The CIA Shill and the KGB Mole: Conversation Of The Galactically Stupid...

Most of the people are fooled most of the time.

Some recall that scene toward the end of the Movie "A Few Good Men" where Joanne Galloway, in a last ditch effort to save their two clients accused of murder from a long prison term, advocates calling Colonel Nathan Jessup to the witness stand, and a drunken Daniel Kaffee, convinced that botched testimony has doomed the case, calls her "galactically stupid" in a fit of anger.  While Kaffee would go on to take her advice and pull victory from the seeming jaws of defeat, no such hope exists for the recent Tucker Carlson interview.  The more one does research, the more hopelessly convoluted this whole conversation is.  Vladimir Putin is trying to make the case Russia has a historical claim to the lands of Eastern Ukraine, and that he is saving peoples who want to be a part of Russia from foreign oppression.  Nothing could be further from the truth.
Putin begins with the establishment of the "Russian State" in 862. The townspeople of Novgorod invited a Virangian Prince Rurik from Scandinavia to reign.  Putin then explains that, in 882, Rurik's successor, came to Kiev.  He ousted two brothers who apparently had once been members of Rurik's squad.  So Russia began to develop with two centers of power Kiev and Novgorod.  Actually, Russia begins to develop with eight centers of power, Moscow being another one of them.  Jumping to the year 988, he discusses the conversion of Prince Vladimir, and his baptising of his tribe in the Dnieper River- which this Wolf considers the real start of Russia.  Be that as it may, Putin posits that from this date, the "Centralized Russian State" began to strengthen.
Nothing could be further from the truth.  In reality, central Russia was a hopeless confusion of primitive tribes, some nomadic, just a little better than the American Indians at the time the British Colonists began arriving on the shores of Virginia and Massachutets. Both Intra- and Inter- Tribal Wars were common, with centers of power constantly shifting.  Putin himself admits that "The throne was passed not directly from father to eldest son, but from the prince who had passed away to his brother. Then to his sons in different lines. All this led to the fragmentation and the end of Rus as a single state."  Needless to say, there was not one "throne" recognized by all the "Russians" who were only very loosely organized along ethnic lines.
Much of this, of course, has to do with Russian topography, which neither Putin nor Carlson ever bother to discuss.  From the Baltic to the Black and Caspian Seas, and all the way to extreme Eastern Siberia, Russia is a featureless, flat expanse, broken only by the chain of the Ural Mountains, really just very broad hills very easily traversed.  In the days of the Romans Attila and his Huns came from distant Mongolia to ravage Russia, with nothing in their path from the mountains of Inner Mongolia to the Alps of Hungary.  From North to South and East to West, waves of invaders came to plunder and pillage.
In the 13th Century, Ghengis Khan came with the Mongolian Hordes, the greatest conqueror since Alexander the Great.  By 1279 He and his vassals had established an empire that extended from Siam and Korea all the way to the Baltic Sea which included most of what was the Soviet Union.  To say that during this time a vast intermixture of races and peoples occurred in the region of Moscow, Kiev, and Novgorod is an understatement.  All the tribes were subsumed into the Mongolian conquest, and, at the least, had to pay tribute to their Overlords, or face further plunder and pillage.  Fortunately, the Mongolian Empire, historically speaking, was a mere flash in the pan.  A scant fifteen years later Northern Russia was largely free of the scourge.
And from about this time dates the emergence of modern Russia, centered in Moscow.  The Russian peoples would essentially migrate from Kiev to Moscow and Novgorod, which would continue to tussle for supremacy over the region.  Meanwhile, Kiev would have to contend with the "Golden Horde" for the next three centuries.  (More on this momentarily.)
Meanwhile, Putin is giving Tucker Carlson his version: "...the fragmented Russian state became an easy prey to the empire created earlier by Genghis Khan. His successors, namely Batu Khan plundered and ruined nearly all the cities.  The southern part, including Kiev, by the way, and some other cities, simply lost independence.  While northern cities preserved some of their sovereignty. They had to pay tribute to the horde, but they managed to preserve some part of their sovereignty.  And then a unified Russian state began to take shape with its center in Moscow.  The southern part of Russian lands, including Kiev begun to gradually gravitate towards another magnet, the center that was emerging in Europe.  This was the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and it was even called the Lithuanian Russian Duchy because Russians were a significant part of this population.  They spoke the old Russian language and were Orthodox.  But then there was a unification, the union of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland..."

