Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewed Russian president Vladimir Putin, Feb. 6, 2024, claiming his goal was to get Putin’s side of the story. Unlike Putin, I won’t mince words. This endeavor and its aftermath were a sad and worrisome attempt at trying to sell a victim complex to the populations of NATO member countries.
Putin’s Rant
Carlson asked his first question: why did Russia invade Ukraine? Putin immediately derailed the interview with a semi-coherent diatribe of Russian history from the Early Middle Ages to the 2010s — and not always in chronological order. As best as I can discern, these are the highlights of Putin’s revisionist history lesson:
Putin overlooked Stalin’s plentiful human rights violations, including mass famines such as Holodomor, instead focusing on the bureaucratic transfer of Crimea’s administration to the Ukrainian SSR. He claimed Ukraine is just a collection of lands belonging to other countries like Poland, Hungary and of course, Russia, primarily citing his experience road-tripping through Western Ukraine in the 1980s.
Putin accused the West of ganging up on Russia by refusing to admit it to NATO. When Carlson asked Putin if would have ever sincerely joined NATO, he nervously mumbled his way around the question. Putin, an ex-KGB agent, still belongs to a political clique that has always been resistant toward cooperation with the West.
Putin accused the West of forcing Eastern European countries into NATO. There was no mention that the former SSRs and Warsaw Pact members, thoroughly traumatized by decades of direct or proxy Soviet rule, might have wanted guarantees there would be no repeats of history. For those countries, NATO membership provides a guarantee against reconquest by Russia.
Putin subtly justifies his current invasion by drawing a comparison to Nazi Germany — claiming Poland had forced Nazi Germany to invade them during WWII and then collaborated through the rest of the war. I’m not surprised Putin admires Hitler’s tactic of invading other countries under skeptical pretexts while advancing an imperial agenda backed by pseudo-history.
Despite Putin’s worrying lack of depth and clarity in his rant, it seems he wants to resurrect the Soviet Union or pre-Soviet Russian Empire in his image but needed time to repair Russia from the economic and social turmoil of the Soviet collapse. Hence, no full-scale wars were started until he was 22 years into his presidency. The rest of his spiel is a flimsy attempt at padding his invasion with a sense of legitimacy.
Post-interview, academics from Duke University and USC highlighted Putin’s increasing detachment from reality. Historian and Cambridge Professor Emeritus David Abulafia also came forward with similar criticisms and is now facing sanctions from the Russian Foreign Ministry.
The Hypocrisy of “De-Nazifying” Ukraine
Putin called Ukraine a “Nazi state,” claiming that “de-Nazification” of the country is the paramount objective of his war. Carlson surprised me with a good question — “What do you mean by De-Nazification?” — to which Putin had no direct answer. Instead, he ranted about the fact that some Ukrainians fought for the Nazis in WWII. After vague anecdotes, Putin bumbled on about an incident where a former SS soldier received a standing ovation in Canada’s parliament building, a blunder that was quickly retracted.
Putin’s claims are bold and jaw-dropping considering Ukraine’s current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish and a direct descendant of Holocaust victims.
Compounding this hypocrisy is Putin’s popularity with white supremacists in the US, like Donald Trump, the same man who praised white nationalist protestors in 2017 and who refused to condemn white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups on national television. Trump and his followers support Putin because he is an enabler. Putin has relied heavily on neo-Nazi paramilitary forces like the Wagner PMC and Russian Imperial Movement, which are founded and led by prominent Neo-Nazis like Yevgeny Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin.
Putin’s claims of nonviolence: Being gaslit by your mugger
In the interview, Putin complained about Ukraine’s unwillingness to negotiate — conveniently leaving out the fact that every Russian olive branch has been littered with stipulations for unreasonable territorial concessions. When Carlson asked why he hadn’t negotiated with the US directly, Putin responded that he didn’t remember the last time he spoke to President Biden and halfheartedly demanded an end to NATO aid for an end to his own violence.
There is no reason to believe Putin’s violence would end with Ukraine’s capitulation. We have already seen how the Russian army conducts itself in the Ukrainian territory it occupies, from the summary executions of civilians in the streets of Bucha, to the torture cells found in Kherson City, from the chronic human rights violations of Ukrainian POWs, to the mass abduction and relocation of over 19,000 Ukrainian children into reeducation camps.
Despite claiming he has no ambitions to invade Eastern Europe, Putin has likened himself to czar Peter the Great, signaling a desire to restore the Russian Empire. Putin has begun acting belligerently toward Moldova much like he did toward Ukraine in January 2022. He has also made attempts to thaw the frozen 2008 conflict in Georgia, and he has bullied other heads of state with threats of arrest. Armed Russian bombers have repeatedly violated the airspace of multiple NATO member states, most recently the US and UK. All of this occurs against a backdrop of state media and Kremlin pundits frothing like rabid dogs at the thought of a nuclear rampage across Western Europe.
Europe has responded to Putin’s actions in kind. Previously neutral Finland and Sweden have entered NATO, and member states have announced increased military spending, with Poland at the forefront. Even Switzerland, the poster child of absolute neutrality, condemned Russia’s invasion.
Aftermath
Despite receiving substantial criticism, Carlson said he felt positively about the interview. Putin, however, did not share Carlson’s sentiments, saying the interview was a farce. In turn, Carlson bashed Putin over Alexei Navalny’s sudden death in prison. Carlson’s criticisms seem but a clumsy political flip; he had to have been aware of Navalny’s political imprisonment before his death.
Despite this whole endeavor degrading into a circus, Carlson’s popularity with the American far-right will likely strengthen Putin’s claims to Ukraine. The rest of us must not be fooled.
Contact Jacob Whitney at jwhitney@oxy.edu
