What Putin Actually Said

Last week, Tucker Carlson released a two-hour long interview with Putin, which resulted a torrent of analyses and commentaries. The consensus that immediately emerged is that, to paraphrase a popular Twitter account, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had “nothing to do” with NATO expansion and everything to do with the fact that he thinks Ukraine is not a real country but a part of Russia. In the hours and days that followed the release of the interview, this conclusion was repeated by hundreds of journalists, academics and other commentators, but many of them went further and claim that Putin had not even talked about NATO expansion or even that he’d explicitly rejected that NATO expansion had anything to do with the invasion. According to them, even though Carlson tried to prompt him to talk about NATO expansion by explicitly asking him about it, Putin refused to go there and kept talking about his view that, as a matter of historical fact, Ukraine is really a part of Russia and the Ukrainians are part of the Russian people. In other words, if we are to believe the dominant narrative about the interview, it definitively buries the hypothesis that NATO expansion had anything to do with Putin’s decision to invade either in 2014 or 2022. The only problem with that narrative is that it’s completely at odds with the facts and what Putin actually said during that interview.

If you actually watch the interview, it’s impossible to agree with that claim, no matter what your view about the origins of the war is. What happened is that, as soon as the interview was released, the narrative alignment machine kicked into high gear and everyone started distorting the interview to eliminate any friction with the prevailing view that Russia’s invasion had nothing to do with NATO expansion. For instance, despite the fact that Putin complains repeatedly about NATO expansion during the interview, one professor of international relations claimed in a thread that was retweeted hundreds of times that although Putin had talked at length about distant historical issues NATO was “absent from such talk”. Another professional Russia watcher, in one of the most popular analyses of the interview, went even further and claimed that Putin had repeatedly “dismisse[d] NATO expansion as the reason for action”. It’s not even that I disagree with everything those people say, the second author I just mentioned in particular has made a point that I think is important about how the debate on the structural causes of the war (such as NATO expansion) should not make us lose sight of the importance of Putin’s agency and the role of his personal obsessions, but those claims about what he said or didn’t say during the interview with Carlson are simply false.¹

It’s true that Putin has repeated his, which he’s held consistently for decades and had already defended at length in a long essay he published in 2021, that Ukraine is really a part of Russia and that the Ukrainians are part of the Russian people, but he did not say or even imply that Russia had invaded Ukraine because of that. In fact, not only did he not say that, but he clearly denied that Russia had invaded Ukraine for that reason. More precisely, what he told Carlson implies that despite the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine (according to Putin’s version of history anyway), Russia would not have invaded Ukraine were it not for other factors, among which he explicitly mentions NATO expansion. Of course, you can disagree that Putin’s account is historically accurate (I certainly do) or that even if accurate it would justify the invasion (I also do), but you can’t disagree that it’s what he said. Again, it’s simply not true that he said that NATO expansion had played no role in his decision making process, let alone that he didn’t even talk about NATO expansion. And it doesn’t matter how many times people repeat it, that won’t make it true.

It’s striking, but not really surprising in light of what I just said, that the people who peddle this narrative about Putin’s interview never actually quote it, so I want to quote a few passages to support the claims I’ve just made. First, a key point in Putin’s narrative is that, while he thinks that Ukraine is really a part of Russia and that the Ukrainians are a part of the Russian people, he also insists that it doesn’t mean that Ukraine can’t be independent. That’s because even Ukrainian nationalists originally insisted that Ukraine should have good relations with Russia:

As far back as the 19th century, theorists calling for Ukrainian independence appeared. All those, however, claimed that Ukraine should have a very good relationship with Russia. They insisted on that.

This observation comes after Putin summarized the traditional Russian view that the Pereyaslav Agreement of 1654, which turned the Cossack Hetmanate into a Muscovite protectorate, was the reunification of the Russian lands which had been divided after the Mongol invasion. He continues by explain that Ukraine as it exists today is an artificial creation of the Bolsheviks, who arbitrarily put it together largely with historically Russian territories.

