Vladimir Putin rants about Ukraine in Tucker Carlson interview: Live

Putin claimed in the interview with Carlson that peace talks “reached a very high stage of coordination of positions in a complex process. But still, they were almost finalized”.

“But after we withdrew our troops from Kyiv, as I have already said, the other side threw away all these agreements and obeyed the instructions of Western countries, European countries and the United States to fight Russia to the bitter end,” he added.

“I beg your pardon. Can you tell us what period…? I’m losing track of where in history we are,” said the former Fox News host, who had been listening to Putin’s words with an expression of deepening vexation.

“It was in the 13th century,” said the Russian president matter-of-factly.

The exchange was only one of many odd moments in Carlson’s much-trailed meeting with the ex-KGB strongman, who has dominated his country’s politics for more than two decades and is now virtually a dictator.

Streamed for free on Carlson’s website on Thursday evening, it was Putin’s first interview with a Western journalist since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Here are the key points of their strange, freewheeling, and occasionally comical encounter.

But Carlson did record an interview with Tara Reade, a former Senate aide who later accused President Joe Biden of sexual assault, which he has denied.

The former aide moved to Russia after sharing her increasingly supportive views of Russian policies.

The Russian UN delegation called on her to speak in 2022 regarding “weapons diversion”, and she had Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN appear on her YouTube channel.

The former Fox News host was heavily criticised for seeking an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which was his main purpose for travelling to Moscow.

Several journalists, including from Russia, have also called out Tucker Carlson for patting himself on the back for landing an interview with Vladimir Putin.

“Unbelievable! I am like hundreds of Russian journalists who have had to go into exile to keep reporting about the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine,” Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats wrote. “The alternative was to go to jail. And now this SoB is teaching us about good journalism, shooting from the $1,000 Ritz suite in Moscow.”

“He says he’s interviewing Putin because freedom of speech is Americans’ birthright,” wrote BBC Eastern Europe Correspondent Sarah Rainsford, who was chucked out of Russia in 2021 after being declared a threat to national security. “I guess he knows that Putin made it a crime to tell the truth about Russia’s war on Ukraine? That independent Russian journalists have fled to avoid prison?”

Several journalists took to social media to mock Tucker Carlson for claiming that “most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine or what his goals are now”.

“They’ve never heard his voice. That’s wrong,” he said.

Journalists were quick to point out that his 24 February invasion speech from 2022 was widely covered by major media outlets.“Poor, poor Vladimir Putin,” mocked the Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov, wrote on X.

“Until now, nobody in the West has had the chance to hear him explain all the excellent reasons for why he had to invade Ukraine.”

“Not in the speech that was broadcast live on every global network the morning of the invasion, and not in countless others,” Trofimov added.

Putin said, “We agreed with the fact that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, our borders should be along the borders of former Union republics. We agreed to that”.

“We never agreed to NATO’s expansion. And moreover, we never agreed that Ukraine would be in NATO … we did not agree to NATO bases … without any discussion with us for decades we kept asking you don’t do this, don’t do that,” he added.

Americal- Polish journalist, Anne Applebaum took to social media to lash out at Tucker Carlson for his interview with Vladimir Putin.

“Many journalists have interviewed Putin, who also makes frequent, widely covered speeches. Carlson’s interview is different because he is not a journalist, he’s a propagandist, with a history of helping autocrats conceal corruption,” she wrote on X.

“BBC tried repeatedly to interview Putin. I wonder why he says no to them, yes to Carlson?

Carlson before the interview, falsely claimed “not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview” Mr Putin since 2022.

Countless reporters from Western countries, including the BBC’s Russia Editor Steve Rosenberg, have sent the Kremlin repeated interview requests, wrote the British broadcaster in an article.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged this and told the BBC: “Mr Carlson is not correct, and he couldn’t have known that. We receive a lot of requests for interviews with the president.”

Russian president Vladimir Putin could not remember the last time he spoke with his US counterpart Joe Biden while claiming he had a “personal relationship” with his predecessor Donald Trump.

“I cannot remember when I talked to him,” he said of Biden, adding that the two last spoke before the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “But why should I remember everything? I have a lot of my own things to do. We have domestic political affairs.”

Putin claimed that the West is more “afraid of a strong China … than it fears a strong Russia because Russia has 150 million people and China has 1.5 billion population and its economy is growing by leaps and bounds or 5 per cent a year. It used to be even more but that’s enough for China”.

“China’s potential is enormous. It is the biggest economy in the world today in terms of purchasing power parity and the size of the economy. It has already overtaken the United States quite a long time ago, and it is growing at a rapid clip,” Putin said.

Late last month, Bloomberg reported: “The US has pulled further ahead of China in the race for world’s biggest economy, thanks in part to a vibrant American consumer. US gross domestic product rose 6.3% in nominal terms — that is, unadjusted for inflation — last year, outpacing China’s 4.6% gain.”

“Let’s not talk about who is afraid of whom … let’s get into the fact that after 1991 when Russia expected that it would be welcomed into the brotherly family of civilized nations nothing like this happened … the promise was that NATO would not expand eastward, but it happened five times. There were five waves of expansion. We tolerated it, we were trying to persuade them we were saying, ‘Please don’t we are as bourgeois now as you are. We are a market economy and there’s no Communist Party power, let’s negotiate.”

Russian president Vladimir Putin said that Russia will fight for its interests “to the end” but has no interest in expanding its war in Ukraine to other countries such as Poland and Latvia.

He said Western leaders had come to realise it was impossible inflict a strategic defeat on Russia and were wondering what to do next.

“We are ready for this dialogue,” he said.

The Russian leader said the US had pressing domestic issues to worry about. “Wouldn’t it be better to negotiate with Russia? Make an agreement. Already understanding the situation that is developing today, realizing that Russia will fight for its interests to the end,” he said.

Washington, which has sent Ukraine more than $110bn in aid since Russia invaded in February 2022, has made clear it has no interest in talking on Mr Putin’s terms.