Tucker Carlson Returns to Moscow to Interview Russian Foreign Minister

Tucker Carlson has travelled to Moscow to interview the Russian Foreign Minister, expressing concern at a lack of communication is leading the world to a potential “nuclear holocaust”, and stating his anger at the U.S. government preventing him from hearing both sides of the story by blocking an interview with Ukrainian President Zelensky.

Outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden is accelerating towards the possibility of nuclear war between America and Russia, “back channel” de-escalation methods developed during the Cold War are being ignored, and the U.S. government has blocked repeated requests to interview Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, broadcaster Tucker Carlson said as he revealed a new Russia interview overnight. Speaking in a trailer for the forthcoming broadcast with Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s top diplomat, Carlson revealed he’d travelled to Moscow for the discussion and that he’d found the interview “absolutely fascinating”.

The Russian government confirmed the interview has been recorded, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova saying it was “quite long, over an hour and a half” and that it would have to be translated before broadcast. On the topics covered, she said the discussion touched on the state of Russian-U.S. relations, the Ukraine War, and “global geopolitics”.

Zakharova also made clear the Russian government’s own view on the nature and purpose of the war was expressed by her boss Lavrov, including allegations — common to Russia’s rhetoric over the conflict — that Ukraine was committing terrorist attacks against civilians.

The interview with Foreign Minister Lavrov comes ten months after Carlson became the first Western journalist to have a sit-down with Russian President Vladimir Putin since the renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Carlson was criticised by many legacy media outlets for even speaking to Putin, to which he replied at the time: “it’s our job. We’re in journalism. Our duty is to inform people”, and said he was also trying to interview Ukraine’s President Zelensky.

Kyiv later forcefully slapped down the suggestion they’d talk to Carlson at all, implying he was an Russian asset. Yet today Carlson said the limiting factor on having such a conversation with Zelensky himself was not the Ukrainian government, but the United States. Carlson said:

…we’ve also tried for over a year to get an interview with Zelensky, the President of Ukraine. We’ve attacked that from a bunch of different angles, we’ve spoken to a lot of different people around him, had dinner with them, we’ve been in talks continuously. And those efforts have been thwarted by the U.S. government. The American embassy in Kyiv, which our tax dollars pay for, told the Zelensky government no, you may not do the interview. You can talk to CNN, but you can’t talk to us. So we’ve been unable to speak to him.

The likelihood of Carlson coming under fire from the legacy media this time around is also dampened by establishment broadcaster CNN publishing an interview of their own with Lavrov’s subordinate, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov on Wednesday.

Perhaps the key theme in Carlson’s remarks is the importance of communication, both in the sense of allowing journalists to do their jobs to shine light on all players in the Ukraine drama, but also in preventing nuclear war itself by keeping the U.S. and Russia talking to each other. Carlson expressed alarm at the idea that there was no senior person in Washington trying to de-escalate, and that there was no contact between Washington and Moscow whatsoever. He said: “Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, cut off all contact between the U.S. and Russian governments. There is no back channel, there is no conversation, there hasn’t been for more than two years. That’s shocking.”

On the United States suddenly ploughing forward with allowing Ukraine to launch strikes into the Russian hinterland with U.S.-provided missiles after the election of President Trump, Carlson said this was bringing the world closer to nuclear war even than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He said of President Biden’s apparent decision: “It has accelerated ever since and it has reached its apogee so far in the weeks after Trump’s election… just a few weeks ago, the Biden administration, American military personnel launched missiles into mainland Russia and killed at least a dozen Russian soldiers. So we are, unbeknownst to most Americans, in a hot war with Russia, undeclared war.”

Tucker Carlson said the interview would be published “very soon” but did not name a date.

Sergei Lavrov has been the foreign minister of Russia since 2004 and is a career diplomat. As reported at Breitbart News, he has been heavily involved in Russia’s campaign to attempt to dissuade the West from supporting Ukraine through threats of retaliation. He has also appeared abroad as a deputy for President Putin since the Russian head of state was issued with an International Arrest Warrant.

In November, Lavrov criticised President Biden for deliberately trying to “muck things up” for President Trump’s forthcoming second term, saying the outgoing leader was trying to “leave as negative a legacy as possible for the next administration”. In June, he said Russia would consider any NATO troops deployed to Ukraine fair game, stating they “represent a legitimate target for our armed forces”.