I am vastly disappointed. No heroes have arisen to rebut the claims Putin made in the Tucker interview.
20240111
Alexander Motyl, writing in The National Interest, which as I recall is a left-leaning publication, has nothing to say! He vilifies Tucker and Putin. He says that Putin's history is bunk. But he does not cite any examples! That will never fly. That's the kind of phony rebuttal that I have seen from the establishment over and over when I question the Covid 19 narrative, the climate change narrative, or any other sacred dogma.
It won't work, Alexander. We need substance! You don't need to build your credentials by breast-beating in a friendly publication. You need to attack the enemy on their own territory. With real bullets - give us some facts!
This Time magazine piece by a Ukrainophile is equally vapid. It responds to Putin's recitation of a millennium of history by citing the author’s own version history. No reader will recognize either, and neither is relevant.
The Daily Mail begins with an off-putting stream of liberal-lipped invective, but actually gets down to some substance. ‘scuse me but I repeat it below in the dialog.
Again, you could argue that there was nothing to be gained by getting bogged down in history. But Carlson was equally unchallenging when it came to Putin’s more bizarre claims and outright lies about contemporary events. He claimed he withdrew Russian troops from north of Kyiv at the start of the invasion in 2022 as part of a peace deal, on which Ukraine then reneged. This is nonsense. Russia retreated with its tail between its legs because of unexpected fierce Ukrainian resistance. But Carlson let it go.
‘We did not start this war,’ Putin claimed without batting an eyelid ‘[the invasion in 2022] was an attempt to stop it’. It’s a claim akin to George Orwell calling the propaganda ministry in his 1984, a novel about totalitarianism, the Ministry of Truth. Carlson offered not a word against the lie.
Putin said the purpose of the invasion was the 'denazification' of Ukraine. This is an oft-repeated Kremlin talking point. Again, it went unchallenged. Carlson might have pointed out that if there’s anything that needs to be ‘denazified’ it’s Putin’s increasingly totalitarian regime. But that would have spoiled the mood.
Another well-worn piece of Kremlin propaganda — that the invasion was in response to NATO’s eastward expansion — was repeated several times by Putin. Each time Carlson nodded in agreement. He never once pointed out the eastward expansion had stopped long before the invasion. Putin was even allowed to get away with the absurd claim that the invasion had been provoked by Ukraine getting rid of a pro-Kremlin stooge as its leader in 2014. That might explain why he annexed Crimea soon after. But he didn’t invade Ukraine till 2022.
Here’s are excerpts from the interview, with Streamfortyseven’s, Daily Mail and my comments purple-striped.
Tucker: I'm just, you obviously have encyclopedic knowledge of this region. But why didn't you make this case for the first 22 years as president, that Ukraine wasn't a real country?
Vladimir Putin: The Soviet Union was given a great deal of territory that had never belonged to it, including the Black Sea region. At some point when Russia received them as an outcome of the Russo Turkish wars, they were called New Russia or another Russia. But that does not matter. What matters is that Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, established Ukraine that way. For decades, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic developed as part of the USSR. And for unknown reasons, again, the Bolsheviks were engaged in Ukrainization. It was not merely because the Soviet leadership was composed to a great extent of those originating from Ukraine. Rather, it was explained by the general policy of indigenization pursued by the Soviet Union.
Graham: The Soviets sometimes encouraged local languages, sometimes strongly enforced the use of Russian.
As an example, my wife's thoroughly Ukrainian grandparents, born 1947 and 1949, and she herself, 1979, had to speak Russian in school. Books by prominent Ukrainians such as Taras Schevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka were banned or taken out of circulation. Ukrainian authors such as Gogol and Bulgokov were recharacterized as Russian. ‘scuse me - I’m not a philologist. Details may be off.
Same things were done in other Soviet republics. This involved promoting national languages and national cultures, which is not a bad, in principle. That is how the Soviet Ukraine was created. After the World War 2, Ukraine received, in addition to the lands that had belonged to Poland before the war, part of the lands that had previously belonged to Hungary and Romania. So Romania and Hungary had some of their lands taken away and given to the Soviet Ukraine, and they still remain part of Ukraine. So in this sense, we have every reason to affirm that Ukraine is an artificial state that was shaped at Stalin's will.
47: Oh, and for what it's worth, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, were, in their individual and sovereign capacities, founding members of the United Nations in 1945 - see https://research.un.org/en/unmembers/founders. Their successor states, the Russian Federation, Belarus, and Ukraine, remain members to this day. Putin had to know this, it facially negates his claims about Ukraine. As for Tucker, who knows?
