Tucker Carlson Interview of Vladimir Putin - Part 11 of 12

AI Technology, Return of Detainees,  Huge Ukrainian Population Losses

In part 10 of this series, Vladimir Putin was asked about the nature of Russian Christianity, how it is related to the Russian world view, Putin’s own faith, and his opinion of the rise and fall of great nations in the past. Tucker Carlson continued to probe into Putin’s political philosophies and views on international relations and current issues.

Tucker Carlson: So when does the AI empire start do you think?

Vladimir Putin: You are asking increasingly more complicated questions. To answer them, you need to be an expert in big numbers, big data and AI.

Mankind is currently facing many threats. Due to genetic research, it is now possible to create a superhuman, a specialized human being – a genetically engineered athlete, scientist, military man.

There are reports that Elon Musk has already had a chip implanted in the human brain in the USA.

Tucker Carlson: What do you think of that?

Vladimir Putin: Well, I think there’s no stopping Elon Musk, he will do as he sees fit. Nevertheless, you need to find some common ground with him, search for ways to persuade him. I think he’s a smart person, I truly believe he is. So you need to reach an agreement with him because this process needs to be formalized and subjected to certain rules.

Humanity has to consider what is going to happen due to the newest developments in genetics or in AI. One can make an approximate prediction of what will happen. Once mankind felt an existential threat coming from nuclear weapons, all nuclear nations began to come to terms with one another since they realized that negligent use of nuclear weaponry could drive humanity to extinction.

It is impossible to stop research in genetics or AI today, just as it was impossible to stop the use of gunpowder back in the day. But as soon as we realize that the threat comes from unbridled and uncontrolled development of AI, or genetics, or any other fields, the time will come to reach an international agreement on how to regulate these things.

Tucker Carlson: I appreciate all the time you’ve given us. I just want to ask you one last question and it’s about someone who is very famous in the United States, probably not here. Evan Gershkovich who is the Wall Street Journal reporter, he is 32 and he’s been in prison for almost a year. This is a huge story in the United States and I just want to ask you directly without getting into details of your version of what happened, if as a sign of your decency you’ll be willing to release him to us and we’ll bring him back to the United States?

Vladimir Putin: We have done so many gestures of goodwill out of decency that I think we have run out of them. We have never seen anyone reciprocate to us in a similar manner. However, in theory, we can say that we do not rule out that we can do that if our partners take reciprocal steps.

When I talk about the “partners,” I, first of all, refer to special services. Special services are in contact with one another, they are talking about the matter in question. There is no taboo to settle the issue. We are willing to solve it, but there are certain terms being discussed via special services channels. I believe an agreement can be reached.

Tucker Carlson: So, typically, I mean, this stuff has happened for, obviously, centuries. One country catches another’s spy within its borders and trades it for one of its own intel guys in other country. I think what makes it, and it’s not my business, but what makes it different is that this guy is obviously not a spy, he is a kid and maybe he was breaking a law in some way but he is not a superspy and everybody knows that and he has been held hostage and exchange, which is true, with respect, it’s true and everyone knows it’s true. So maybe he is in a different category, maybe it’s not fair to ask for somebody else in exchange for letting him out. Maybe it degrades Russia to do that.

Vladimir Putin: You know, you can give different interpretations to what constitutes a “spy,” but there are certain things provided by law. If a person gets secret information, and does that in a conspiratorial manner, then this is qualified as espionage. And that is exactly what he was doing. He was receiving classified, confidential information, and he did it covertly. Maybe he had been implicated in that, someone could have dragged him into that, maybe he did that out of carelessness, or on his own initiative. Considering the sheer facts, this is qualified as espionage. The fact has been proven, as he was caught red-handed when he was receiving this information. If it had been some far-fetched excuse, some fabrication, something not proven, it would have been a different story then. But he was caught red-handed when he was secretly getting confidential information. What is it, then?

Tucker Carlson: But are you suggesting he was working for the US government or NATO? Or he was just a reporter who was given material he wasn’t supposed to have? Those seem like very different, very different things.

Vladimir Putin: I don’t know who he was working for. But I would like to reiterate that getting classified information in secret is called espionage, and he was working for the U.S. special services, some other agencies. I don’t think that he was working for Monaco, as Monaco is hardly interested in getting that information. It is up to the special services to come to an agreement. Some groundwork has been laid. There are people who, in our view, are not connected with special services.

Let me tell you a story about a person serving a sentence in an allied country of the U.S. That person, due to patriotic sentiments, eliminated a bandit in one of the European capitals. During the events in the Caucasus, do you know what he [bandit] was doing? I don’t want to say that, but I will do it anyway. He was laying our soldiers, taken prisoner, on the road and then he drove his car over their heads. What kind of a person is that? Can he be even called a human? But there was a patriot who eliminated him in one of the European capitals. Whether he did that of his own volition or not, that is a different question.

