One historical lie on top of the other.
This is a line the best describes the recent interview of US Russia Peace Envoy Steve Witkoff with the infamous commentator Tucker Carlson.
In this interview, which was filled with various statements ranging from dubious to scandalous, several particularly caught everyone’s attention.
One of them is that Witkoff apparently favors and trusts the Russian ruler, saying, “I liked him. I think he was honest with me,” and adding, “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy.” He insisted that the Russian ruler, who bombs Ukraine daily and struck Kyiv the day after Witkoff’s interview, allegedly wants peace and happens not to have imperial ambitions that stretch beyond southeastern Ukraine even though he wanted to occupy Kyiv and has been threatening Europe on federal TV almost daily. Either with a conventional invasion or a nuclear attack.
The second statement pertained to the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, where the “vox populi” supported joining the Russian Federation in 2022.
“I think the largest issue in that conflict are these so-called four regions, Donbas, Crimea… and there’s two others,” adding, “they are Russian-speaking, and there have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.”
What Witkoff chose not to mention was that those were sham referendums following a mass exodus of local residents who sought haven elsewhere in Ukraine or abroad and often at gunpoint, literally or figuratively.
Many of those who stayed are victims of torture, like beatings, electrocution, waterboarding, and threats of death, with Russian specifically targeting families of Ukrainian military personnel and teachers, including Ukrainian language ones. Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International have gathered evidence of such abuses and called for international accountability.
Nonetheless Witkoff took a step further and claimed that Russia rightfully regards “those five regions”, the names of which he apparently couldn’t remember, as belonging to Russia since “WWII and that’s something nobody wants to talk about.”
Rightly so. As a rule, not many wish to discuss things made up by a New York real estate agent with no knowledge of history or geopolitics except for an equally educated interviewer Tucker Carlson who suggested that Nikita Khrushchev, who served as Soviet ruler between 1953-1964 made Crimea, Donetsk Oblast, Luhansk Oblast, Zaporizhya, and Kherson Oblast part of Ukraine.
“Correct,” Witkoff concurred, prompting Carlson to express amazement and claiming that Khrushchev was apparently Ukrainian.
Amazing indeed given that Khruschev did not make those five regions part of Ukraine as they had been part of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic before WWII and before that as well. Except for Crimea which became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in 1954.
Zaporizhya, on the other hand, is the core historical region of Ukraine and a place where the Cossacks lived between the 16th-18th centuries before Catherine the Great took the decision to eradicate them.
As for Nikita Khruschev, well, he wasn’t Ukrainian either. He was born in Kalinovka, Russia though he did indeed spend much of his life in Ukraine, worked in Ukrainian political structures, and was Ukraine-sympathetic by Soviet standards.
Then again, none of this should be surprising. Witkoff has no sense of what’s right and wrong and doesn’t particularly seem to care as long as he wins the real-life “Apprentice” show, while Carlson has long made it clear whose side he supports, calling Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator in an interview with Piers Morgan while actually interviewing a real dictator in the Kremlin and his lackey, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, after.
Both, however, would really benefit from a solid history class. Preferably not given by a former Dresden-based KGB agent.
