Tucker Carlson’s Putin Interview Was Even Worse Than Expected

It is legitimate, in principle, for a journalist to interview a murderous dictator. The uproar over Tucker Carlson’s announcement that he would interview Vladimir Putin was that the session would amount to pure Kremlin propaganda. Carlson, after all, is an admirer of Putin who, in his days as a Fox News host, hoped out loud that Russia would win its war against Ukraine. It was also feared that Putin would spout a stream of lies and that Carlson, who is not a real journalist, much less a historian, would be incapable of pushing back.

In this sense, the two-hour interview, which aired Thursday night on X and Carlson’s website, exceeded all expectations. It is a thoroughly repellent show—for the perniciousness of Putin’s falsehoods, the thoroughness of Carlson’s complicity, and the possible impact it might have at a time when many in Congress are looking for any excuse to cut off further aid to Ukraine’s embattled military.

One bit of good news is that Putin kicked off the big event with a half-hour-long monologue about Russian history, and, amid his holding forth on Yaroslav the Wise, the Ryurik dynasty, and the baptism of Rus (and this was all merely leading up to 1000 A.D.), many viewers likely tuned out and turned it off.

The upshot of Putin’s lecture, it soon became clear, was that Ukraine never existed as a nation, a culture, or an ethnicity separate from Russia; that there was no mention of such a place until 1919, when the Bolsheviks created the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine; and, therefore, the assertion of Ukrainian independence, after the breakup of the USSR, was an absurdity and a gesture of ingratitude.

This is total nonsense, as many analysts and historians noted when Putin laid out his thesis in a 5,000-word essay in 2021 called On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians. Carlson, who sat listening with the expression of a listless undergrad who wondered if he’d stumbled into the wrong seminar, challenged none of it.

The true depths of Putin’s mischief, and Carlson’s collaboration, were plumbed when the discussion turned to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In Putin’s account, the war was brought on by the United States and Ukraine. In 2008, President George W. Bush opened the door to Ukraine’s membership in NATO, which had already taken over many of Russia’s former allies in central and Eastern Europe. In 2014, the CIA engineered a coup in Kyiv, which brought to power “neo-Nazis” who sent soldiers into Donbas province, where many Russian speakers lived, forcing Moscow to come to their aid.

This account had the virtue of being half-true, but the half that was false is crucial. It is true that, at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Bush declared (and pressured the Western allies to agree) that Ukraine and Georgia would become members, but he didn’t lay out a timetable, thus feeding Ukrainians’ false hopes and Putin’s paranoia—the worst of both worlds.

Putin omitted or distorted much context. First, the expansion of NATO, which began under Bush’s father and President Bill Clinton, was encouraged most of all by the small central and Eastern European countries—chiefly Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary—which did not want to be left defenseless in the face of what they saw as Russia’s inevitable revanchism. (Putin repeated to Carlson his claim that Clinton had promised NATO would expand “not one inch” to the east; as historian M.E. Sarotte proves in her book, titled Not One Inch, this is a myth.)

Second, the events of 2014 began when Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, reversed his pledge to seek formal affiliation with the European Union—after Putin offered the country $17 billion if he did so. This backpedaling sparked a mass rebellion on the Maidan, Kyiv’s public square. Yanukovych tried to suppress it with gunfire, but in the end fled to Russia as pro-EU leaders took power.

Putin told Carlson, with a shrug, that he didn’t mind Yanukovych’s turn toward the EU—but in fact he minded it very much, fearing that if Ukraine, the largest and closest of Russia’s former allies, could turn westward and benefit from the switch, democratic protesters in other former republics and in Russia itself might get ideas. Putin refers to Maidan as a “coup,” mounted by the CIA. (I suggest you watch Winter on Fire, Evgeny Afineevsky’s Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary, for vivid rebuttal. If CIA agents were capable of mounting such massive and successful protests, one can only wonder why U.S. ideas and policies don’t spread like wildfire worldwide.)

