World Affairs Brief, February 9, 2024 Commentary and Insights on a Troubled World.

Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted. Cite source as Joel Skousen’s World Affairs Brief (http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com)

PUTIN ADMITS RUSSIAN LEADERSHIP INITIATED FALL OF SOVIET UNION!

In Tucker Carlson’s newly-released interview with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, in a moment of historical candor, admitted that the Russian leadership “initiated the collapse of the Soviet Union.” Tucker completely missed the importance of what he just heard as Putin slyly claimed he “didn’t know why they would do this” and then wove a false tale about the aftermath of the “collapse” where Russia continually made overtures of peace and cooperation with the West, but which the US rejected repeatedly. Carlson buys all of this hook, line and sinker, and so will other conservatives who are eager to embrace Russia as the good guy in the war in Ukraine. Putin never admitted that this “collapse” was done to trick the West into thinking “Communism was dead,” and that we had “won the cold war.” In this week’s brief I will help readers see beyond Putin’s artful narrative, and show how the Soviets did this to gain Western aid, trade and technology to catch up as they were losing the economic and military arms race. And it worked. In fact, the US knew the Russians had faked their own demise and went along with it, because the globalists were still in the mode of building Russia and China as future enemies in order to eventually have one more world war that would finally force the US into a militarized global government.

Vladimir Putin doesn’t give interviews unless he is confident the outcome will be favorable to him and his war against Ukraine, and so it was not surprising to me that he welcomed the chance to be interviewed by Tucker, knowing that Carlson has already taken a pro-Russian view of the war and has been a key element in getting conservative Republicans to block aid to Ukraine.

Even before this interview Putin has taken great pains to craft a public image as a “Christian” (which he is not) and someone who is opposed to the Western trend promoting excessive tolerance for the LGBT agenda (which most rational people don’t agree with). And, this interview was clearly intended to reinforce Putin’s claim to be the victim of Western aggression, targeting Carlson’s core audience–Republican conservatives.

In reaction, the globalists made a big mistake by openly condemning Carlson for giving time to Putin to talk, which reinforced conservatives’ impressions about Russia and Carlson both being the victims of more globalist meddling. As usual, it’s much more complex than that, but I admit the globalists can be stupid sometimes. The EU even called for a ban on Carlson’s travel to Europe for daring to interview Putin. In the end, EU sanctions on Carlson were defeated narrowly, but it shows just how paranoid Europe’s leaders are over anyone going against the establishment narrative in Ukraine.

There appeared to be some promotional maneuvering surrounding this interview—diverging stories about when it took place and when it was going to be released. The Russians didn’t release the transcript until today, and Tucker’s official release was yesterday.

But AMG News and State of the Nation posted a claimed early transcript on Tuesday, and it was too good to be true—Putin admitting that he knew Biden wasn’t running things in the US, that no matter who wins the election, others in power are calling the shots, etc. In this transcript he regaled Carlson with his dedication to marriage between a man and a woman, and spoke out against the LGBTQ woke agenda—all music to conservative ears.

Even though this fits with what Putin wants to project to US conservatives, I felt nervous about its validity, coming out days before the real interview was posted. I searched in vain for any other official early release of the transcript to confirm this partial early leaked transcript, but there was nothing.

Then, on Thursday afternoon, the entire interview was released on TuckerCarslon.com and the transcript has been posted by the Kremlin, both show absolutely nothing in the leaked partial transcript was true. It was completely faked, and at least two conservative internet news sites fell for it. So, let’s get down to what really happened in the interview. It was not nearly as exciting as the fake transcript. Carlson and Putin didn’t even talk about Biden or Trump or the coming election.

In the full interview, Putin spends most of the time dodging the whole truth and weaving a carefully crafted narrative to present a totally pro-Russian history relative to Ukraine and even the collapse of the Soviet Union to justify the ongoing war. But he did make some historic admissions that confirm what I’ve been saying for years in the World Affairs Brief about the phony fall of the Soviet Union.

Putin spent about 20 minutes right up front talking about ancient Russian history (to the consternation of Tucker) but eventually got around to admitting what I have long said: that the Soviets under Stalin “for some unknown reason” put Russian speaking peoples into the border of Ukraine. He also admitted that the Soviets put parts of Poland and Hungary into Western Ukraine—but when asked by Tucker if these two nations are justified in demanding the return of their territory, he didn’t think it would be appropriate, unlike what he has demanded with Ukraine—a bit hypocritical.

