The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, granted an interview to the US television host Tucker Carlson on Tuesday, the Kremlin said, claiming it was arranged because Carlson’s approach differs from the one-sided reporting of many traditional western news media.
The interview was likely to be aired on Thursday, according to Russia’s Tass news agency, citing reports by the Wall Street Journal.
Speculation had been growing for days that Carlson, who was dumped by Fox last year for “getting too big for his boots”, had traveled to the Russian capital to meet Putin, whose reasons for invading Ukraine he says should be heard by the American public.
But his visit, which reportedly has included visits to the Bolshoi ballet and dining in fine restaurants, has drawn accusations that he is acting as a propaganda tool for Putin, whom he has frequently defended. Russian media, meanwhile, have hailed Carlson as a celebrity “who speaks the truth”.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed western media no longer tried to appear impartial in their reporting of Russia, and said the Kremlin had no appetite to communicate directly with primary media organisations.
“When it comes to the countries of the collective west, the large network media, TV channels, [and] large newspapers can in no way boast of even trying to at least look impartial in terms of coverage,” Peskov said.
“These are all media outlets that take an exceptionally one-sided position. Of course, there is no desire to communicate with such media, and it hardly makes sense, and it is unlikely that it will be useful.”
When asked directly why Putin granted an interview to Carlson, Peskov said of the former Fox News host: “His position is different from the others. It is in no way pro-Russian, it is not pro-Ukrainian – it is pro-American, but at least it contrasts with the position of the traditional Anglo-Saxon media,” Peskov said.
In a post to X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday afternoon, Carlson portrayed the upcoming interview as a chance for the American public to see the “truth” of the Ukraine war, against a backdrop of what he claimed, without offering any evidence, were a succession of lies told by western media outlets.
He said the interview would be on his own website and posted “uncensored” by the X owner, Elon Musk.
“Most Americans have no idea why Putin invaded Ukraine or what his goals are now,” Carlson said in the four-minute video recorded in Moscow.
“You’ve never heard his voice. That’s wrong. Americans have a right to know all we can about a war they’re implicated in, and we have the right to tell them about it,” he continued.
“Western governments by contrast will certainly do their best to censor this video. They are afraid of information they can’t control.”
Carlson, whose downfall at Fox followed his on-air amplification of Donald Trump’s lies that his 2020 election defeat was fraudulent, untruths that ultimately cost Fox $787.5m in a defamation lawsuit brought by the Dominion Voting Systems company, also claimed Americans were “uninformed” about the effects of the war, and had “no real idea of what’s happening in this region”.
Since leaving Fox, Carlson has taken to broadcasting on X, where his shows – which have included speculation about UFOs among other topics – are often conspiracy-laced and have included segments on disgraced figures like Andrew Tate.
Even during his prime-time Fox News years, Carlson become notorious for extremist and bigoted language, especially around the issue of immigration.
In the post on X, Carlson attacked Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “The populations of the English-speaking countries seem mostly unaware. Their media outlets are corrupt. They lie to the readers and viewers,” he said. “The interviews [Zelenskiy has] done in the US are not traditional interviews, they are fawning pep sessions specifically designed to amplify Zelenskiy’s demands that the US enter more deeply into a war in eastern Europe and pay for it.
“That is not journalism. It is government propaganda of the ugliest kind,” he added.
Press freedoms have largely disappeared in Russia over the past two decades, as pressure has grown on independent media and the danger of arrest has increased for local and foreign journalists working in the country.
The arrest of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich last year on espionage charges was a watershed attack on a foreign reporter in the post-cold war era.
But Russian journalists had already faced long prison sentences for their work and for angering Putin’s allies and friends.
More than 1,000 journalists have fled the country since the invasion of Ukraine, a number of high-profile criminal cases have been opened against reporters for discrediting the Russian army or spreading “fake news”, and legacy broadcast media such as Ekho Moskvy have been forced to close down, despite having powerful backers in the government.
Russia was one of the world’s top five jailers of journalists in 2023, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, with 22 reporters in prison.
At a protest of military wives near the Kremlin this week, the police arrested more than 20 journalists in order to prevent them from reporting on the demonstration in an “unprecedented” move, according to Reporters without Borders.
Putin last gave an interview to a western outlet in 2021, when he spoke with a reporter for CNBC. He has largely ceased speaking with independent media, both Russian and international, since launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since 2021, he has only given interviews to Russian, Kazakh and Chinese media.
Putin’s press secretary, Peskov, said that “we’ve received numerous requests [from western media] for an interview with the president” but “all those media assume a lopsided position”.
“Of course, no one is happy about speaking to such media, and besides, there’s hardly any sense in doing this, it’s unlikely that it can do any good,” Peskov said.
