Carlson called a traitor over his cosy Putin interview

A RIGHT-WING US TV host was last night branded a ‘traitor’ for flying to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin.

Tucker Carlson’s sit-down with the Russian president, the dictator’s first with any Western journalist since the invasion of Ukraine two years ago, was due to air last night.

Critics said that Carlson, a former host on TV network Fox News, was invited only because he would be sympathetic to Putin, who has refused to be interviewed by mainstream journalists.

The interview is nevertheless a coup for Mr Carlson, who was fired from Fox in April last year.

Mr Carlson claimed that he was the only Western journalist who requested an interview with Mr Putin, but he was met with a wall of criticism from major media organisations.

Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Russia Editor, posted online that the BBC had ‘lodged several requests with the Kremlin in the last 18 months’ which were always rebuffed.

The Financial Times’s Moscow bureau chief, Max Seddon, said Mr Carlson’s claims that Western journalists were not reporting on Russia were rich because two American journalists from the Wall Street Journal and Radio Free Europe are currently in jail for doing just that.

Russian journalist Yevgenia Albats pointed out that she and hundreds of her colleagues had had to go into exile to keep reporting on the war, while Carlson was ‘shooting from the $1,000 Ritz suite in Moscow’.

Among those criticising Mr Carlson was Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican representative, who called him a ‘traitor’.

Hillary Clinton, who lost to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, said: ‘He’s what’s called a “useful idiot”.’