Instead, viewers got a lesson in Russian history, going all the way back to Prince Rurik – a Scandinavian who came and dished out a good kicking in the region in 862 – and taking in the reign of Yaroslav the Wise, the circa-1300 threat of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Russia going to war with Poland in the mid-1600s.
“So that you don’t think that I’m inventing things, I’ll give you these documents,” Putin said early in the interview, after telling Carlson about how after Yaroslav the Wise died in 1054 the throne passed to Yaroslav’s brother, rather than his sons.
Putin beckoned to someone off camera and a lackey appeared with a binder containing letters written by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who is not a household name in the US but is vaunted in Russia for telling the Poles to clear off in 1654.
Depending upon Putin’s target audience – and while Carlson is mostly known in the US, maybe it’s non-American – I think that a larger problem with this tack is that Americans don’t have a history of land disputes made on historical grounds. I think that a more-likely reaction to “we controlled Land X at Time Y, ergo it we rightfully should have it regardless of what borders are like today” is going to be more or less a shrug. You might make be on stronger grounds somewhere like, I don’t know, Hungary.
That may honestly sell well in Russia, but if Putin’s aim is to make a case for annexation to Americans, I don’t think that he’s choosing very strong grounds to make it.
The US’s identity was built around – and to some extent, still is – the concept of independence from the British Empire. Some of the most-common words used in the US associated with national identity are “freedom”, “liberty”, and “independence”. If one is going to make a case to the American public that because Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire at one point, that it must again be run out of Moscow, I think that the framing probably isn’t what I’d be choosing.
I think that he’s kinda lobbing a softball there to Ukrainian propaganda if they want to draw parallels, long as they don’t piss off the Brits.
But in Putin’s telling, the so-called “special military operation” was necessary to sort out corruption to conduct a “denazification” in Ukraine.
And I don’t think that the Nazi thing is going to work well either. In the US, being Nazi has a lot to do with being anti-semitic, not, I don’t know, anti-Slavic or whatever else is more-emphasized in Russia, and pointing out that the elected president is Jewish kind of makes that argument really awkward.
I feel – without having seen the actual material, mind – like he’s pushing a narrative crafted for domestic Russian audiences, not tailored to an American one.
I get that there are maybe limits on what he can say because anything he’s going to be recorded saying could have political impact in Russia, but he could have shown up with Lavrov in tow, had Lavrov say whatever the hell he thought would be most-compelling to an American audience – Lavrov’s popularity in Russia doesn’t matter much – and just hopped in himself with whatever he wanted to have himself saying.
I don’t think that this is going to wind up being a masterful political move, at least based on what in the thing The Guardian mentioned.
I’ll also add that the interview doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of favorable traction in the major conservative American outlets. The only reference to “Putin” on the front page of Fox News mentioned the interview, but chose to highlight that he was wrongfully holding an American journalist from the (also conservative) Wall Street Journal.
Russian President Vladimir Putin floated a potential prisoner swap when asked about releasing Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been wrongfully detained in Russia for nearly a year.
Gershkovich was arrested last March as Russian authorities leveled dubious espionage charges against him. Both the State Department and The Wall Street Journal categorically denied those allegations.
Breitbart, which is one of the most-friendly media outlets specifically to Trump – and loves its conspiracy theory – was not commenting very favorably on Putin saying that the US blew up Nordic Stream 2:
The United States “for sure” blew up the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic sea, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed during his interview with broadcaster Tucker Carlson this week. The allegation, which he made without corroborating evidence, was said to be self-evidently true because the U.S. had both the motivation and the means to damage the energy infrastructure.
When probed for further details, such as “evidence” for the claim by Carlson, and even in response to the suggestion proving who blew up Nord Stream might constitute a “propaganda victory” for Moscow, Putin refused to be drawn. He replied: “, 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.”
Asked why he wouldn’t give up what he knew on what Tucker called “the biggest act of industrial terrorism ever”, Putin shrugged off the question by stating it was pointless trying to go toe-to-toe with the U.S. on the “war of propaganda” because Washington “controls all the world’s media”, so Moscow couldn’t hope to compete. “It’s clear to the whole world what happened” to Nord Stream, said Putin, so elaborating any further would not be cost-effective.
And which decided to highlight Trump’s pro-NATO and anti-Russia credentials:
That the German government was making the nation’s state of health so dependent on Russian good faith was a key criticism of the lax attitude of European patterns to the NATO alliance of Donald Trump, who warned Germany had become a “captive to Russia”.
The only man desperate enough to give a platform to Putin to spout lies. Ukraine existed before Russia and the people have no common thread.
Moscow was founded by Scandinavians who were later run out of existence by the Mongol hordes.
Kiev stayed under the rule of the Kievan Rus from who Russia later stole the name Russia based on some fabricated story like the one Putin is pedaling here to hide the fact that their real history is one of slavery and subjugation under the Mongols.
their real history is one of slavery and subjugation under the Mongols
And this shouldn't even be a big deal. What group of people haven't been subjugated at some point in their history? Collectively, I suspect that nearly all peoples have been. Certainly it is a bigger conversation with modern, more recent slavery, involving forced migration, but it doesn't change what happened either. The US and some European countries face this topic (as the subjugators) and are talking about it with varying degrees of honesty.
I've only met one Russian immigrant who felt comfortable talking about Russian people, and they definitely said something like this, among other things.
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