelings vis-a-vis murdering a lot of people.
And then Tucker asks a strange question that I think is, like, I think it would be impossible for anybody, world leader, even dictator or not, to answer.
People who profess different religions in Russia consider Russia their motherland.
They have no other motherland.
We are together.
This is one big family.
And our traditional values are very similar.
I've just mentioned one big family, but everyone has his /her own family.
And this is the basis of our society.
And if we say that the motherland and the family are specifically connected with each other, it is indeed the case, since it is impossible to ensure a normal future for our children and our families unless we ensure a normal, sustainable future for the entire country, for the motherland.
That is why patriotic sentiment is so strong in Russia.
Right, but I think that Putin's non-answer answer there is actually probably as good as you can do, which is define everything as self-defense, and then all aggression is justified in the religious context.
I believe in the religion and I do all that stuff, but I've given up the actual chance of a relationship with God and Christ in order to lead you as people.
Yeah, but if you actually got a Catholic and a Southern Baptist to, like, talk about what they believe at each other, they don't believe any of the same shit, you know?
But the problem is that, you know, especially through various avenues of the right-wing media, they've presented Putin as this guy who's fighting the new world.
Totally.
And they have the same ideas about, you know, divine battles and stuff like that.
You're asking increasingly more complicated questions.
To answer them, you need to be an expert in big numbers, big data and AI.
Mankind is currently facing many threats.
Due to the genetic researches, it is now possible to create a superhuman, a specialized human being, a genetically engineered athlete, scientist, military man.
There are reports that Elon Musk had already had a chip implanted in the human brain in the USA.
I just got to ask you one last question, and that's about someone who's very famous in the United States, probably not here, Evan Gershkovitz, who's the Wall Street Journal reporter.
He's 32, and he's been in prison for almost a year.
This is a huge story in the United States, and I just want to ask you directly, without getting into the details of it or your version of what happened, if as a sign of your decency you would be willing to...
Release him to us and we'll bring him back to the United States.
So this has not been a hard-hitting interview at all, and I think that it's kind of a dud for both Tucker and Putin, but this was not something I expected.
There's a showiness to it as opposed to just highlighting an issue because it's the first thing he asks is, will you release him to us so we can take him home?
I'm not sure if it's that far or whatever, but it does reveal something, and that is through this entire interview, Tucker has been sitting on a very clear awareness that Putin has imprisoned a journalist for the sake of using them as a hostage negotiation.
So he has that awareness in his mind.
He's having this sort of impotent, bizarre conversation.
I don't know who he was working for, but I would like to reiterate that getting classified information in secret is called espionage, and he was working for the U.S. Special Services and some other agencies.
It's a pretty chilling picture we're getting here right at the end of this interview.
In the span of the last, like, ten seconds of that clip, Putin deflects a question from Tucker about whether he thinks that Evan was a spy or just a journalist saying, I don't know who he works for, only to immediately after that say he was working for U.S. Special Services.
That's weird.
I really think that the First Amendment people who love Putin so much really need to take a hard look in the mirror.
It seems very strange that someone could possibly watch this interview and not come out with their feelings about both dudes seriously diminished.
Tucker looks very foolish and kind of incompetent through most of the interview, but I would be dishonest if I didn't say that this was a moment that I would not have predicted.
It's a legitimately tough question that he's posing to Putin.
The rest of this has not been very intense, and Tucker's had zero control over the interview from the jump, but you've got to give it a point where there's a point deserved, and pushing back on this is probably pretty...
But at the same time, what this exists at from a distance, if you don't microscope this...
I just, I find it so fascinating that both of them have kind of come to the conclusion that this should just be, you know, we'll just let this one fade into the dust.
This is such a wild end to the interview because it doesn't tonally match the rest of this at all.
Tucker is taking the reins and it almost feels like he's been emboldened by asking about releasing this journalist.
And I think a big part of that is that in order to justify jailing a journalist, Putin throws out this wild story about a patriot killing a bandit and being arrested.
This is so disconnected from the issue at hand, which is telling, and it shows weakness in Putin's position, needing to grasp that far to make excuses.
That mentality runs counter...
the story about the war that's been told through all of right-wing media, including Tucker's work, and it's dissonant with this interview itself.
That could be a really decent moment but Putin's able to undercut it by saying, come on, man, we both know that Ukraine's a puppet state in the United States.
This is one of the reasons why Tucker is ill-equipped to do this interview, because he can't really follow through with points that can get around Putin's dodges.
This is just fascinating, where Tucker tries to do the throw-to-commercial-type wrap-up, where he says, thank you for your time, I hope you let him out, and Putin laughs and keeps talking.
Putin wasn't going to let Tucker have that sting, so he goes on, and Tucker needs to reassert his power, so he launches into that question about the war.
And Putin's inaction on negotiating an end to it.
This is somewhat confrontational, but you kind of get a clear sense of this path of conversation.
