Russian President Vladimir Putin has told conservative American journalist Tucker Carlson that ending Moscow's nearly two-year invasion of Ukraine is “simple.”
In his first interview with a Western journalist since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began two years ago, the Kremlin singled out Carlson, a former Fox News superstar turned online commentator.
The reason is obvious: Carlson has characterized the war between Russia and Ukraine as a “border dispute,” called on Americans to cut multibillion-dollar aid packages to Kiev, and compared Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to a “rat” and a “procurer”.
During the two-hour interview recorded in a gilt-furnished Kremlin courtroom, Carlson did not press Putin in the same way he used to attack pro-Democratic guests on the Fox News show from which he was fired last year.
Putin's goal seems obvious: He wanted Carlson to urge Republicans to stop supporting Ukraine and focus on domestic problems.
“There are problems on the border, problems with migration, problems with the national debt,” Putin told Carlson, who appeared gullible and embarrassed for most of the meeting. “You have nothing better to do, so you should fight in Ukraine? Wouldn't it be better to negotiate with Russia?”
When Carlson asked if Putin could simply call US President Joe Biden to “solve it,” Putin declined but said the solution was “very simple.”
“If they really want to stop fighting, they must stop supplying weapons. It will be over in a few weeks. That's all. Then we can agree on some terms,” she said.
Carlson did not even attempt to refute Putin's outlandish and baseless claims.
One was Putin's belief that elected leaders do not govern the United States.
“So you have twice described American presidents making decisions and then being undermined by their agency heads. “So it sounds like you are describing a system that is not run by the elected people,” Carlson said.
“That's right,” Putin said without offering further explanation, and Carlson immediately agreed.
He then asked Putin who was behind the 2022 explosion in the Baltic Sea that damaged Nord Stream, a gas pipeline from Russia to Germany that was crucial to Moscow's coffers.
Carlson called it “the largest act of industrial terrorism ever seen,” but he did not dispute Putin's claim that it was the CIA that had supposedly blown up the pipeline, and he did not present any concrete evidence.
A history lesson or tired tropes?
Putin began the interview with a long lecture on the history of Eastern Europe, in which he reiterated the Kremlin's manipulative view of Kyivan Rus, a medieval superpower whose disintegration gave rise to modern-day Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
Carlson seemed completely ignorant on the subject and simply nodded in bewilderment when Putin told him about a Viking prince named Ruric whose descendants ruled Kyivan Rus. One of them, Prince Vladimir, converted to Orthodox Christianity a millennium ago.
According to Putin's logic, Russia was the only legitimate successor to Kievan Rus', and the very idea of Ukraine was “invented” by Tsarist Russia's archrival: Austria.
“Before the First World War, the Austrian General Staff relied on the ideas of Ukrainization and began to actively promote the ideas of Ukraine and Ukrainization,” Putin said.
To Carlson's audience and to many in the West, the lecture may seem boring and irrelevant.
But for Ukrainians, Putin's interpretation of events is a sobering and threatening reminder that the Kremlin denies Ukraine's very right to exist.
“Because all these anecdotes about Prince Vladimir and Rurik have to tell all skeptics one thing: this man has obsessive ideas,” said Maria Kucherenko, an analyst at the Ukrainian Institute of the Future, a think tank in Kiev.
“And he will stop at nothing to make them a reality,” he told Al Jazeera.
Ukrainian officials and public figures who have met face-to-face with Putin have long maintained that the Russian president is determined to subjugate and annihilate Ukraine no matter what.
“He is tough and behaves as if he has almost divine power, over Ukraine in particular,” Yuriy Vitrenko, who at the time headed Naftogaz, Ukraine's state energy company, told this journalist in 2021, recalling his meetings with Putin.
For other Ukrainian observers, the interview offered nothing more than old Kremlin tropes.
“The only thing notable about this interview is the size of the table: it's tiny! The rest we have seen and heard millions of times,” Svetlana Chunikhina, vice president of the Association of Political Psychologists, a kyiv group, told Al Jazeera.
“Tucker fucking Carlson served well as microphone support for the crazy maniac who rambled on for two hours about how much he loves killing Ukrainians.”
To one Russian observer, the interview is a Kremlin public relations stunt designed to convince the average Russian that Putin's war did not turn his nation into an international pariah despised by the West.
“They want to show that Russia does not confront the civilized world, but only separate elites within it. To emphasize that there are other elites, and here is a well-known journalist interviewing [Putin]”said Sergey Biziyukin, an opposition activist exiled from the western Russian city of Ryazan.
“And that once [these elites] “If we win the election, the West will admit that Russia is right,” he told Al Jazeera, referring to Donald Trump's potential victory in November's presidential election and the recent success of several nationalist and far-right groups in Europe.
The timing of the interview was decisive for Ukraine.
On Wednesday, Republicans blocked a multibillion-dollar aid package that was critical to kyiv, as Zelenskyy announced his highly divisive decision to fire Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the influential and trusted top general.
However, for the Ukrainian military the interview is nothing more than a demonstration of weakness.
“They're two losers trying to support each other, trying to express their conspiracy theories,” said Valentin, a Ukrainian drone operator stationed in the eastern Donetsk region who watched parts of the interview on his cellphone.
“They cannot face the truth about Ukraine, which is real and will prevail,” he told Al Jazeera by phone.
