Marco Bello/Reuters
The Kremlin confirmed Wednesday that an interview between Tucker Carlson and Vladimir Putin has already taken place, with a spokesperson for the Russian president also explaining what makes the former Fox News host special, in Putin’s eyes, compared with other Western reporters whose requests for access are routinely rejected.
Dmitry Peskov declined to reveal when the interview would be released, saying only that it will be published “as soon as it is prepared.” He also contradicted a claim that Carlson made in his own video confirming the interview Tuesday, in which the conservative claimed that “not a single Western journalist has bothered to interview” Putin during his war in Ukraine.
“Mr. Carlson is wrong. But he couldn’t have known,” Peskov said, noting that, on the contrary, Western media outlets frequently ask for interviews with Putin, but such requests are declined. “When it comes to the countries of the collective West, we are talking about large online media, traditional television channels, large newspapers, which cannot boast of attempts to at least look impartial in terms of coverage,” Peskov said, according to TASS. “These are all media that take an exclusively one-sided position.”