The interview that’s had most of your “legacy media’s” panties in a twist all week has finally happened.
I don’t remember anyone making a fuss when Dan Rather interviewed Saddam Hussein, just sayin’.
Tucker Carlson gets Vladimir Putin’s take on, among other things, the current situation in Ukraine, how it started and possible resolutions, Russia’s relationship with China,the world economy, and a look into the future. Highlights include:
“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. But it happened five times. There were five waves of expansion. We tolerated all that. We were trying to persuade them. We were saying, please don’t. We are as bourgeois now as you are. We are a market economy and there is no communist party power, let’s negotiate.
“The events in the Middle East, in Iraq, we were building relations with the United States in a very soft, prudent, cautious manner. I repeatedly raised the issue that the United States should not support separatism or terrorism in the North Caucasus, but they continued 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. I once raised this issue with my colleague, also the president of the United States. He says it’s impossible, do you have proof? I said yes, I was prepared for this conversation, and I gave him that proof. He looked at it, and you know what he said? I apologize, but that’s what happened. I’ll quote, “Well, I’m gonna kick their ass.” We waited and waited for some response…The CIA replied, “We have been working with the opposition in Russia. We believe that this is the thing to do and we will on doing it.”
“…In 2008, the doors of NATO were opened for Ukraine. In 2014, there was a coup. They started persecuting those who did not accept the coup, and it was indeed a coup. They created a threat to Crimea, which we had to take under our protection. They launched the war in Donbas in 2014 with the use of aircraft and artillery against civilians. This is when it all started… They launched a large scale military operation, then another one. When they failed, they started to prepare the next one. All this against the background of military development of this territory and opening of NATO’s doors. How could we not express concern over what was happening?”
“Our goal is to stop this war, and we did not start this war in 2022. This is an attempt to stop it… No, we haven’t achieved our aims yet because one of them is de-nazification. This means the prohibition of all kinds of neo-Nazi movements. This is one of the problems that we discussed during the negotiation process, which ended in Istanbul early this year…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.”
“Further on, the president of Ukraine issued a decree prohibiting negotiations with us. Let him cancel that decree, and that’s it. We have never refused negotiations, indeed. We hear all the time, is Russia ready? Yes. We have not refused. It was them who publicly refused. Well, let him cancel his decree and enter into negotiations. We have never refused.”
Check out the interview for yourself and give us your thoughts in the comments.
Ep. 73 The Vladimir Putin Interview pic.twitter.com/67YuZRkfLL
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 8, 2024
