On Monday, the Kremlin refused to comment on reports that American TV presenter Tucker Carlson is in Russia for an interview with Vladimir Putin, Reuters reports.

“You can hardly ask us for information about the movements of foreign journalists,” Dmytro Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, said Monday after being asked by Kremlin reporters about Carlson’s presence in Russia and whether he would be interviewed by President Vladimir Putin.

“Many foreign journalists come to Russia every day, many continue to work here, and we welcome it,” Peskov said, adding that “we have nothing to report about the president’s interview with foreign media.”

The famous Russian Telegram channel Mash published a photo of Carlson, who arrived in Moscow in early February, and then the American TV presenter was filmed at a performance in the Bolshoi Theater of the Russian capital.

He was approached by journalists from Izvestia, Russia’s oldest daily newspaper, and told them that he had come to see what was happening in the country and that it “remained to be seen” whether he would interview Vladimir Putin.

Tucker Carlson was the most popular host of Fox News until last April, when the conservative American broadcaster announced that it was parting ways with him “amicably”. But Carlson charged in a video message posted on social media days later that he had been “silenced.”

“Suddenly, the United States has become very similar to a one-party state. It is a depressing finding, but it is not something permanent,” he said, among other things.

Carlson was hired by Fox News in 2009 and in 2016 had his own primetime show, Tucker Carlson Tonight.

In May, he announced he would stream his show on Twitter, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, who has since renamed it “X.”

Carlson, who is considered a vector of Russian propaganda in the United States

After the start of the war in Ukraine, the TV host was accused of spreading Russian propaganda, and the comments he made during his show were widely picked up and translated by Moscow’s state media.

Valeriu Pasha, an expert on disinformation at the anti-corruption organization WatchDog.MD, said in an interview with Insider journalists in April 2022 that the American TV host will be banned from the Republic. Moldova because of his pro-Russian comments.

Carlson was accused of pushing many of the Kremlin’s propaganda lines before Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a “special military operation” on February 24, questioning, among other things, why the United States should stick with Ukraine and not Russia, “which is a very important bigger country “.

He even declared that he “stands on the side of Russia” in the dispute with Ukraine, the broadcast of individual fragments of his monologues has become common for Russian television since March of last year. Among other things, he later questioned the US government’s military aid to Ukraine and accused Kyiv of persecuting the country’s Christians.

Tucker Carlson compared Zelensky to the manager of a strip club

Commenting on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi’s first visit to the US in December 2022, Carlson compared him to “strip club manager” and crypto-swindler Sam Bankman-Fried, who was later convicted of the collapse of the FTX trading platform.

“Remember when Sam Bankman-Fried showed up in Washington wearing a t-shirt and talking gibberish and all the self-proclaimed geniuses hailed him as a hero? The media, Congress, the White House, they all loved this weird little guy named Sam Bankman-Fried. Do you still remember that?” Carlson rhetorically asks the audience.

“In a way, we were reminded of that today when the president of Ukraine arrived at the White House dressed as a strip club manager and started demanding money,” Carlson said at the opening of his show after President Joe Biden congratulated Zelenskyi.

After being fired from Fox News, Carlson was invited by Russia Today to work on the EU-banned TV channel shortly after the start of the invasion of Ukraine.

Last year, he visited Romania to interview British millionaire Andrew Tate, who is accused by the Romanian authorities of human trafficking.