There comes a time in every partisan political writer’s life, no matter how big or small his audience is, no matter how moderate or hardline he may be, where he has to call out his own. This, alas, is that time.
So, let me get this question out there right off the top: How credulous or jaded about the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy do you have to be to believe a man on a one-minute video clip released through highly dubious Russian-linked sources who claims he was arrested in Moscow after Ukrainian intelligence paid him $4,000 to assassinate former Fox News journalist Tucker Carlson on his recent visit to Russia?
Because, just to be clear, there are people who believe this claim is credible, or were at least willing to give it air. And not just some crazies, either. Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson of Turning Point USA gave this video credence. So did Simon Ateba, the U.S.-based African journalist who’s been a fly in the ointment of President Joe Biden’s White House.
This is in spite of the fact that any independent verification — and I’m including Russian state media in this, mind you — of this man’s arrest or of the plot itself, as described in the short video clip, is completely lacking.
So, here are the “facts,” at least as we understand them at the moment. A video of a man identified as Vasiliev Pyotr Alexeieovich appeared on the internet sometime Monday. One of the earliest uploads seems to be from a YouTube account in Russian with fewer than 500 subscribers. In the clip, the man claims to be 35 years old and to have been arrested during the preparation for an attack at the Four Seasons Hotel in Moscow.
In the video, he says he was given $4,000 by Ukraine’s intelligence service and was asked to place an improvised explosive device underneath a car. He says he didn’t know the target at the time but that he now knows it was Carlson and that he was “detained at the preparation stage.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRE6mpk6Dy0
The audio is in Russian, but you don’t need to speak Russian to notice this is pretty clearly script-reading, and not particularly good script-reading at that. But I digress.
It’s also unclear where the news initially broke outside of the video dump on social media, as well. One of the first outlets to report it, sometime Monday morning Eastern Time in the United States, was the Finnish-run, pro-Russian fake news website UMV-Lehti.
Do you think this assassination story is true?
(According to a 2022 article by Finnish outlet Seura, translated via computer, the site began in 2015 and is now “based in eastern Ukraine in a Russian-dominated area, distributes Russian state propaganda, conspiracy theories on a daily basis and explains the war started by Russia in the best light.”)
That article contained more or less the facts in the video, reported “straight” as if it were the gospel truth.
Also sometime on Monday, a supposedly Icelandic-based, anti-American, pro-Russian, pro-Palestinian propaganda outlet called The Intel Drop also reported on the video as if there was no reason to doubt it.
A reason to doubt it? The fact it was being reported by The Intel Drop, for starters.
Some sample headlines from the front page of the outlet as of early Tuesday morning: “State Dept downplays reports Talmudic [Israel Defense Force] Rape Squads assaulting both male and female Palestinian children and women.” “US-UK Spy Agencies Trained Nazi Terrorists, Saboteurs to attack Russia Way Before 2022 – Russian MFA.” “Learnt from Apartheid Israel, Brutal Indian forces deploy drones against protesting farmers.” “Children, women death toll in Gaza 6 times higher than Ukraine war: Report.”
Hardly unbiased reporting that Americans should trust, in other words.
Suddenly, however, this started showing up in mainstream U.S. social media discourse — again, as if there was no reason to doubt it:
🚨BREAKING: Russian Counter-Terrorism Unit Thwarts Assassination Attempt on @TuckerCarlson
Source: https://t.co/bK8As8Vmoc pic.twitter.com/9bldZ8MZZZ
— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) February 26, 2024
🚨 A Terrorist attack on Tucker Carlson was reportedly prevented when he visited Russia for his interview with Vladimir Putin and it was allegedly planned by the Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine leading to the arrest of a man named Vasiliev Pyotr Alexievich in Moscow. pic.twitter.com/83XP8AeEtm
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 26, 2024
BREAKING – ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION OF TUCKER CARLSON: A man has just been arrested in Moscow, accused of being paid by Ukrainian intelligence to plant an explosive device on Tucker Carlson’s vehicle and assassinate the prominent American journalist while he was there to interview… pic.twitter.com/aFg5Qeu7cH
— Simon Ateba (@simonateba) February 26, 2024
Do you think the claim is true? https://t.co/fRuOy0Ttvx
— Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) February 27, 2024
Perhaps most problematic was a post from Turning Point USA founder and CEO Charlie Kirk, otherwise reliable in these matters.
