Popular US conservative journalist Tucker Carlson has claimed that the US government was blocking his attempts to interview Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky for over a year. Carlson published a video on social media platform X Wednesday (Dec 4), in which he revealed he was back in Moscow to talk with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. He further added in the same video that he had been trying to contact Zelensky to interview him, but the US embassy in Kyiv had ‘told him not to talk to us.’
Carlson said his team “has 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.”
Earlier in June, Carlson said that he had agreed to conduct Zelensky’s interview but the Ukrainian president’s press secretary rejected the claim. “Tucker Carlson should check his sources in the FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service) more carefully,” said the Kyiv official back then.
Carlson is visiting Moscow for the second time since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, having landed there in February and interviewing President Vladimir Putin.
Watch:Russia-Ukraine War: Zelensky Says NATO Membership Could End War
The conversation soon became an internet sensation in the US, with the video amassing more than 14 million views on YouTube and over 185 million views on X. Carlson says his current visit to Moscow was necessitated by Joe Biden administration’s incendiary actions against Russia, especially the long-range strike support to Ukraine.
The American journalist said he wanted to know Russia’s top diplomat’s perspective on how close the world is to a nuclear war and was there still a possibility to pull Russia out of China’s camp in favour of the West.