Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tore into Tucker Carlson for calling him a “dictator” who has banned free elections, telling Piers Morgan on Tuesday that the former Fox News star should “stop licking” Vladimir Putin’s “a**” and “stop working” for the Russian leader.
The fiery comeback from the president of Ukraine, which has been at war with Russia for nearly three years, followed Carlson’s tense appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored last week that featured the far-right pundit firing off a number of accusations about Zelensky.
The first trait of a dictator is that he is not elected,” Carlson exclaimed while mocking Morgan’s support of the Ukraine leader. “Zelensky is not elected. He has also banned a religious denomination, killed his political opponents, and banned a language group. To me, these all seem like traits of a dictatorship. The governments of the USA and the UK support this dictator.
Speaking at length about Carlson, Zelensky told Morgan that the right-wing commentator was essentially just echoing Putin and engaging in whataboutism by accusing him of being a dictator.
Putin has a narrative on elections, on my legitimacy, on dictatorship. That’s from a person who is 30 years in power! Zelensky exclaimed.
He added: “The bloody dictator, murderer who violated territorial integrity of Ukraine … All that is Putin’s narrative. And regrettably this, this blogger or journalist, whatever he wants to call himself, he unfortunately fully repeats the words of Putin and what he wants. He works for Putin because he wants to lower me to the level of Putin.”
The Ukrainian leader also addressed Carlson’s accusations one by one, starting with the claim that he murdered his political opponents. According to Zelensky, the only thing that was even close was the exile of former Ukrainian lawyer and politician Viktor Medvedchuk.
Nobody killed him. He was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine, and in time, we exchanged him [with Russia] for 200 Ukrainian military personnel,” Zelensky stated. “So I’m not aware of which opponents he speaks. All my opponents are the opposition, all the opposition that was there when I became the president. It is all there in the Ukrainian parliament, and even this party that was the party of Medvedchuk … whom we exchanged, those MPs are in Parliament.
As for Carlson’s dictatorial allegations, which the conservative podcaster ties to Ukraine pausing elections last year, Zelensky cited the ongoing war and implementation of “martial law” as the reason why the nation can’t currently hold elections.
