Putin's response to
Tucker Carlson's inteview

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/73457/print
(Transcript below)

Answers to questions from journalist Pavel Zarubin
February 14, 2024 (11:00 pm)

Pavel Zarubin: Mr President, your interview with Tucker Carlson has already garnered one billion views. While there has been a lot of positive feedback, we can see the kind of comments that Western leaders are making. For example, the Prime Minister of the UK and the German Chancellor labelled your explanation that the special military operation had been caused by a threat from NATO as “absurd” and “clearly ridiculous.” What do you think of this?

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: First of all, it is good that they have been watching and listening to what I say. If we are not able to maintain a direct dialogue today due to certain reasons, we should be grateful to Mr Carlson for acting as an intermediary. So, it is good that they are watching and listening.

The fact that they are distorting my words and misrepresenting things is concerning. Why? Because I never said those things. Nowhere in the interview did I say that the start of the special military operation in Ukraine is linked to the threat of a NATO attack on Russia. Where in the interview did I make such a statement? The interview was recorded. They can go back and pinpoint exactly where I said this.

What I actually said was that we have been constantly deceived about NATO’s non-expansion to the east. By the way, then NATO Secretary-General, a representative of Germany, made such a promise. He explicitly stated NATO would not expand even an inch to the east. After that, NATO proceeded to expand five times, completely deceiving us. Of course, we were concerned about the possibility of Ukraine being drawn into NATO, as it poses a security threat to us. So, this is what I actually said.

However, what served as the trigger was the current Ukrainian officials’ outright refusal to comply with the Minsk agreements, coupled with Ukraine’s relentless attacks on the unrecognised republics of Donbass, the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic, which continued for eight years and resulted in numerous deaths. Realising that there are no prospects of resolving this problem under the Minsk agreements, these republics formally requested our recognition. We recognised them and signed a treaty of friendship and mutual assistance. After that, as required by the UN Charter, we fulfilled our obligations under the treaty.

As I said, we did not initiate this war; rather, we are striving to end it. During the first phase, we tried to achieve this through peaceful means, specifically, through the Minsk agreements. However, it became apparent that we had been given the runaround once again. Both the former German Chancellor and the former President of France admitted and publicly stated that they had never intended to honour the agreements and had merely used them to buy time to supply the Ukrainian regime with more weapons, which they successfully did. Our only regret is that we did not take action sooner, believing that we were dealing with honest people.

Pavel Zarubin: Carlson faced criticism before the interview, and since then he has been accused of asking too few probing questions and of allegedly being too soft on you, which is why you felt so comfortable with him. Do you think you overwhelmed the American journalist with your authority?

Vladimir Putin: I believe that your Carlson – “your” as a member of the journalistic community – is a dangerous man, and here is why. To be honest, I thought he would be quite aggressive and ask so-called tough questions.

I was not just prepared for this, I wanted it, because it would give me the opportunity to respond with equally sharp answers, which would add a certain character to our conversation. But he chose a different tactic. He tried to interrupt me several times, but still, surprisingly for a Western journalist, he remained patient and listened to my lengthy monologues, especially when I spoke about history. He gave me no cause for doing what I was prepared to do. That is why, to tell the truth, I did not fully enjoy that interview. But he acted strictly according to his plan, and he did what he intended. As for how informative it turned out to be in the end, that is not for me to judge. It is for the viewers, listeners and possibly readers of this material to judge.

Pavel Zarubin: Following that interview, calls have been made to impose sanctions against Tucker Carlson, and there are even rumours that he could be arrested. Is this possible?

Vladimir Putin: Assange has been locked up, and few people mention him now. Only those close to him still talk about it, and that is all. One specific feature of public opinion is that people tend to forget quickly. But Assange was at least accused of revealing state secrets. Carlson cannot be charged with that because he did not touch upon any secrets. Nevertheless, anything is possible, theoretically, in modern-day America, in the United States today.

This would be bad for Carlson. I feel sorry for him, but it was his choice. He knew what he was doing. On the other hand, this could be a good opportunity for people around the world to see the true nature of modern “liberal democratic” (in scare quotes) dictatorship, which is supposedly represented in the current ruling class in the United States. This would reveal its true face.