And the reason for this forcing of Russians into Ukraine is not an “unknown reason,” as Putin claimed. Lenin had already set the pattern early in Soviet history for feigning weakness and rapprochement with the West in order to gain Western aid and trade, so Stalin knew about this strategy. It would later play out in a much more dramatic phony fall of the Soviet Union long after Stalin was dead. But that’s how Satanic inspired and directed conspiracies work, many years ahead of their time, beyond the capacity of mortals to plan for.

Then, when he talks about the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, he even admits that it was effectively directed by the Soviet leadership! At minute 23:28 he said,

“We are coming to the point where the Soviet Ukraine was established. Then, in 1991 [it was actually 1989/90] , the Soviet Union collapsed. And everything that Russia had generously bestowed on Ukraine [Russian and other ethnic lands that weren’t originally part of 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.”

Wow! Finally some official Russian vindication that the fall wasn’t a spontaneous uprising that the Russians couldn’t control. For years I have documented this and no one wanted to believe it except for Christopher Story in the UK, who collaborated with Russian defector Anatoli Golitsyn in his book The Perestroika Deception where he predicted the Soviets would fake a collapse of Communism.

Then Putin quickly explains it away in benign terms, but I believe he’s lying when he says, “I do not understand what the Russian leadership was guided by at the time.” He would have known that they did it to get aid and trade from the West, and to fool the West into thinking they could quit the arms race and take a “peace dividend.” The West did just that and began spending more and more on social welfare systems at home than on weapon systems.

Putin went on to claim that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant there were no longer any ideological differences between East and West, which has never been true. He added a bit later, “we are bourgeois like the West, have a market economy and the Communist party no longer exists.”

None of that was really true. Even though the Russian and other Communist leaders did live in bourgeois luxury, they never let their economies become totally free, and the Communist Party simply went underground. They have never given up their intentions of replacing the West in a Communist New World Order. Then he admitted again:

“Russia even agreed voluntarily and pro-actively to collapse the Soviet Union and believed that this would be understood by the ‘civilized West,’ as an invitation for cooperation and association.”

This statement would set the tone for his numerous tales told to Tucker about how Russia tried to get the West and the USA to become partners in peace—which the West never reciprocated, he said. Again he claims ignorance of why the West wouldn’t accept his offers.

He started giving examples, like when Russia suggested to Europe that they be included in a “new security arrangement,” while insisting that NATO not be expanded to include the former Soviet states.

Putin said he asked President Bill Clinton about the possibility of Russia joining NATO in 2008 (a strange contradiction to the no-NATO expansion claim). He said Clinton thought it was a good idea, but later Clinton told Putin his staff rejected that. When Tucker asked Putin what he would have done if Clinton had said “yes,” Putin waffled, and said only that “it would start the process of rapprochement.”

Of course, even though the globalists didn’t expose Russia’s phony collapse of Communism, I knew that if I could see all the evidence (outlined in the March 3, 2023 briefing), they could too. But they were still in the mode of building future enemies, so they gave aid and trade to Russia, and even rebuilt their entire oil industry. Evidence of their knowledge that Russia was faking peace and cooperation, took various forms, but the globalists did try to go along with Russia in ways that now seem treasonous—which they were.

Russia asked the West to pay for and help them disarm their obsolete missiles—but only with the provision that Moscow could to retain all the nuclear warheads. In response, using funds from the Nunn-Lugar bill, the US built the Russians a state-of-the-art missile warhead refurbishing factory supposedly to reprocess deactivated nuclear warheads and turn it into nuclear reactor fuel to be purchased by the West.

But as soon as the plant was complete, the Russians locked out US inspectors, who admitted you can’t tell the difference between refurbished warhead nuclear material and new production material—implying that Russians were keeping their warheads and not selling deactivated material as agreed—but providing newly created Uranium fuel for Western consumption. In short, this is why the American teams never trusted the Russians after the phony fall, though they did continue to pour money into Russian industry.

Another sign of bad faith was that the Russians still wouldn’t let anyone in the West inspect the underground military city at Yamantau Mountain. In addition, the Russians never openly admitted they had cheated on the INF treaty, even after the West found Russian missiles still in the caves of Eastern Europe after the “Fall.” The Russians also never stopped spying on or infiltrating the West’s high tech industry, and there are many more examples disproving Putin’s claims of constant good intentions.

The West even promised Russia they would not expand NATO in 2008, which they did anyway, knowing that the former Soviet States still had Communists in all parts of the those satellite country’s governments. With the “collapse of Communism” the West never required a purging of the communists, as they had of Nazis at the end of WWII as a condition of aid and reunification.

