What Tucker Carlson should have asked Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin relished being interviewed by American journalist Tucker Carlson, who doesn’t seem to know much about Russia, Ukraine or the war. The old autocrat turned a two-hour interview into a monologue and spent most of it talking about a fictionalised history of Ukraine. In one of the rare moments when Carlson dared to interrupt Putin and ask about the war, Putin said he didn’t start it. ‘This is an attempt to stop it. We have not achieved our aims yet, because one of them is denazification,’ he said, and then continued to talk about neo-Nazi Ukrainians.

Maybe, that was ‘the truth’ Carlson had promised to reveal in a teaser to the interview, saying that it would open the eyes of the Americans and offer a different angle than the western media had previously explored. Putin kept repeating the tiresome Russian rhetoric that his country had been a ‘victim’ of Nato expansionism, explaining that he had to annex Crimea, invade Donbas in 2014 and then start a full-scale war in 2022 to protect the Russian people.