Tucker Carlson: Our leaders are lying about Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and it's insulting

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Tucker: Why did the Russians do this?

Fox News host gives his take on the Russian invasion of Ukraine on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight.’

When the Russian military invaded Ukraine last month, the most highly credentialed people in the world seemed stunned by it and that was not very reassuring to the rest of us.  

"It was a shock to many of the leading experts and policymakers in the United States, Europe and even Ukraine," explained a fellow expert and policymaker at the Atlantic Council. "The head of German intelligence was so caught off guard that he was still in Kyiv and had to be evacuated."  

That's pretty weird if you think about it, because for weeks, Joe Biden had been speaking in a very loud voice about a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine. They seemed ready for it and yet it turns out that nobody in Washington, including Biden himself, really thought it was going to happen and when it did happen, official Washington concluded that Putin must be insane.  

UKRAINE APPEARS TO HAVE BEGUN SHELLING RUSSIAN TERRITORY 

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a cabinet meeting via video conference at the Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, March 23, 2022. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

"The casual speculation about Vladimir Putin's mental state has become more serious," wrote National Review. In other words, there's a reason, a good reason none of us saw this coming. Putin just snapped. He's irrational and impossible to predict. A lot of people took that at face value, but you had to notice that, like most explanations you hear in Washington, it was self-exculpatory. It was more an excuse than an analysis.  

In fact, Putin may well be crazy, but it's fair to assume there was more to the invasion of Ukraine than a single psychiatric episode and at this point, it would be nice to know exactly what it is, what happened and why. Why did the Russians do this? It's not treasonous to ask that. It's essential. You can't make wise decisions about the future without understanding what just happened. It's a prerequisite, but our leaders so far have refused to do that. They keep lying to themselves. They're imposing censorship on the rest of us.  

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They're forcing the entire American population to mouth childish slogans about good versus evil. It's insulting, but worse, it's not helpful. This is not how nations survive complex moments like this. Crisis demands crystal clear thinking. So now is the moment to ignore the people who've been consistently wrong and instead listen carefully to the people who've gotten it right in the past, the ones who saw the Ukraine war coming and said so out loud. Those are the people you should be listening to and one of them is Nigel Farage.  

Nobody would call Farage a stooge of Vladimir Putin, just the opposite. Farage is a nationalist. He cares about his own country. He's devoted his life to it. In his case, his country is Great Britain, whose long-term interests have been gravely damaged by the Russian invasion and by the West's response to it. The same is true, unfortunately, of our country. 

The U.S. has never had a president as reckless as Joe Biden is. We're going to pay the price for that for a long time. But Nigel Farage, had you asked him, could have predicted all of this. In fact, he did predict it back in 2014 as the leader of the U.K. Independence Party. Farage gave a speech to the European Parliament that year, which unfortunately, we just saw yesterday. In retrospect, his words seem prophetic. Farage understood what would happen because he saw clearly what had already taken place. Read this carefully. We think you'll agree it's an analysis worth understanding. Here's Nigel Farage eight years ago on Ukraine.  

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Brexit Party leader and former MEP, Nigel Farage arrives to appear on the Andrew Marr Show at BBC Television Centre on February 2, 2020 in London, England.  ( Hollie Adams/Getty Images)

NIGEL FARAGE: Among the long list of foreign policy failures and contradictions in the last few years, including, of course, the bombing of Libya, the desire to arm the rebels in Syria, has been the unnecessary provocation of Vladimir Putin. 

This EU empire, ever seeking to expand, stated its territorial claim on the Ukraine some years ago. Just to make that worse, of course, some NATO members said they too would like the Ukraine to join NATO. We directly encouraged the uprising in the Ukraine that led to the toppling of the president, Yanukovych, and that led, of course, in turn to Vladimir Putin reacting and the moral of the story is if you poke the Russian bear with a stick, don't be surprised when he reacts. 

Now, just to continue with that, today we are rushing through an association agreement at undue speed with the Ukraine and as we speak, there are NATO soldiers engaged in military exercises in the Ukraine. Have we taken leave of our senses? Do we actually want to have a war with Putin? Because if we do, we're certainly going about it the right way. 

Perhaps we ought to recognize that the West now faces the biggest threat and crisis to our way of life that we have seen for over 70 years. The recent beheadings of the British and American hostages graphically illustrates the problem, and of course, we have our own citizens from our own countries engaged in that struggle too. In the war against Islamic extremism, Vladimir Putin, whatever we may think of him as a human being, is actually on our side. 

I suggest we grow up. I suggest we recognize the real threat facing all of our countries, communities and societies; we stop playing war games in the Ukraine; and we start to prepare a plan to help countries like Syria, like Iraq, like Kenya, like indeed Nigeria, to try and help them to deal with the real threat that faces us. Let us not go on provoking Putin, whether we like him or not.  

This article was adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the March 30, 2022 edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight.