What’s new on the tube? Tucker Carlson in Russian!
Yesterday, in the early evening (Brussels time) I switched channels on smotrim.ru from my usual setting on Rossiya 1, where I catch the 14.00 and 20.00 (Moscow time) news summaries as well as the 23.30 broadcast of the Vladimir Solovyov talk show. I went to Rossiya 3, the 24-hour news channel, in the hope of finding latest live coverage of Vladimir Putin’s momentous, one might say historic one-day visit to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
And so, accidentally, I landed on the broadcast of a recent 37 minute interview with Republican Congresswoman from Georgia Marjorie Taylor Greene that Tucker Carlson posted initially on his X account and which the Russians have re-broadcast on state television in what they call “Tucker Carlson in Russian.” Here below is a link to what I saw last night:
https://yandex.ru/video/preview/718145611631830410
Apparently the Russians began presenting complete Tucker Carlson shows in voice over during the first week of October, but I had missed them. Better late than ever to make the connection. In this show Carlson mugs it up as usual and feeds lines to the ever outrageous Marjorie Taylor Greene who takes the opportunity to slam the rottenness of American federal politics and the abuses of campaign financing by military industrial complex corporate lobbyists. If you want to hear what a Member of Congress thinks of the herd which courses through the hallways of Congress wearing Slava Ukraina pins on their jackets, then this is the show for you. I have no doubt that it was enjoyed immensely by its Russian audience.
****
Notwithstanding that enjoyable distraction, in the course of yesterday evening I did manage to pick up some information relating to Vladimir Putin’s visit to the United Arab Emirates and to Saudi Arabia that I have not seen carried in Western electronic and print media this morning. Some of it was trivial, some of it was substantial.
On the trivial side, the UAE air force fly-by, streaming the Russian tricolor as part of the welcoming ceremony in Abu Dhabi was carried out by local pilots in American built F-16s. It is not surprising that this detail was not mentioned by CNN today.
In the same domain of aircraft but far more substantial in political language, Russian news sources highlighted the fact that during the entire flight from Moscow to Abu Dhabi the Russian president’s equivalent to Air Force One was accompanied by a number of SU35S air defense fighter jets in close formation, said to be just a few meters from one another. The unstated logic is that this was done to protect Putin from any ground to air missile that ‘you know who’ might have been thinking of firing on his plane to accomplish the long sought regime change in Russia. The skills of the Russian pilots and of their equipment was said to have produced an appropriate positive impression on emirate officials, which is entirely in keeping with one of the objectives of Putin’s visit: to promote Russia as a ‘security provider,’ meaning seller of latest generation military hardware that has proven its merits in the ongoing Ukraine war. Indeed, commentators on Russian state television expect sales of military hardware to soon rise above the export value of Russian oil and gas. There is not much that the United States or the EU can do to put a ‘price cap’ on Russian military sales. The biggest outdoor advertisement for ‘Buy Russian’ is the battlefield in Ukraine right now where NATO gear is being shot to pieces by Russian drones, guided bombs, missiles and artillery.
Though some Western media described Putin’s visit to the capital of the United Arab Emirates as a ‘breakfast meeting’ with their sheikh-president, in fact Putin brought with him a large government delegation and spent the whole day in Abu Dhabi, departing for Saudi Arabia only in the early evening.
Putin used his time in the public introductory remarks before the parties went into closed meetings to say that the UAE is Russia’s largest trading partner in the Arab world, with trading volumes that rose 67% in 2022 to reach 9 billion dollars and which continue to rise apace in 2023. Contrary to the remarks of Western commentators, these commercial exchanges go well outside the predictable domains of oil and gas. There are ongoing talks between the parties about possible purchase of Russian small scale nuclear reactors. There are joint investments, particularly by the UAE in Russian infrastructure projects such as the latest world class Russian intercity federal highways.
The UAE dirham is now used by Moscow in some international trades. We may assume that this vector will continue to develop given the presence in Putin’s delegation of Russian Central Bank president Elvira Nabiulina. Nabiulina almost never travels with the President, so there must have been some very important business to do in the area of her competence.
