In the first episode of his new online show since being let go from Fox News, Tucker Carlson pitched a theory that Ukraine may have been responsible for the explosion of a Soviet-era dam in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region.
The Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant dam was destroyed Tuesday morning, releasing at least 150 tons of machine oil into the Dnieper River. Kyiv blamed Moscow for the “terrorist attack,” but Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Ukraine had struck the dam in an attempt to impact Crimea’s water supplies.
Carlson, who was ousted from his primetime slot on Fox News April 24, offered his opinion on who was behind the Kakhovka dam explosion in a video shared to Twitter Tuesday evening. The former host of Tucker Carlson Tonight previously promised to relaunch his show on Twitter, touting it as one of the few “platforms left that allow free speech.”
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“The Kakhovka dam was effectively Russian,” Carlson said shortly after his video’s introduction. “It was built by the Russian government. It currently sits in Russian- controlled territory. The dam’s reservoir supplies water to Crimea, which has been for the last 240 years home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet.”
“Blowing up the dam may be bad for Ukraine, but it hurts Russia more, and for precisely that reason, the Ukrainian government has considered destroying it,” Carlson continued, citing a December report from The Washington Post in which a Ukrainian general spoke of using U.S.-made HIMARS launchers to “test strike” on the Kakhovka dam.
“So really, once the facts start coming in, it becomes much less of a mystery what might have happened to the dam, and a fair person would conclude that the Ukrainians probably blew it up, just as you would assume they blew up Nord Stream, the Russian natural gas pipeline last fall,” Carlson continued. “And in fact, the Ukrainians did do that, as we now know.”
Moscow previously blamed the West for the attack on the Nord Stream pipeline, an allegation that the White House called “utterly false and complete fiction.” In May, however, U.S. intelligence suggested that a pro-Ukrainian group had carried out the attack, but found no evidence of involvement from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky or other Ukrainian government officials, reported The New York Times.
It is not immediately clear who is responsible for the Kakhovka dam’s destruction, and both Russia and Ukraine did not offer evidence after quickly blaming one another. The destruction has raised concerns about the nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, although Ukraine’s state nuclear power company Energoatom said in a statement on Telegram that the situation for now is under control. The explosion also caused a massive flood in the city of Kakhovka and devastated the city’s zoo, killing upward of 300 animals despite rescue attempts.
But Carlson doubled down on his theory Tuesday, pointing a finger at the American media, which “wasted no time this morning accusing the Russians of sabotaging their own infrastructure.” Much of his Twitter broadcast was spent attacking news organizations for always assuming Russian President Vladimir Putin is “evil,” and Carlson instead threw attacks at Zelensky, describing him as a “sweaty and rat-like-comedian-turned oligarch” who is a “persecutor of Christians” and “a friend of Blackrock.”
“But don’t believe your own eyes,” Carlson sarcastically continued. “Actually, Mr. Zelensky is a very good man. The best really, as George W. Bush once noted, he is our generation’s Winston Churchill. Of all the people in the world, our shifty, dead-eyed Ukrainian friend in the tracksuit is uniquely incapable of blowing up a dam.”
Carlson’s entire episode of his Twitter broadcast is just over 10 minutes and, at the time of publication, had over 10.5 million views.
The former primetime host has been repeatedly accused of expressing pro-Kremlin views since Russia first invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Carlson was described by Kremlin-friendly media outlets in April as a “voice of reason” in U.S. mainstream media and was even invited by an anchor on the Russia 1 channel to “come join us” after he was ousted by Fox News.
Newsweek has reached out to Zelensky’s press office via email for comment.