Ukrainian Americans Protest California Church Talk By Putin Defender Tucker Carlson

A group of Ukrainian Americans and their supporters gathered outside a conservative Christian megachurch in San Diego County this past weekend to protest a talk inside by Tucker Carlson . The Fox News host has repeatedly attacked Ukraine and defended Russian President Vladimir Putin .

The protest at the Awaken Church in San Marcos, California, was held Saturday just as horrifying images from Ukraine showed civilians, some of them bound, shot dead  in Bucha and other towns after Russian troops withdrew.

President Joe Biden and other world leaders are calling Putin a war criminal, and Biden demanded that Putin stand trial for the atrocities .

Yet Carlson has often supported Putin on air. A former official for the Reagan administration said last month that she almost has a “stroke” listening to Carlson as he “apologizes” for Putin “on his show nearly every night.”

The conservative pundit’s comments have been so Putin-positive that his videos air repeatedly on Russian TV. The Kremlin asked state-controlled Russian media to highlight Carlson’s broadcasts “as much as possible,”  according to a leaked Russian government memo obtained by Mother Jones .

The protesters in San Marcos lined up strollers on Saturday to highlight the deaths of 150 children in the Russian invasion.

“Children are dying in Ukraine ; this is why we have all the strollers and kids’ shoes and kids’ toys, representing every child that’s been killed in the last month,” Mira Rubin of the San Diego cultural museum House of Ukraine told CBS News 8. “Innocent citizens are dying in Ukraine.”

Protester Sergiy Korelov said: “It’s not OK. We need to have empathy . If somebody gets violated on the street, if somebody gets abused on the streets, we as humans, we have to react. So that’s my message to Tucker Carlson: React —with empathy, compassion, as a human being.”

Watch a segment about the protest below.

Carlson could not be reached for comment. Awaken Church did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.