Russian president takes aim at the ex-Fox News host, saying he had wanted hard questions during an interview, “but he chose a different tactic.”
He was ready for a heavy hitter, but he got a bantamweight.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday said he “didn’t get complete satisfaction” from last week’s interview with Tucker Carlson, because the right-wing U.S. pundit failed to take him to task.
Speaking to Russian state TV, Putin said he had thought Carlson was a dangerous person, “because I honestly thought he would be aggressive and ask so-called sharp questions. And I wasn’t just ready for that, I wanted it, because it would have given me the opportunity to respond sharply in kind … But he chose a different tactic.”
Putin, who famously enjoys trolling Western figures, smirked while describing Carlson’s passivity to Russian TV propagandist Pavel Zarubin: “He tried to interrupt me several times, but still, surprisingly for a Western journalist, he turned out to be patient and listened to my lengthy dialogues, especially those related to history, and didn’t give me reason to do what I was ready for. So frankly, I didn’t get complete satisfaction from this interview.”
During the over two-hour-long Carlson interview, Putin delivered a 20-plus-minute soliloquy about Russian history and mocked Carlson over his failed attempt to join CIA."
