Tucker Carlson interviewed Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week.
Gavriil Grigorov/Reuters
Tucker Carlson said Vladimir Putin was “a couple hours late” for their Kremlin interview this week.Making people wait is a power move often used by the Russian president, experts say.Putin launched into a lengthy revisionist history of Russia that Carlson said “annoyed” him.
Russian President Vladimir Putin pulled a power move on Tucker Carlson that set the stage for the former Fox News host getting steamrolled.
In a post-interview reaction clip, Carlson said Putin was “a couple hours late” for his two-hour interview with the Russian leader in the Kremlin this week.
Making world leaders wait is a tactic Putin has regularly used as a power play to show dominance over his guests.
Putin had former President Donald Trump wait for an hour before a summit in Helsinki in 2018.
He was about 50 minutes behind schedule for a meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican in 2015, per Reuters.
And he also held then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel waiting for more than four hours at a private lunch in 2014, per Radio Free Europe.
Carlson was the latest victim of Putin’s power play, losing command of the interview released on Thursday.
He said that Putin “launched into an extremely detailed history going back to the 9th century of the formation of Russia, from the tribes into a nation, and Ukraine’s part in that.”
In the interview, Putin claimed there was no such thing as a Ukrainian nation. He said Ukrainians were really Russians rebranded by different political players in an effort to undermine Russia’s authority over its borders with European nations, according to a report about the interview by the Institute for the Study of War.
Putin “rewrote centuries of history to this effect,” the institute added.
His lengthy answers “annoyed” Carlson, who said: “I thought it was filibustering.”
Jonathan Eyal, a Russia expert at the Royal United Services Institute, previously told Business Insider that Putin’s strategy indicates “more or less how seriously he takes you, or how pleased he is with you.”
Making someone wait is actually Putin’s sign of approval, Eyal said in 2018, after Trump waited for an hour to meet the Russian leader: “I think that this is a backhanded compliment.”
Lyudmila Putina, Putin’s ex-wife, said his lateness on their first dates reduced her to tears, The Guardian reported.
While she said she was always on time, she said Putin was “always” late. “An hour and a half was normal. I remember standing around in the metro. The first 15 minutes of lateness are OK, half an hour also fine. But when an hour goes by and he’s still not there, you start crying,” she told the outlet.
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