Listen to Putin and understand

If I were asked to describe in a single word the topic of the interview Vladimir Putin gave on 6 February to Tucker Carlson, the American network commentator, I would reply instantly that it was history. The Russian president is an “amateur” of this discipline as the French use the term, a devotee. More to the immediate point, Putin assigns a knowledge of history the highest importance if we are properly to understand the conflict in Ukraine and altogether the crisis in relations between the Russia Federation and the West. This dedication to history is evident in many or most of Putin’s speeches and public appearances. It is unmistakable as one watches the two hours and seven minutes Putin gave to Carlson as they sat in a hall at the Kremlin.

Something else is also immediately evident as the video footage1 unrolls. Carlson was utterly out of his depth for the duration of his exchange with the Russian leader. He was poorly prepared, as many of his questions made clear. And he displayed neither a grasp of history nor much interest in it. He floundered. In all of this Carlson was not merely typical of mainstream American journalists: He was the perfect emissary from the US – ignorant of the world beyond his own shores, not especially curious, and by appearances more or less indifferent to his ignorance and his incuriosity.
  In consequence, Carlson quickly, in the first few minutes, lost control over his encounter with Putin. In this I was embarrassed for Carlson as he struggled to keep pace with his interlocutor. But this is merely a professional judgment, one journalist’s observations of another. Vladimir V. Putin, notably at ease throughout, directed the Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir V. Putin. This is what was important. It is due to this circumstance that we can understand why Putin granted this interview – what it was he was intent on getting across.
  “Are we having a ‘talk show,’” Putin asked with a slight smirk as they began, “or a serious conversation?”
  “It’s formidably serious,” Carlson eagerly assured him.
  With that Putin replied, “So if you don’t mind, I will take only 30 seconds or one minute of your time to give you a brief historical background.”
  And so Putin began to place the Ukraine crisis and, more broadly, Russia’s post–Soviet relations with the West in an historical context. He was after context, causality, responsibility: It is when we understand these that the truth of the present impasse between East and West is clear and immune from distortion.
  Putin’s “brief historical background” lasted not 30 seconds or a minute but most of half an hour. Many American commentators have dismissed this account as irrelevant indulgence or a distortion or both. While I am not a scholar of Russian or Slavic history, it was neither in my view. These commentators merely exhibit the usual American disregard to the pertinence of the past – which is one reason we Americans do not, by and large, have much grasp of our new century’s dynamics.

Knowing and understanding history

Putin’s account began in 862, which Russians celebrate as the year Rurik, a Nordic chieftain, founded the Russian state. His synopsis, long and detailed, pauses in 988, when Russia began to Christianise and power began to centralise. “Why?” Putin asks. “Because of a single territory, integrated economic ties, one and the same language and, after the Baptism of Russia, the same faith and rule of the prince,” this last a reference to Vladimir, Rurik’s great-grandson.
  One begins to sense even at this early moment the point of Putin’s pencil-sketched history, but let us leave this question aside for now, for interpreting his intent – or misinterpreting, as most Americans and many Europeans have done – has long been an exceedingly contentious exercise. Is it too much to say that prevalent, and I would say purposeful misreadings of Putin’s gloss of Russian history, which he has related many times, have become perversely influential in determining the foreign policies and the common posture of the collective West as it looks Eastward? I do not think so – a conclusion that fills me with chagrin for what it tells us about statecraft as we now have it in the Atlantic world.
  Putin’s history runs through the later fragmentation of Rus, the pull of Europe in the early 17^th century by way of the Poles and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the return of “the southern lands” – these included present-day Ukraine – to Csarist Muscovy, and the war with Poland that ensued in 1654 and lasted 13 years. Then came Catherine the Great, the empire builder; by the 19^th century, the question of Ukrainian independence in one or another form had arisen. Four years after the 1917 Revolution, Moscow established Ukraine as a Soviet republic. After the 1945 victory Ukraine was effectively reassembled, taking control of lands previously held by Poland, Romania, and Hungary. This is the entity we see today on maps.

