Putin vs. US: Let's Make a Deal on Ukraine (On My Terms)
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia kept coming back to one message in his meandering, two-hour interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson: Russia wants to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine.
But the day after the long-awaited interview, that message seemed to get lost in the shuffle.
The Russian leader's discursive historical rants, which delved into everything from the Rurik dynasty to the Golden Horde, dominated the commentary on the online interview and overshadowed the message he wanted to convey to Americans.
In Russia, pundits and even some of Putin's allies also wondered Friday why he was short shrifting his core ideological common ground with Carlson's followers: opposition to LGBTQ rights and other liberal social causes.
Margarita Simonyan, head of Russian state broadcaster RT, regretted that Putin failed to market Russia as a “safe haven for people who are not ready to have their children raised around LGBT people.”
“This is the only thing on which Russia can and should now build an ideology externally,” Ms. Simonyan said, blaming Mr. Carlson for not asking the right questions. “Just as the USSR once built it on the ideas of social equality.”
Instead, Putin spent much of the interview subjecting a bewildered Mr. Carlson to an irredentist lesson on a thousand years of Eastern European history, leaving the former Fox News host, by his own admission, “shocked.”
The result was a feeling that the Russian leader was missing an opportunity.
“I guess he just didn't try very hard,” Grigorii Golosov, a professor of political science at the European University of St. Petersburg, said in a telephone interview. “If his goal really was to explain himself – and it appears to have been – then it is unlikely he achieved that goal.”
Mr. Golosov said that Mr. Putin's main tactical goal was to try to force the West to reach a favorable deal to end the war — an agreement that would strengthen Russian control over the Ukrainian territory it has already captured and perhaps lead to a more Russia-friendly government in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
“Putin believes that now is the best time to force the West into what he believes is the natural way out of this situation,” Mr. Golosov said. “And that means direct talks with Russia, without Ukraine's participation, on how to end the conflict on Russian terms.”
Between the historical tirades, that intention was clear.
Mr Putin presented negotiations, on his terms, as a way out, now that the West had finally realized that Russia would not suffer a “strategic defeat” on the battlefield in Ukraine.
“It will never happen,” Putin said. “It seems to me that those in power in the West have now also realized this. If so, once the realization sets in, they need to think about what to do next. We are ready for this dialogue.”
At another point he asked: “Wouldn't it be better to reach an agreement with Russia?”
His pitch comes at a particularly challenging time for Ukraine.
Kiev faces shortages of ammunition and personnel, significant resistance to additional aid in Washington and the prospect of a Russia-friendly former president, Donald J. Trump, returning to the White House. A Western-backed counter-offensive aimed at recapturing territory last year failed, and the military leadership is in the midst of a chaotic upheaval.
Mr Putin offered an alternative to doubling aid to Ukraine.
“He very clearly targeted the Republican right, tried to expand the vote against aid to Ukraine, tried to build or foster support in this country for a negotiated solution on his terms,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group . , a political risk consultancy. That said, he added, it was clearly not Putin's “best performance.”
In Ukraine, where officials have been deeply skeptical of Putin's desire to talk in recent months — as Russian missile strikes pounded cities across the country — the suggestion was dismissed as unserious.
“Carlson's interview with Putin is a two-hour marathon of delusions and falsifications,” the Center for Strategic Communications, a Ukrainian government organization, said in a statement.
Ukrainian officials and commentators have said they see Putin's overtures not as a willingness to compromise but rather an attempt to undermine support in Congress for military aid by suggesting the war could end soon through negotiations.
In the interview, Mr. Putin took the message of a possible settlement directly to “the mass of Trump's electorate” on with regard to Ukraine. by resonating with Republicans who oppose aid.
The argument that the war could end through concessions to Russia, she said, “fits right into Trump's narrative.”
Mr. Putin could see this year as his moment to strike a deal that would allow him to regroup and pursue bigger goals in Ukraine later. Although Russia has seized the initiative on the battlefield, the country still faces significant restrictions and heavily fortified Ukrainian frontlines. As a result, it is unlikely that in the near future the Russian army will storm the Ukrainian territory and capture new, major cities.
The content of Putin's historical diatribes – aimed at portraying Ukraine as a fake country with no identity of its own – was not a sign of a Russia willing to compromise.
The Ukrainian government has noted that Putin has never backed down from his maximalist demands, interpreting the goal of “demilitarizing” and “de-Nazification” of Ukraine as cutting off Western military aid and installing a pro-Russian government in Kiev.
“We have seen the film before about its view of history and its total avoidance of Ukraine becoming an internationally recognized country with sovereign borders in 1991,” said Mr Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group. “He honestly thinks that Ukraine was his, is his and will always be his.”
Andrew E. Kramer, Milana Mazaeva, and Neil MacFarquhar contributed to this report.