In what way is the interview excellent?
I suppose seeing a world leader who actually seems intelligent and "real" was just something novel. The political personality all Western politicians use now a days is something I find irritating. Giving focus tested answers, or no answers at all, while speaking endlessly nonetheless. Even on topics he clearly found irritating, he didn't try to spin things. E.g. - on the Wallstreet Journal guy, he simply focused on the fact that he broke Russian law, and wanted to trade him for a Russian citizen.
Basically it felt much more like a diplomat speaking to another diplomat instead of a politician trying to give you the answers he thinks you want to hear, regardless of what he actually thinks.
And yeah, I do think the two interviews are extremely similar in content. He asks significant and poignant questions, without fishing for trap stuff. So e.g. he asks most obviously why Putin invaded, what he even means by 'denazification', why he thinks Britain wanted Ukraine to fight, whether China may end up dominating (and thus undermining the point of) BRICS, the risks and possibilities around potential ongoing escalation, and other such questions.
Whenever I hear "hard hitting" in modern times, I just think of a journalist digging up some random dirt to try to shock the interviewee with, using argumentative fallacies like strawmen, and just generally doing whatever they can to agitate the interviewee and get some sensational headline or emotional response. And there was none of that.
[1] - http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21558
> And there was none of that.
Yeap, no questions on Bucha and who did such a well documented atrocities...
Yeap, no questions on how people fall from windows, or get poisoned so easily in Russia and the Russian chemical attacks in the UK...
Yeap, no questions on the 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped into Russia...
Yeah none of that. An excellent articulated piece of propaganda.
The Western take is: look, Putin is avoiding talking about the current conflict and talks history instead. The Russian take is: look, Crimea changes hands once every 100 or so years, and this is just the latest iteration.
So, the content is the same? An aggressor trying to justify his aggression by his version of history?
> The Russian take is: look, Crimea changes hands once every 100 or so years, and this is just the latest iteration.
Putin was not going after Crimea, he was going to "free" the whole Ukraine in a few days (the "special operation") and then beyond. That's what he sold the Russian people. Too bad, his troops were defeated while on their way to Kiev. Now his troops are fighting a bloody war and Russia is isolated in Europe. Countries are joining NATO instead. Putin has achieved to unite most of Europe, unfortunately without and against him.
The Russia public lives in the propaganda bubble of an aggressive regime. There are no flights to much of Europe, few trains, borders are closed, ...
There Russian take is that the evil West is responsible and the reason why its now hard to get all the good things..., but is it worth for them to die for an outdated version of an imperialistic history, where Putin is a czar?
Putin, the emperor with no clothes.
If he has the opportunity, than he invades neighbour countries. Why do you think Finland is a NATO member now and Sweden is seeking NATO membership? It was clear to them that they would be easy and early targets for conflicts, if they were not in a more powerful union.
Other countries he would start a conflict with, are countries which are looking to be members of the EU.
Putin just said in the interview that he won't invade Poland, only when Poland attacks Russia. Just like he said before that he won't invade Ukraine, but then he had to, to defend Russia from the West (and then did not call it war, but "special operation).
Putin dreams of a larger Russia and he as said that the real enemy is the "west", which he now sees as weak, especially when Trump is President again and Trump and his republican party won't defend Europe.
Poland and Estland would be the first targets. It might not start with a war, but Putin also did start to destabilize the Ukraine long before the current war. The interviewer is a tool, just like Trump.
Putin's Russia is an imperialistic terror state.
Realistically the only thing Russia can hope for is the preservation of the status quo - keeping Crimea and the land bridge to it.
That's not enough for him, it would be a huge defeat. He would not survive that, I would think.
To an American this kind of communication seems like evasion and filibustering. To a Russian not getting into the details feels shallow and rash.
Personally, I've struggled mightily with writing in American business style. You know, executive summary front and center, any details relegated to an appendix. A much more natural style for me is storytelling - linear, chronological, with details inline.
Also the point where Tucker reached the conclusion that "only an idiot would believe that Russia is an expansionist power" sounds a lot like slurping sounds around Putin's private parts to me(Russia has invaded at least 3 neighbouring countries in the last decade)
The Hitler/Poland observation especially makes me think perhaps Putin would like to call it the Second World Special Military Operation, which isn't all that far from calling the Ukraine war by any other name than a war.
There's a transcript of the interview here [2]. It looks like an auto-translated version of the Russian transcript, and a rather terrible one at that. So I would take it with a grain of salt, but it should at least be a decent way of finding whichever topic you're interested in and correlating that against its location in the actual interview.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_City_of_Danzig
[2] - https://voxday.net/2024/02/09/tucker-putin-interview-complet...