The Ukraine did not merely lose independence, but underwent a substantial transformation.  The Mongol conquest was the catalyst for a profound shift in the Muslim World.  At the end of the 13th Century, an obscure Turk by the name of Osman I united Asia Minor. This was the start of the Ottoman Empire.  And while this vast political entity would focus on the Muslim World, it poured into the area North of the Black Sea, and towards the Caspian Sea.  Traders also trickled North.  Eventually, they came to dominate the infrastructure of the Golden Horde.  And these would displace the Russians in the region.  They would give rise to the famous Cossacks, the feared horsemen of Southern Russia.
Now let us turn to the "Grand Duchy of Lithuania".  At about the same time as Osman I and the genesis of the Ottoman Empire, another obscure figure, Mindaugas, was rising in Lithuania.  Crowned a Catholic King over a pagan land, he presided over a strengthening kingdom that in the succeeding years would continue to expand south, taking advantage of the power vacuum created by the overextended Mongolian Empire.  Through intrigues and subterfuge, the Lithuanians and Poles expanded south all the way to the Black Sea, and overran Kiev.  Under their influence, Turkish dominance waned.  However, the Lithuanian-Polish entity was politically and ethnically unstable, to put it mildly.  A series of "Monarchs" also claimed sovereignty over Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, and Moldavia.  In turn, Ukraine would actually begin to be Germanized.  In fact, many in Ukraine actually speak dialects of German.

But let us listen to Putin's version: "Thus these lands became part of the Polish-Lithuanian state. [For] decades the Poles were engaged in colonization of this part of the population. They introduced a language there, tried to entrench the idea that this population was not exactly Russians, that because they lived on the fringe, they were Ukrainians. Originally the word Ukrainian meant that the person was living on the outskirts of the state, along the fringes, or was engaged in a border patrol service. It didn't mean any particular ethnic group. So the Poles were trying, in every possible way, to colonize this part of the 'Russian' lands and actually treated it rather harshly, not to say cruelly, all that led to the fact that this part of the Russian lands began to struggle for their rights. They wrote letters to Warsaw demanding that their rights be observed and people be commissioned here, including to Kiev."

Putin here is not talking about Kiev or Ukraine, but a now decidedly small Russian minority that had remained in these lands for whatever reason.  Meanwhile, Putin entirely neglects to mention the whole hot steaming mess that was the "Muscovite Civil War". Let's run down a few highlights: In 1425,Vasili II, succeeded Vasili as Grand Prince of Moscow; his wife Sophia became regent.  His younger brother, Yury Dmitrievich of Zvenigorod, also issued a claim to the throne, and appealed to the khan of the Golden Horde for support.  The Khan in turn arranged for Vasili II to retain the Duchy of Moscow, but Yury was given the Duchy of Dmitrov.  In 1432 Vasili II led an army to capture Dmitrov, but was defeated and forced to flee to Kolomna. Yury arrived in Moscow and declared himself the Grand Prince.  Vasili II was pardoned and made mayor of Kolomna.  The next year Yury returned Moscow to his nephew and moved to Galich. The next year Vasily II returned the favor by burning Galich.  In rapid succession, on March 16th the army of Yury Dmitrievich defeated the army of Vasily II who fled to Nizhny Novgorod, while Yury arrived in Moscow on April 1st and again declared himself the Grand Prince.  He died July 5th, and his oldest son Vasily the Squint, succeeded him as Grand Prince.
But Yury's second son, Dmitry Shemyaka, allied himself with Vasily II. Vasily the Squint was expelled from the Kremlin and blinded. Vasili II returned to the throne of the Grand Prince.  But in 1437 he was defeated in battle by the Tatars of Kazan and taken prisoner; the operation of the government fell to Dmitry Shemyaka.  After a few months Vasili II was ransomed back to Muscovy.  Shemyaka had Vasili II blinded and exiled to Uglich, and had himself declared the Grand Prince.  But in 1450 The boyars of Moscow expelled Shemyaka from the Kremlin and recalled Vasili II to the throne.  Shemyaka fled to the Novgorod Republic and was subsequently poisoned by Muscovite agents in 1453.  His son Ivan III, The Great, succeeded him as Grand Prince.  This was the beginning of modern Russia.  In 1463 Grand Duchy of Moscow annexed the Duchy of Yaroslavl, in 1474 the Rostov Duchy was absorbed, and in 1478 The Novgorod Republic fell.  Also about this time Moscow stopped paying tribute to the remnants of the Mongolian Empire.  So this Wolf's question to Putin is:  Just who should the "Ukrainians" appeal to: Yury, Vasily, or the Boyars of Moscow?  And meanwhile it seemed they would need a Pony Express to ensure that any letter to the suzerain arrived before he was replaced on the throne.

