Three points made by Vladimir Putin in his speech about Ukraine on Monday were enthusiastically deployed by Fox News' Tucker Carlson the next day.
Fox News
Tucker Carlson argued Russia's case in its dispute with Ukraine on his Tuesday show, echoing several points made during President Vladimir Putin's speech the day before.
In Monday's lengthy address, Putin defended his escalation of the conflict with Ukraine, rewriting its history to emphasize its cultural overlap with Russia and to argue that it has never really existed as a state.
He also aired his grievances with NATO's expansion eastwards, saying falsely that the alliance had broken a promise not to do so after the Cold War.
On Fox News, Carlson made strikingly similar points.
As part of a 15-minute segment devoted largely to attacking the Biden administration's response to events in Ukraine, he echoed three main of Putin's main arguments.
"Democrats want you to hate Putin, anything less is treason," said Carlson Tuesday night.
It's "that hatred of Vladimir Putin" that could tip the situation into war, he said. He went on to suggest that it's China, not Russia, that deserves a robust response from the US.
Putin made a similar claim — that NATO doesn't want Russia to exist and so is seeking to punish him. Putin has long bemoaned NATO's policy that any country is eligible to seek membership.
That, he said, is because "their one and only goal is to hold back the development of Russia. And they will keep doing so, just as they did before, even without any formal pretext just because we exist."
"They just do not need a big and independent country like Russia around," he said.
Putin painted Ukraine in bleak terms, pointing to its political strife, high levels of corruption. He claimed that the 2014 revolution that ousted the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych "did not bring Ukraine any closer to democracy and progress."
"A stable statehood has never developed in Ukraine," he said, saying that its democratic framework is just a cover for oligarchs. He also pointed to attacks on political opponents and media outlets.
On Tuesday Carlson said: "You can't say it enough, Ukraine is not a democracy," pointing to the same issues of political and journalistic freedoms.
"And by the way, if the Biden administration believes that is a model democracy, we ought to be very concerned," he added.
In 2021 the DC-based nonprofit Freedom House, which produces detailed analyses and rankings of democracies, categorized Ukraine as a "transitional or hybrid regime."
Western leaders have not called Ukraine a model state, but have spoken of its democracy as a still-developing one worthy of support.
In portraying Ukraine's instability, Putin pointed to the number of anti-corruption institutions that receive US backing there.
He also said the country's agreements with western governments and NGOs have rendered it "a colony with a puppet regime."
Carlson made the same point, arguing that Ukraine is "essentially managed by the State Department."
He later connected Biden's defense of the country to the theory that he is indebted to Ukrainian oligarchs — one of several references to Hunter Biden's former employment with the Ukrainian firm Burisma.
President Biden has long denied any business connection to Ukraine, according to the BBC, and insisted that Hunters activities in Ukraine were nothing to do with him.