Assertions without evidence

Now let us consider with great care why President Putin related this complex past to Tucker Carlson. What did he mean to convey?
  We have been subject to a riot of nonsense as to Putin’s ambitions for the Russian Federation’s since, I would say, his much-remarked speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, when he complained bluntly and bitterly about the hegemonic conduct of the U.S. and the supporting role played by its European allies. Putin is a nostalgist, we hear very regularly, ambitious to make himself “the new csar.” Or Putin proposes to “reassemble the Soviet empire.” Or, somehow, both.
  Since Russian forces intervened in Ukraine two years ago this month, this kind of talk has acquired a new specificity. Putin’s objective has from the start been to take over the whole of Ukraine, we read, including the European-tilted west of the country. And he will not stop there, we are warned. As I write, European leaders – some of them, anyway – take to asserting that unless Russian forces are defeated in Ukraine, “Putin’s Russia” (we no longer speak simply of Russia) will continue on to Western Europe and, this from the 14 February “New York Times”, “may try to test NATO’s commitment to defend every inch of its territory in the coming years.”
  There has never been anything to support these assertions. No one making them has ever presented any kind of credible case to substantiate them. Indeed, the sheer distance separating such assertions from reality is astonishing. They comprise a never-ending wave of disinformation – not more, not less – which explains, in my view, why they feature so incessantly across the West. We now have elaborate, expensive, socially distorting foreign and military policies across the West that draw from what amounts to a collection of falsehoods – propaganda, in a word.

Imperial expansionist intentions – 
a projection of the West

The Putin-Carlson interview has been distorted further to support this reading of Russia’s ambitions. This, too, has been astonishing. “Putin to US: Let’s Make a Deal on Ukraine (on My Terms),” read the headline atop the “New York Times” piece analysing the Carlson interview. Given this report is incontrovertibly false – Putin reiterated Moscow is open to negotiation but placed no conditions on them – we must conclude that the policy cliques in Washington and the media that reflect their views will obstruct all prospects of a negotiated settlement in Ukraine by any means at their disposal.
  Carlson missed an excellent opportunity constructively to counter these falsehoods and orthodoxies in his interview with Putin. Instead, he reflected them. Here he intervenes toward the end of Putin’s brief historical account:

“You are making the case that Ukraine, certain parts of Ukraine, Eastern Ukraine, in fact, has been Russian for hundreds of years. Why wouldn’t you just take it when you became president 24 years ago? You have nuclear weapons, they don’t. It’s actually your land. Why did you wait so long?”

I found these questions hopelessly clumsy as soon as Carlson posed them. In them we can recognise the notion of Russia’s expansionist designs as an idée fixe that reflects the habit of projection so often found among Westerners. In my reading this version of Russia’s intent can be explained only with reference to the Atlantic nations’ pursuit of territorial dominion over many centuries: What the West did before the East will do now. There is no understanding in this that imperial expansion was a nineteenth century technology and that the non-Western nations now emergent have no interest in it.

Common history 
of Russia and Ukraine – 
fundamental for a lasting agreement

If we watch the video recording attentively, or read with equal care the transcript published 9 February on the Kremlin’s website,² we arrive at an entirely different understanding of what Putin sought to articulate. “Let’s look at where our relationship with Ukraine started from,” he proposes early in the interview. “Where does Ukraine come from?” This is a deceptively simple question. Why did Putin pose it?
  His intent as he put the question and explored the answer had nothing to do with asserting Moscow’s right to claim or assert territorial sovereignty over Ukraine. He made this clear multiple times in the course of his two hours with Carlson. Putin began with so simple a line of inquiry to introduce his conviction that Russians and Ukrainians – as Russians and Ukrainians – share a rich, complex past that can be the basis of an enduring settlement achieved not by way of animosity and conflict across the two nations’ border, but by way of a common history. If there is one point we, as viewers or readers, should grasp as we view or read this document, this is it.
  Putin has long displayed a mastery of detail whether his topic is economics, ballistic missiles, or America’s national debt. Here he is on what he termed in the interview “the fundamentals of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine”:

“… in fact, a common language – more than 90 per cent of the population there [in Ukraine] spoke Russian; family ties – every third person there had some kind of family or friendship ties; common culture; common history; finally, common faith; coexistence within a single state for centuries; and deeply interconnected economies. All of these were so fundamental.”

“All these elements together make our good relations inevitable,” Putin concluded this recital of facts.

What the West is dismantling

Let us make use of this remark as a mirror. In it we see reflected numerous of the policies the Kiev regime has advanced – first under Petro Poroshenko, now under Volodymyr Zelensky – since the US cultivated the coup 10 years ago this month that was intended to tilt Ukraine Westward. The Russian language has been banned as a medium of instruction, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is under attack, previously dense economic ties are disrupted. We now understand the nature of Kiev’s project: It is to dismantle all that has bound together Ukrainians and Russia – again, as Ukrainians and Russians – all that could form the foundation of the peaceful coexistence Putin continues to consider possible.
  “What is happening is, to a certain extent, an element of a civil war,” Putin tells Carlson at the end of their time together. “Why are the Ukrainian authorities dismantling the Ukrainian Orthodox Church? Because it unites not the territory; it unites our souls. No one will be able to disunite them.”

