Putin to U.S.: A deal on Ukraine (on my terms)

President Vladimir Putin of Russia kept returning to one message over and over in his meandering, two-hour interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson: Russia wants to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine — albeit on the Kremlin's terms.

That message seemed aimed at the American right and Republicans in Congress, with an eye to undermining support for aid to Ukraine. If so, the day after the long-anticipated interview, it seemed lost in the muddle.

The Russian leader's discursive historical diatribes, delving into everything from the Rurik dynasty to the Golden Horde, dominated commentary about the interview online and overshadowed the message he intended to deliver. In Russia on Friday, experts and even some of Putin's allies were also puzzling over why he gave short shrift to his main ideological commonality with Carlson's followers: opposition to LGBTQ rights and other liberal social causes.

Margarita Simonyan, head of the Russian state broadcaster, RT, lamented that Putin neglected to market Russia as a “safe haven for people who are not ready to send their children to be raised by LGBT people.”

“This is the only thing on which Russia can and should now build an ideology externally,” Simonyan said, blaming Carlson for not asking the right questions. “Just as the USSR once built it on the ideas of social equality.”

Instead, Putin spent much of the interview subjecting a baffled Carlson to an irredentist teachin on 1,000 years of Eastern European history. The result was a sense that the Russian leader missed a chance.

“I assume that he just didn't try very hard,” Grigorii Golosov, a professor of political science at the European University at St. Petersburg, said in a phone interview. “If his goal was really to explain himself — and that's what it seems to have been — then it is unlikely that he reached that goal.”

Golosov said that Putin's main tactical aim was to try to compel the West to make a favorable deal to end the war — one that would cement Russia's control of the Ukrainian territory it has already captured.

“Putin feels that this is the very best moment to force the West into what he believes is the natural way out of this situation,” Golosov said. “And that means direct talks with Russia without the participation of Ukraine about how to end the conflict on Russia's terms.”

Between the historical diatribes, that intent was evident.

Putin presented negotiations, on his terms, as a way out, now that the West had finally realized Russia was not going to suffer a “strategic defeat” on the battlefield in Ukraine.

“It is never going to happen,” Putin said.