Later he explains that when the Soviet Union collapsed, a process that he claims was initiated by the Russian leadership for reasons that are unclear to him (he clearly thinks it was a mistake), Russia let Ukraine become independent and keep the Russian territories it had received from the Bolsheviks, because it still had good reasons to think that Ukraine would have good relations with Russia:

We are coming to the point where the Soviet Ukraine was established. Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. And everything that Russia had generously bestowed on Ukraine was ”dragged away“ by the latter.

I'm coming to a very important point of today's agenda. After all, the collapse of the Soviet Union was effectively initiated by the Russian leadership. I do not understand what the Russian leadership was guided by at the time, but I suspect there were several reasons to think everything would be fine.

First, I think that the then Russian leadership believed that the fundamentals of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine were: in fact, a common language — more than 90 percent of the population there spoke Russian; family ties — every third person there had some kind of family or friendship ties; common culture; common history; finally, common faith; co-existence within a single state for centuries; and deeply interconnected economies. All of these were so fundamental. All these elements together make our good relations inevitable.

Clearly, the implication is that Russia was mistaken about that, because those fundamentals didn’t prevent Ukraine from adopting a hostile attitude toward Russia eventually, which as we’ll see he claims was largely because of the West.

The second reason why, according to Putin, Russia had good reasons to expect that Ukraine’s independent would not be a problem is that with the end of the Cold War, there was no longer any ideological difference between Russia and the West. Russia wanted to join the West and, since the Cold War was over, it was also promised that NATO would not expand:

The second point is a very important one. I want you as an American citizen and your viewers to hear about this as well. The former Russian leadership assumed that the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and therefore there were no longer any ideological dividing lines. Russia even agreed, voluntarily and proactively, to the collapse of the Soviet Union and believed that this would be understood by the so-called (now in scare quotes) ”civilized West“ as an invitation for cooperation and associateship. That is what Russia was expecting both from the United States and the so-called collective West as a whole.

…

Let's not talk about who is afraid of whom, let's not reason in such terms. And 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. You tricked us (I don't mean you personally when I say ”you“, of course, I'm talking about the United States), the promise was that NATO would not expand eastward, but it happened five times, there were five waves of expansion. We tolerated all that, 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 is no Communist Party power. Let's negotiate.“ Moreover, I have also said this publicly before (let's look at Yeltsin's times now), there was a moment when a certain rift started growing between us. Before that, Yeltsin came to the United States, remember, he spoke in Congress and said the good words: ”God bless America“. Everything he said were signals — let us in.

Again, as long as Ukraine and the West held up their part of the bargain, there was no reason for Russia to oppose Ukrainian independence, despite Putin’s views on the artificial character of the Ukrainian state and the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine.

But according to Putin, Ukraine and the West didn’t hold up their part of the bargain:

Now, about NATO's expansion to the East. Well, we were promised, no NATO to the East, not an inch to the East, as we were told. And then what? They said, ”Well, it's not enshrined on paper, so we'll expand.“ So there were five waves of expansion, the Baltic States, the whole of Eastern Europe, and so on.

And now I come to the main thing: they have come to Ukraine ultimately. [emphasis is mine] In 2008 at the summit in Bucharest they declared that the doors for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO were open.

…

So, they started to develop the territory of Ukraine. Whatever is there, I have told you the background, how this territory developed, what kind of relations there were with Russia. Every second or third person there has always had some ties with Russia. And during the elections in already independent, sovereign Ukraine, which gained its independence as a result of the Declaration of Independence, and, by the way, it says that Ukraine is a neutral state, and in 2008 suddenly the doors or gates to NATO were open to it. Oh, come on! This is not how we agreed. [emphasis is mine] Now, all the presidents that have come to power in Ukraine, they've relied on an electorate with a good attitude to Russia in one way or another. This is the south-east of Ukraine, this is a large number of people. And it was very difficult to dissuade this electorate, which had a positive attitude towards Russia.

