Russian President Vladimir Putin was apparently itching for a verbal wrestling match with Tucker Carlson when the former Fox News host interviewed him earlier this month. He was disappointed not to get one.
Speaking to Russian state TV anchor Pavel Zarubin earlier this week, Putin said that he “thought he would behave aggressively and ask so-called sharp questions. I wasn’t just prepared for this, I wanted it!”
During his more than two-hour-long interview with Carlson, which aired on Feb. 8, Putin dominated the conversation. The president delivered a lengthy lecture on his propagandistic version of Russian and Ukrainian history, with virtually no interruption from Carlson. The host gave Putin what was essentially an open forum to reiterate his stated reasons for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, his criticism of NATO, and his disdain for the United States and other Western powers’ support for Ukraine in the ongoing war between the two nations. The only moment when Carlson seemed to outright challenge the president was during their discussion of the detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
While the interview was ultimately a propaganda victory for Putin, it wasn’t quite the flavor he was going for.
“He tried to interrupt me several times, but still, surprisingly for a Western journalist, he turned out to be patient and listened to my lengthy dialogues, especially those related to history, and didn’t give me a reason to do what I was ready for,” Putin told Zarubin, according to a translation of the conversation by Politico EU.
“To be frank, I didn’t get much pleasure from this interview,” he added.
The Kremlin acknowledged ahead of Putin’s interview with Carlson that they had rejected a slew of media requests to speak with the Russian president. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed they had been denied because most major Western media outlets “don’t even attempt to appear impartial in their coverage. Of course there’s no desire to communicate with this kind of media.”
As many have pointed out, the notion that Carlson has been “impartial” in his coverage of Russia is laughable. Carlson was likely selected to interview Putin because of his prominent advocacy against U.S. and NATO intervention in the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and his often explicit support and whitewashing of the Russian government’s actions. The host has a long history of espousing pro-Russian talking points regarding the war, even going so far as to claim in 2019 that he was actively “[rooting] for Russia” as tensions escalated between the two nations.
The Russian government has attempted to take advantage of Carlson’s coverage in the past. In March of 2022, Mother Jones obtained a Kremlin memo that encouraged state-controlled media outlets to “use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally.”