Tucker, meanwhile, has lost the plot.  "I beg your pardon. Could you tell us what period, I'm losing track of where in history, we are in the Polish oppression of Ukraine..."

"It was in the 13th century,"  Putin replies.  But wait.  In the 13th century the Mongolians were overrunning Ukraine, and Poland was a band of pagan tribes.  At any rate, barely a sentence later, we are in the year 1654.  What happened in Ukraine in 1654?  Glad you asked.  The Khmelnytsky Uprising, [ also known as the Cossack–Polish War or the Khmelnytsky insurrection] was a Cossack rebellion that took place in the eastern territories of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which led to the creation of a Cossack Hetmanate in Ukraine.  Under the command of hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, allied with the Crimean Tatars and local Ukrainian peasantry, fought against Polish forces. The insurgency was accompanied by mass atrocities committed by Cossacks against the civilian population, especially against the Roman Catholic and Ruthenian Uniate clergy and the Jews, as well as savage reprisals by Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, the voivode (warlord) of the Ruthenian Voivodeship.

A few years later, in 1658, we have the Treaty of Hadiach.  This was a treaty signed by those very same Cossacks who were appealing to Moscow just a few back with Poland and Lithuania.  The Cossacks were to rule the newly created Grand Principality of Ruthenia, which would encroach upon Russian lands and also Ukraine.  And so what we have here is those very same people Vladimir Putin claimed were being oppressed by the Poles aligning themselves with the Poles and Lithuanians against Moscow. Scratching your head yet?  Just wait, you will be.

Meanwhile, Tucker has still lost the plot. "Well, I, it doesn't sound like you're inventing.  And I'm not sure why it's relevant to what happened two years ago."

Putin replies: "...Here's the letters from Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the man who then controlled the power in this part of the Russian lands [Huh?  His Cossacks were a decided minority], that is now called Ukraine.  He wrote to Warsaw demanding that their rights be upheld.  And after being refused, he began to write letters to Moscow.  Asking to take them under the strong hand of the Moscow Tsar.  There are copies of these documents.  There is a translation into Russian.  But Russia would not agree to admit them straight away, assuming that the war with Poland would start."  [But wait.  If these are Russian lands, why would the letters have to be TRANSLATED into the Russian language?  Color this Wolf confused.]

Okay, quick recap.  Bohdan Khmelnytsky, also known as Cossack Hetman Khmelnytsky, was the leader of a semi-militarized semi-nomadic tribe that was about as oppressed by the Poles as General William Tecumsah Sherman's Army was by the State of Georgia during the American War of Northern Aggression.  A better argument can be made that this man was nothing but an opportunist looking for allies on the road to fame and fortune, and thought that Russia just might be the ticket until he decided the Poles were a better option.  If this is Putin's best argument for Ukrainian theatre, he might as well sign a cease-fire with Zelensky today.

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson, rather than sitting there dumbfounded while being schooled in the Vladimir Putin version of Russian history, might have just asked if he could take a minute to look up Bohdan Khmelnytsky.  This Wolf is certain the interview might have taken a very interesting turn.  Instead Putin goes on to talk about Russia's war with Poland, which started soon thereafter.  He neglects to add that, concurrently, Russia was at war with Sweden and Latvia, in what would be known as the Great Northern War.
Instead, in just three sentences he mentions Catherine the Great, that great believer in open borders, and then the Treaty of Eternal Peace with Poland, which gave Kiev and much of Ukraine to Russia.  

