Tucker Carlson reveals he’s interviewing Putin in Moscow after years of anti-Ukraine vitriol

Tucker Carlson is in Moscow to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin after spending years on Fox News and subsequently on X denigrating the Ukrainian cause and pushing Kremlin talking points regarding Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.

“There are risks to conducting an interview like this, obviously,” Carlson said in a video posted on X on Tuesday afternoon. “So we 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, but they should know. They're paying for much of it in ways they might not fully yet perceive.”

Carlson has been heavily used in Russian state propaganda as a way to push Russia’s distorted view of the conflict, which was started under the baseless pretence that Ukraine was being led by neo-Nazis, a galling claim as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust.

Last summer, following his removal from Fox News, Carlson started his new show on Elon Musk’s X with a pro-Russia rant in which he said Mr Zelensky is “sweaty and rat-like”, adding that he’s “a persecutor of Christians”.

Carlson’s support for Russia has been so ferocious that after he left Fox, he was offered a job on Russian state TV.

“Hey @TuckerCarlson, you can always question more with @RT_com,” state broadcaster RT wrote on X on 24 April last year.

“The war in Ukraine is a human disaster. It's left hundreds of thousands of people dead,” Carlson said in the video published on Tuesday, adding that the war “has