History as an instrument of exposure

Those who have followed the Putin presidency will be familiar with his accounting of various events between East and West before and during his Kremlin years. The Russian leader reprises, among much else, the diplomatic betrayals that began with the U.S. and European commitment not to expand NATO after the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991. There is, another example, the duplicity of Berlin and Paris, guarantors of the Minsk Protocols of 2014 and 2015, when they failed to enforce them as they had committed to doing. This has been well-reported, although it is worthwhile listening to Putin dilate on the occasion. I found the detail he provided in numerous cases interesting and occasionally revelatory. History is, once again, Putin’s chosen instrument of exposure.
  A few such events make cases in point. 
  Prior to the 2014 coup and the violence that accompanied it, Viktor Yanukovych, the duly elected president, was besieged after calculating that an association agreement with the European Union would not work to Ukraine’s advantage. As Putin recalls, “The US told us: ‘Calm Yanukovych down and we will calm the opposition. Let the situation unfold according to the scenario of a political settlement.’” Yanukovych then agreed to early elections – elections he knew he could not win, as Putin notes – and promised not to resort to the army or the police as demonstrations erupted. It was in this context the US pushed the coup forward.
  Here is Putin on these events:

“By the way, back then the representatives of three European countries – Germany, Poland and France – arrived. They were the guarantors of the signed agreement between the government of Yanukovych and the opposition. They signed it as guarantors … and all these countries pretended that they didn’t remember that they were guarantors of a peaceful settlement. They just threw it in the stove right away and nobody recalls that.”

Putin also offers an inside look at the peace agreement Moscow and Kiev negotiated in Istanbul in late March 2022, a month after the Russian intervention began. This accord appears to have been further along than had previously been understood. Just prior to the hasty arrival of Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, who swiftly scuttled the draft, the Ukrainian side had initialled many – not all – of its clauses. Putin again:

“It was necessary to create conditions for the final signing of the documents. My counterparts in France and Germany said, ‘How can you imagine them signing a treaty with a gun to their heads? [Russian] troops should be pulled back from Kiev.’ I said, ‘All right.’ We withdrew the troops from Kiev.
  As soon as we pulled back our troops from Kiev, our Ukrainian negotiators immediately threw all our agreements reached in Istanbul into the bin and got prepared for a longstanding armed confrontation with the help of the United States and its satellites in Europe. That is how the situation has developed.”

There is another feature of the short-lived Istanbul accord that must be noted. It concerns the presence of neo–Nazis at all levels of Ukrainian society. While the US and its allies continue to insist this presence is mere Russian propaganda, the question featured in the draft accord that nearly went into effect. “During the negotiations in Istanbul,” Putin tells Carlson, “we did agree that – we have it all in writing – neo-Nazism would not be cultivated in Ukraine, including that it would be prohibited at the legislative level.”
  Neo–Nazi influence in Ukraine remains among Putin’s preoccupations, however much this problem is obscured in the West. “I say that Ukrainians are part of the one Russian people. They say, ‘No, we are a separate people,’” Putin tells Carlson. “Okay, fine. If they consider themselves a separate people, they have the right to do so, but not on the basis of Nazism, the Nazi ideology.” In effect, Putin declared via Carlson that de–Nazification is the one condition he would impose, unapologetically, on a settlement. “Is any state allowed to promote Nazism?” he asks. “It is not, is it? That is it.”
  At no moment in Vladimir Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson does history count so immediately as when he defines the conflict in Ukraine, its origin, and Moscow’s true aims. The coup in Kiev ten years ago this month, which Putin counts “a colossal mistake” on Washington’s part, the later betrayals at Minsk, the start of shelling of civilians in the eastern provinces: These marked the start of the war, as the Russian leader reads it. “It was they who started the war in 2014,” Putin says in reference to the Kiev regime and its Western sponsors. “Our goal is to stop this war. And we did not start this war in 2022. This is an attempt to stop it.”   •

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYfByTcY49k
² http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/73411

* Patrick Lawrence is a writer, a commentator, a critic, a longtime newspaper and magazine correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the “International Herald Tribune”. He is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His next to last book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century, Yale 2013. In July 2023 his new book Journalists and Their Shadows was published by Clarity Press. His web site is patricklawrence.us. Support his work via patreon.com/thefloutist.