Tucker Carlson: Evan Gershkovich, that’s a completely different, I mean, this is a thirty-two year old newspaper reporter.

Vladimir Putin: He committed something different.

Tucker Carlson: He is just a journalist.

Vladimir Putin: He is not just a journalist, I repeat again. This is a journalist who received secret information on a secret basis. It is different, but still, I am talking about other people who are essentially controlled by the U.S. authorities wherever they are serving a sentence. There is an ongoing dialogue between the special services. This has to be resolved in a calm, responsible and professional manner. They are keeping in touch, so let them do their work.

I do not rule out that the person you referred to, Mister Gershkovich, may return to his motherland. By the end of the day, it does not make any sense to keep him in prison in Russia. We want the U.S. special services to think about how they can contribute to achieving the goals our special services are pursuing. We are ready to talk. Moreover, the talks are underway, and there have been many successful examples of these talks crowned with success. Probably this is going to be crowned with success as well, but we have to come to an agreement.

Tucker Carlson: I hope you’ll let him out. Mister President, thank you!

Vladimir Putin: I would also like him to go home eventually. I say this sincerely and completely. But I repeat, the dialogue is ongoing. The more we publicize things like this, the more difficult it is to solve them. Everything should be calm.

General Contextual Commentary: As we are nearing the end of this series on Tucker Carlson’s interview of Vladimir Putin, it is important to consider the demographic losses Ukraine has suffered since the U.S. inspired Maidan Revolution and coup d’etat in 2014. This was followed by a civil war prosecuted by Ukrainian military forces against the large Russian-speaking minority. A major escalation of Ukrainian artillery shelling of civilian areas of the Donbass provoked Russian sentiment and therefore Vladimir Putin to intervene against genocidal Ukrainian artillery attacks and a possible Ukrainian invasion of Donbass and Crimea. The population of Ukraine in 1991, the year it seceded from the Soviet Union, was 52 million.  About 40 percent of those were either culturally Russian or of mixed Russian and Ukrainian parentage.

According to the Wilson Center, the population dropped from 45 to 39 million during 2014 and 2015 alone. when the Ukrainian government implemented strong anti-Russian language laws and cultural cleansing measures against the Russian minority, and the civil war began.  Over 1.6 million of this 6.0 million drop was due to flight of ethnic Russians from Ukraine to Russia. Another 2.5 million was the loss of Russian-speaking Crimea to Russia. Predominantly Russian Crimea had been attempting to rejoin Russia since 1991. The February 2022 Ukraine War has resulted in 6.5 million additional  refugees leaving Ukraine, of which in 2024,  6.0 million had gone to Europe. The largest share of these, 1.2 million, fled to Russia. Germany is second with 1.1 million, and Poland third with 1.0 million. The Biden Administration has taken in over 271,000 Ukrainian refugees since February 2023. The population of pre-2022 Ukraine was down to less than 33 million by 2023.

The predominantly Russian oblasts of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson, which Russia recently assessed by referendum with Russian legislative approval, had a population of 8.8 million before the 2022 war. Without the return of Ukrainian ethnic refugees, this would drop the rest of Ukraine’s population to around 26 million. Many of these refugees say they are not coming back. Included among the Ukrainian ethnic refugees are between 650,000 and 1.3 million military-age males. The pre-war population of the four other predominantly Russian-speaking oblasts of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Odessa, and Mykolaiv was 9.2 million. Should the Russians decide these territories are needed to provide a buffer and prevention of NATO missile or nuclear attacks threatening Russian national survival, it is easily conceivable that the population of what is left of Ukraine would be less than 20 million. The Ukrainian economy is already on U.S. life-support.

According to the UN, about 11,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed since the Russian intervention on February 24, 2022. This is a surprisingly low figure. Contrary to Ukrainian propaganda, the Russians have been relatively successful in keeping civilian losses low. About 15,000 people died in the 2015-2022 civil war phase of Project Ukraine. Of the approximately 5,000 civilians killed by Ukrainian artillery fire, more than 80 percent were Russian ethnics in the two Donbass oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk.

Despite notoriously disinformationaal Ukrainian General Staff reports on military casualties, Ukrainian casualties are enormous and disabling. The proof is a severe shortage of manpower and desperate recruiting and draft measures. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor recently estimated Ukrainian military casualties include over 400,000 dead with total casualties exceeding 1.0 million. Russian casualties may be only 10 to 12 percent of this. This is because of massive Russian artillery, air defense, airpower, missile, and industrial production advantages, as well as ever increasing numerical superiority in combined armor, helicopter, and infantry forces.

Why did Ukraine have to become a member of NATO? Why did the U.S. back a coup that resulted in Ukrainian leadership that implemented a major campaign of genocidal cultural cleansing against the large Russian minority in Ukraine? Who gains from Ukrainian sacrifice?  Whom the gods would destroy, they first dull their reason and moral wisdom.

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~ To be continued …