Of course, geopolitics was one of the main topics for the state to state discussions in Abu Dhabi. There was an exchange of information about the ongoing Gaza war and the Ukraine war. There was surely also talk about what the agenda topics will be for BRICS, which the United Arab Emirates joins as a full member in January. Russia will be the host nation and the sessions will be held in Kazan, one of Russia’s main oil-producing regions and the de facto capital of Russia’s Muslim population. The sheikh-president of the UAE was guest of honor at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in St Petersburg this past June. He accepted the invitation to be present in Kazan for the BRICS sessions.
To underscore the importance and prestige which Russia gives to its large Muslim population , the one member of the delegation who is not part of the federal government was Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the Muslim majority Chechnya Republic who travels widely in the Middle East as a bearer of the Russian flag and influence.
Russian news has been more sparing in the coverage of Putin’s visit to Saudi Arabia, though the video showing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman seeing Putin off in his Aurus limousine following their meeting, with the Crown Prince putting his hand to his heart as a farewell gesture spoke volumes. Here, the continued joint management of OPEC+ production levels would have figured high in the talks, and for this purpose the presence of Russian deputy prime minister Alexander Novak, long time Russian Minister of Energy, would have been useful. Otherwise, the talks surely addressed security issues in the region and possible common action on the Gaza war. In addition, there would surely be discussion of the objectives for BRICS in 2024, which must include plans to create a permanent coordinating body and plans for recruitment of the next round of members.
****
The visits of Vladimir Putin to the UAE and Saudi Arabia were one of two subjects that I was invited to discuss this morning on WION, India’s premier English language global television news broadcast. This 10-minute live interview will be put up on the internet and when I receive the link I will post it in a separate article.
However, if I may strike while the iron is hot and direct attention here and now to the second half of the interview in which I was asked about the significance of the vote in the U.S. Senate blocking the bill introduced by the Biden Administration to appropriate more than 100 billion dollars in financial and military aid to Ukraine and Israel.
The program hosts put on air a segment from President Biden’s speech calling upon Congress to approve the bill, lest the Ukrainian war efforts be allowed to fail and the road be opened for Putin to move on to Europe and continue his aggression into NATO countries. This and the related question posed to me provided an excellent opportunity to put forward a contrary view of what the Administration is now up to, namely that Biden has intentionally allowed the Senate to veto his bill by holding back the concession that could have given him the approval of funding for Ukraine that he says he wants. The obstacle was the Senate Republicans’ demand that appropriate funding be included in the bill to strengthen U.S. border defense against illegal immigration across the Mexican border. Biden did nothing, which suggests that what we are seeing already is the start of the blame game over who lost Ukraine, the Republicans in Congress or the Democratic Administration.
Of course, I do not disregard the possibility that Biden may yet come around and offer concessions on the border security issue, but first he wants to score points against the Senate Republicans for use later when the electoral campaign is well under way.
*****
Finally, in closing this installment I wish to share a new development in Russian-American affairs that is at least as amusing as the Tucker Carlson story with which I opened.
A couple of days ago I paid attention to a news item that was becoming ubiquitous on Western media, namely that the United States intends to maintain its sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons for the indefinite future in order to deprive the Kremlin of the financial resources to wage wars of aggression. Specifically, Washington’s target is to reduce Russian revenues from oil and gas sales by 50% by 2030. This policy was announced by the Deputy Secretary of State for Energy Resources who bears the name Geoffrey Pyatt.
Pyatt? Yes, this is the very same Geoffrey Pyatt who was U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine in February 2014 and who consulted with his boss in Washington, Victoria Nuland, over whom the U.S. was putting forward to become head of the Ukrainian government following the U.S.-directed coup against the sitting president Yanukovich. These conversations came to the attention of the global public when a tape of the most outrageous of them was posted on the internet. And so we could then all enjoy the ever polite Nuland, dispenser of cookies on the Maidan, saying “Fuck the EU.”
What appeared then is reconfirmed now: Pyatt is not the brightest light in the room. His plans to cut Russian hydrocarbon revenues by 50% in 2030 ignores other developments in the sector entrusted to his care by Washington. This past week the COP 28 Luddites meeting in Dubai appear to have approved a target of reducing global consumption of oil and gas by 40% in the very same target year, 2030. The incisiveness of Pyatt’s planning speaks for itself.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023