Finally, Putin claimed that Ukraine sent troops to occupy the eastern provinces of Donbas, when in fact it was Russian special forces who crossed the border to fight alongside secessionist militias.

Putin also claimed that he has always been ready to make peace. He said that he withdrew his troops from Kyiv as a friendly gesture—when, in fact, his troops were forcibly repelled by Ukrainian soldiers. He also said that Russian and Ukrainian diplomats were all set to sign a peace treaty at talks in Istanbul in the spring of 2022—until British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, egged on by President Joe Biden, encouraged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to keep fighting (in order to weaken Russia and to swell the profits of the U.S. military-industrial complex).

In fact, Putin’s negotiation position at Istanbul was simply unacceptable. He demanded that Ukraine recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea and his declaration that two of Ukraine’s eastern provinces were now independent states. He also demanded Ukraine’s demilitarization (without any withdrawal of Russian troops) and “de-Nazification” (meaning a resignation of Kyiv’s government for a pro-Kremlin regime). In other words, Putin was demanding Ukrainian surrender.

Again, Carlson said nothing. In fact, he repeated the claim about Johnson as if it were true, and wondered out loud why Johnson did that. Putin also neglected to note (and Carlson lacked the resources to remind him) that, two weeks into the war, Zelensky dropped his insistence on joining NATO. If the Western militarization of Ukraine were really the cause of Russia’s invasion, as he continues to claim, Putin could have halted the war then and there.

Carlson did ask Putin what he meant by “de-Nazification.” Putin cited the ultranationalist, even fascistic figures from World War II that Ukrainians still heroize, claiming that Zelensky is among them. There is something to the claim about Ukrainian nationalism, but it is nonsense to pin the tag on Zelensky, who is Jewish and whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust. It is also worth noting, though Putin did not, that in the 2019 parliamentary elections, a coalition of Ukraine’s four extreme-right parties won just 2 percent of the vote—less than the 5 percent threshold needed to win even a single seat and far less than far-right parties in most other European countries.

Finally, Putin claimed that Zelensky issued a decree banning peace talks with Russia. In fact, Zelensky’s decree banned peace talks not with Russia but with Putin—on the quite sensible grounds that Putin could not be trusted on anything.

Carlson did not challenge this claim, so Putin went on. Ukraine, he said, not for the first time, is a mere puppet of the United States. Biden should lift the decree, and Putin will happily negotiate. Why keep sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, he calmly asked, when America has so many other problems—the southern border, the national debt, and so forth?

This was the point that Putin came to make, the point that he knew no real Western journalist would leave unchallenged, which is why he turned down many other invitations for an interview until the reliable Tucker came calling. Putin knew—and so did Carlson—that many viewers, who know little and care less about Russia or Ukraine, will nod their heads and agree that it’s time to give up and give in.

Carlson did confront Putin on one point. He asked about Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who has been in a Russian jail for nearly a year on trumped-up charges of espionage. He clearly isn’t a spy, Carlson asserted, so why not free him and let him fly home with me? That would have been quite the coup—a real feather, and favor, for Putin’s favorite American scribe. Putin allowed that a deal would be made at some point, but he continued to insist that Gershkovich “was working for U.S. special services.” Again, Carlson said nothing.

Otherwise, Carlson asked nothing about the many other journalists and critics that Putin has shut down, arrested, or killed. He asked nothing about Putin’s incessant bombing of purely civilian structures across Ukraine. He asked nothing about Russian cyber-operations against the West. He asked nothing about his cooperation with North Korea or Iran. When Putin said he had no territorial ambitions in the Baltics, Poland, or anyplace else, he failed to note that Putin said the same thing about Ukraine before the invasion or that he has rhapsodized since about restoring the Great Russian Empire.

All in all, the interview, by Putin’s standards, was more of the same that we’ve heard for some time now—and, by Carlson’s, even worse than anyone could have dreaded.