Most Americans naively believe that Ukraine could defeat Russia because the media has told them so, independent journalist Tucker Carlson said on Tuesday. What the US has done has harmed both Ukrainians and Americans, he added.
Carlson spent eight days in Moscow earlier this month and interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 8. He looked back at that conversation during a three-hour podcast hosted by Lex Fridman.
“I reject the whole premise of the war in Ukraine from the American perspective,” Carlson added. “There’s a war going on that is wrecking the US economy in a way and at a scale that people do not understand.”
The current policy of the American government is only accelerating the demise of the dollar and the world is “resetting to the great disadvantage of the US,” Carlson said.
According to him, for the past two years the US media have insisted that Kiev can win – and it took an encounter with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, last August, to jolt him into reality.
“It doesn’t even matter what I want to happen… that’s a distortion of what is happening,” Carlson told Fridman. Russia has 100 million more people and more industry “than all of NATO combined,” he added.
Carlson revealed that he feels “sorry” for Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, because “ he’s caught between these forces that are bigger than he is.”
A “victory” for Kiev would be to not get obliterated, he added, and that almost happened in March 2022 when Zelensky almost made peace with Russia. Then the US dispatched British PM Boris Johnson to stop it, Carlson noted.
The US journalist again confirmed that Johnson demanded $1 million to do an interview, calling the former PM a “sad, rapacious fraud.”
The point of interviewing Putin wasn’t to show the world how smart or good Tucker Carlson was, but “to have more information brought to the West so people could make their own decisions about whether this is a good idea,” he told Fridman, referring to the Ukraine conflict.
Every Western journalist so far has tried to make an encounter with Putin about themselves, which Carlson described as “the most tiresome, fruitless kind of interview.”