Tucker Carlson posts first photo with Putin
Tucker Carlson speaks at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida, November 17, 2022
©AFP/Jason Koerner
US journalist Tucker Carlson published a photo of himself sitting at the same table with Russian President Vladimir Putin during his interview to his Instagram account.
The photo depicts the journalist and the Russian leader sitting a short distance against each other.
The right-wing television provocateur Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin in Moscow in an exchange fueling both the Russian president's anti-Ukrainian rhetoric and Carlson's drive for renewed relevance in his post-Fox career.
It is the first interview Putin has granted to an American since the Russian invasion two years ago.
The pairing should not come as a surprise. Carlson has routinely been lionized by Kremlin propaganda outlets; his clips attacking the Biden administration's support for Ukraine have been routinely rebroadcast, for example. Russian media has fawned over Carlson this week, giving his comings and goings in Moscow a treatment akin to U.S. media's coverage of Taylor Swift.
American journalist Tucker Carlson has shared the first image from his highly-anticipated interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The full discussion airs on Thursday at 6pm EST on Carlson’s website.
In a post to his Instagram account on Thursday afternoon, Carlson shared an image, apparently taken in the Kremlin, of himself and Putin sitting on opposing chairs.
Carlson explained that he wanted to talk to the Russian leader because “Americans have the right to know all they can about a war they are implicated in,” he said, referring to the conflict in Ukraine.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed on Tuesday that the interview had taken place, noting that Carlson’s stance on the conflict was neither pro-Russian nor pro-Ukrainian. Putin, Peskov said, had “no desire” to speak to Western media outlets that have “completely one-sided” opinions and “aren’t even trying to be impartial.”
Carlson has been condemned by pro-Ukrainian pundits and politicians for speaking to Putin, with former US Representative Adam Kinzinger branding him “a traitor” and neoconservative writer Bill Kristol urging American authorities to prevent him from returning home, “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Carlson predicted that Western governments “will certainly do their best to censor” the interview because “they are afraid of information they can’t control.”
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that Americans listening to the interview “shouldn’t take at face value anything” that Putin says.
The Kremlin said Putin agreed to the Carlson interview because the approach of the former Fox News host differed from the “one-sided” reporting of the Ukraine conflict by many Western news outlets.
Carlson is considered to have close connections to Trump, who is expected to be the Republican Party candidate in the November US presidential election.
Complaining about the billions of dollars in aid sent to Kyiv so far, Trump has called for de-escalation of the war in Ukraine, in which the Biden administration has strongly backed the Zelensky government.
Putin tells Tucker Carlson Ukraine war can be ‘over in a few weeks’
Russian President Vladimir Putin can’t remember the last time he spoke with his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden, had a “personal relationship” with his predecessor Donald Trump, and reckons his country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine could end in a few weeks — if the West would just stop helping Kyiv defend itself.
These nuggets of Putin-think emerged from a two-hour, hotly anticipated interview the Russian president granted to ex-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson, which was published on the far-right commentator’s website on Thursday.
When asked by Carlson about the possibility of peace in Ukraine, Putin said: “If you really want to stop fighting, you need to stop supplying weapons,” referring to Western aid to Kyiv. “It will be over within a few weeks. That’s it,” he added.
Speaking of the goals of what he called the “special military operation” in Ukraine, Putin said they had yet to be achieved, because one of the aims “is de-Nazification.” For the first time, Putin expanded on what he means by that. “This means the prohibition of all kinds of neo-Nazi movements. We have to get rid of those people who maintain this concept and support this practice and try to preserve it,” he said.
Asked about when he last spoke to U.S. President Joe Biden, Putin said “I cannot remember when I talked to him,” adding that the two last spoke before the Feb. 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Carlson never mentioned former President Donald Trump by name, but Putin did. “I had such personal relationship with Trump,” he said, adding he also personally liked George W. Bush.
Asked for his thoughts on X owner Elon Musk, Putin said he was rumored to have implanted a chip in a human brain, adding: “I think there’s no stopping Elon Musk. He will do as he sees fit.”
Asked about Evan Gershkovich, the 32-year-old Wall Street Journal correspondent who has been in pre-trial detention for almost a year on espionage charges — allegations he and his employer have strongly rebuffed — Putin said the two countries’ special services were “in contact with one another” and there was “no taboo to settle this issue.”
“He’s not just a journalist. I reiterate. He’s a journalist who is secretly getting confidential information,” Putin said in answer to Carlson’s objections that Gershkovich is clearly not a spy.
