Russian Media Scrambles to Bury Putin's Tucker Carlson Interview Gaffes

Vladimir Putin gives an interview to U.S. talk show host Tucker Carlson at the Kremlin in Moscow on February 6, 2024. It has been reported that parts of the interview were edited out.

Kremlin-controlled media corrected a mistake that Vladimir Putin made about World War II in his interview with Tucker Carlson.

Interjections by the former Fox News anchor during his interview released on Thursday were also cut, it was reported, and a version viewed online omitted a controversial segment in which the Russian president spoke about Adolf Hitler.

The fallout from the interview continues as the American anchor faced criticism that he did little to challenge the Russian president, especially during monologues about Russian history that he used to justify his full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

In one part of the interview, Putin made a factual error in describing an alleged encounter with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, when according to the Kremlin website, Carlson asked him about whether the Ukrainian president had “the freedom to negotiate a resolution to this conflict.”

Putin replied: “It’s difficult for me to judge” and he said that Zelensky’s “father fought against the fascists, the Nazis, during World War II.”

One of the justifications Putin has given for the war he started was to rid Ukraine of Nazis, whose alleged presence and influence has been dismissed as nonsense by Kyiv and the international community.

Putin continued: “Once I talked to him about this. I said, ‘Volodya, what are you doing? Why do you support neo-Nazis in Ukraine today when your father fought against fascism?’ where during what Moscow calls the Great Patriotic War fought by the USSR against Germany, he was a “a front-line soldier.”

Zelensky’s father, Oleksandr was not born until 1947, two years after the war ended, although his father—the Ukrainian president’s grandfather, Semyon, did fight, investigative Russian language outlet Agentstvo noted.

As of Monday, the Kremlin website retained the word “father” in its transcript of the interview, but Agentstvo, reported that state outlets TASS, Lenta.ru and tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda had replaced the word “father” with “grandfather” the morning after the broadcast.

“This suggests that at least some media outlets understood at the time of publication that Putin had made a mistake and tried to correct it,” Agentstvo said.

“By Sunday evening, viewers were shown an already censored version of the president’s words, where he does not talk about either Zelensky’s father or grandfather,” it added, noting how the change had been made for Russia 1 TV channel.

Russian media platform RTVI said that some of Carlson’s questions were also cut from the Kremlin website, such as when the American presenter followed Putin’s speech about a millennium of history with “I’m not sure it’s relevant.”

A version of the interview that was widely seen online on OTC Live, a Russian YouTube channel, omitted Putin’s response to a question about Poland and Ukraine that mentioned Adolf Hitler.

The Russian president had said that Poland “forced” Hitler into aggression by being “uncooperative” with Nazi demands to take territories including the Polish city of Gdańsk, then known as Danzig.

There is no evidence to support Putin’s claim that Hitler had “no choice” but to invade Poland, and The National WWII Museum says that the German leader had conducted false-flag operations to set the stage for the invasion of 1939.

Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski wrote on X that Putin was “paranoid” and called it “shocking” that Carlson gave the Russian leader a platform to spread his false claims.

Tetiana Hranchak, a visiting assistant teaching professor at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs who fled Kyiv at the start of the war, told Newsweek that Putin wanted to give the interview to spread distorted narratives of his invasion.

With a lack of cross-party consensus around further aid for Ukraine in the U.S., she said Putin “emphasizes this is not your war, it is so far from you, you have other matters besides Ukraine.

“However, for Russians, his propagandists have other messages, about war with the collective West, about the redesign of the world and the restoration of imperial greatness.”

Newsweek has contacted the Kremlin and the Tucker Carlson Network for comment.

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