MoscowSubwayTucker CarlsonVladimir Putin

Since his two-hour-long sit-down with Vladimir Putin, Tucker Carlson has been taking his viewers on a Lonely Planet tour of Moscow. Marvelling at low grocery prices and the efficiency of Moscow’s subway system, Carlson wondered why the US could not attain something similar. “How does Russia — a ‘gas station with nuclear weapons’,” asked Carlson, “have a subway station that is nicer than anything in our country?”

Unfortunately, Tucker’s praise for Moscow did not appear to feed back to Putin, who told state broadcasters this week that he “didn’t get complete satisfaction” from the interview because “I honestly thought he would be aggressive and ask so-called sharp questions…But he chose a different tactic.” Even if Putin is trolling Carlson, as a New York resident I certainly sympathise with his subway critique: a first-world city with third-world infrastructure.