“He knows a lot about Serbia and said he is planning to come to Serbia in mid-2024 and that he extremely respects [Serbian] President Aleksandar Vučić,” Brnabić said this week. “And I told him I look forward to seeing him.”

The Serbian PM added that she had “congratulated” Carlson on “his courage to do a really phenomenal interview” with Russian President Vladimir Putin in defiance of “censorship.”

Carlson’s two-hour sit-down with Putin earlier this month was the first interview the Russian president granted to a Western journalist since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The American commentator was widely criticized for failing to hold Putin to account on issues such as Moscow’s atrocities in Ukraine, and the silencing of the Russian leader’s opponents by the Kremlin.

It wasn’t the first time Carlson has cozied up to a European strongman. In 2021, he broadcast his show from Budapest, interviewing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and riding in a military helicopter to inspect a border fence.

He returned to the Hungarian capital in 2023, where he briefly met with Serbian President Vučić.