An excellent, brief counterpoint to the now infamous Tucker Carlson-Putin interview is provided in an article by Stefan Hedlund, professor of Russian Studies at Uppsala University.
The counterpoint is necessary because, as many have pointed out, the interview is riddled with lies and imagined history.
Hedlund's article, What President Putin Could Have Learned from History, sets the record straight on Russian and Ukrainian history and their connection. What it covers is important to keep in mind, while navigating the distortions and outright fabrications on social media. The basic facts in Hedlund's article are important to keep in mind to avoid being misled.
Among Hedlund's conclusions,
"The final lesson to be drawn from history is that when Ivan the Terrible died in 1584, Muscovy was so exhausted by its drawn-out campaigns to destroy Novgorod and by the Livonian War against Sweden and Poland-Lithuania that it collapsed shortly after...Putin's latter-day Muscovy may be looking at a similar fate...It will find itself increasingly exhausted by its attempt to destroy Ukraine..."
For a longer analysis, read Timothy Snyder's article, Putin's Genocidal Myth on the subtleties of Putin's "naive and cynical" use of history to justify not only Russia's land claims but its genocidal actions in its current war in Ukraine.
For a more detailed history of Ukraine read Paul R. Magocsi's A History of Ukraine: the Land and Its Peoples or Serhii Plokhy's The Gates of Europe. For an insight into what the Ukrainian people are defending themselves against in Putin's war, read Anne Applebaum's Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine, when up to 4 million Ukrainians may have died in Stalin's 1932-33 manmade famine.
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