Next thing we know, we are on the eve of World War I, and Putin is complaining about Habsburg interference in the region.  He completely skips over a little event that occurred from 1853 to 1856 that you might have heard of- the Crimean War.  You know, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Into the Valley of Death, Ours is not to reason why, but to do or die, and all that.  Because, starting after 1795 with the partition of Poland and the elimination of those evil men- this Wolf is being facetious- Russia would pursue an aggressive policy of expansion south and west, so much so that France and England feared the Czars would swallow up the disintegrating Ottoman and Habsburg dynasties and emerge with only Prussia and France to contest them for control of the whole continent of Europe.  (Italy and Germany were yet to be unified into powerful political entities, and Spain and Portugal were languishing.)  Using, of all things, the rights of Orthodox Christians over Roman Catholics in Palestine as an excuse, Czar Nicholas, when the Ottomans did not meet his demands, In July 1853,  sent Russian troops to occupy the Danubian Principalities.  Backed by England and France, the Ottomans went to war.  It was a costly, but decisive, victory.  Russia was contained, for the moment.

(It is interesting that a mere 40 years later, France, now fearing a Germany victorious after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, would sign an alliance with Russia that would be the basis of the Triple Entente- the Alliance that fomented World War I.  This should really show the reader how fake and ghey European politics always has been, but we digress...)

Putin is now complaining about the evil Habsburg Empire.  "Before World War 1, Austrian General Staff relied on the ideas of Ukrainization, and started actively promoting the ideas of Ukraine and the Ukrainization. The motive was obvious. Just before World War 1, they wanted to weaken the potential enemy and secure themselves favorable conditions in the border area."  (Once again- you would think that the Kremlin could hire a better translator of Russian into English.)  First off, Putin gives the impression the Austro-Hungarian Empire was planning for a war with Russia.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The Habsburg Empire at the turn of the century was a hot steaming mess.  The Duma was torn by factions demanding independence.  Eastern European Germans were looking North.  The Balkans were looking inward.  Vienna was trying to emulate Paris.  Morals and morale were in general decline.  It was all the Habsburg dual-monarchy could do just to maintain stability and prevent British influence from destabilizing its port cities.   Putin was getting Austria confused with Germany, which definitely did have territorial ambitions Eastward under the machiavellian Otto Von Bismarch.  

Putin then starts talking about how, after the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks wanted to give the Ukraine "statehood" contrary to what Poland wanted.  Putin seems to be forgetting that there was no such thing as Poland before 1919, but more on that later.  However, it is at this point that Tucker asks the dumbest question of the interview: "But may I ask, you're making the case that Ukraine, certainly parts of Ukraine, eastern Ukraine is in effect Russia has been for hundreds of years.  Why wouldn't you just take it when you became president 24 years ago?  You have nuclear weapons.  They don't.  It's actually your land.  Why did you wait so long?"  (That bad English must be contagious, something like Covid.)

Now Putin is talking about how Poland collaborated with Hitler, specifically, over the partitioning of Czechoslovakia.  Poland did not collaborate with Hitler.  Let's dive into all the gory details:  As Czechoslovakia was being absorbed into the German Reich, Trans-Olza, the Czech half of Cieszyn, was annexed by Poland in 1938 following the Munich Agreement and the First Vienna Award.  At noon on September 30, Poland gave an ultimatum to the Czechoslovak government.  It demanded the immediate evacuation of Czech troops and police from Trans-Olza and gave Prague until noon the following day.  At 11:45 a.m. on October 1 the Czech foreign ministry called the Polish ambassador in Prague and told him that Poland could have what it wanted.  Poland was accused of being an accomplice of Nazi Germany.  And for the record, the territory Poland seized was about the size of the Island of Manhattan.  Considering that less than a year later Poland would be German territory, Hitler probably could not have cared less.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is going to revert back to the period immediately following the Russian Revolution of 1917.  He says: "For some inexplicable reason, Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, insisted that they [Ukraine] be entitled to withdraw from the USSR. And again, for some unknown reasons, he transferred to that newly established Soviet Republic of Ukraine some of the lands, together with people living there, even though those lands had never been called Ukraine, and yet they were made part of that Soviet Republic of Ukraine.  Those lands included the Black Sea region, which was received under Catherine the Great and which had no historical connection with Ukraine whatsoever.  Even if we go as far back as 1654, when these lands returned to the Russian Empire. That territory was the size of 3 to 4 regions of modern Ukraine, with no Black Sea region.  That was completely out of the question."
Talk about a linguistic dumpster fire.  The "inexplicable reason" Lenin did what was described above was the "Treaty" of Brest-Litovsk signed between Germany and Lenin to end the eastern front of WW1.   Russia lost control of Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, its Baltic provinces (now Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia), and its Caucasus provinces of Kars and Batum. The lands comprised 34% of the former empire's population, 54% of its industrial land, 89% of its coalfields, and 26% of its railways.  The obvious reason the Germans forced this on Lenin and Russia was they were still fighting WW1 against France, England, and (soon), the United States, and they did not want Russia regrouping and re-entering the war.  The "Treaty" was in essence the unconditional surrender of Russia, which was allegedly the whole reason the Germans transported Lenin into Russia to begin with.