So, while Russia loudly protested NATO expansion, I believe she was secretly not displeased because Russia still had spies in Eastern Europe that could tell them some of NATO’s secrets as the former Soviet states were integrated into NATO.

Putin then listed all the times he tried to suggest joint operations with the US, including missile defense and how all these were rejected. He implies that all this proves that Russia had tried to mend the relationship but the US rejected their offers.

But during all of Putin’s tedious historical recitations, Carlson was clearly out of his league having no background in this time period that would have allowed him to counter Putin’s claims of attempted reconciliation with the West or his one-sided views of history.

Then Putin comes to the part where he justifies his “special operation” against Ukraine, and in doing so he mentions Georgia in relation to the controversy of whether or not a former Soviet state should be allowed to join NATO. He artfully fails to mention that the West specifically rejected Georgia joining NATO because Russia had said it would “feel threatened by it.” But Russia still invaded Georgia, showing that no NATO integration doesn’t necessarily stop Russia from invading a former Soviet State to make sure it doesn’t happen.

In any case, Russia even then had the 3 Baltic states on its northern border who are part of NATO, so it can’t use the excuse that it feels threatened by a NATO country on his border.

Then Putin tells a big whopper about the 2014 Maidan revolution that ousted Communist president Yanukovich in Ukraine, saying the opposition in the Maidan square used “armed force” to complete the coup. There was one incident of a minor sniper attack on the police surrounding the protestors, from outside the square, but no one was able to determine who did it. Putin blamed the CIA, but really it was that Yanukovich ordered the Berkut, the riot police, to stand down and let the protestors advance on the parliament building and presidential palace. Only the Communists in power could have made this decision, proving they manipulated the end result, even while blaming the coup and “Orange Revolution” on the West. I believe the sniper event was likely a false flag.

The sniper certainly didn’t alter anything on the ground in the Maidan square where the protestors had zero firearms—only the makeshift weapons and baseball bats they were known for, as they displayed on the steps of Parliament in the news. Yanukovich’s claim the next day that he was “fleeing for his life,” rang rather hollow.

Putin told Carlson the Western coup was a miscalculation because it allowed the persecution of the pro-Russian elements who didn’t like the results of the coup. The next government in Ukraine, he said, began to persecute the Russians in Crimea forcing us (Russia) to intervene.

But that “next government” was run by a secret Putin puppet—Pietro Poroshenko. The Communists faked the coup so they could help set the stage for this false nationalist to be elected president—who was secretly allied with Russia just like most of the early Ukrainian Presidents, masquerading as pro-Western.

Poroshenko was eventually elected after an interim president and proceeded to antagonize the Russians in Eastern Ukraine—something Yanukovich, as a Communist, could never get away with. Why would a pro-Russian president antagonize other Russians? Because that is exactly what Putin needed to justify his eventual intervention. So, when a feigned pro-Western president like Poroshenko antagonizes the Russian enclaves, Putin can now blame the West, and start his stealth invasion of Crimea, and later advance into the Donbass. That’s what really happened.

Then Putin claims Ukraine launched unprovoked attacks on the Russian speaking area of Donbass in eastern Ukraine, that directly caused his military intervention. But he fails to admit that he, Putin, had already infiltrated the Donbass with thousands of Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms and civilian clothes (the stealth invasion of 2014), who started attacking Ukrainian outposts later on. He made it sound like Ukraine started it totally unprovoked which was false. It was the presence of Putin’s stealth troops and their attacks that precipitated the Ukrainian military response.

These kinds of conspiracies are indeed complex, and you have to know the true details to sort it all out. Perhaps that’s why Putin told Carlson, “I don’t want to get into the details.” Had Carlson come armed with the other side of the story he wouldn’t have been so believing of everything Putin said.

Sadly, conservatives who don’t subscribe to the WAB are going to come away from this interview completely convinced that Putin is telling the whole story.

I don’t have the space to cover the last hour of the interview, which involved Putin covering for China’s hegemonic intentions, blaming the CIA for the Nordstream Pipeline (probably true), and Russia’s war against the break-away province in the Caucasus region; his bragging about being able to create super-human genetically altered athletes or soldiers, and Tucker’s unsuccessful lobbying at the end of the interview for Putin to release the US journalist Evan Gershkovich who Russia claims is a spy. Putin refused to give in.

In summary, this was a sophisticated interview with Putin demonstrating his still considerable mental powers to weave a complex tale of convenient history to fool the West. I like Tucker, but in this case, he fell into a trap of his own making.