Here I emphasized a sentence that shows clearly that, in Putin’s narrative, it’s not Ukrainian independence itself that was a problem but the fact that promises made when the Soviet Union collapsed were not respected. Again, you don’t have to agree that it’s true or that it would justify Putin’s actions if it were, but that’s what he is saying.

A bit later, after presenting his view that Yanukovych’s overthrow in 2014 was a coup orchestrated with the backing of the CIA, he connects it to the attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO in 2008 and explains why according to him this changed the situation for Russia:

So, in 2008 the doors of NATO were opened for Ukraine. In 2014, there was a coup, they started persecuting those who did not accept the coup, and it was indeed a coup, they created a threat to Crimea which we had to take under our protection. They launched a war in Donbass in 2014 with the use of aircraft and artillery against civilians. This is when it started. There is a video of aircraft attacking Donetsk from above. They launched a large-scale military operation, then another one. When they failed, they started to prepare the next one. All this against the background of military development of this territory and opening of NATO’s doors.

Again, I’m not saying that you have to accept Putin’s narrative here, but you have to accept that it’s the narrative he is peddling.

Next, after explaining that it was pointless to overthrow Yanukovych since he’d already been forced to agree to early presidential elections that he was certain to lose, Putin explicitly says that had Yanukovych not been violently overthrown Russia wouldn’t have annexed Crimea or done any of the things it did afterward:

Why would they have to do that? All this could have been done legally, without victims, without military action, without losing Crimea. We would have never considered to even lift a finger, if it hadn’t been for the bloody developments on Maidan.

Because we agreed with the fact that after the collapse of the Soviet Union our borders should be along the borders of former Union’s republics. We agreed to that. But we never agreed to NATO’s expansion and moreover we never agreed that Ukraine would be in NATO. We did not agree to NATO bases there without any discussion with us. For decades we kept asking: don’t do this, don’t do that.

At the risk of repeating myself, you don’t have to accept this claim, but you can’t deny that Putin made it even if you think it’s not true. Now, if he said that Russia wouldn’t have invaded if Yanukovych had not been violently overthrown, then obviously he didn’t say that Russia invaded simply because in his view Ukraine is really a part of Russia and the Ukrainians are part of the Russian people.

After complaining that Ukrainians had elevated Nazi collaborators to the rank of national heroes, Putin explicitly says that, although he personally regards the Ukrainians as part of the Russian people, he still wouldn’t have objected to Ukrainian independence if they hadn’t done that kind of things:

I say that Ukrainians are part of the one Russian people. They say, ”No, we are a separate people.“ Okay, fine. If they consider themselves a separate people, they have the right to do so, but not on the basis of Nazism, the Nazi ideology.

Again, you don’t have to have to agree with his characterization of post-independence/post-Maidan’s relationship Ukraine with Nazism and you don’t have to agree that it makes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine morally justified, but he is clearly not saying that Russia invaded Ukraine simply because he believes that Ukraine is a part of Russia and that the Ukrainians are part of the Russian people. That’s just false, and this isn’t something there should even be a debate about, yet here we are.

What Putin explained during that interview is that, in view of how the Ukrainian state was created and the historical unity of Ukraine and Russia, Russia would have been entitled to ask for a revision of borders when the Soviet Union collapsed before granting Ukraine independence, but it decided not to do so because it counted on a number of implicit and explicit guarantees that were later violated. This is a point he’d already made in the essay he published in 2021 on the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine:

Therefore, modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era. We know and remember well that it was shaped – for a significant part – on the lands of historical Russia. To make sure of that, it is enough to look at the boundaries of the lands reunited with the Russian state in the 17th century and the territory of the Ukrainian SSR when it left the Soviet Union.

