Tucker Carlson hands Russia a propaganda coup

In his first interview with an American since invading Ukraine, Vladimir Putin wasn’t asked about war crimes or political prisoners but was allowed to repeat a set of bogus assertions on which he bases his actions. In a nearly two-hour interview with Tucker Carlson, the disgraced former Fox News anchor, Putin said no one can defeat Russia on the battlefield (indicating he is prepared for a long war) but that Russia was "ready for dialogue" – if only on its own terms. In Putin’s world, Ukraine has never existed and was created by Stalin; Ukrainians are “the same nation with Russians” but have to be “de-Nazified”; mass public protests in Kyiv’s Maidan Square were a Western-backed "coup"; and fighting in Donbas, started by Moscow in 2014, was a "civil war". The only conclusion to be drawn from this interview is that Putin is not going to change course. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky confirmed he was changing his Commander-in-Chief, sacking the highly respected Valery Zaluzhny and replacing him with the Moscow-trained Oleksandr Syrskiy.