‘What is it with this guy?’ Boris Johnson urges GOP to ignore Tucker Carlson on Russia

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Fox News host Tucker Carlson has “intimidated” some Republicans with his commentary on the war in Ukraine, according to former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who warned against underestimating Russia’s ambitions.

“I’ve been amazed and horrified by how many people are frightened of a guy called Tucker Carlson,” Johnson said during an event at the Atlantic Council. “What is it with this guy? All these wonderful Republicans who seem somehow intimidated by his perspective. … I’m struck by how often this comes up.”

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Carlson has emerged over the last year as the most prominent American critic of Western support for the war in Ukraine, as he regards Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a dictator and thinks the conflict risks “the total destruction of the West.” Johnson, once an icon among American conservatives for orchestrating the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, argued that such assessments invert the problem.

“Some bad ideas are starting to infect some of the thinking around the world about what Putin stands for, what he believes in,” Johnson said. “It’s a disaster. He stands for war, aggression, systematic murder, rape and destruction. That’s what he stands for.”

Johnson’s moment of media criticism offered a glimpse of his private conversations while traveling in Washington this week, one that foreshadows a potential dispute about the extent to which the United States should continue to send aid to Ukraine. Johnson argued that a victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine would portend a Kremlin effort to subjugate Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia — a trio of NATO allies, on the Baltic Sea, who gained independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“He basically thinks that what happened to the Baltic states, when they joined NATO, was an absolute humiliation for Moscow and he wants to reverse it,” Johnson said Wednesday. “He wants to rebuild Russian influence throughout the whole zone of Eastern Europe. Help the Ukrainians to win now and win fast, you end that nonsense, you save colossal sums of money.”

Johnson’s belief that populist skeptics of aid to Ukraine are being penny-wise, pound-foolish is in tension with other analysis that suggests Western allies are not prepared at the moment to give Ukraine the weaponry that it would need to defeat Russia. Yet Johnson countered that those assessments are the latest in a year’s worth of miscalculations about the likely progress of the war.

“So far, we’ve overestimated Putin and we’ve underestimated what the Ukrainians can do,” he said, recalling predictions that Russia would capture Kyiv in the first week. “The Ukrainians have proved themselves able to use our technology to massively destructive effect. … They think that if they have the right kit, in the right quantities, they can take back” the territory that Russia has seized since Putin launched this offensive on February 24.

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That would be a reversal of the three-pronged invasion launched last year, when Russian forces attacked not only Kyiv, but seized the territory between Crimea — a Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 — and their holdings in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

“The absolute minimum is to take back, as I say, the land-bridge [between Crimea and Donbas], but realistically they should be taking back their entire country,” Johnson said. “Never forget that the origins of this catastrophe lie in our failure, in our collective failure in 2014, to do enough to punish Putin for his decision to change borders by force then.”

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