(CN) — In a highly controversial interview with conservative American pundit Tucker Carlson, Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed the United States for pushing Ukraine into war with Russia but also said he was ready to open discussions with the West to end the conflict.
At the end of the two-hour interview, Putin accused Washington and its Western allies of seeking to inflict “a strategic defeat on Russia on the battlefield” but said that the West is now “apparently coming to realize that it is difficult to achieve, if possible at all.”
He then claimed defeating Russia was “impossible.”
“In my opinion, it is impossible by definition, it is never going to happen,” Putin said. “It seems to me that now those who are in power in the West have come to realize this as well. If so, if the realization has set in, they have to think what to do next. We are ready for this dialogue.”
He said the West wants to end the war with negotiations, “but they are struggling to understand how to do it.”
“They have driven the situation to the point where we are at,” he said. “It is not us who have done that, it is our partners, opponents who have done that. Well, now let them think how to reverse the situation. We are not against it.”
Carlson's two-hour interview with Putin inside the Kremlin aired Thursday evening in the United States and prompted a furious reaction in Europe, where fears are running high that the interview will further fuel misgivings among U.S. Republicans about President Joe Biden's Ukraine strategy. A vital $60 billion military aid package for Kyiv is being blocked by Republicans.
Carlson, a former Fox News host with radical-right views, released the sit-down discussion with Putin on his website and on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, with the approval of Elon Musk. Musk promoted the Putin interview on his own X feed.
In Europe, some politicians called for sanctions, such as a travel ban, against Carlson for spreading “Kremlin propaganda” and the European Union's watchdogs were even considering whether the interview might violate the bloc's rules governing harmful content, such as disinformation, on the internet.
A spokesman for the European Commission told reporters that Carlson did not face sanctions, but he warned that he could run afoul of EU laws, as reported by Politico.
Peter Stano, the spokesman, said the EU has the power to sanction “propagandists” with a “track record” of manipulating information to “undermine the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine and to promote the illegal and brutal aggression by Putin.”
Shortly before the interview was released, the White House warned against believing “anything” Putin would say.
“Remember, you’re listening to Vladimir Putin,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said. “You shouldn’t take it face value, anything he has to say.”
Carlson was criticized for not asking Putin difficult questions. For example, he did not ask Putin about Russian war crimes in Ukraine, the imprisonment of political rivals such as Alexei Navalny and the ferocious clampdown on Russian civil society and dissidents.
As of Friday evening, the interview had not been blocked on social media platforms in Europe and it had become a top news item around the world. Carlson was the first Western media figure to interview Putin since he launched the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Over the long interview, Putin rehashed many familiar arguments and accusations about American interference in Russian affairs since the end of the Cold War. He averred that Washington cannot admit that its dominance over world affairs is ending as other powers like China, India, Russia and Indonesia take the lead.
To make this point, he said the economies of developing countries associated with BRICS — an intergovernmental organization of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates — make up more of the world economy than those of the Group of Seven, the West's most powerful nations.
“This is due to the trends of global development and world economy that I mentioned just now, and this is inevitable,” he said.
“This will keep happening, it is like the rise of the sun — you cannot prevent the sun from rising, you have to adapt to it,” Putin said. “How do the United States adapt? With the help of force: Sanctions, pressure, bombings, and use of armed forces.”
He called Washington's “brutal actions” toward Russia and other developing countries “counterproductive.”
Asked at the start of the interview why he invaded Ukraine, Putin veered into a long historical discussion to argue that Ukraine is inseparable from Russia and that Ukraine was pushed by Washington to take an aggressive stance against Russia.
He blamed Washington's insistence to bring Ukraine into the NATO alliance as the reason the conflict started. In 2008, then-President George W. Bush declared Ukraine and Georgia could become NATO members, a move that deeply angered the Kremlin.
He said the current war started with the 2014 ouster of Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian Ukrainian president, during the violent Maidan protests. He accused Washington of backing the protests in what he said was a “coup” and subsequently turning Ukraine into a threatening NATO ally.
Even before the Ukraine conflict, though, he said relations between Russia and the U.S. were ruined by actions taken by Washington.
He accused Washington of supporting Islamic independence fighters in Chechnya in the 1990s, refusing to consider allowing Russia to become a member of NATO and deploying ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe without considering Moscow's security concerns.
He also accused American agents of being behind explosions that blew up Russia's Nord Stream natural gas pipelines in September 2022 and charged that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into scuttling peace negotiations in April 2022, two months after the invasion started. Johnson has denied that, though it appears he may have helped persuade Zelenskyy to keep keep fighting because the West would continue supporting Ukraine.
Carlson also asked Putin to release Evan Gershkovich, an imprisoned 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter. He has been held in a Moscow prison for nearly a year on espionage charges, which he and his newspaper deny.
Putin suggested Gershkovich could be freed in a prisoner exchange, hinting that he would trade him for a Russian serving a life sentence in Germany for the killing of a former Chechen separatist fighter in 2019. Putin did not mention Vadim Krasikov by name, but he referred to him as a “patriot” who killed Zelimkhan Khangoshvili because he'd committed atrocities against Russian soldiers. Krasikov was allegedly a Russian FSB agent, the country's security agency.
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union
Follow @cainburdeau
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