No extensive historical analysis, especially of Putin's laughable account of history, needs doing, because none of that crap matters, and Putin knows it, it's why he keeps saying the end of the USSR was the greatest disaster in history. Because with the dissolution of the USSR, all land claims that the constituent Soviet Socialist Republics had on each other, if any, were dissolved, and the land claims of the USSR itself - and its successor in right, title, and interest, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (hereinafter "Russia") - on any of the constituent Soviet Socialist Republics were likewise extinguished. This result was formalized in two documents signed by States parties, one at Minsk, the other in Alma Ata, both in 1991. Russia has no justiciable claim to any part of Ukraine, including Crimea. It's all down on paper, and the documents set out the choice of law by which they are to be interpreted. Legally, it's game, set, and match - and the same goes equitably as well. It's all over except for the shooting.
Tucker: So he did more trade with Russia than with the EU? Ukraine did.
Vladimir Putin: Of course. It's not even the matter of trade volume, although for the most part it is. It is the matter of cooperation size which the entire Ukrainian economy was based on. A cooperation size between the enterprises were very close since the times of the Soviet Union. Yeah. One enterprise there used to produce components to be assembled both in Russia and Ukraine and vice versa. They used to be very close ties. A coup d'etat was committed. Although I shall not delve into details now as I find doing it inappropriate. The US told us, calm Yanukovych down and we will calm the opposition. Let the situation unfold. In the scenario of a political settlement. We said, all right, agreed, let's do it this way. As the Americans requested, Yanukovych did use neither the armed forces nor the police. Yet the armed opposition committed a coup in Kiev. What is that supposed to mean? Who do you think you are? I wanted to ask the then US leadership.
Graham: Yanukovych was infamous for his use of the Berkut (Eagle) police unit to abuse Ukrainian citizens.
Small business people like my barber had been up in arms for more than a year about his harsh "tax police" shaking them down. He totally stopped grain exports for bogus reasons, resuming them only when he could do it through export entities he controlled and rake off a percentage.
The Ukrainian people had ample reason to hate Yanukovych. It was a true revolt of the common people.
I have no love for the CIA. Read my glowing reviews of books reviling them. I think they were not involved, not out of any goodwill but ineptitude. As Victoria Nuland's frustration in 2014 indicated, events got far ahead of their machinations.
This is my recollection. Other sources have far more detail. See Ukraine Diaries. For one. Also Taras Kuzio's Putin's War Against Ukraine. Taras - why aren’t you here?
Tucker: With the backing of whom?
Vladimir Putin: With the backing of CIA, of course, the organization you wanted to join back in the day, as I understand. We should thank God they didn't let you in. Although it is a serious organization, I understand. My former is a V in the sense that I served in the First Main Directorate, Soviet Union's intelligence service. They have always been our opponents. A job is a job. Technically, they did everything right. They achieved their goal of changing the government. However, from political standpoint, it was a colossal mistake. Surely it was political leadership's miscalculation. They should have seen what it would evolve into.
break between sections
Vladimir Putin: So 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 the 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. There's a video of aircraft attacking Donetsk from above. 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? From our side this would have been a culpable negligence. That's what it would have been. It's just that the US political leadership pushed us to the line we could not cross because doing so could have ruined Russia itself. Besides, we could not leave our brothers in faith. In fact, just part of Russian people in the face of this "war machine".
Graham: Wrong and wrong. It was not a coup but a revolution, It was spontaneous, unorganized. After Yanukovych fled in the night, taking his pilfered billions with him to Russia, nobody was in charge.
There was no threat to anybody. Ukraine's armed forces were a shambles. They had been thoroughly infested with Russian agents. Ukraine had sold a lot of equipment overseas. They did not launch the war of 2014 – it was Putin taking advantage of a highly vulnerable, disorganized, prostrate victim.
What does he mean, "brothers in faith?" Fellow Orthodox? That's most people in Ukraine. There was a division in the Orthodox church, between the Kremlin-controlled Moscow Patriarchy and two independent patriarchies.
Tucker: So that was eight years before the current conflict started. So what was the trigger for you? What was the moment where you decided you had to do this?
Vladimir Putin: Initially, it was the coup in Ukraine that provoked the conflict. By the way, back then, the representatives of three European countries Germany, Poland and France aligned, they were the guarantors of the signed agreement between the government of Yanukovych and the opposition. They signed it as guarantors. Despite that, the opposition committed a coup and all these countries pretended that they didn't remember that they were guarantors of the peaceful settlement. They just threw it in the snow right away. And nobody recalls that. I don't know if the US knew anything about the agreement between the opposition and the authorities and its three guarantors, who, instead of bringing this whole situation back in the political field supported the coup.
