From LifeSiteNews

By Patrick Delaney

‘When did the developments in Ukraine start? Since the coup d’etat and the hostilities in Donbas began. That’s when they started. And we were protecting our people, ourselves, our homeland and our future,’ the Russian president said.

In a much-anticipated interview with popular commentator Tucker Carlson, Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed his motivations behind invading Ukraine two years ago, the many decisions the United States and their partners made to provoke the war, the CIA’s ability to disregard the policy of U.S. presidents, and the notion that Russia intends to invade Western Europe as obviously “imaginary.”

After a long, detailed presentation on the history of the region and the immediate run-up to Russia’s February 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine, Putin made the case for how the U.S. broke its verbal commitment to expand NATO eastward after the collapse of the Soviet Union. With five waves of expansion, this came to a critical point at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest that declared the alliance’s intention to welcome Ukraine and Georgia despite the Bush administration having a clear understanding this could set the stage for war with Russia.

Ep. 73 The Vladimir Putin Interview pic.twitter.com/67YuZRkfLL

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 8, 2024

He also described the process behind the 2014 coup d’etat of the democratically elected government in Ukraine as being orchestrated by the CIA to facilitate the utilization of this nation as a springboard of aggression against the Russian motherland. This included the government of Kiev’s war against native Russians within their own borders in the east.

READ: ‘Monumental provocation’: How US and international policy-makers deliberately baited Putin to war

“So, in 2008, the doors of NATO were opened for Ukraine. In 2014, there was a coup (and) they started persecuting those who did not accept the coup,” Putin said. “They created the threat to Crimea, which we had to take under our protection. They launched the war in Donbas in 2014 with the use of aircraft and artillery against civilians. This is when it all started.”

“They launched a large-scale military operation. Then another one. When they failed, they started to prepare the next one. All this against the background of military development of this territory and opening of NATO’s doors.”

“How could we not express concern over what was happening? From our side this would have been a culpable negligence,” he said. “It’s just that the U.S. political leadership pushed us to the line we could not cross because doing so could have ruined Russia itself. Besides, we could not leave our brothers in faith, in fact, a part of Russian people, in the face of this war machine.”

He recalled the efforts to bring about a peace agreement in April of that year in Istanbul, Turkey. Stating they had a deal agreed upon, including Ukraine’s “de-nazification” of their nation, he was told by European officials that he had to “create conditions for the final signing of the documents.”

“My counterparts in France, in Germany said, ‘How can you imagine them signing a treaty with a gun to their heads?” demanding he pull back troops from Kiev, the Russian president explained. “As soon as we pulled back our troops from Kiev, our Ukrainian negotiators immediately threw all our agreements reached in Istanbul into the bin and got prepared for a longstanding armed confrontation with the help of the United States and its satellites in Europe.”

He explained the real presence of Nazi ideology in Ukraine and elsewhere, which strikes a prominent chord in the memory of the Russian people due to Hitler’s atrocities against them and others during World War II.

Asked about the notion stated in the U.S. and elsewhere that Russia is aggressive and plans to expand its territories west to Poland and other nations, Putin said, “They’re trying to intimidate their own population with an imaginary Russian threat. This is an obvious fact. And thinking people, not Philistines, but thinking people, analysts, those who are engaged in real politics, just smart people, understand perfectly well that this is a fake. They’re trying to fuel the Russian threat.”

This statement is supported by prominent political science scholar and author Dr. John Mearsheimer, who observed in a 2015 lecture that “there is no evidence that (the United States) thought Putin was aggressive before the (2014 coup) crisis. There’s no evidence that we were talking about expanding NATO because we had to contain the Russians.”

“What happened here was that after the crisis broke out on February 22nd, we then decided that Russia was aggressive. We then decided that Russia was bent on creating a Greater Russia. It was after the fact,” the best-selling author explained.

Putin went on to address “the war of propaganda,” telling Carlson “it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world’s media and many European media.”

Regarding the falling U.S. dollar, Putin explained that “to use the dollar as a tool of foreign policy struggle is one of the biggest strategic mistakes made by the U.S. political leadership. The dollar is the cornerstone of the United States power… As soon as the political leadership decided to use the U.S. dollar as a tool of political struggle, a blow was dealt to this American power.”

The Russian president also stated that despite all the sanctions and restrictions utilized against his nation, “Russia was the first economy in Europe last year,” the fifth largest economy in the world.

He complained about aggressive Western policy toward Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union and discussed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky deceiving his voters by embracing a hardline policy against Russia after campaigning that he would bring about peace.

Putin also mentioned famous literary giant “Dostoyevsky, who was very well known in the West” and who spoke much “about the Russian soul.”

“Everyone in the West thinks that the Russian people have been split by hostilities forever, and now they will be reunited. The unity is still there,” he exclaimed. “Why are the Ukrainian authorities dismantling the Ukrainian Orthodox Church? Because it brings together not only the territory, it brings together our souls. No one will be able to separate the soul.”