According to the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin was interviewed in Moscow by former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson.
“Americans have a right to know all they can about a war they are implicated in,” Carlson stated earlier on X, which is why he wanted to undertake the interview.
Since the start of the full-scale conflict in Ukraine, this is Mr. Putin’s first one-on-one interview with a Western journalist.
According to Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, the meeting was taped on Tuesday.
Hanna Maliar, the deputy minister of defense for Ukraine, countered, saying, “The only interview that is safe in this situation is the interrogation in The Hague.”
In her statement, she alluded to an arrest order that had been issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which had charged Vladimir Putin with war crimes and with forcibly removing children from Ukraine and sending them to Russia.
Russian official media has covered Tucker Carlson’s visit to Moscow extensively, covering his every move almost nonstop.
Carlson stated, “There are risks to doing an interview like this, obviously, so we’ve thought about it over many months,” confirming the Russian media coverage of his decision.
Carlson continued by saying that he had personally funded his travel to Russia and that he was motivated to do the interview because, according to him, “most Americans are not informed” about the struggle that is “reshaping the world”—a charge he laid at the feet of the mainstream media.
He claimed that since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, Western media had conducted numerous interviews with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, whom he had previously referred to as a “dictator.”
However, Carlson argued that these were “fawning pep sessions” designed to accentuate Mr. Zelensky’s urge for the US to become more and more involved in the war. “That is not journalism – it is government propaganda.”
Carlson claimed that, in the meantime, “not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview” Vladimir Putin.
The BBC seems not to agree with the statement as BBC Russia Editor, Steve Rosenberg, stated in a piece that the organization has “lodged several requests with the Kremlin in the last 18 months.” ‘No’ all the time for us.
Carlson stated that the interview will air on Thursday (today) at 18:00 EST (23:00 GMT).
It will be available on his website, tuckercarlson.com, he said. At first, he had said that he would post the interview to his X account live and uncut. The platform’s owner, Elon Musk, had “promised not to suppress or block the interview”.