Daily Mail: "We did not start this war,’ Putin claimed without batting an eyelid ‘[the invasion in 2022] was an attempt to stop it’. It’s a claim akin to George Orwell calling the propaganda ministry in his 1984, a novel about totalitarianism, the Ministry of Truth. Carlson offered not a word against the lie.
Putin said the purpose of the invasion was the 'denazification' of Ukraine. This is an oft-repeated Kremlin talking point. Again, it went unchallenged. Carlson might have pointed out that if there’s anything that needs to be ‘denazified’ it’s Putin’s increasingly totalitarian regime. But that would have spoiled the mood.
Another well-worn piece of Kremlin propaganda — that the invasion was in response to NATO’s eastward expansion — was repeated several times by Putin. Each time Carlson nodded in agreement. He never once pointed out the eastward expansion had stopped long before the invasion. Putin was even allowed to get away with the absurd claim that the invasion had been provoked by Ukraine getting rid of a pro-Kremlin stooge as its leader in 2014. That might explain why he annexed Crimea soon after. But he didn’t invade Ukraine till 2022.
Although it was meaningless, believe me, because President Yanukovych agreed to all conditions, he was ready to hold an early election, which he had no chance of winning frankly speaking. Everyone knew that. Then, why the coup? Why the victims? Why threatening Crimea? Why launching an operation in Donbas? This I do not understand. That is exactly what the miscalculation is. CIA did its job to complete the coup. I think one of the deputy secretaries of state said that they cost a large sum of money. Almost 5 billion. But the political mistake was colossal. Why would they have to do that? All this could have been done legally, without victims, without military action, without the losing Crimea. We would have never considered to even lift the finger if it hadn't been for the bloody developments on Maidan. Because we agreed with the fact that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, our borders should be along the borders of former union republics.
Graham:: There was no coup. Had there been, a coup leader would have been evident. Probably before and certainly after Yanukovych fled.
There was no threat to Crimea. That is totally fabricated, in my opinion.
I read Russian quite well. I scoured the Internet for articles implicating the CIA in the insurrection and could find none. As above, I believe they were caught flat-footed. I have no love for Nuland or the CIA, but believe they were overtaken by events.
We agreed to that, but we never agreed to NATO's expansion, and moreover, we never agreed that Ukraine would be in NATO. We did not agree to NATO bases there without any discussion with us. For decades we kept asking, don't do this, don't do that. And what triggered the latest events? Firstly, the current Ukrainian leadership declared that it would not implement the Minsk agreements which had been signed, as you know, after the events of 2014 in Minsk where the plan of peaceful settlement in Donbas was set forth. But no, the current Ukrainian leadership, foreign minister, all other officials and then president himself said that they don't like anything about the Minsk agreements. In other words, they were not going to implement it. A year or a year and a half ago, former leaders of Germany and France said openly to the whole that they indeed signed the Minsk agreements, but they never intended to implement them, they simply led us by the nose.
Graham: NATO's expansion did not involve Ukraine. This war is with Ukraine.
Russia's territorial ambitions have deep historical roots. See Alexander Dugin's books. Like Russia's tsars througout history, the layers of deceit in the tiers of the hierarchy below Putin prevented his getting a clear view of the situation. Putin honestly believed that expanding Russia by taking Ukraine was a three day project. See Letters from Russia below.
Here are reviews I have read of books on Russia and Ukraine. The authors could do a better job of explaining things than I. Where are they?
That’s what’s happening in Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man - the old man, the retiree raising young kids - finds himself at the barricades all too alone fighting for truth. Thank God for allies like Streamfortyseven.
We live in a fundamentally unserious culture. We don't know how to engage in detailed historical discussion or engage in the details of deep philosophical differences. All we have are soundbites and snark. As long as we only had to fight videogame wars it was all fine, we could watch the highlights on the news and then move on to the latest celebrity gossip. Now that reality is returning and our holiday from history is ending (sorry Francis Fukuyama, turns out you were mistaken) we don't know how to respond. We virtue signal, then get bored and turn away. Unfortunately, reality doesn't turn away from us. If we in the West don't get real and get serious fast, we will find ourselves facing some very unpleasant circumstances. Until then, the only response to Putin's arguments will be perpexity and weak denials.
Thanks for the compliment/mention! I've been fighting with the plumbing - badly-done copper pipes, to be replaced by PEX - so haven't had a lot of time for anything else. There's a good place to look for info on Dugin (and Putin) here: https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics