The Feb 8 airing of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin, (with almost 200 million views on X as of this writing) will have vast implications because it punctures the “Big Lie” about Ukraine. Not just the lies of 2022-24, but lies going back to 2014, 2004, and earlier have been blown apart.

Ever since Tony Blair’s 2003 “Dodgy Dossier” claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and going all the way back to Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin lie in 1964, Americans have been given hard lessons about the propaganda used to entrap us into far-away, no-win wars against countries which never attacked us. 

Now, after Tucker’s interview, can the fake news continue to fool all of the people, all of the time, this time around?

The first Big Lie which collapsed on Feb 8, was that Russia is refusing negotiations to end this catastrophic war, which has caused over half a million dead and wounded on both sides. Even though that lie has been trumpeted daily by our fake news media, the provable facts are that Putin has never refused negotiations. He has always insisted that he was ready for talks—just as he told Tucker. In reality, it was Britain and the US which forced Ukraine to break off ongoing, productive negotiations with Russia in Spring, 2022, as then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and others have testified. Indeed, the New York Times reported in December that Putin had been asking the US to agree to a ceasefire for over a year. 

Every fake-news assertion that Russia ever refused negotiations can be shown to be a fabrication, and often a knowing fabrication, by simply tracing it back its sources.

But this media blitz had swayed even as independent and sophisticated an observer as Tucker Carlson. Once he got back to his hotel, he recorded a statement to the effect that it had been “striking” that “Putin was willing to admit he wants a peace deal—giving it all away.” The only reason he found it “striking,” was that Tucker had been fooled into half-believing that Russia had refused to talk. “He was willing to say he wants some kind of settlement,” Tucker went on. “He said it several times.” I would add that Putin did not pose any preconditions for talks.

Face it—Ukraine has lost this war. How much longer must we drag out the slaughter? Arms shipments must stop, and Putin’s offer of talks must be accepted now. On Sunday, February 11th, the US Senate advanced the latest arms deal for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan with the arms industry flooding the Hill with money and threats. Now, it goes to the House where there is substantial opposition.  Call your Representative now, at (202) 224-3121, to demand an immediate ceasefire and negotiations, rather than more weapons deliveries, more dead Ukrainians and Russians, and an ever-greater risk of World War III.

How the Trap was Laid

Watching Putin and Tucker talking across a table, you are forced to wonder—what vital US national interest has compelled us to send $75 billion in aid and weapons into a proxy war on the other side of the globe, three decades after the fall of Soviet Communism? What satanic force now drives the U.S. Senate to add another $60 billion to that total with the rancid Senator McConnell declaring it the most important need for America and the world?

We have traveled down a long road to get to this point, and Americans should be much more aware of how we got here. The first step was the "shock therapy" applied to post-communist Russia by teams of British and American economists in the 1990s—supposedly to start up a “free-market economy.” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s guru, Sir Keith Joseph, along with our own Larry Summers and Jeffrey Sachs, dictated wild privatizations which created instant billionaires—while tens of millions became unemployed, and wages went unpaid for months or years. Alcoholism and drug-addiction surged, and male life-expectancy plunged into the fifties. Some scientists moonlighted as taxi-drivers, while others rushed to emigrate. Many Russians called it genocide. 

Putin’s enduring mass support began in 1999, when Russians began to credit him for extracting them from this Hell.

"Shock therapy" badly damaged the esteem and friendship of most Russians towards America, which had persisted through 70 years of Communist rule. 

The next step was the expansion of NATO—ultimately right up onto Russia’s doorstep. This highly controversial policy was launched under the Clinton administration during 1993-95. Why was this necessary? It violated our promise of 1990, that if Russia accepted German reunification into NATO, then the alliance would not expand “one step east.” But beyond that: Russia was now no longer a Communist, but a Christian nation. It was also economically prostrate and no threat to anyone. By expanding NATO when there was no threat, weren’t we taking the risk of setting up an unnecessary confrontation with a Russia which now only wanted to be our friend and ally?

Many leading American patriots saw it just that way. The legendary US diplomat George Kennan, then 94, who had first laid out the policy of “containment” of the Soviet Union in 1947, told columnist Thomas Friedman in 1998:

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves… It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong. 

Defense Secretary William Perry considered resigning in protest against what he considered too-rapid expansion, and the Pentagon and most of the State Department were opposed as well. But the policy was forced through the administration by the combination of National Security Advisor Tony Lake and the investment banker and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke. (It was Holbrooke who later arranged the unprecedented NATO bombing of Russia’s ally, Serbia, in 1999—the first time European cities had been bombed from the air since World War II.) Outside of government, Russophobe emigre Zbigniew Brzezinski led the public campaign for NATO enlargement with Henry Kissinger. 

Ukraine sits on the border through which Hitler invaded Russia, and Putin warned repeatedly against its admission into NATO. He was not the only one. Present CIA Director William Burns, who had repeatedly warned against NATO expansion as a staffer in our Moscow embassy, warned in 2008 as our Ambassador that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” 

Yet successive US administrations persisted. Finally, on the eve of the 2022 Russian invasion, and after Russia had issued an ultimatum on just this point, Biden sent Vice-President Harris to Europe to insist once more that Ukraine would join NATO—as Tucker remarked during his interview. And here we are.

The Trap is Sprung—But Who’s In It?

In order to spring the trap and force Russia to act, it was necessary to impose a radically anti-Russian government in Ukraine. One that would integrate its military forces with NATO against Russia, and which the US and NATO would arm and train. One that would deny rights and carry out repressive measures against Ukraine’s Russian minority, even using neo-Nazis to do so, to be sure to prod Russia into action. 

The CIA and British Intelligence apparatus called “Project Democracy” made two attempts at this. The first, the so-called “Orange Revolution,” was mounted in 2004-05, but ultimately failed. In the second, the “Maidan Uprising,” of 2014, the duly-elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych was violently overthrown, with the help of hidden professional snipers who fired into the ranks both of police and demonstrators in Maidan Square. 

LaRouchePAC has published extensively on the Maidan uprising, including evidence that the same institutions and methods used there, were used again here in the continuing coup against President Trump from 2015 through the present. Other researchers have recently reached the same conclusion. 

From the “Maidan Uprising” through to today, neo-Nazi elements of the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been shelling civilians in the Russian-speaking city of Donetsk, killing over 13,000.

The ever-chubbier neoconservative couple of Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and her husband, Trump-assassination advocate Robert Kagan, may have been disappointed in their faith that economic sanctions would cripple the Russian economy and topple Putin. But at least they should be happy that they got the war for which they and their friends had schemed for so long.  Russia has been caught in the trap they created.

Or has it? The Kagans, the neocons, and America’s useful fools generally (whom the British call their “American cousins”)—all play the fool thanks to their lack of patriotism and their ignorance of history. They are, as the British say, “too clever by half.” They scheme for decades to trick Russia into war, never looking behind their own backs. Who is it who is working behind their backs to pit the world’s great land powers, America, Russia, and China, against one another? It is the still-surviving British financial empire, the center of the old European oligarchy. It is Britain’s maritime-based power which can only control the big continents by setting the nations there at war against each other, as in our American Civil War, and the two World Wars of the last century.

Every step which led into this war, from "Shock Therapy," through NATO expansion, into the two Ukraine coups, and Biden’s blunders, was part of a British plan. Not the ideal plan of some master-mind which knows everything, as some imagine, but steps which were each calculated in some way to lead on towards the general sort of result desired. Namely, to have America, China, and Russia all at each other’s throats, all destroying each other and themselves—to the advantage of the third party quietly manipulating everything from the sidelines.

All the Americans who played these games were fools. And it’s no coincidence that none of them were patriots. Patriotism does not guarantee wisdom, unfortunately, but not to be a patriot is to be a fool.