“No Western journalist bothered to interview the president of the other country involved in this conflict, Vladimir Putin,” Tucker said. “Most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine or what his goals are now. They have never heard his voice. That is wrong.”
It was Carlson here who was misleading his viewers. The Russian President has not had sufficient opportunities to express his opinion about why he decided to invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, he has repeatedly provided detailed explanations for this ambiguous decision. If Carlson hasn't heard them before, it's because he hasn't listened to them.
The Russian president has not sat down with a Western journalist for an interview since his forces invaded Ukraine nearly two years ago. The last time he did so was in October 2021, when a CNBC correspondent spoke with Putin for 20 minutes on the sidelines of an energy conference in Moscow.
But this choice was not made by journalists, but by the Kremlin. “We have made several requests to the Kremlin over the past 18 months,” said Steve Rosenberg, BBC Russia editor. he wrote in response to Tucker's video. “Always a 'no' for us.”
The Kremlin itself later refuted Carlson's claim. “Mr. Carlson is wrong,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said at a daily news conference on Wednesday. “We receive many requests for interviews with the president.”
Why is Putin talking to a foreign journalist? The Russian president is backed by a sprawling state-funded media empire, which includes the English-language newspaper Russia Today, as well as several friendly privately owned outlets. He is known for his long question-and-answer sessions: the last one lasted more than four hours and included inquiries from foreign journalists.
Speaking at that session, which took place in late December, he stated that there had been no changes to Russia's war aims: “denazification, disarmament, and neutralization of Ukraine.” He repeated his claim that problems with Kiev began with a 2014 “state coup” against pro-Moscow politician Viktor Yanukovych, and justified the seizure of Crimea by saying that saying Crimea was part of Ukraine was “historical nonsense.”
The message was not much different from the one he delivered in February 2022. He then described his decision to invade Ukraine as a last-ditch effort to repel Western aggression that included NATO expansion. “The collapse of the Soviet Union led to the redividing of the world,” Putin said. “This package includes promises not to expand NATO eastward by even an inch. I repeat: they have deceived us, or quite simply, they have deceived us.”
At times, Putin has drawn on megalomaniac theories to explain his worldview: in a July 2022 speech, he repeatedly referenced the “Golden Billion,” a vaguely apocalyptic theory describing an anti-Russian plot hatched by a wealthy Western elite. Long before the invasion of Ukraine, he had completely rejected the idea of a Ukrainian national identity. “The word ‘Ukrainian’, based on archival documents, originally referred to border guards protecting the external borders,” he wrote in July 2021.
The Russian leader often distorts history according to his worldview. In 2020, he published a 9,000-word article in which he claimed that the Soviet annexation of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in 1939 was done “with the consent of elected authorities” – a historical statement that, in hindsight, seems more like justification. To seize a future neighbor.
A skilled interviewer may be able to investigate here. Does Putin really believe his stated motives? But the Kremlin was not looking for a potential investigator to conduct his first interview since the invasion of Ukraine. If Putin had wanted to, he might have spoken to the BBC's Rosenberg, who speaks Russian and lives in the country. Instead, they chose a former TV presenter with no real ties to Russia, who was unceremoniously fired from his job last year.
Journalists who publish critical reports on Russia will no longer get interviews with Putin. Many were forced to leave the country due to restrictive censorship laws put in place after the invasion of Ukraine. This includes Western and Russian journalists, who often work abroad with a great deal of personal and professional insecurity.
Some foreign journalists whom Carlson despised were arrested. Ivan Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was arrested and charged with espionage during a reporting trip to Yekaterinburg last year. In October, another journalist working for an international outlet, Alsu Kurmasheva of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, was arrested while visiting Russia from her home in Prague (Kurmasheva holds dual American and Russian citizenship).
When Putin was asked about the detention of journalists in December, he rejected this assumption. “Why don't they do that? [Western journalists] Stop committing crimes on Russian territory? He said this in response to a question from New York Times correspondent Valerie Hopkins, a Western journalist who was in Moscow at that moment.
Putin has been a source of fascination around the world and the subject of countless biographies and books over the decades. Those who have spoken with him in depth over the years describe him as a difficult interviewer. “It’s very difficult to extract,” Austrian broadcaster Armin Wolff told Politico in 2018 after his, particularly combative, interview with the Russian president went viral online. “He doesn't say a word he doesn't intend to say. He's very controlled.”
There are many probing questions we should ask Putin, from the impact of the Wagner rebellion to the true state of the Russian economy and much more. Carlson might try to ask some of these questions. But sitting face to face with him does not guarantee a glimpse into his soul, as at least one other American has already discovered.
