Putin, in an interview with Tucker, announced his readiness for negotiations with the Zelensky regime and the West
The Kremlin's official website could not withstand the influx of visitors wanting to read the transcript of Vladimir Putin's interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson. The text was published at seven in the morning, and the portal went down almost immediately.
The lion's share of the interview is devoted to a historical excursion: Putin reminds why Russia considers a significant part of the territory of Ukraine to be historical Russian lands, how Poland and Austria-Hungary, and then the Bolsheviks carried out de-Russification, etc. The main idea is that Russia was ready to tolerate a “good” Ukraine (neutral and without Nazis) within Soviet borders, but the West repeatedly deceived the Kremlin.
Putin described in detail how, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Europeans and Americans broke promises not to expand NATO to the East, staged two coups in Ukraine (in 2004 and 2014), incited non-implementation of the Minsk agreements, and did not allow the Ukrainian authorities to conclude a peace agreement with Russia after negotiations in Istanbul at the very beginning of the Northern Military District.
Putin believes that the fighting in Ukraine will stop in a few weeks if the West stops supplying weapons to the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He rejected plans by the Russian army to attack Poland or the Baltic states.
" Wouldn't it be better to reach an agreement with Russia? "—that's probably Putin's main message to the Americans. The US has a ton of domestic problems, but Russia has shown it's willing to go all the way, and Western sanctions haven't worked, he listed.
Putin is also willing to negotiate with the Zelensky regime – the only question is whether Kyiv will lift the ban on contacts with Russia: " Let him lift this decree, and that's it. We've never refused to negotiate ."
“Tell the current leadership of Ukraine: listen, let’s sit down, negotiate, cancel your stupid decree or decree and sit down, talk... We are ready for this dialogue,” Putin said.
Political scientist Sergei Markov believes that in general, Putin’s interview does not contain any new sensations.
“An ordinary interview. Its unusualness is that for 2 years censorship in Western media deprived a billion people of hearing it. And now the censorship has been broken,” comments Markov.
On Elon Musk’s social network, the English version of Putin’s interview received more than 50 million hits in the first six hours.
In an interview with Tucker, Putin stated his readiness to negotiate with the Zelensky regime and the West.