American journalist Tucker Carlson has said the US government has been blocking his attempts to organize an interview with Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky for more than a year.
On Wednesday, Carlson published a video on X in which he previewed the upcoming release of an interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
The journalist said the conversation with Russia’s top diplomat was aimed at providing a perspective on how close Washington and Moscow could be to a direct clash, after the administration of outgoing US President Joe Biden granted Ukraine permission to fire American-made long-range weapons deep into Russian territory.
In the same clip, filmed on Manezhnaya Square in the heart of Moscow, the former Fox News host revealed that “we have also tried for over a year to get an interview with Zelensky, the president of Ukraine.”
According to Carlson, his team “have attacked that from a bunch of different angles. We have spoken to a lot of different people around him, had dinner with them. We have been in talks continuously.”
“And those efforts have been thwarted by the US government. The American Embassy in Kiev, which our tax dollars pay for, told the Zelensky government: No, you may not do the interview. You can talk to CNN. You cannot talk to us,” Carlson said.
In June, the journalist said he had agreed an interview with the Ukrainian leader. However, Zelensky’s press-secretary, Sergey Nikiforov, swiftly rejected the claim, saying that “Tucker Carlson should check his sources in the FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service) more carefully.” Zelensky “has a completely different schedule, and Tucker Carlson is not on it,” Nikiforov stressed.
Carlson’s latest trip to Moscow is his second since the escalation between Russia and Ukraine in early 2022. In February, he interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin, with the recording of their two-hour conversation getting 14 million views on YouTube and 185 million views on X in the first three days after its release.