Putin explains that he attended Leningrad State University Faculty of Law in the Soviet Union straight out of high school.

He explains his views on NATO, and cannot see any reason to why this military alliance has grown East after the fall of Soviet Bloc in Europe.

Putin had never seen Stanley Kubrick's 1963 black comedy satire about the Cold War, Dr. Strangelove; the two men watch the film together.

"[2] Verne Gay of Newsday, who rates the series a B+, acknowledges that "not once does Stone push back, or harsh the mellow with phrases like 'the facts say otherwise'.

While the many points he makes are impossible to summarize here, Putin's motives for this interview are not: He emerges as an intelligent, sane, reasonable leader caught in the vortex of an occasionally feckless, often contradictory superpower called the United States.

[4] Sonia Saraiya of Variety also offers praise of the series, writing that "The Putin Interviews is a destabilizing documentary that challenges Americans' narratives about ourselves and asks the viewer to engage in a conversation with a slippery subject.

"[7] Poniewozik's charge that the interview is "solicitous, even obsequious" mirrors criticism leveled by Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post, who summarizes the series as consisting mostly of "softball questions," and by Brian Lowry of CNN who writes that "Stone's idle chitchat and solicitous tone will surely leave many journalists and Putin critics gnashing their teeth.

However, a Russian video published on 20 June 2017 pointed out strong similarities between the clip Putin played and footage from 2013 of a U.S. Apache helicopter firing at militants in Afghanistan.

The striking similarities led people on social media to call the clip "fake" and suggest that the Russian president did not realize what he was showing was not his own forces.