“It’s impossible from the outside to verify the credibility of his claim, but remember this Sept 2023 clip from Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, a transgender former US soldier who acts as an English-speaking spokesman for the Ukrainian military: ‘Next week, the teeth of the Russian devils will gnash even harder, and their rabid mouths will foam in uncontrollable frenzy as the world will see a favorite Kremlin propagandist pay for their crimes. This puppet of Putin is only the first. Russia’s war criminal propagandists will all be hunted down and justice will be served,’” he wrote. [Emphasis ours].
“I speculated then that Tucker Carlson was at the top of their hit list. Did Ukraine just attempt to make good on this threat?” Kirk asked.
A Moscow man named Vasiliev Pyotr Alexeievich claims he was recruited and trained by Ukrainian Intelligence to plant an explosive device in the underground parking of the Four Seasons hotel in Moscow to assassinate an unknown target, who he later learned was Tucker Carlson. He… https://t.co/8Lgq9xwEDn pic.twitter.com/Xo80pVD88S
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) February 26, 2024
Probably not, no — and this fails the smell test at both the a priori and a posteriori levels.
At the a posteriori level — i.e., proceeding from the evidence — this is a random video that seems to have emerged from nowhere and was amplified in pro-Russian fake media. Carlson himself had made no comment on X as of Tuesday morning — and you would think, given the situation, the alleged target of the attack would be one of the first to speak out on this matter if there had been an actual arrest.
The only primary source is the video — which could have been taken in an office park somewhere in St. Petersburg, for all we know, not in a Moscow jail. Even pro-Russia English-language state outlets like RT and Sputnik, which would be expected splash this all over their front pages with five different angles on it if it were true, have said not a word about it. It takes roughly five minutes of googling to figure out that UMV-Lehti is a fake news site infamous in the Finnish media sphere and one look at The Intel Drop’s front page to realize that it was about as reliable as a Yugo that’s just competed in a demolition derby.
At the a priori level — i.e., proceeding from reason or deduction — how does this make sense? The United States has sent hundreds of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine, and that’s just us. To assassinate Tucker Carlson, a heavily guarded guest of Vladimir Putin’s government, Ukrainian intelligence supposedly paid a guy $4,000 and gave him an IED that looks like the kind of bomb that even a director of a D-movie with a budget of $200 would have rejected as too obvious and fake?
Furthermore, why would the Ukrainians do it? To make the Kremlin look … better? It’s not as if Vladimir Putin is getting any good press in America or the West, as you might have noticed. If it was a Moscow plan to make Kyiv look bad, why wouldn’t they be splashing it all over the front pages of their main English-language media outlets, RT and Sputnik?
And wouldn’t they have come up with something more convincing than a hostage-video recitation from some random guy who claims he was given a few thousand bucks to assassinate one of the most prominent media figures in the West? If this were true, furthermore, an attempted assassination against any American — even a lightning rod like Tucker Carlson — would unite Americans across the political spectrum in revulsion against the government in Kyiv. Why would they risk it?
As for whether this came from the Kremlin, do keep in mind that Carlson is one of the few American journalists willing to talk to Putin and present the Russian side of things. Faking an attempt on his life to score propaganda points probably isn’t going to make Tucker happy, if that’s indeed what happened — particularly given the flak he’s taken for even visiting Russia in the first place.
The point is, it’s unclear who’s responsible for this — but a moment’s thought combined with the lack of confirmation from any media source that isn’t a troll site, including Russian state media, ought to have given some prominent people on the right significant pause.
I understand that it’s difficult to trust what we hear in the media regarding the Ukraine-Russia war. The Ukrainians were winning and embarrassing the Russians … until they weren’t and needed even more money and munitions, lest they go under. The Ukrainian military was a brave and noble institution … which is now reportedly shanghaiing individuals exempt from service off the street and into recruitment centers for conscription because of dwindling numbers.
It’s perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of what we’re being told about the war and the unblemished righteousness of the Ukrainian cause without becoming credulous. Taking this video as anything more than a stunt — and a relatively low-budget one, at that — is credulity of the worst kind, at least until there’s some kind of independent verification what is being described in the video.
It doesn’t matter whether you emphasize, as Charlie Kirk did, that it was “impossible from the outside to verify the credibility of his claim” before echoing it. The mere sight of it, combined with the radio silence of both Kremlin-run media and Carlson himself, ought to have been enough for conservatives to use proper discernment and give this one a hard pass.
This is the kind of “story” that will only be thrown back in our faces by Ukrainian war-pushers the next time their half-truths about the progress of the war are challenged by anyone on the right — and that, in the end, might have been the whole point.
