Putin Interprets Putin

After the Tucker interview I expressed the view that Putin’s 20+ minute narratival interpretation of Russian history was basically beside the point of Tucker’s initial question: Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Of course I’m sympathetic to Putin’s view that an historical understanding of everything that led up to this war is important and useful knowledge. Still, to anybody with a passing familiarity with both Russian and Western European history, the narrative came across as pretty lame. That was partly because of the tendentious spin Putin gave to history—which I’ve gone through at some length already—but also because of puzzling omissions: Things like the Napoleonic invasion, the Crimean War (Britain, France, Turkey against Russia), and the disastrous, for Russia, Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, which featured the Imperial Japanese Navy devastating the Russian Navy using British designed and built battleships.

That last war illustrated that, no matter the status of British intentions toward Germany and Russia in the years before WW1, destroying Russia remained a priority for Britain’s long term strategy. Having armed Japan with a blockade of Russia’s Far East ports specifically in mind—part of the usual strategy of somehow encircling Russia—Britain entered into a very obviously anti-Russian treaty with Japan. British interventions against Russia resumed immediately after WW1:

Japan's industrial resources at the time were inadequate for the construction of a fleet of armored warships domestically, as the country was still in the process of developing and acquiring the industrial infrastructure for the construction of major naval vessels. Consequently, the overwhelming majority was built in British shipyards.^[55] With the completion of the fleet, Japan would become the fourth strongest naval power in the world in a single decade.^[55] In 1902, Japan formed an alliance with Britain, the terms of which stated that if Japan went to war in the Far East and that a third power entered the fight against Japan, then Britain would come to the aid of the Japanese.^[57] This was a check to prevent any third power from intervening militarily in any future war with Russia.

The trajectory of these anti-Russian war and anti-Russian strategery over a span of centuries on the part of powerful Western nations seems far, far more relevant to the current Americaan led war on Russia than Poles being mean to Cossacks in the 17th century and teaching them the Polish language. Being charitable, and recognizing that Putin is clearly a very intelligent man, I attribute what I see as Putin’s misguided approach (complete with Putin supplying a baffled Tucker with Cossack letters to the Tsar dated in the mid 17th century) to the understandable but now almost obsessive Russian desire to counter Polish propaganda that portrayed Russians as an Asiatic barbarian horde, rather than as fellow Europeans. I get Russia’s resentment over the success of this propaganda, but propaganda was the only weapon Poles had for many years. That portrayal of Russia was picked up in the West and has become part of the common knowledge (“common it may be, knowledge it is not”).

My own view remains that a focus on the recent past—from the end of the Cold War on, at the most—would have served Putin’s immediate purpose far better than his defensive sounding narrative of Russia’s grievances against the Poles in particular. It now appears that, having had time to do a post mortem assessment of the interview, Putin has come to a similar conclusion. Thus:

Aaron Maté @aaronjmate

Asked by Tucker Carlson why he invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Putin went on a 25-minute rant going back to the 8th century. In a follow-up interview with a Russian journalist, he gave a three-paragraph answer:

4:58 PM · Feb 18, 2024

Equally puzzling, to me, was Putin’s failure to describe the attempted hostile takeover of the Russian economy by the globalist West following the Cold War. That history might have resonated with a significant portion of the Western population—certainly with those elements that are disaffected from our oligarchical ruling class. A smart commenter on Aaron Maté’s thread picked up on that, and pointed to one specific episode that could have made an impression on Western audiences:

Petre Solheim @PetreSolheim

I think the real split happened in 2003 when Putin rejected an Exxon’s bid to control Russian oil production and imprisoned Khodorkovsky.

Now it’s a war over who gets to sell LNG to Europe, really. Watch out for Ukraine Reconstruction Contracts - Iraq 2.0. All hail Blackrock.

5:02 PM · Feb 18, 2024