On Thursday, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed to have secured an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but this has been vehemently denied by one of the president’s representatives.
“Mr. Tucker Carlson should more carefully check his sources in the FSB”, Zelenskyy spokesperson Sergii Nykyforov said in a statement – referring to Russia’s internal security services “The president of Ukraine has a completely different schedule, and Tucker Carlson is not on it”.
The denial from the Ukrainian leader came just hours after Carlson had declared that it “looks like we’ve got the Zelensky interview,” adding that, “We’ve been trying for two years, and with particular intensity after interviewing [President Vladimir] Putin in February,” he wrote on X.
Carlson flew to Moscow in February to interview Putin on the Ukraine crisis, becoming the first Western journalist to do so since the aggression began in February 2022. The conservative journalist said at the time that he was interviewing the Russian president “because that’s what we do. We work in journalism. The people’s job is to be informed.” However, many Western government officials and journalists have accused him of serving as the Kremlin’s “useful idiot,” amplifying Russian propaganda theses and allowing Putin to dabble in uncontradicted monologues.
Carlson hosted Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight from 2016 to 2023 before leaving the network last April, with no formal explanation provided by his former employer. Since the outbreak of the Ukraine war, moreover, he has evolved into one of the most pro-Moscow conservative voices on the U.S. television scene.
