Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News anchor, has interviewed President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, the Kremlin said Wednesday, a sign that the Russian leader is seeking to appeal directly to American conservatives as U.S. aid to Ukraine hangs . .
Dmitry S. Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman, said Mr. Carlson had given the interview on Tuesday. He did not say when it will be released.
Mr. Carlson has been in Moscow for several days, according to Russian state media, which issued a surprise announcement of his visit, raising anticipation of a possible interview by Mr. Putin with Mr. Carlson. On Tuesday night he revealed he was interviewing the Russian leader.
“We are here to interview the president of Russia, Vladimir Putin,” Mr. Carlson said in a video apparently shot from a high-rise building in central Moscow and posted on social network X. “We’ll do it soon.”
Mr. Carlson, whose show appears on X, did not specify the timing of any upcoming interviews. It would be Mr Putin’s first official interview with a Western media figure since launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and his first with a US outlet since he spoke to CNBC in 2021.
Mr Putin’s government has sharply curtailed the ability of Western journalists to cover Russia and jailed a Wall Street Journal correspondent, Evan Gershkovich, for more than 10 months on espionage charges that he, his employer and the government of the United States categorically deny. The Kremlin has told Western countries that they have been “dazed” by anti-Russian propaganda.
The interview comes at a critical time for the war in Ukraine, with US aid to Kiev stalled in Congress. A Senate vote on an aid package on Wednesday is almost certain to fail after a growing number of Republicans said they would not support it.
By talking to Mr. Carlson, Mr. Putin would likely be seeking to seize a unique opportunity: a chance to reach a potentially sympathetic audience in the United States.
Mr. Carlson, like Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Mr Trump is skeptical of further US support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression and has embraced Mr Putin’s efforts to position himself as a global standard-bearer for “traditional values”, such as opposition to LGBT rights.
Mr. Putin’s calculus, to a large extent, appears to be tied to the war in Ukraine. The interview could inflame political divisions over Ukraine within the United States, especially if Mr. Putin signals that he is open to a negotiated end to the war.
In promoting the expected interview, Mr. Carlson falsely claimed that he was alone among the Western media in seeking to interview Mr. Putin. Various Western news organizations, including television networks as well as The New York Times, have requested interviews.
“Does Tucker really believe that we journalists haven’t been trying to interview President Putin every day since his full invasion of Ukraine?” Christiane Amanpour, journalist for CNN and PBS; wrote to Xadding that Mr. Carlson’s claim was “preposterous.”
Mr. Peskov addressed this point on Wednesday, saying: “Mr. Carlson is not right, but he could not have known it. We’re getting a lot of requests for interviews with the president.”
Mr. Peskov said that Western newspapers and television networks “cannot boast of efforts to appear impartial in covering what is happening” and that “there is no desire to communicate with such media.” Mr. Carlson, he said, is taking a position that “contradicts the position of the traditional Anglo-Saxon media.”
An interview in the Kremlin could be mutually beneficial for Mr. Carlson and Mr. Putin. Mr. Carlson lost the most prominent platform in the conservative media when he was dropped from the Fox lineup last year, while Mr. Putin lost the most prominent proponent of his anti-Ukraine talking points in the United States.
Mr Carlson’s arrival in Moscow, and speculation that he was there to interview Mr Putin, drew a mixture of condemnation and praise from prominent X users.
“He is a traitor,” former representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, tweeted, referring to Mr. Carlson. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Trump-aligned Republican lawmaker from Georgia, praised the news, saying: “Democrats and their propagandists fret over prospect of Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin”.
Mr Carlson said in his video that the interview would be published on X – formerly known as Twitter – and that the social network’s owner, billionaire Elon Musk, had promised “not to suppress or block this interview”.
That may not be the case, however, for the Russian government, which has restricted access to Twitter since March 2022, claiming the platform hosted false information about the war in Ukraine.
While Mr. Carlson continues to provide the Kremlin media with pro-Putin commentary for consumption in Russia, he has become a declining figure in the United States since leaving Fox News, where he averaged an audience of more than 3 million a night.
Western officials and Russians close to the Kremlin have said in recent months that with Russia regaining the initiative on the battlefield and further US aid to Ukraine stalled in Congress, Mr Putin appears to see an opening for negotiations that they could work to his advantage. But many Ukrainian supporters say that seeking a deal with Mr. Putin now would amount to capitulation, because it would almost certainly require Ukraine to give up the roughly one-fifth of Ukraine that Russia now controls.
In suffocating coverage of Mr. Carlson’s movements around Moscow in recent days, Russia’s pro-Kremlin media appeared to be working to create chatter about a possible Putin interview. On television and online, Russian state media treated Mr. Carlson as a visiting celebrity, offering a stream of photos and videos of his various stops — arriving at the airport, dining at a restaurant and watching the ballet “Spartacus” at the Bolshoi Theater .