…

Of course, inside the USSR, borders between republics were never seen as state borders; they were nominal within a single country, which, while featuring all the attributes of a federation, was highly centralized – this, again, was secured by the CPSU's leading role. But in 1991, all those territories, and, which is more important, people, found themselves abroad overnight, taken away, this time indeed, from their historical motherland.

What can be said to this? Things change: countries and communities are no exception. Of course, some part of a people in the process of its development, influenced by a number of reasons and historical circumstances, can become aware of itself as a separate nation at a certain moment. [emphasis is mine] How should we treat that? There is only one answer: with respect!

You want to establish a state of your own: you are welcome! But what are the terms? I will recall the assessment given by one of the most prominent political figures of new Russia, first mayor of Saint Petersburg Anatoly Sobchak. As a legal expert who believed that every decision must be legitimate, in 1992, he shared the following opinion: the republics that were founders of the Union, having denounced the 1922 Union Treaty, must return to the boundaries they had had before joining the Soviet Union. All other territorial acquisitions are subject to discussion, negotiations, given that the ground has been revoked.

In other words, when you leave, take what you brought with you. This logic is hard to refute. I will just say that the Bolsheviks had embarked on reshaping boundaries even before the Soviet Union, manipulating with territories to their liking, in disregard of people's views.

The Russian Federation recognized the new geopolitical realities: and not only recognized, but, indeed, did a lot for Ukraine to establish itself as an independent country. Throughout the difficult 1990's and in the new millennium, we have provided considerable support to Ukraine. Whatever “political arithmetic” of its own Kiev may wish to apply, in 1991–2013, Ukraine's budget savings amounted to more than USD 82 billion, while today, it holds on to the mere USD 1.5 billion of Russian payments for gas transit to Europe. If economic ties between our countries had been retained, Ukraine would enjoy the benefit of tens of billions of dollars.

In the passage I highlighted, Putin actually goes further than is generally recognized in acknowledging the possibility of Ukraine as a separate nation, for he seems to be saying that even if the Ukrainians are historically part of the Russian people, it needn’t always be true and it doesn’t preclude the possibility that at some point they might go their separate way and become a full-fledge nation. It’s not clear whether he was saying that it had already happened, but in any case, he clearly did think that it takes anything away from the obligation for Ukraine and the West to respect the promises that, according to him, they made when Ukraine became independent. Again, you don’t have to agree with that, this isn’t the point.

When he explained to Carlson that Moscow was ready to negotiate, Putin made clear again that Russia didn’t have a problem with Ukrainian independence per se (even in the borders of 1991), but that it was conditional on a number of implicit and explicit guarantees that were subsequently violated:

I know one can say it is our mistake, it was us who intensified the situation and decided to put an end to the war that started in 2014 in Donbas, as I have already said, by means of weapons. Let me get back to further in history, I already told you this, we were just discussing it. Let us go back to 1991 when we were promised that NATO would not be expanded, to 2008 when the doors to NATO opened, to the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine declaring Ukraine a neutral state. Let us go back to the fact that NATO and US military bases started to appear on the territory of Ukraine creating threats for us. Let us go back to coup d'état in Ukraine in 2014. It is pointless though, isn’t it? We may go back and forth endlessly. But they stopped negotiations. Is it a mistake? Yes. Correct it. We are ready. What else is needed?

I could go on for a while, Putin raised other grievances against both Ukraine and the West that he clearly thinks contributed to creating a situation in which he had no choice but to “intensify the situation” (as he euphemistically put it), but to be honest I don’t think analyzing Putin’s discourse is that interesting and I think I've already done more than enough to show that the dominant narrative on his interview with Carlson was a gross distortion of reality.

