By Anadolu Agency
Russian President Vladimir Putin said a change of president in the US will not change the attitude of their elites toward his country.
“You asked me just now: will another leader come and change something? It’s not about the leader’s personality—it’s about the mood of the elites,” Putin said during an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in Moscow that aired late Thursday.
Stressing that defeating Russia on the battlefield is “impossible,” Putin said he has nothing to talk about with US President Joe Biden due to Washington’s supply of weapons to Ukraine and that the last time he spoke with Biden was prior to the start of the Russia-Ukraine war.
“By the way, I told him then — I won’t go into details, I never do this — but I told him then: I believe that you are making a huge mistake of historical proportions supporting everything that is happening there in Ukraine, pushing Russia away,” he said.
Putin said that Russia is ready to resolve the issue surrounding the detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich but there are “certain conditions” being discussed through “partner channels between the intelligence services.”
“It seems to me that this can be agreed upon,” he said.
He also said that what Gershkovich did while in Russia was “espionage” because he was found to have “received secret information on a secret basis” and that he was caught “red-handed.”
Gershkovich, a US citizen who worked as a reporter at the Journal’s Moscow bureau, was arrested by the Russian Federal Security Service in the city of Yekaterinburg in March last year on espionage charges.
Russia, Ukraine will come to an agreement ‘sooner or later’
Putin also commented on the situation in Ukraine, saying that Moscow and Kyiv will come to an agreement “sooner or later,” reiterating that Russia “has never refused negotiations.”
“Sooner or later, we will come to an agreement anyway. And you know what? It may even sound strange in today’s situation, but relations between the peoples will be restored anyway. It will take a lot of time, but they will be restored,” he said.
Saying that what is happening on the front lines between Russian and Ukrainian forces is, to some extent, an “element of civil war,” Putin noted that everyone in the West thinks the fighting in Ukraine has forever pulled one part of the Russian people apart from another, but “reunification will happen.”
Putin also defined Ukraine as a “satellite” of the US and an “artificial state” created by the Soviet Union, saying Ukraine’s leadership refused to negotiate with Russia based on “instructions from Washington” and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy legally prohibited himself from talking with Russia.
“He signed a decree prohibiting everyone from negotiating with Russia. But how will we negotiate if he forbade himself and forbade everyone?” he said.
Putin went on to say that the US needs to stop the supply of weapons to Ukraine if it wants to stop the conflict, adding that this will “end everything within a few weeks.”
He stressed that Moscow has no territorial claims to Poland, Latvia or any other country while not ruling out a reaction to a possible attack launched by Warsaw.