by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia kept repeating one message over and over again in his meandering two-hour interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson: Russia wants to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine, even if it’s on the terms of the Kremlin.
That message seemed aimed at the American right and Republicans in Congress, with a view to undermining support for aid to Ukraine. If so, the day after the long-awaited interview, he seemed lost in the mess.
The Russian leader’s discursive historical rants, delving into everything from the Rurik dynasty to the Golden Horde, dominated comments on the online interview and overshadowed the message he intended to convey.
In Russia on Friday, experts and even some of Putin’s allies were also puzzled about why he gave short shrift to his main ideological commonality with Carlson’s followers: opposition to LGBTQ rights and other liberal social causes.
Margarita Simonyan, head of Russian state broadcaster RT, regretted that Putin had not promoted Russia as “a safe haven for people who are not willing to send their children to be raised by LGBT people.”
“This is the only thing on which Russia can and should build an external ideology,” Simonyan said, blaming Carlson for not asking the right questions. “Just as the USSR once built it on the ideas of social equality.”
Instead, Putin spent much of the interview subjecting a bewildered Carlson to an irredentist lecture on 1,000 years of Eastern European history, leaving the former Fox News host, by his own admission, “shocked.”
The result was a feeling that the Russian leader missed an opportunity.
“I guess he just didn’t try very hard,” Grigorii Golosov, a professor of political science at the European University in St. Petersburg, said in a telephone interview. “If his goal was really to explain himself, and that is what it appears to have been, then it is unlikely that he achieved that goal.”
Golosov said Putin’s main tactical objective was to try to force the West to reach a favorable agreement to end the war, one that would consolidate Russia’s control over Ukrainian territory it has already captured and, perhaps, lead to a broader war. Russian-friendly government in kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.
“Putin feels this is the best time to force the West to adopt what he believes is the natural way out of this situation,” Golosov said. “And that means direct talks with Russia without Ukraine’s participation on how to end the conflict on Russia’s terms.”
Among the historical diatribes, that intention was evident.
Putin presented the negotiations, on his terms, as a way out, now that the West had finally realized that Russia was not going to suffer a “strategic defeat” on the Ukrainian battlefield.
“That will never happen,” Putin said. “It seems to me that now those in power in the West have also realized this. If so, if they have realized it, they have to think about what to do next. “We are ready for this dialogue.”
At another point he asked: “Wouldn’t it be better to reach an agreement with Russia?”
His speech comes at a particularly challenging time for Ukraine.
kyiv faces ammunition and personnel shortages, significant opposition to additional aid in Washington and the prospect of a Russia-friendly former president, Donald J. Trump, returning to the White House. A Western-backed counteroffensive designed to recapture territory last year failed and the military leadership is in the midst of a chaotic reorganization.
Putin offered an alternative to redouble support for Ukraine.
“He was clearly targeting the Republican right, trying to broaden the vote against aid to Ukraine, trying to develop or foster support in this country for a negotiated solution on his terms,” said Cliff Kupchan, president of the Group. Eurasia. , a political risk consultancy. That said, he added, it was clearly not Putin’s “best performance.”
In Ukraine, where officials have been deeply skeptical of Putin’s signals that he wanted talks in recent months (as Russian missile strikes hit cities across the country), the suggestion was dismissed as unserious.
“Carlson’s interview with Putin is a two-hour marathon of deception and falsifications,” the Center for Strategic Communications, a Ukrainian government organization, said in a statement.
Ukrainian officials and commentators have said they see in Putin’s proposals not a willingness to compromise, but rather an effort to undermine congressional support for military assistance by suggesting the war could soon end through negotiations. .
In the interview, Putin took the message of a possible deal directly to “the masses of the Trump electorate” in . resonating among Republicans who oppose aid.
The argument that the war could be ended through concessions to Russia, he said, “fits perfectly with Trump’s narrative.”
Putin could see this year as his moment to strike a deal that would allow him to regroup and pursue bigger goals in Ukraine later. While Russia has taken the lead on the battlefield, it still faces significant limitations as well as heavily fortified Ukrainian frontlines. As a result, the Russian army is unlikely to break through Ukrainian territory and seize new large cities in the immediate future.
The content of Putin’s historical diatribes – designed to portray Ukraine as a fake country without a separate identity – did not indicate a Russia willing to concede.
The Ukrainian government has noted that Putin has never backed down from its maximalist demands, interpreting the goal of “demilitarizing” and “denazifying” Ukraine as stopping Western military assistance and installing a pro-Russian government in kyiv.
“We’ve seen the film before about its view of history and its complete avoidance of the fact that Ukraine became an internationally recognized country with sovereign borders in 1991,” said Kupchan, president of the Eurasia Group. “He really thinks Ukraine was his, is his and will always be his.”
Andrew E. Kramer, Milana Mazaeva and Neil MacFarquhar contributed to this report.