Like, if it hadn't have happened, then Tucker wouldn't have asked that question.
I didn't think you meant it as an insult because you already said correctly.
it's been reported that Ukraine was prevented from negotiating a peace settlement by the former British prime minister acting on behalf of the Biden administration.
So of course there's a satellite, big countries control small countries, that's not new.
And that's why I asked about dealing directly with the Biden administration, which is making these decisions, not President Zelensky of Ukraine.
Well, if Zelensky's administration in Ukraine refused to leave the negotiations, Well, if the Zelensky administration in Ukraine refused to negotiate, I assume they did it under the instruction from Washington.
If Washington believes it to be the wrong decision, let it abandon it.
Let it find a delicate excuse so that no one is insulted.
Boris Johnson did say that Ukraine shouldn't accept the terms of Putin's deal, but there's no evidence that he strong-armed them into that position at all.
Ukrainian representatives indicated they were inclined not to accept the deals Russia was offering, partially because they had no reason to trust that Putin would live up to his end.
But now we've entered into a somewhat paradoxical world.
Ukraine is a satellite country of the United States, so there's no reason for Putin to try to negotiate with them.
But also, Zelensky wouldn't have made that decree that Ukrainians can't negotiate with Putin unless the U.S. told him so, so there's no reason to try and negotiate with the United States either.
Putin knows that Ukraine and the United States aren't going to concede to his demands, so this becomes a very convenient way to argue that no negotiation is possible.
No negotiation on his terms is probably possible.
That is probably true.
And because he doesn't get to dictate the terms, it's everyone else's fault for not playing into his shit.
You may notice a very important detail that Putin's just kind of casually glossing over, namely that the Ukrainian side hadn't agreed to all the terms of the agreement at Istanbul.
Boris Johnson didn't force or force Ukraine or Zelensky into anything, and he's come out very aggressively against this accusation.
It all stems from a Ukrainian negotiator who said that when Johnson visited Kiev on April 9th, 2022, he said that Ukraine, quote, shouldn't sign anything with them at all, and let's just fight.
He also said that the whole denazification thing was a charade that Russia was using to hide its primary concern, which is making sure that Ukraine doesn't join NATO.
This comment from Arihami is what the whole narrative is hinged on, even when it's coming from the head of the belligerent state in this negotiation.
Putin doesn't have more evidence of this past what you'd hear on Infowars.
It's really weird.
There's no more evidence being presented.
It's the same shit that goes on in right-wing media.
Because if you settle with Putin now, then five years from now, Putin spent five years building up a military so he can take back your shit.
Or you spent five years building up a military, in which case everybody wasted five years of time building up a military to continue a conflict that's going on now.
I mean, the idea that that doesn't tell you everything you need to know and basically nullify any possible value the previous two hours could have had.
Something that's so bizarre about this is that this interview...
If slightly more confrontational, and if it had some of the vibe that came around in the end, asking about the jailed journalist, if that came from someone who wasn't Tucker, this interview probably works very negatively against Putin.
But I think part of it, too, is that Putin has a clear understanding that in order to be against Putin, Tucker would have to change a lot of narratives, admit he was wrong about a ton of stuff.
I think it would be easier, honestly, like legitimately, serious talk, it would be easier for me to try and kill Putin than it would be to ask that question.
Because that's a scary question to ask unless you're holding a fucking knife to Putin's throat.
He let him hold court for half an hour about Russian history and then seemed to not understand the point until reflection, which is why he had to add this disclaimer at the beginning.
Yeah.
So then you ask yourself, does Putin come off looking strong?
And especially because coming forward is the idea that if Trump is elected, we're going to go fuck off NATO.
So this should be essentially preparation for everybody on the right wing going, yes, it's totally fine to throw out the past 80 years of orthodoxy and become pro-Russia, right?
Well, certainly, you know, on some level, if you are recognizing that a lot of the content is going to be ignored by people, and maybe people will just passively watch it or whatever, it does raise your stature a bit if you're Tucker.
Obviously.
You interviewed Putin.
You're interviewing Cat Turd and the guy who claims he had sex with Obama.
Yeah, so that does raise your stature in some sense, but the actual product of it, if you mean this interview to be taken seriously, it should facilitate a pivot.
It should facilitate a changing of position of like, hey...
This guy, maybe we had his intentions wrong all the time about Ukraine.
Maybe we should reconsider some of these other things that we've been selling you.
I think it's possible that we're wrong in terms of what they thought they were trying to get, but if they were trying to get something different from what we would have been trying to get, then they were wrong about what they're trying to get.
Do you know what I mean?
There's only one valuable thing out of this, and that is the right-wing loving Putin enough to exit NATO.
I think based on a lot of the behaviors that you see displayed by Tucker throughout the interview, it seems like that is still his intention of trying to get down that road, and that road is not being gone down by Putin.