Masha Gesson sat through the whole Putin interview. Here are a few of her thoughts. She speaks Russian, of course, so this doesn’t rely on the Kremlin translators as Tucker’s show does: : What Putin Saw When He Was Interviewed by Tucker Carlson Here was an easy mark. Carlson meekly tried to interrupt Putin a couple of times, to ask a question he seemed stuck on: Why hadn’t all this history and these territorial issues come up when Putin first became President, in 2000? It was an ill-informed question—Putin has trafficked in historical revisionism from the start and became increasingly obsessed with Ukraine after the Orange Revolution, in 2004—and an easy one for Putin to ignore. It seemed to show that Carlson was less well briefed than Putin, who dropped biographical trivia about Carlson into the conversation, a trademark intimidation tactic of a K.G.B. agent. He mentioned, for example, that Carlson had unsuccessfully tried to join the C.I.A. Carlson didn’t interrupt or challenge Putin on the many—too many to count—occasions when Putin told falsehoods about the history of Ukraine, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the relationship between Russia and nato, probably his conversations with former U.S. leaders, and, perhaps most egregiously of all, the Russian Army’s withdrawal from the suburbs of Kyiv after a month of invasion in 2022. Putin claimed that this was a gesture of good will aimed at achieving a speedy negotiated peace; in fact, it was a military defeat. This would also have been a good…