That was an excuse, not motivation. Hitler was motivated by theories of racial superiority, which he immediately began carrying out in Poland after invading the country and dividing it with the USSR, which had attacked Poland from the east in a supporting action (they even held a joint victory parade). Hitler sought to exterminate all Jews and most Poles living in Poland and turn the few remaining Poles into a slave race serving German settlers, who were given Polish farms and businesses. Hitler managed to murder roughly 3 million Polish Jews and 3 million Poles before finding a sorry end in a petrol-filled ditch somewhere in Berlin. Systemic extermination of people living in Poland had been planned for years in advance and started right on the first days of the invasion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligenzaktion
Russian theories of superiority, exceptionalism and Russki mir are eerily similar to the German ideas of superiority and Lebensraum in both theory and practice:
Operation Tannenberg (German: Unternehmen Tannenberg) was a codename for one of the anti-Polish extermination actions by Nazi Germany. The shootings were conducted with the use of a proscription list (Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen) targeting Poland’s elite, compiled by the Gestapo in the two years before the invasion of Poland. The secret lists identified more than 61,000 members of the Polish elite: activists, intelligentsia, scholars, clergy, actors, former officers and others, who were to be interned or shot. Members of the German minority living in Poland assisted in preparing the lists.
USSR did the same in the parts of Poland they invaded:
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. /---/ The order to execute captive members of the Polish officer corps was secretly issued by the Soviet Politburo led by Joseph Stalin. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be "intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners and officials".
And the same thing is going on in occupied parts of Ukraine right now:
In a deliberate, widespread campaign, Russian forces systematically targeted influential Ukrainians, nationally and locally, to neutralize resistance through detention, torture and executions, an Associated Press investigation has found. The strategy appears to violate the laws of war and could help build a case for genocide. Russian troops hunted Ukrainians by name, using lists prepared with the help of their intelligence services. In the crosshairs were government officials, journalists, activists, veterans, religious leaders and lawyers. /---/ The pattern was similar across the country, according to testimonies AP collected from occupied and formerly occupied territories around Kyiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Chernihiv and Donetsk regions.
And there's no marginalization or racial issues or whatever, at least nothing outside the norm. You can find countless ethnic minorities in various positions of power that aren't there just because of an invisible quota or whatever, but because all that matters is who can do the job best. For instance Sergei Shoigu [2] is a name you probably know, and he is ethnically Tuvan. The American far right who view Russia as something like a white Christian ethnostate are seen, by Russians, as complete idiots.
One can disagree with another, even be involved in a violent war, without trying to turn them into the Devil incarnate. Such fatuous and exaggerated claims also ultimately make light of when there are real issues, such as in another war we're supporting, which is nothing like this one.
[1] - https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/largest-ethnic-groups-in...
As to ethnic minorities in Russia:
> And there's no marginalization or racial issues or whatever, at least nothing outside the norm.
Complete lie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification#In_Russian_Feder...
This is not really what I would call ethnic strife. I do agree that language is a big part of ethnic identity, but such a law obviously does not prevent people from using or learning their ethnic language, and people being unable to communicate in a common tongue is likely to lead to real ethnic strife within a region. To me, the ideal of a multi-ethnic nation would be one where people have a shared common identity first, yet also don't entirely relinquish their own unique distinctions. Like I think in America one of the reasons there's such an increasingly absurd division in society is that we've lost any sort of shared collective identity.
Out of curiosity, would you actually even prefer the opposite of what is described in the page you linked to? If there happens to be an ethnic minority that is a majority in some region, should that region be able to determine that education, and so on, should be in the language of the local ethnic group?
It is only one measure of many that is driving the rapid decline of indigenous peoples in Russia. Russia has a long history of methodical persecution of indigenous peoples with a wide arsenal that spans from closure of schools and suppression of media to made up charges about "extremism" and being a "foreign agent" to punitive psychiatry in the best Soviet traditions. Many languages and cultures have already become extinct like Native American tribes that were forced into conditions that caused a permanent loss of language, culture and identity. With official departure from the European Convention on Human Rights, the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, and other international treaties, Russia doesn't even bother to act like they care about human rights. The council that monitored how signatories enforced the framework convention used the same word in their reports about the situation of minorities as you did: marginalization, increasingly so.
And it's gotten much worse since Putin decided to invade Ukraine in 2022. Russia is now decimating indigenous populations by disproportionally conscripting them to die in Ukraine. Buryats and Nenets are overrepresented by a factor of 50 in casualties compared to ethnic Russians from Moscow. Two genocides for the price of one - trying to overwhelm Ukrainian defenders by throwing indigenous peoples from Russia at them.
