Russian President Vladimir Putin is willing to engage in diplomacy to end the fighting in Ukraine, but the longer it continues the less likely he will be to compromise, US journalist Tucker Carlson warned on Monday.
Carlson spoke at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he flew after interviewing Putin in Moscow last week. The video of the discussion has been viewed hundreds of millions of times.
“Putin wants to get out of this war. He’s not going to become more open to negotiation the longer this goes on,” Carlson said in response to a moderator's question.
The West needs to keep in mind that “Russia’s industrial capacity is a lot more profound than we thought it was,” and that Moscow is having a far easier time manufacturing weapons and ammunition than NATO countries that have been supplying Ukraine, the journalist continued.
There are competent people in US President Joe Biden’s administration, Carlson noted, but they lack perspective and see international relations through a very narrow lens in which every foreign leader is Adolf Hitler and every day is Munich 1938. As a result, Western governments have no real sense of what is possible or achievable, he claimed.
“Leaders of any country on the planet, other than maybe the United States during the unipolar period, are forced by the nature of their jobs to compromise. That’s what diplomacy is,” Carlson told the crowd in Dubai. Putin practices diplomacy just like everyone else, but “his position is hardening,” he added.
Following Carlson’s two-hour interview with Putin, the Kremlin said that Russia has communicated its stance to the US quite clearly, but that Washington did not appear interested in talks.
“The US authorities know our position very well, they are perfectly aware of all of Putin’s main points,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told TASS news agency on Saturday. However, the American leadership apparently lacks the “political will” for negotiations.
“This is not an issue of knowledge, but an issue of desire. The desire to do something to get on to the track of negotiations. We have not yet seen such a desire or the political will for this [in the US],” Peskov noted.