Amanpour pushes back on Tucker Carlson's claim about Putin interview

Moving to Russia and Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson has now interviewed Vladimir Putin. He made an inaccurate claim that no other Western journalist has bothered to try to interview Vladimir Putin. What do people need to know ahead of this interview being released? Well, you know, of course that is so ridiculous that even Vladimir Putin's press spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, very powerful man in the Kremlin, close associate of Putin, said that that wasn't true because he knows that all of us have been knocking down his door to try to get such an interview. But he said, well, maybe Carlson didn't know that. That's the sort of nonsense that Carlson is trying to justify this interview. But let me just read for you what some Russian journalists have said, if I can find that in fact. I will look for it. Basically, somebody like Evgenia Albats, who is a prominent journalist, has been very angry at this notion that only Carlson can interview Putin. She said, unbelievable, I'm like hundreds of Russian journalists who have had to go into exile to keep reporting about the Kremlin's war against Ukraine. The alternative was to go to jail. And then she adds a little bit of an expletive against Tucker's position there. But I think what's really important to know is Tucker Carlson suggests that the American people, the rest of the West, don't understand Putin, don't understand the Russian military action, the war, the invasion. Well, again, that's clearly untrue because if you saw polls in the United States and around the world, even at the UN, everybody understood that this was an illegal invasion of a democratic and sovereign state. And the polls were very, very much, and these are people, not journalists, for the defense of Ukraine and the values it is upholding for all of us. And that is a fact. Now, obviously, the longer it goes, the more difficult it is to keep up that support, particularly as you've just been reporting the unbelievable shenanigans that are going on in the U.S. Congress that simply will not send support to a country that is trying to fight not just for its values but for all of our security. So I think that Tucker Carlson, as you know, has said over the years many, many things that are very supportive of Vladimir Putin, even after the annexation of Crimea, suggested that Putin was never a threat to the United States or to U.S. interests, has called Zelensky an authoritarian and a dictator, worse than, you know, is as bad as Lenin, etc. So, you know, this stuff just doesn't hold up. Why he's doing this interview now, obviously, for the Kremlin, it makes sense if they want to talk. It's a friendly voice. But we will keep trying our best to actually commit journalism. Yeah. We'll never stop trying, Christiane. Thank you for all that this morning.