Putin then, without mentioning him by name, referred to the case of Vadim Krasikov, a Russian FSB agent currently serving a life sentence in Germany for murder, whom Moscow reportedly is aiming to swap for Gershkovich.
Carlson also asked Putin about the attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in September 2022 — prompting a curious exchange.
“Who blew up Nord Stream?” Carlson asked. Putin responded: “You for sure.” The pundit responded: “I was busy that day. I did not blow up Nord Stream.”
Carlson has repeatedly questioned the United States’ aid to Ukraine and mirrored the Kremlin’s propaganda on numerous occasions.
He has argued that the West’s push to welcome Ukraine into NATO was to blame for Russia’s invasion, and said the war was “designed to cause regime change in Moscow.”
It is no coincidence that Carlson is the only foreign media personality to receive the Kremlin’s blessing for an interview with the Russian leader.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov earlier this week did not hide that Carlson had been handpicked because of his Moscow-friendly position on the conflict.
Putin jokingly parried back that while Carlson personally had an alibi for the day of the bombings, the CIA had none. The Russian didn’t present any evidence to back up his accusations — which Washington has repeatedly denied — arguing instead that only the U.S. would have the capability and interest in blowing up the pipeline.
Carlson, a provocative pundit who was ousted from Fox News last year, is the first Western media figure to interview Putin since the start of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The war has killed tens of thousands of people and prompted an international arrest warrant against the Russian president for war crimes.
“It’s not pro-Russian, not pro-Ukrainian, it’s pro-American. It starkly contrasts with the stance of traditional Anglo-Saxon media,” Peskov said of Carlson’s position.
News of the interview has prompted furious reactions from established journalists, some of whom have sought a sit-down with Putin for years.
Anne Applebaum, an American journalist and historian, has accused Carlson of being “a propagandist, with a history of helping autocrats conceal corruption.”
Putin’s domination of the interview with Carlson was a stark contrast with a grilling that the Russian leader received from Austrian news anchor Armin Wolf, who won acclaim in 2018 by repeatedly challenging him and putting him on the defensive.
Carlson himself appeared to acknowledge the challenges of interviewing an increasingly reclusive autocrat with a 24-year history of dodging questions and dominating interviews.
Ruminating on the interview afterward in a gilded antechamber at the Kremlin palace, Carlson said that the start of the interview had taken him by surprise, with “an extremely detailed history going back to the 9th century of the formation of Russia.”
“I’m not exactly sure what I thought of the interview. … It’s going to take me a year to decide what that was,” said Carlson in a video published on his website. “Putin is not someone who does a lot of interviews. He is not good at explaining himself. … But he’s clearly spending a lot of time in a world where he doesn’t have to explain himself.”
Carlson said he felt that Putin had not presented his case coherently, but sensed that the Russian leader was “wounded” by the rejection of the West.
During the long and rambling course of the interview, the Russian leader recycled justifications he has made for the invasion of Ukraine, including the “denazification” of the country.
“If they consider themselves a separate people, they have the right to do so. But not on the basis of Nazism, the Nazi ideology,” said Putin, adding that Ukraine was a satellite state of the United States.
The president also claimed that Moscow withdrew its troops from Kyiv in 2022 as part of a peace deal. In April 2022, Kyiv pushed back invading Russian troops from the capital.
Putin at one point warned the West sternly against sending its own troops to fight in Ukraine, and then wondered why the United States was meddling in the conflict rather than attending to its own problems. And he said Washington should be willing to reach a deal with Russia to end the war (ignoring the obvious fact that Kyiv would not go along.)
“Well, if somebody has the desire to send regular troops, that would certainly bring humanity to the brink of a very serious global conflict — this is obvious,” Putin said.
In some of his most direct comments on the case, Putin said that Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was detained while on a reporting trip in Yekaterinburg last year, was arrested because he was “working for the U.S. intelligence services.”
Putin claimed that Gershkovich, who has been charged with espionage and has been in jail since March last year — was “caught red-handed when he was secretly getting confidential information.”
Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal and the White House vehemently deny the charges against him.
“Evan is a journalist, and journalism is not a crime. Any portrayal to the contrary is total fiction,” the Journal said in a statement Thursday. “Evan was unjustly arrested and has been wrongfully detained by Russia for nearly a year for doing his job, and we continue to demand his immediate release.”
Late last year, the State Department said that the Kremlin had rejected a “significant offer” that would have seen the release of Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine also incarcerated in Russia.
But during the interview with Carlson, Putin said that he believed an agreement on an exchange was possible and that he hoped Gershkovich would return home, but claimed there had been “many gestures of goodwill” and that Moscow had “run out of them.”
