Tucker Carlson and Kiev issue conflicting statements about ‘Zelensky interview’
Vladimir Zelensky has finally accepted a request to be interviewed by Tucker Carlson, the American journalist has revealed. A notorious Ukrainian government-linked website branded Carlson an enemy of the state, in particular for his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year.
Carlson used to host a highly-rated evening show on Fox News until he was fired last April for reasons never quite explained. He has since launched his own network, posting on X (formerly Twitter) and Telegram.
“Looks like we’ve got the Zelenskyy interview,” Carlson said on Wednesday. “We’ve been trying for two years, and with particular intensity after interviewing Putin in February.”
“The point is to bring Americans much-needed information about the conflict that’s completely reshaping their country’s position in the world. Coming soon we hope,” he added.
Later, however, a spokesman for Zelensky, Segrey Nikoforov, denied that his boss had plans to sit down with Carlson. “Mr. Tucker Carlson should check his sources in [Russia’s] FSB more carefully. The President of Ukraine has a completely different schedule, and Tucker Carlson is not there,” he wrote on Facebook.
Following the Putin interview, Carlson revealed that he also reached out to Zelensky to give him a chance to “explain his position,” but said that the Ukrainian leader ignored his overtures.
The influential American journalist has long been critical of the US policy to fund Kiev in the conflict against Moscow.
“Ukraine can’t win. Everybody knows that around the world. People are very clear on that. There is not one informed person outside the United States who thinks that somehow Ukraine is going to beat Russia,” he said in April.
Last month, during an interview with Donald Trump Jr, Carlson argued that Ukraine was being sold off to foreign corporate investors and that the Ukrainian nation would disappear within 50 years. “We betrayed them like no other country ever,” he said at the time.
Carlson’s announcement has caused some concern among his fans, given that he was placed on Ukraine’s notorious list of public enemies back in 2023, labeled as “an accomplice of Russian occupiers and terrorists.”
“Stage [the interview] on neutral grounds or he might have you disappeared like Gonzalo Lira,” conservative blogger Ian Miles Cheong warned Carlson, referring to an American-Chilean journalist who was tortured to death in a Ukrainian jail earlier this year.
The controversial Mirotvorets (Peacemaker) database was launched by Ukrainian government-linked activists in 2014. It has often been called Ukraine’s ‘kill list’, as a number of prominent journalists and other public figures featured on the website have been murdered over the years.