From here, the conversation becomes a dog's breakfast in a dumpster fire.  Putin, in talking about how many people in the Donbass and Crimea speak Russian, forgets to mention that, first off, during the Holodomor, millions of Ethnic Ukrainians died, and were displaced by Russians.  Next, Stalin, even during World War II, did some serious "Ethnic cleansing" of Turks, Armenians, and other races from the region and replaced them with Russians.  This continued after the war, in much the same way Eastern Germans were shipped off their ancestral lands to be replaced by colonizing Poles.  And, of course, there were those Ukrainians who had welcomed the German army in 1941 as liberators from the Bolsheviks.  All of those were disposed of too, except a nucleus which went underground to re-emerge as the "Azov Battalion".  Those who excoriate these people as being "Nazies" have no clue concerning the background of the situation.  (Not that any flags are being waved here.  This Wolf has no dog in this fight.)

In the course of the conversation Putin offers the flimsiest excuse for the unprovoked Soviet invasion of Poland following the German invasion of Sept 1st, 1939, just 17 days later: "Sobieski. By the way, the USSR, I have read some archive documents, behaved very honestly, and it asked Poland's permission to transit its troops through the Polish territory to help Czechoslovakia. But the then Polish foreign minister said that if the Soviet planes flew over Poland, they would be downed over the territory of Poland." Tucker Carlson just sits there slack jawed; my but we have come a long way since Ronald Reagan called the USSR the "evil empire".

Vladimir Putin will go on to excoriate the Big Bad Nato Alliance.  Now, to be sure, this Wolf understands the "Color Revolution" of 2015, the leaked phone calls of Victoria Nuland, and all that.  In retrospect, he does not know how much was real, and how much a dog-and-pony show.  The Ukrainian people, on the whole, did not seem to have any problem accepting the new regime and the status quo.  Some names changed on political mastheads, and life went on.  Some parts of Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea wanted to remain attached to Russia, or so they say.  How much is true and how much is political theatre is anybody's guess at this point.  The same goes for all the military theatre in the eastern Ukraine before the Russian invasion.  And also with the plane crash.  

Meanwhile, Putin seems to be forgetting Hungary 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968, Sodality in 1982, and etc.  He also seems to be entirely forgetting The Gulag Archipelago and  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.  In just 20 years, Russia has metamorphosed from Evil Empire to Victim of Nato.  (It is not that Nato has not played the part, but quite frankly if this Wolf was master of the Kremlin he would not really be too worried about fat, lazy European men invading across the Dnieper, or even the Volga for that matter, and even less fret about  Americans forsaking their Twitter feeds and video games to cross an ocean and go over the top.  Seriously, Vlad, you do know that militaries across the West have had to lower standards lest they be forced to simply have all their recruits reboard the bus for the ride home.)

Meanwhile, Tucker is equally clueless.  Nations are upset about the borders that were redrawn in the 20th century and after wars a millennia ago?  Seriously, Tucker.  Most  Americans cannot identify Texas on a map of the United States, let alone their own state.  I am sure the same is true for many people in Europe.  Given the way everybody complied with the Plandemic in 2020, this Wolf has no doubt that if Biden decreed tomorrow that Massachutetes, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hampshire would henceforth be known as the State of Dimwit, most of the people would just append their addresses without batting an eyelash.  Given that the "unification" of Germany occurred with nary a catcall some 20 years ago, who would doubt it?  Nobody in Bonn was screeching about being overrun with Communist immigrants seeking a "better life".  So long as the welfare checks are in the mail and the local grocery store has that box of Yiddish Inflated Toastios, the sheeple could care less who won what wars ten, one hundred, or one thousand years ago.

History us harder, Tucker and Vlad.  After all, just the narrative matters.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.  You are our only hope!