(NewsNation) — Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, in part one of a wide-ranging conversation with NewsNation anchor Chris Cuomo, explained why he decided to do a widely-criticized interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Overall, what Carlson said he learned from the interview is that Russia “is an extremely complicated political environment.”
“These are the people who dominate world chess, and so their politics are incomprehensible to me — so what’s actually happening? I mean, I’ve been in a lot of countries and covered a lot of stuff abroad, and the one thing I’ve learned is you actually don’t really know what’s going on,” he said.
The Associated Press reports Carlson barely questioned Putin during the two-hour interview and let the Russian leader talk unchallenged about his country’s history.
“I don’t disagree that sitting across from Putin and getting into a shouting match, or whatever, is going to bear much fruit for people. But you made choices,” Cuomo said to Carlson in a discussion that aired on NewsNation Monday.
One of these choices Carlson made, Cuomo said, was not asking about Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who later died.
“Don’t you feel that if you are gonna go and sit with someone like that you have to hold them to account for things that matter — the fact that he may have murdered somebody or a lot of people?” Cuomo asked.
The Kremlin has said Navalny’s death in a remote Arctic penal colony was from natural causes, while Western leaders are pointing the finger at Putin. Navalny had been one of Putin’s biggest critics.
Carlson said to Cuomo that “Ukranians say he didn’t kill Navalny,” although the country’s officials and Navalny’s family have said the opposite.
“Now what’s going on there? I can’t even guess,” Carlson said.
To Carlson, Cuomo asked, “Who killed him then? Guy looks good one minute, the next minute he’s dead.”
After Navalny’s death, U.S. President Joe Biden said Washington doesn’t know exactly what happened, “but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something Putin and his thugs did.”
Carlson said he had a “bunch of Navalny questions” for Putin but ultimately decided that whatever he asked wouldn’t “move the ball at all.”
“There’s a war going on that is resetting the world. I’m not for throwing your political opponents in prison,” he said.
Carlson argued that the federal government is playing “the hardest-edged possible politics” in Russia, and “using the U.S. dollar” as well as sanctions to do so.
“What is the message to the rest of the world? Get the hell away from the United States,” Carlson said.
This is something that will change American history as well as “world history,” he said.
“I don’t think Americans understand that,” Carlson said. “And I want them to, and I want to hear what Putin’s thinking is.”
Carlson acknowledged that he didn’t know if he achieved that or not. Media outlets were critical of the interview, noting that Putin, during his interview with Carlson, was not asked about war crimes Russian troops have been accused of in Ukraine or his relentless crackdown on dissent, the Associated Press wrote.
Even Putin himself later told a Russian TV interviewer that he had hoped Carlson would have behaved more “aggressively and ask so-called sharp questions” during the interview, according to Reuters.
But to Cuomo, Carlson said, “I don’t care” what the media thinks of him.
“What I didn’t want to do is try to convince other journalists, for whom I have no regard at all, for the most part, that I’m a good person. I don’t care what they think of me. They call me a Nazi all the time, which I’m not, so their views are totally immaterial,” Carlson said. “I just want to focus on what I want to focus on and if you don’t like it, don’t watch it. That’s my view.”
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.