Vladimir Putin relished being interviewed by American journalist Tucker Carlson, who doesn’t seem to know much about Russia, Ukraine or the war. The old autocrat turned a two-hour interview into a monologue and spent most of it talking about a fictionalised history of Ukraine. In one of the rare moments when Carlson dared to interrupt Putin and ask about the war, Putin said he didn’t start it. ‘This is an attempt to stop it. We have not achieved our aims yet, because one of them is denazification,’ he said, and then continued to talk about neo-Nazi Ukrainians.

Putin said he didn’t start the war

Maybe, that was ‘the truth’ Carlson had promised to reveal in a teaser to the interview, saying that it would open the eyes of the Americans and offer a different angle than the western media had previously explored. Putin kept repeating the tiresome Russian rhetoric that his country had been a ‘victim’ of Nato expansionism, explaining that he had to annex Crimea, invade Donbas in 2014 and then start a full-scale war in 2022 to protect the Russian people. It was a defensive campaign, he said.

Putin also avoided answering Carlson’s question about whether he was satisfied with the territories he had occupied so far. He claimed to want ‘to achieve a resolution to the situation in Ukraine through negotiations’, but complained that Kyiv is proposing conditions Russia cannot agree to. Putin didn’t specify which conditions exactly he objects to, but Kyiv has demanded that the Russian army leave all of Ukraine’s lands and that the country must pay reparations.

‘Shall we end here or is there anything else?’ Putin asked at the end of the interview. Carlson, looking lost and exhausted, answered: ‘No, I think that’s great.’ But the interview was far from great in the eyes of Ukrainians: there are many questions Carlson should have asked Putin but didn’t. For example, why did his army bomb a theatre in Mariupol, killing up to 600 civilians? Didn’t Putin claim that he started the invasion to protect the Russian-speaking population, not to slaughter it? What about the Russian missile strike at a railway station in Kramatorsk that killed 63 civilians. Or the mass graves in Izium and massacre in Bucha? What about everyday missile attacks on civilian infrastructure all over Ukraine?

Carlson also didn’t ask about the fate of the more than 20,000 children who have been deported to Russia. Or what really happened when an Il-76 plane crashed last month, which was allegedly carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war. He didn’t question why Russia had disregarded the Minsk agreements or the Budapest memorandum. He didn’t even ask about Russia’s internal issues: why has Boris Nadezhdin, the only ‘anti-war’ candidate, been banned from participating in the upcoming presidential elections? Why is Alexei Navalny in jail? Why are Russians who dare to protest the war immediately arrested?

This list of questions could go on forever. Putin used the interview to feed a wider western audience with his long-standing disinformation about the Russian invasion, and about Ukraine being an ‘artificial state’. The interview will also serve as a promotional campaign for an internal audience in Russia; already, state-controlled media have proudly been writing about the 80 million people who watched the president speaking. Elon Musk, who hosted the interview on X (formerly Twitter), must have felt satisfied.

Those who believe in Russian propaganda will have enjoyed the show, but everyone else just got bored. Putin shows no real intention of ending his war against Ukraine.

Svitlana Morenets writes the weekly Ukraine in Focus newsletter.