PUTIN SPEAKS
An honest man has little or nothing to hide.
But who can talk like this on the Western side?
On February 6 last a famous and decent American journalist interviewed President Putin of Russia, heavily and steadily blackened in the vile media of the West, bravely giving Putin a chance to present his case to a Western audience. The selection below is less than 5% of the interview’s original length –
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, we were promised that NATO would not expand eastwards. There have now been five waves of expansion. In 2014, there was a coup d’état in Ukraine supported by the US. Ukraine launched a war in Donbass with the use of aircraft and artillery against civilians. They created a threat to the Crimea which we had to take under our protection. Then the current Ukrainian leadership declared that it would not implement the Minsk Agreements, signed after 2014, where a plan for the peaceful settlement of Donbass was set forth. More recently, former leaders of Germany and France said openly that they indeed co-signed the Minsk Agreements, but never took them seriously. For us not to have reacted would have been culpable negligence. It was the Ukrainians who started the war in 2014. Our goal now is to bring it to an end.
We did not refuse to talk. We negotiated with Ukraine in Istanbul in 2022 and Davyd Arakhamia, who led Ukraine’s delegation, even put his preliminary signature on a peace treaty. The war would end if Ukraine dropped any aspiration to join NATO. Arakhamia publicly stated that Boris Johnson, then Prime Minister of Britain, came to Kiev and dissuaded Ukraine from doing this. Johnson said that it was better to fight Russia and not sign any agreement. As for NATO, they are trying to intimidate their own populations with an imaginary Russian threat. Thinking people understand perfectly well that this is a fake. We have no interest in Poland, Latvia or anywhere else. These are horror stories to extort additional money from US and European taxpayers. It goes against common sense to get involved in some kind of global war that will bring all mankind to the brink of destruction.
Did NATO/CIA blow up the Nord Stream pipeline in 2022? Yes. Whoever did it must have had not only a sufficient motive for destroying the pipeline, but also the necessary capabilities. There may be many people interested in ending Nord Stream, but not all of them can go to the bottom of the Baltic Sea to carry out such an explosion. So why not make propaganda out of this crime of the West? In the war of propaganda, it is very difficult to defeat the USA, because they control the world’s media.
The dollar is the cornerstone of US power. However, even the United States’ allies are now downsizing their dollar reserves. Until 2022, US dollars accounted for approximately 50% of Russian transactions with third countries, while currently it is down to 13%. This is because the USA decided to restrict our transactions. I think this was complete foolishness from the point of view of the interests of the USA, damaging the US economy. Why did the United States do this? Self-conceit. They thought it would lead to a full collapse of Russia, but nothing collapsed.
A very significant date in the history of Russia was 988. This was the Baptism of Russia by Prince Vladimir and the adoption of Orthodoxy, or Eastern Christianity. The Russian state incorporated both Novgorod (northern Russia) and Kiev (southern Russia). There was a single territory, one and the same language and the same Faith. What is happening now is, to a certain extent, something of a civil war. The West thinks that the Russian people have been split by hostilities forever. No. Russians will be re-united. Relations will be re-built. It will take time, but they will heal.
Could Tucker Carlson now go to the real policy-makers of the West and obtain an equally open account of their drive to subjugate the entire world? One may doubt it. To start with, who are those real makers of Western policy, and not just their public puppets?
Kyrie eleison.