The real message of Vladimir Putin’s chat with Tucker Carlson
congressional Republicans have held up further support for Kyiv, mindful of the presidential election this November and Donald Trump’s candidacy in it. A Trumpist provocateur and host on Fox News until he was sacked last year, Mr Carlson gave Mr Putin lots of chances to stir up American politics. For a supposed sorcerer of electoral interference, the president did a poor job.
Might a different administration in Washington help mend relations with Russia? “It is not about the leader," Mr Putin said disobligingly. Invited, more than once, to blame NATO for the war—a bogus explanation favoured by American isolationists—he repeatedly blathered about history. Mr Carlson looked, now and then, like a man who has drifted into a reverie over whether he left the oven on.
The president told flagrant lies. He suggested Poland (rather than the Soviet Union) collaborated with Hitler in 1939. He said he launched the invasion of 2022 to stop a war that Ukraine had started in 2014 after a CIA-backed coup.
Russian forces withdrew from Kyiv as a gesture of goodwill, he fibbed. He alleged, as usual, that the Ukrainian government and its Jewish president promote Nazi ideology. Mr Carlson, who mixed up Ukraine’s revolution of 2014 with the one a decade earlier, was unwilling or unable to challenge these falsehoods.
Nor did he ask about Russian war crimes, including those of which Mr Putin personally stands accused, or the repression of domestic critics such as Alexei Navalny. (He did press for the release of Evan Gershkovich, an American journalist imprisoned in Russia on risible espionage charges.) Still, Mr Carlson came away with more than the file of letters by a 17th-century Cossack leader which, bizarrely, Mr Putin gave him. For Mr Putin
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