Tucker’s Putin Interview — Bold Gambit Worth Taking: Sam Patten

Tucker Carlson is neither Walter Duranty (the notorious New York Times correspondent in Moscow in the 1930s who helped Josef Stalin cover up his murder by starvation of millions of Ukrainians, earning a Pulitzer Prize in the process) nor David Frost (who famously interview Richard Nixon at San Clemente, Calif. after the late American president resigned), but he did conduct an ambitious interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin that aired on his website and the X platform on Thursday night.

“Is this a talk show or a serious conversation?” Putin taunted Carlson at the interview’s outset, before launching into a thirty-minute lecture on Russian history from Ninth Century to the present.

“Our history is very controversial,” Russian opposition politician Grigory Yavlinsky told me in 2003, as I relayed in recent memoir Dangerous Company: The Misadventures of a ‘Foreign Agent.’ But Tucker didn’t argue with Putin on any of it as he struggled through the first half of the interview to focus on the present. When, at the one-hour mark, he finally did, the interview got interesting.

Russia does not have territorial ambitions on NATO countries like Poland or Lithuania, Putin said – even if his history lesson went to some pains to point out how tricky Poles and Lithuanians have been when it came to Russian imperial territory in past centuries. The Russian word “hitri,” or sneaky, came to mind as Tucker’s audience listened to Putin dance around these issues.

And then there was the tangent on “de-Nazification” of Ukraine on which Putin insisted and Carlson did his best to bridge beyond. Putin was clear about his various sources of peevishness – NATO expansion, support for insurgents in Russia’s North Caucasus, and a missile defense regime that excluded Russian involvement.

Some of Putin’s assertions were shaky at best – like his insistence that Ukraine’s Orange Revolution from 2004-5 and Maidan “Revolution of Peoples’ Dignity” from 2013-14 were both staged by America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). But his grievance about NATO expansion precedes the moment he became Russia’s president twenty-four years ago, indeed many U.S. foreign policy experts warned about it during the term of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

What were Putin’s big reveals? He alleged that multiple U.S. administrations – Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s – double-crossed Russia on promises not to press NATO expansion or include Russia in a joint development of missile defense. He seemed to suggest that the American president is merely a hostage to the agencies he is supposed to oversee, offering examples in both the cases of Clinton and Bush.

Putin also revealed that a younger Tucker sought to join the CIA but was rebuffed by the highly-politicized U.S. foreign intelligence agency, and went on to congratulate him for dodging a (figurative) bullet.

Putin also let loose his gripes about Bolshevik revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, who mistakenly gave the Ukrainian SSR too much autonomy, the Russian president griped. One Kremlin insider story holds that Lenin’s death in 1924 might have been the result of poisoning – and that the Kremlin chef at that time was named Spiridon Putin.

On bigger issues, there was plenty of smack-talking the U.S. dollar. Putin was not wrong to say Washington puts the dollar’s value at some risk with its sanctions policies. When Russia seized Crimea in 2014, I remember arguing with a Middle Eastern businessman about Moscow’s mistake then – we’ll kick them off SWIFT and then they’ll be f***ed. No, the bazaar-tested tycoon told me, China and Russia will make their own currency and you’ll be f****d. The jury’s still out on that one, but mounting evidence over the intervening years suggests he had a point.

Other big stuff: how can a self-declared Christian leader prosecute a war that kills hundreds of thousands of innocents? Carlson pressed Putin. It’s very simple, Putin shot back, we only defend our people, we are aggressive, he said, against no one. No definitive answer reached there, though it remains pretty clear that it was Russia that invaded Ukraine two years ago and not vice versa.

To his credit, Carlson asked Putin for the release of Wall Street Journal correspondent and Bowdoin College alum Evan Gerskovich, going so far as to suggest that he be allowed to return home with Tucker’s crew. A final decision on that, Putin said, had to be reached between the intelligence services of the respective countries (earlier in the interview the Russian president shared his esteem for current CIA Director Bill Burns).

But as with talks to end the war, no agreement was reached during the two-hour interview. What mattered, and what was different, was that there was a conversation. However much Tucker Carlson may have been vilified as a useful idiot in the run-up to the interview that aired tonight, he accomplished a good deal more than his fellow Fourth Estaters back home who are too often too content simply re-gurgitating talking points and repeating excuses for failure.