Yes, the U.S. made mistakes in the 1990s. But the war in Ukraine is not a one-sided tragedy

By Valerie Hudson

It took a lot of moxie for Tucker Carlson to arrange a two-hour sit-down interview with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. There’s the moxie it took to brave things like threats of travel bans from the European Union. But there’s also the moxie of thinking that one is going to control an interview with Putin, which clearly did not go Carlson’s way.

Instead, Carlson got a 40-minute disquisition on the history of Ukraine, with Putin barreling on despite Carlson’s attempts to steer the conversation back to the present day. The look on Carlson’s face is hard to describe: it’s a cross between suddenly realizing you are out of your depth and having to look resolute and undaunted — simultaneously.

While not a historian of Russia or Ukraine, I am a big fan of knowing history in order to understand the worldviews that motivate state behavior. History is a site of contestation itself, and those conflicts of fact and interpretation are as important as what happens on battlefields. It’s important to know what elements of history are agreed upon and which are contested in order to make sense of the current day. I’ll leave it to others to examine Putin’s version of the history of Rus — the medieval Russian state — but the history surrounding the fall of the Soviet Union and subsequent years to the present is a time period that international relations scholars like myself know well.

Putin’s recounting of that time period is not false, but is not the whole story, either. Putin points to three developments after the fall of the USSR that set the stage for the armed incursion which started in 2014. He points to promises made to Mikhail Gorbachev by the George H.W. Bush administration that were broken by Bill Clinton; covert Western support to groups in the Caucasus fighting the Russian government during the time of the George W. Bush administration; and rejection of a proposal for a multilateral missile defense program during that same administration.

https://www.deseret.com/2024/2/9/24067406/putin-tucker-carlson-interview-russia-history-ukraine