I’m making a very weak claim here that, precisely because it’s so weak, shouldn’t even be controversial. In particular, it’s compatible with the view that NATO expansion had in fact nothing to do with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, even though to be clear I not only disagree with that view but think it’s so absurd that the mere fact that people can defend it without fear of ridicule is an indictment of the state of the public debate in the West on that issue. Of course, although I think NATO expansion played an important role in the lead-up to the war, that is not to say that I agree with Putin’s account of the history of relations between Russia and Ukraine and between Russia and the West or that I agree that it makes Russia’s invasion of Ukraine morally permissible. This should go without saying, but since on this topic people seem to lack basic reading comprehension and logical skills, it will go even better by saying it. On the history, I think Putin says a lot of things that are true and a lot of things that are false, but even the true things he says are often framed incorrectly or misleadingly.² On the other hand, I also think the dominant historical narrative in the West is not much better, so there is that. In any case, although I think Western and even Ukrainian policy toward Russia has been very unwise, I certainly don’t think that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was morally legitimate.

What I said in this post is also compatible with the argument that, although Putin claimed that he wouldn’t have been fine with Ukrainian independence had it not been for NATO expansion, Maidan, etc., the fact that he spent so much time talking about historical issues going back several centuries in the past during the interview with Carlson shows that imperialism and his view that Russia was entitled to large swathes of Ukrainian territory is the real cause of the war. To be clear, I don’t find that argument even remotely convincing, if only because I think it’s ridiculous to think that one can infer the causes of something like Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine — which I don’t even think Putin himself fully understands anymore than other statesmen in the past understood all the causes that led them to make the decisions they did — from what is essentially a propaganda exercise. But as long as one doesn’t distort what Putin said during the interview, nothing I said in this post is inconsistent with that argument. Again, it doesn’t matter for the point I’m making here what your views are on the truth of Putin’s historical narrative, the extent to which that history justifies Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or even what you think one may infer from the interview about the causes of the war. None of that has anything to do with the point I have been making in this post.

If people had just said that Putin’s historical narrative was inaccurate or that his justification for the invasion was unconvincing, I probably would have disagreed with some of their arguments, but I would not have accused them of misrepresenting what was and wasn’t said by Putin during the interview. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what they did, but nobody seems to care. In fact, it’s not just that nobody seems to care, the worst part is that people are being actively cheered on for distorting the content of the interview. If people can’t even report what the Russians say accurately, what do you think are the odds that we understand why they do what they do? Ignoring some of the things Putin said is bad enough, but claiming he didn’t say them or even that he said the opposite is much worse. In a healthy intellectual environment, this would attract criticism, but instead it draws only praise. It’s obviously not true that Putin didn’t talk about NATO expansion and it’s even less true that he dismissed it as a factor in his decision to invade. However, I haven’t seen a single professional Russia watcher or international relations expert point that out publicly (though I’m sure a few did), which sadly is not difficult to understand. I’m sure that some of them noticed that Putin’s interview was being misrepresented, but they didn’t want to spoil the party and feared that if they pointed it out they’d be accused of being a Putin shill or some such nonsense.³ And they were right to fear it, because that’s exactly what would have happened. People are so hysterical on this topic that it creates a climate of fear and dissent gradually retreats from the public sphere. The result is that even straightforward falsehoods go unchallenged.

1. As I plan to explain in another post, one of the main problems with the debate on the causes of the war and the role of NATO expansion is that people almost never discuss what they’re disagreeing about exactly, so most people are conceptually confused because they fail to make basic conceptual distinctions and implicitly make obviously false assumptions. I think virtually every argument against the hypothesis that NATO expansion played a causal role in Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine is based on that kind of conceptual confusion.

2. It’s impossible to go over everything Putin said about the history of the relations between Russia, Ukraine and the West, but if you’re interested in my views on the origins of the Russo-Ukrainian War, I have started a series of detailed essays on the topic. The first part was published a few months ago and I plan to publish the second part soonish.

3. I’m not just speculating here, I know that is happening, because I know many Russia watchers and many of them know me (not to mention other commentators who follow the issue but are not experts), so I’ve been told on several occasions since the beginning of the war that people are afraid to speak frankly on the issue. Indeed, I’ve heard specifically from people who have refrained from writing about Putin’s interview with Carlson, out of fear that it would make them look pro-Putin.