Putin claims ‘Ukraine is an artificial state that was shaped at Stalin’s will’ in interview with Tucker Carlson
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has released his controversial interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The two-hour, seven-minute interview was recorded on 6 February and released in full shortly before 6pm ET on Thursday.
Ep. 73 The Vladimir Putin Interview pic.twitter.com/67YuZRkfLL
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 8, 2024
Carlson travelled to Moscow for Putin’s first interview with a Western media figure since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.
The former Fox News host, who has heaped praise on Putin for years, claimed not a “single Western journalist” had bothered to interview the Russian president since the conflict began nearly two years ago.
The Kremlin slapped down the claim and said Mr Carlson “was not correct” as Mr Putin received “numerous requests” for interviews which were denied because Western media are too one-sided. This comes as Mr Putin has instituted a severe crackdown on the press in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.
Carlson’s access to Mr Putin is in stark contrast to two other US citizens in Russia – Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and Radio Free Europe’s Alsu Kurmasheva – who are imprisoned on charges related to their reporting.
Putin: West is more ‘afraid of a strong China … than it fears a strong Russia’
Putin claimed that the West is more “afraid of a strong China … than it fears a strong Russia because Russia has 150 million people and China has 1.5 billion population and its economy is growing by leaps and bounds or 5 per cent a year. It used to be even more but that’s enough for China”.
“China’s potential is enormous. It is the biggest economy in the world today in terms of purchasing power parity and the size of the economy. It has already overtaken the United States quite a long time ago, and it is growing at a rapid clip,” Putin said.
Late last month, Bloomberg reported: “The US has pulled further ahead of China in the race for world’s biggest economy, thanks in part to a vibrant American consumer. US gross domestic product rose 6.3% in nominal terms — that is, unadjusted for inflation — last year, outpacing China’s 4.6% gain.”
“Let’s not talk about who is afraid of whom … let’s get into the fact that after 1991 when Russia expected that it would be welcomed into the brotherly family of civilized nations nothing like this happened … the promise was that NATO would not expand eastward, but it happened five times. There were five waves of expansion. We tolerated it, we were trying to persuade them we were saying, ‘Please don’t we are as bourgeois now as you are. We are a market economy and there’s no Communist Party power, let’s negotiate.”
