Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted on Wednesday that X host Tucker Carlson caught him by surprise during their interview last week.
The final interview was two hours long and has been seen by hundreds of millions of people. Before it, Carlson was criticized for speaking to Putin at all – and afterwards, for not asking the Russian president certain things.
“I think your Carlson – I say yours, since he’s a member of your profession – is a dangerous man,” Putin told journalist Pavel Zarubin on the sidelines of the Future Technologies Forum in Moscow.
“I thought he would be aggressive, ask me sharp questions. I was not just ready for that, I wanted that, so I could give equally sharp answers,” Putin explained. “But he chose a different tactic.”
Carlson ended up patiently sitting through Putin’s lengthy digression into history and “did not give me an occasion to do something I had prepared for,” Putin said. “Frankly speaking, I did not get the full satisfaction from this interview.”
Commenting on reactions to the interview from the West, Putin said it was a good thing that the leaders there watched and listened to what he had to say – but bad that they felt the need to twist his words.
Asked if Carlson could face reprisals in the West, the Russian president pointed out that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange “still sits” in a British prison.
While the US has tried to accuse Assange of revealing state secrets, which is more difficult to pin on Carlson, “anything is possible in today’s US,” Putin said. While this kind of persecution would certainly be a bad thing for Carlson himself, it would be good for the world, because it would reveal the true face of the “liberal-democratic dictatorship” embodied by the ruling class in the US, the president concluded.