Listened to most of it. It really was less than worse than anticipated. I think that the overal framework of the interview wasn’t bad. It wasn’t a interview of ‘you did this, that, responsible for x, y, z’, but rather also time for Putin to speak in long form what he thinks without interruptions. Wether you agree with his message is something else but the form more reminded me of a podcast. I hope that in general more political leaders will agree to long form conversations. They’ll always win for me compared to the things we might see on tv.
For the things he said it won’t suddenly change the narrative of the war. What happened 3 centuries ago isn’t relevant. It stands out that he always starts about the history of the nations and somehow tries to justify that Ukraine isn’t a sovereign nation, and it isn’t just recent history but at some point he’s talking about the 17th century for example.
Also the part about denazification remains so strange. A word we almost forgot over the time but apparently it’s his things. And it remains so weird hearing someone taking about it. We really can’t define the political system in Ukraine as nazism so automatically it would mean he’s fighting a ideology in his view, which of course given the sheer scale of the war doesn’t make sense at all. It’s hard to say wether he knows that he’s twisting reality or if he’s trapped in his own reality here.
Something else I found interesting is the period right before and after 2014. Here we’re taking about complex geopolitical relations and actions between countries, where the odds aren’t in his favour for speaking the truth but his claims are more or less that the CIA was involved in a coup and things went wrong after that.