So for example, I decided to look up the European Convention on Human Rights things, because it sounded pretty interesting. And what you've been told is not quite what happened. It seems that after the invasion of Ukraine, the relevant bureaucracy chose to suspend Russia's representation in such, so Russia announced a petition to withdraw from the organization, which the Council responded with, 'you can't quit, you're fired!' type stuff. [2]
It's just the ongoing of weaponization of international organizations in the West, which ultimately serves little purpose other than to undermine their relevance and authority. Observe the the grossly incongruent responses to actions of Israel vs those of Russia. Organizations whose actions become driven by politics become seen as political actors, which entirely defeats their purpose.
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[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_the_Council_o...
It wasn't me who changed the topic from blaming Poland for Hitler's invasion, to denial of the well-known persecution of indigenous peoples in Russia, to calling international human rights organizations weapons against the glorious Russian motherland. Denial of mistreatment of indigenous peoples is particularly nasty, because it has been a cornerstone of dissident Russian human rights and environmentalist movements for a very long time. Indigenous peoples inhabit many Russian regions rich in natural resources and they have seen persecution not only in the form of suppression of their language and culture, but also in the form of physical destruction of their native land through mismanaged and inefficient resource extraction that leaves behind toxic wastelands. "We don't want to live in moonscapes," as one activist put it: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/1/23/in-russia-indig...
Would you prefer to return to how Hitler only wanted Danzig and other Nazi myths? For some unknown reason they are very widespread in Russia and have strong foothold among boomers like Putin.
So here, it seems to me that your biggest and most compelling issue with Russia is the mistreatment of ethnic indigenous groups? But the article you linked to uses a lot of words to say very little. And what it does say is so absurdly one sided that it just completely omits any sort of detail whatsoever. For instance:
---
Pressure on Sulyandziga began after he organised public hearings on pressure on an Evenki Indigenous community that developed a jade mine on their ancestral lands.. In 2012, the mine was taken over by the Rostec state-run corporation focusing on defence and hi-tech... That year, criminal charges were brought against community leaders, leading to confiscation of jade and land, activists say... Sulyandziga claimed he was accused by state officials of “separatism”, “espionage” and embezzlement... In 2016, Sulyandziga left for New York to deliver a speech at a UN session about Russia’s Indigenous rights situation. He says he never returned because a high-ranking security official told him that intelligence services planned to kill him and present his death as “suicide”.
---
What was the conclusion of the charges? Why were they initially made and/or dismissed? What happened between 2012-2016? How did a random indigenous tribesman in Russia find himself able to present a speech in front of the UN? I feel like this article is trying to appeal to my emotions, and not my logic. I want details, I want logic, I want evidence. I want something that doesn't assume I already agree with the premise of what's being said, and thus will just happily accept anything they say.
What really made you take up the issue of indigenous peoples in Russia as such a key cause? Was there some significant event that happened? Is it something personal? I'm just trying to understand where you're coming from, and perhaps with such I might be able to see the world through your eyes. Make sense?
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"The response of non-ethnic Poles to the situation caused considerable complications. Many Ukrainians, Belarusians and Jews welcomed the invading troops.[100] Local Communists gathered people to welcome the Red Army troops in the traditional Slavic way by presenting bread and salt in the eastern suburb of Brest. A sort of triumphal arch on two poles, decked with spruce branches and flowers was fashioned for this occasion. A slogan in Russian on a long red banner, glorifying the USSR and welcoming the Red Army, crowned the arch.[101] The event was recorded by Lev Mekhlis, who reported to Stalin that the people of the West Ukraine welcomed the Soviet troops "like true liberators".[102] The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists rebelled against Polish rule and Communist partisans stirred up local revolts, such as in Skidel.[1]".
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[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland#Dome...
Such is history that sometimes great people do awful things, and sometimes awful people do great things.
Nothing about the war against Poland was great.
Putin is an aggressor and he even tried to justify his history view with Poland/Germany from 1939.
From the interview: "Hitler asked them to give it amicably, but they refused."
That's complete nonsense, Hitler had very different motives and Poland knew that it was not "amicably".
What is disturbing, is that Putin compares his own motives to attack the Ukraine to the German/Polish situation in 1939, where we see Putin siding in his arguments with Hitler. That's completely crazy.
Hitler had all staged this, back then, to conquer Poland and follow his long-term goals & plans (-> kill the jews, enslave east europe).
Putin reverses the attacker and the victim.