The Kremlin has declined to say whether Vladimir Putin would grant an interview to Tucker Carlson, the far-right American journalist, after the former Fox News presenter was spotted in Moscow.
“We can hardly be expected to provide information on the movement of foreign journalists,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, said when asked about speculation that Carlson was in Russia to interview the Russian president.
“Many foreign journalists come to Russia every day, many continue to work here, and we welcome this,” Peskov said. “We have nothing to announce in terms of the president’s interviews to foreign media.”
The Mash Telegram channel published a picture on Saturday of Carlson at the Bolshoi theatre in Moscow attending the Spartacus ballet, creating rumours of an interview with Putin.
Carlson, 54, who reportedly arrived in Moscow last Thursday, has since been photographed in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels.
When asked on Sunday by a journalist from the Russian state-controlled Izvestia outlet about his visit to Moscow, Carlson said he “wanted to talk to people, look around, and see how it’s doing ... and it’s doing very well”. Asked if he was in Moscow to interview Putin, Carlson said: “We’ll see.” He then smiled.
Carlson was the most popular host at Fox News before he was abruptly fired last April. Since leaving, he has used X, formerly Twitter, to distribute a rightwing talkshow, Tucker on X.
He became a popular figure in Moscow during the Donald Trump presidency when he regularly mocked allegations that Russia had intervened in the US presidential election.
Carlson has since echoed many of the Kremlin’s talking points in its war against Ukraine, slamming Washington for its support of Ukraine while suggesting the west is to blame for the invasion.
In his shows on Fox News and X, Carlson has described the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, as a “dictator” and “sweaty and rat-like” while once stating that he was “rooting for Moscow”.
His pro-Putin and anti-Ukrainian rhetoric has been lauded in Moscow where his clips have become a fixture on Russian state television, with local propagandists using them as evidence that influential people in the US are sympathetic to Putin’s military campaign.
Carlson recently claimed he previously tried to interview the Russian president but was “stopped” by the US government.
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“Well, you’re not allowed to hear Putin’s voice, ‘coz why?’” Carlson complained to the Swiss magazine Die Weltwoche.
Before the war in Ukraine Putin occasionally gave interviews, but he largely stopped speaking to foreign press after the invasion, which turned him into a pariah in the west.
While Carlson’s reasons for travelling to Moscow are not immediately clear, his visit divided opinion among US politicians.
Responding to a picture of Carlson travelling to Moscow, Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican Illinois representative, wrote on X that Carlson was a “traitor”.
However, the far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene defended the prospect of an interview. “We have a free press in this country and its [sic] people like Tucker Carlson who we depend on to speak the truth,” she wrote on X.
