By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 2/10/24

I watched with interest evaluations of the Putin interview last night aired on Russian state television’s Vesti program, read assorted articles on this subject published in yesterday’s Johnson’s Russia List and the comments which readers posted on my website or sent to me directly via email.

I think the issues are worthy of further discussion and that is the objective of today’s essay.

It should come as no surprise that yesterday’s Vesti only sang the praises of the interview and of Putin’s performance in particular. In that context they put on air the very complimentary remarks of two Americans from the intelligence community who in recent months have become the darlings of Russian television:  Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson. I will only say that both showed poor judgment in giving unqualified thumbs-up.  Why?  I hope that will become clear from what I have to say today to amplify and dig down deeper into the critique that I sketched yesterday.

By its nature, a website like mine attracts a goodly number of Russia-cheerleaders who don’t want to hear any sour notes. Many of these folks know little or nothing about Russia and rely on guesswork that ignores highly relevant facts available to Russia speakers.

The question of who was the target audience for the Tucker Carlson-Putin interview is critical. Was it the United States? the Collective West? the Russian domestic public? China, India and the Global South?   

As I said yesterday, the Kremlin elites hoped that the interview would get around U.S. censorship and bring the Russian perspective directly to the ears and eyes of the broad American public, which also, of course, includes American elites. It is highly likely that Tucker Carlson was on the same wave length, since Americans are the folks he hopes to entice to become paying subscribers to his Network and also because he likely believes he can influence the course of history by waking up his compatriots. Each time Carlson brings in 40 million viewers he puts to shame the likes of CNN whose viewer numbers are ten times less, if I may be generous to them.

With this objective in mind, I continue to believe that Putin’s decision to deliver a 30 minute opening history lecture by way of answer to Carlson’s question of why Russia invaded was a bad decision. It was bad for several reasons. One is that it was boring for the general public.  Yes, the interview attracted 140 million ‘hits’ on Carlson’s website, but we are not told how long those viewers stayed tuned. Secondly, Putin is not a professional historian and anything he said would be pulled to pieces by academics in the States, not just by the usual journalistic commentators.  Thirdly, the history going back to the 9^th century had nothing to do with the decision to invade Ukraine, which was prompted and justified internally in the Kremlin by reasons of Realpolitik, not by what is called Romantic Nationalism.

As I have said in the past, Realpolitik does not go down well with the general public in Russia as in many other countries whereas Romantic Nationalism does. Mothers don’t willingly send their sons to die for Realpolitik. Hence, the story of how Russians and Ukrainians are just brothers and similar platitudes in many of Putin’s speeches to his domestic audience. But if you have any marketing sense, and I tell you frankly that the people advising Putin seem at times to have zero marketing sense, then you prepare your speech around who is the intended audience, in this case the USA.

Putin’s explanation of why he chose to invade should have started with the year 2008, when the U.S. insisted that NATO offer membership to Ukraine. After all, the trigger for the war in February 2022 was the refusal of the United States to negotiate on Russia’s demand that Ukraine remain neutral and that NATO pull back to its 1996 borders. Note that after one hour of the interview Purin himself says this, but I believe it is too late and many who came to Tucker’s platform will not have stayed with it long enough to hear this.

In the same vein, Putin never answered Tucker Carlson’s reasonable question as to why, knowing as he did that modern Ukraine is an ‘artificial state’ concocted by Lenin and his associates in 1922 to satisfy their own needs to consolidate power throughout what had been the Russian Empire, knowing as he did that the Russian speakers in the Donbas were being persecuted before 2014 and were being bombed and shelled after 2014, why did he wait so long to move against the regime in Kiev.  Fair question, I might add, as I poke back at some readers who insisted that Carlson is just an ignorant clown.

The answer is available and well known among Russia’s foreign policy professionals:  Putin could not dare act until Russia’s armed forces were sufficiently modernized and strengthened, until the Russian economy was made similarly robust to survive any threats coming from the West should Russia forcefully push for regime change in Kiev. That moment arrived in 2018 when Putin announced to the world the serial production of strategic arms including hypersonic missiles that put Russia years ahead of the USA and presented a window of opportunity to act. Meanwhile conventional weapons of superior quality were being delivered to the armed forces and the economy was being readied for the most severe sanctions, beginning with the ‘import substitution’ programs launched in 2014. I do not see why setting out these real motivations on air to the American public was not done.

A couple of readers noted that Tucker introduced his Sinophobe thinking into the interview with Putin, asking pointedly whether Russians are happy to be rushing into the arms of China, whether they understand that Xi is using BRICS to dominate its partners just as Washington has been doing with its allies. Putin responded in line with what he has been saying at many forums, namely that Russia and China have an exceptionally strong cooperation in many spheres that is mutually beneficial. However, he added something that I have rarely heard him say: “Russia and China have thousands of kilometers of common borders. You don’t choose your neighbors, just as you don’t choose your relatives.”  Here is precisely the Realpolitik mentality that I have alluded to above.  The game is not about kissy-kissy. It is about the necessities of life and playing with the hand you are dealt.

If I may expand on the China issue, I believe Russia had no particular interest in how many Chinese or Indians tuned in to watch the interview. The Chinese as a people may or may not have particularly warm feelings for Russians.  I can assure you that the man in the street Russian has mixed feelings about China, of which the most evident are fear and envy. The Chinese loggers who rape the forests of Eastern Siberia are denounced in Russian media, as are the many Chinese farmer settlers in the Far East who find Russian wives and move in permanently, changing the fragile demography.  But none of this can or should influence policy in Moscow, which is focused on the big picture of Russian interests.

China is without question one of the most supportive countries in the world in Russia’s hour of need.  And Xi’s actions are similarly based on realism. As the hero of The Queen of Spades Hermann sings in his last aria, Сегодня ты, завтра я! – Today it is you, tomorrow it will be me!

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024