This is what happened between Putin and Tucker
"It all came down to Maidan and a coup in Ukraine... with the backing of the CIA... We would never have considered to lift even a finger if it hadn't been for the bloody developments," said Putin.
“It all came down to Maidan and a coup in Ukraine... with the backing of the CIA, the organisation you wanted to join back in the day,” said President Vladimir Putin to Tucker Carlson.
“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 a political standpoint, it was a colossal mistake. Surely it was political leadership's miscalculation. They should have seen what it would evolve into.
So, in 2008, the doors of NATO were open 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 a war in Donbas in 2014 with the use of aircraft and artillery against civilians. This is when it all started. There is 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 backdrop of military development of this territory and the 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 U.S. 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 a part of the Russian people, in the face of this war machine…”
Tucker interjected. "That was 8 years before the current conflict started. What was the trigger for you, what was the moment you decided you had to do this?” Putin responded:
“[President Viktor] Yanukovych had agreed to all conditions. He was ready to hold an early election which he had no chance of winning. Then why the coup, 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 that one of the deputy secretaries of state said that it cost a large sum of money, almost $5bn. But the political mistake was colossal.
Why would they have to do that? All this could have been done legally, without military action, without losing Crimea. We would never have considered to lift even a finger if it hadn't been for the bloody developments in Maidan…
We never agreed to NATO’s expansion and that Ukraine would be in NATO… 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 after the events of 2014, where the plan for peaceful settlement in Donbas was set forth. But, no, the current Ukrainian leadership, foreign minister and all other officials, and the President [Zelensky] himself, said that they don’t like anything about the Minsk Agreements.
A year, or a year and a half ago, the former leaders of Germany and France said, openly to the world, that they did, indeed, sign the Minsk Agreements, but they never intended to implement them. They simply led us by the nose."
WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW
I’m not going to steal the whole interview for which Tucker is likely to get lot of flack. Instead, I encourage you to watch it in full on his website.
DON’T LET THEM DISTRACT YOU
The propaganda machine was in full rev before the interview was available. CNN, MSNBC, Euronews, Politico, USA Today, Voice of America, The Independent, The Washington Post, The Guardian etc., all the usual suspects in serving the military industrial complex and European exceptionalism over the ‘barbarians’ in the East.
Tucker is a traitor, a useful idiot, should be sanctioned and blacklisted. Putin is a liar and evil, or, as National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said, “I don’t think we need another interview with Vladimir Putin to understand his brutality.”
Nobody questioned Hilary Clinton as a go-to person to quote against them - her sins are washed away, and she can determine the ‘sins’ of others.
The EU was to be challenged by the impending interview because their tech laws “stamp out illegal content or harmful content that incites violence or hate speech from social media...”
The BBC was more skilful in their article but tacked on an egregious anomaly at the end, bizarrely blaming President Zelensky’s removal of General Zaluzhny on Putin:
"On Thursday, President Zelensky said he was replacing his top military commander, Gen Valery Zaluzhny, amid rumours of a rift between the two men. That will be music to Mr Putin's ears - his ultimate goal, short of the military conquest of Ukraine, is the removal of the Zelensky government in order to replace it with a pro-Russian one under his control."
Despite this seemingly coordinated screaming by mainstream media for the morality of our minds, the meeting of "traitor" Tucker Carlson and "evil" Putin was a civilised event, so gentlemanly that the next round of propaganda aims at it being a nothing event or boring because Putin spent a lot of time explaining the history of Russia and Ukraine.
Yes, Putin loves history, and sees a link between long-ago yesterday and today. It wasn’t the most effective half-hour opening, but should have been mentioned later, as a substantiation to the intro I went with, the partial transcript on the top of this page.
We shouldn’t ignore that Putin was disappointed in the West’s constant rebuttal of friendly relations with Russia, and instead chose to expand NATO.
"Russia even agreed voluntarily and actively to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and believed this would be understood by the so called civilised West as an invitation for cooperation and association. That was what Russia was expecting from the United States and collect West... Nothing like this happened…
We were saying 'We are as bourgeousie now as you are. We are a market economy and there is no Communist power. Let's negotiate... Yeltsin spoke in Congress, he said 'God bless America'. Everything he said was signals: Let us in."
Putin seemed to see the USA as slamming the doors on Russia with its break-up of Yugoslavia.
"Serbs are a special and close-to-us nation. What did the United States do, in violation of international law and UN charter, it started bombing Belgrade. It was the United States that let the genie out of the bottle. Moreover, when Russia protested and expressed its resentment, what was said: The UN charter international law had become obsolete. Yeltsin was immediately dragged through the mud.”
Add how I started this post, and we’re 50 minutes into the interview with more than an hour and a quarter to go. What Putin says next should be listened to.
It’s either that or read mainstream media doing everything it can to distract from the fact that the USA and its vassal countries screwed Russia and Ukraine over. And that there’s blood on the hands of those culpable media.
IN FOR A CORPSE, IN FOR A DOLLAR
As they kill in Ukraine, so they kill in Palestine, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Western Morocco. Same way they did in Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam and Libya. That’s the nature of a corporatocracy with conscienceless employees called experts, analysts, politicians and journalists.
The beast isn’t Putin, and Tucker has rightfully ‘betrayed’ the jerk-off media he used to belong to.
Tucker: "Who blew up Nord Stream?"
Putin: "You for sure."
Tucker: "I was busy that day. I did not blow up Nord Stream."
Putin: "You personally may have an alibi, but the CIA has no such alibi."
Tucker: I just gotta ask you one last question. And that's about someone who is very famous in the United States. Probably not here. Evan Gershkovich who's the Wall Street Journal reporter. He's 32. And he's been in prison for almost a year. This is a huge story in the United States. And I just want to ask you directly, without getting into the details of it or your version of what happened, if, as a sign of your decency, you would be willing to release him to us and we'll bring him back to the United States.
Putin: We have done so many gestures of goodwill out of decency that I think we have run out of them. We have never seen anyone reciprocate to us in a similar manner. However, in theory, we can say that we do not rule out that we can do that if our partners take reciprocal steps. When I talk about the partners, I first of all refer to special services. Special services are in contact with one another. They are talking about the matter in question. There is no taboo to settle this issue. We are willing to solve it but there are certain terms being discussed via special services channels. I believe an agreement can be reached.