Tucker Carlson’s claim to have secured an interview with Zelensky denied by Kyiv

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s spokesperson Serhiy Nykyforov has rejected a claim made by right-wing US former talk show host Tucker Carlson that he hand secured an interview with the Ukrainian leader, news outlet Politico reported on Thursday.

Suggesting that Carlson “check with his sources in the FSB more carefully,” Nykyforov denied the claim on Facebook, writing that “the president of Ukraine has a completely different schedule, and Tucker Carlson is not on it.”

The riposte followed an announcement by Carlson that he had secured an interview with the Ukrainian leader. “Looks like we’ve got the Zelensky interview,” he wrote on X, adding, “Coming soon we hope.”

“We’ve been trying for two years, and with particular intensity after interviewing Putin in February,” Carlson wrote, adding that the interview would allow him “to bring Americans much-needed information about the conflict that’s completely reshaping their country’s position in the world”.

Carlson, a talk show host for right-wing US broadcaster Fox News until he was unceremoniously fired in April last year, has a long history of disparaging Zelensky, who he has called the “celebrity-endorsed dictator of the most corrupt nation in Europe” and “a dangerous authoritarian who has used a hundred billion in US tax dollars to erect a one-party police state in Ukraine”.

In February, Carlson raised eyebrows after he travelled to Moscow to record a two-hour sit-down interview with Vladimir Putin, which was widely ridiculed for Carlson’s unwillingness to challenge or even fact check Putin’s ahistorical claims, and included an almost-30-minute uninterrupted lecture by Putin on Russian history.