Russian President Vladimir Putin said President Clinton told him that he thought that Russia had a shot to be welcomed into NATO — but later told Putin that it wasn’t going to happen.
In a sit-down interview with Tucker Carlson at the Kremlin, Putin said that after he became president in 2000, he asked Clinton during a visit to Moscow if he thought Russia had a shot in joining the defense alliance after tensions settled at the end of the Yugoslav War.
“At a meeting here in the Kremlin with the outgoing President Bill Clinton, right here in the next room, I said to him, I asked him: ‘Bill, do you think if Russia asked to join NATO, do you think it would happen?’ Suddenly he said, ‘You know, it’s interesting. I think so,’” Putin told Carlson.
“But in the evening, when we met for dinner, he said: ‘You know, I’ve talked to my team, no, it’s not possible now.’ You can ask him. I think he will watch our interview, he’ll confirm it,” the Russian president said.
“I wouldn’t have said anything like that if it hadn’t happened. Okay, well, it’s impossible now,” he added.
Putin said that after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians anticipated being “welcomed into the brotherly family of civilized nations.”
“Nothing like this happened. You tricked us,” Putin said, referring to the US.
“The promise was that NATO would not expand eastward. But it happened five times. There were five waves of expansion,” he continued. “We tolerated all that. We were trying to persuade them. We were saying, ‘Please don’t. We are as bourgeois now as you are. We are a market economy and there is no Communist Party power. Let’s negotiate.'”
He referenced Russia’s first President Boris Yeltin’s historic address to Congress in which he proclaimed “God Bless America.”
“Everything he said were signals, let us in,” Putin said.
But a potential relationship soured after US and NATO forces bombed Belgrade after Russia voiced its support for Serbians, according to Putin.
Had Clinton said yes, Putin said “the process of rapprochement would have commenced and eventually it might have happened if we had seen some sincere wish on the side of our partners.
“But it didn’t happen. Well, no means no, okay, fine,” he said.
Carlson also asked Putin his thoughts on Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, whose startup tech company Neuralink just implanted the first AI chip into a human subject.
“I think there’s no stopping Elon Musk. He will do as he sees fit,” Putin said.
“Nevertheless, you’ll need to find some common ground with him. Search for ways to persuade him,” he urged. “I think he’s a smart person. I truly believe he is. So you’ll need to reach an agreement with him because this process needs to be formalized and subjected to certain rules.”