Trashing American media, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced Tuesday that he will be interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. The United States and its NATO allies have bolstered Ukraine’s ability to fend off the Russians with millions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated weapons. Carlson has been a critic of the war and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Carlson arrived in Russia last week amid speculation an interview with Putin was in the cards. Carlson made that official on Tuesday in a video posted to X. He did not reveal when the interview will be released.
“We’re here to interview the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin,” Carlson said in his video. “We’ll be doing that soon. There are risks to conducting an interview like this, obviously. So we’ve thought about it carefully over many months. Here’s why we’re doing it.”
“First, because it’s our job. We’re in journalism. Our duty is to inform people. Two years into a war that’s reshaping the entire world, most Americans are not informed. They have no real idea what’s happening in this region, here in Russia, or 600 miles away in Ukraine,” he said.
Why I’m interviewing Vladimir Putin. pic.twitter.com/hqvXUZqvHX
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 6, 2024
“But they should know. They’re paying for much of it in ways they might not fully yet perceive. The war in Ukraine is a human disaster. It’s left hundreds of thousands of people dead — an entire generation of young Ukrainians — and has depopulated the largest country in Europe,” he said.
Carlson said the ripples of the war are little understood in the U.S.
Will you watch Carlson’s interview?
“But the long-term effects are even more profound. This war has utterly reshaped the global military and trade alliances, and the sanctions that followed have, as well. And in total, they have upended the world economy,” Carlson said, adding that the economic order established after World War II “is coming apart very fast, and along with it, the dominance of the U.S. dollar.”
Claiming that these “history-altering developments” will “define the lives of our grandchildren,” Carlson said “the populations of the English-speaking countries” remain unaware “because no one has told them the truth.”
“Their media outlets are corrupt. They lie to their readers and viewers, and they do that mostly by omission,” Carlson said.
“Since the day the war in Ukraine began, American media outlets have spoken to scores of people from Ukraine, and they have done scores of interviews with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy. We ourselves have put in a request for an interview with Zelenskyy. We hope he accepts, but the interviews he’s already done in the United States are not traditional interviews, they are fawning pep sessions, specifically designed to amplify Zelenskyy’s demand that the U.S. enter more deeply into a war in Eastern Europe and pay for it,” he said.
Carlson said Americans have a one-dimensional view of the war.
“At the same time our politicians and media outlets have been doing this, promoting a foreign leader like he’s a new consumer brand, not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview the president of the other country involved in this conflict, Vladimir Putin,” Carlson said.
“Most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine or what his goals are now. You’ve never heard his voice. That’s wrong. Americans have a right to know all they can about a war they’re implicated in, and we have the right to tell them about it because we are Americans, too,” he said.
Carlson alleged that the Biden administration “illegally spied on our text messages and then leaked their contents to their servants in the news media. They did this in order to stop a Putin interview that we were planning. Last month, we’re pretty sure they did exactly the same thing once again, but this time we came to Moscow anyway.”
“We are not here because we love Vladimir Putin. We are here because we love the United States, and we want it to remain prosperous and free,” he said.
Carlson said the interview would be offered free.
“We paid for this trip ourselves. We took no money from any government or group,” Carlson said in the video. “Nor are we charging people to see the interview; it is not behind a paywall. Anyone can watch the entire thing shot live to tape and unedited on our website,” he said.
“Elon Musk, to his great credit, has promised not to suppress or block this interview once we post it on his platform X, and we’re grateful for that,” he said.
“Western governments, by contrast, will certainly do their best to censor this video on other less principled platforms because that’s what they do. They are afraid of information they can’t control. But you have no reason to be afraid of it. We are not encouraging you to agree with what Putin may say in this interview. But we are urging you to watch it. You should know as much as you can, and then like a free citizen and not a slave, you can decide for yourself.”
On Monday, Russia’s Izvestia newspaper published a snippet about Carlson’s visit to Russia. In Newsweek’s reporting on the Izvestia interview, it said that the videographer for the interview told Carlson that his trip to Russia “blew up” in America.
“They’re crazy, really crazy,” Carlson said.
Carlson has said before that the U.S. government blocked a Putin interview.
“I tried to interview Vladimir Putin, and the U.S. government stopped me,” Carlson said in a September article published in Switzerland, according to the Post Millennial.
“By the way, nobody defended me. I don’t think there was anybody in the news media who said, ‘Wait a second. I may not like this guy, but he has a right to interview anyone he wants, and we have a right to hear what Putin says,’” Carlson said.
“You’re not allowed to hear Putin’s voice. Because why? There was no vote on it. No one asked me. I’m 54 years old. I’ve paid my taxes and followed the law,” he said.