Pavel Zarubin: Carlson said that after the interview… I wanted to ask you a question so that we can put the doubt to rest. Carlson said that after the interview your conversation continued. What did you discuss? Now everyone wants to know.

Vladimir Putin: As I have already said, and as far as I can see, he had a plan for the interview and he stuck to it. But there were other topics too that had to be raised, in my opinion. Still, I decided not to inject new topics into our conversation without being prompted to do so by the journalist.

During the taped part of the interview, we should have discussed efforts to use inter-ethnic relations and the Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire as a way of denigrating and demonising Russia. One of the subjects we discussed when the cameras were turned off was what US Secretary of State, Mr Blinken, mentioned on several occasions. He said that his relatives, his great-grandfather, fled the Jewish pogroms and left Russia.

This topic keeps surfacing across the world, in Europe and in the United States. Let me reiterate that it is being used to demonise and discredit Russia and to demonstrate that it is home to barbaric, cruel people and outlaws. However, we can clarify many issues if we try to understand what today’s US Secretary of State actually said and if we look beyond political slogans by focusing on the substance.

All this information is in our archives. For example, Mr Blinken’s great-grandfather did leave the Russian Empire. I think that he was born somewhere in the Poltava Province, and then moved to Kiev before emigrating. This raises the following question: does Mr Blinken think that Kiev and the surrounding territories are historically Russian land? This is my first point here.

Second, if he says that his great-grandfather left Russia to escape the Jewish pogroms, this, at least, means, and I would like to stress this point, that in 1904, since this is when Mr Blinken’s great-grandfather left Kiev for the United States, Ukraine did not exist – this is what he seems to believe. This way, Mr Blinken seems to share our views. That said, he should have refrained from saying so in public. This could undermine his cause.

Pavel Zarubin: Just the other day, there were articles in the German media saying that the grandfather of Germany’s current Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was a devoted Nazi. Considering the way the relations between our countries have been unfolding over the past years, could it be that the Nazi virus still exists in this country at a genetic level or something like that?

Vladimir Putin: This is an iteration of nationalism, albeit a radical one. By the way, something has just occurred to me about these pogroms. They took place mainly in the south and southwest of the Russian Empire. In fact, this is where present-day Ukraine is, for example in Kiev, in 1905. If Mr Blinken’s ancestor left in 1904, the first pogrom in Kiev, I mean a big one, happened in 1905, which means that his great-grandfather, or his great-great-grandfather, could only find out what happened there from newspapers, or from those who were in Kiev at that time.

In fact, these tragic mass atrocities started in the early 19th century. I think it was in 1820 or in 1821 when the first major pogrom took place. We know that these crimes took place in Odessa, and later in Melitopol, in Zhitomir, and in other cities of present-day Ukraine, as well as in Byelorussia. There were also several incidents of this kind in Siberia, but the very first one happened after a Greek Patriarch was killed in Constantinople. This was when the Greeks who lived there thought that the Jews were involved in the assassination in one way or another.

But this is not what matters here. What does matter is that there were resistance militias who tried to counter these attacks, formed by Jewish and Russian youth, while the government, even the tsarist authorities, delivered a proper assessment of these tragic events and tried to stop them, including by sending in the army. Let me reiterate that this is a whole different story.

Speaking of nationalism, Nazism and fascism, you know, I will tell you something that may sound strange. First, Ms, what is her name?

Annalena Baerbock.

Vladimir Putin: Yes, Baerbock (I do not want to mispronounce her surname) represents the Greens party. Many representatives of this part of the European political spectrum speculate on people’s fears and engage in fearmongering about what might happen in the world due to climate change. Later, they speculate on these fears, fanned by themselves, and follow their political line that differs greatly from their earlier programme, with which they assumed power. This is what is now happening in Germany. For example, the share of coal has increased in the national energy mix. The share of coal was already higher than in Russia, and it has now increased even more. I mean, what happened to the “green” agenda? This is the first thing.

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