First, Know Your Audience

The first twenty minutes of the Tucker - Putin interview … Oh, man! As Tucker said at the beginning, he asked a simple question: Why? and then Putin unloaded.

I’m not sure who Putin thought he was speaking to. I’m pretty sure he put most Americans to sleep, he had most Poles climbing the walls, and most other Europeans shaking their heads.

I get the point he was making, in general. Russians and Ukrainians, to a very great degree, share what amounts to a common culture, a common history, and even a shared living space. The two nations really are bound together, with the exception of the far west of Ukraine. A foreign ideology has divided them, stoked by foreign intervention.

But what we got from Putin, concretely, was a distressingly tendentious “history” in which Russians were the good guys and Poles were the bad guys. I’m sure that played well with many, maybe even most, Russians. But, as I said, it probably mostly befuddled Americans, as Putin bombarded them with a 20 minute “history” of Russia and names of cities (Novgorod, for example) and princes most Americans never heard of. Moreover, more astute critics will easily poke holes in many of his chauvinistic Russian assertions. Unfortunately, some of those assertions went beyond being tendentious and were factually incorrect. I’ve gone into these matters too many times already to do it all over again (except by truly popular demand).

I guess it says a lot about Russia and Russians that Putin felt the need to go there, the feeling that Russia is misunderstood and the desire to validate the Russian nation in the eyes of the world. And to slime the Poles, whom Russians blame for most of those misunderstandings. There is certainly some truth in that, but the valid points could have been made briefly, without the tendentious baggage that Putin kept pushing. The presentation would also have come across as far more convincing if Putin could have been a bit more generous toward the Poles—who, do, after all, have their share of historical grievances. Most of the world will simply not understand this Great Russian sense of grievance toward a country that, for most non-Poles, is a minor player on the world stage.

I give credit to Tucker. Once he recovered from the shock of Putin’s historical onslaught he manfully worked to reestablish some control over the proceedings—and eventually succeeded. Unfortunately, again, I found Putin’s demeanor to be unhelpful. It seemed to me that he adopted an ironic—even, at times, a bit of a wise guy—attitude. That contrasted poorly with the earnest Tucker demeanor. For people not steeped in the history of the West’s war on Russia, much of Putin’s irony would have been missed—and let’s face it, after two years most of the audience for the interview is still foggy on most of the details of this conflict.

Putin did get some of his major points across, but not nearly as effectively as I expected, based on viewing Oliver Stone’s interviews with Putin. For example, Putin mentioned the 2014 coup in Kiev—but failed to clearly address the overt US involvement. How many Americans really understand what happened in Kiev in 2014? Not many—and they still won’t. He also failed to mention the massacre of ethnic Russians in Odessa. He did reference the Ukrainian assault on the Donbass, but failed to provide any context for those events, to mention the heavy civilian casualties, or to relate those events concretely to his decision to begin the Special Military Operation. Overall, I was left puzzled by the way Putin glossed over so much that is so directly relevant to how this tragic war came to pass. He did repeatedly stress the betrayal at the Istanbul peace talks, so there was that.

At any rate, those are my impressions—disappointed and puzzled. I expect most Russians will approve of Putin’s performance, but to me I think he failed to take advantage of this opportunity to speak to Americans who are tired of forever wars. I’m interested in what readers have to say on this.