(Bloomberg) -- Media personality Tucker Carlson, an influential ally of President-elect Donald Trump, said he’d interviewed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, amid speculation over the incoming US administration’s plans to rapidly end the war in Ukraine.
Carlson said he’d met Lavrov to learn whether Trump’s election would “mean an end to this war,” in a video posted on the X social-media platform. He said he also wanted to know if Russia and the US are “headed toward an unprecedented conflict” after President Joe Biden’s outgoing administration allowed Ukraine to use American long-range missiles to strike targets inside Russia.
“We are, unbeknownst to most Americans, in a hot war with Russia, an undeclared war,” Carlson said. “We are closer to nuclear war than in any time in history.”
Trump, a longtime skeptic of continued US military assistance to Ukraine, has vowed to end the war even before he takes office in January. He last week nominated retired General Keith Kellogg as his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia.
Carlson’s trip comes as diplomacy around a possible ceasefire has intensified since Trump’s election, and as Russia continues to make advances on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova confirmed Carlson met Lavrov in a post on her Telegram channel on Wednesday. The 90-minute interview covered topics including Ukraine and US-Russia relations, and will be released in a couple of days, she told Radio Sputnik in Moscow.
The former Fox News personality returned to Russia after interviewing President Vladimir Putin over more than two hours in February. That encounter was widely criticized after Carlson did little to challenge Putin’s account of his decision to invade Ukraine in which he blamed the US and its allies for the war.
The interview was also lampooned on social media after Putin gave a long historical monologue on the roots of the war that went back to the 9th century. Putin later expressed disappointment with his first encounter with Western media since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, complaining that Carlson hadn’t asked tough questions that would have let him give “sharp” replies.
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