I don’t particularly want to dwell on the carcrash that was Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin, because in doing so I am merely adding to the hype that both men want to swirl around them.
But there are a couple of things that I think are worth exploring, in what the staged performance means for the far-right, for Putin’s support in the US, and for what it tells us about how the public and press are currently reacting to events in Ukraine.
In the run-up to the interview, Carlson boasted that no other Western journalists had bothered to interview Putin since the start of his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This claim was quickly debunked, by CNN, the BBC and even the Russian Government’s press office – there had been many requests from Western journalists to chat to the President, but only Carlson had been granted access.
A normal journalist would ask why this is. Why, out of all the other people in the world, am I being given this access? Am I being someone’s useful idiot? But Carlson’s ego, one assumes, meant he saw nothing in this invite but praise of himself, as opposed to a calculated attempt by Putin to get a willing patsy to air his batshit conspiracy theories and deranged notions of history both to the US and Russia.
The interview itself threw up no surprises - unless you are Tucker Carlson, who said he was surprised why Putin spent a good chunk of the session discoursing on 16th century history in order to justify Russia’s claims to Ukraine. Again, any normal journalist who has spent more than five minutes following the conflict would know that Putin was going to do this. But Carlson didn’t, because he doesn’t actually care.
So yes, there was the long rewriting of history, the pushing of conspiracy theories that this is NATO’s war and that Boris Johnson prevented peace negotiations, as well as the insistence that the war could end in a week… if only Ukraine would submit, of course, to Russian occupation. Carlson didn’t bother to ask about war crimes, or the arrest warrants for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, or the evidence of mass death in Mariupol, or the treatment of prisoners of war, or the torture of civilians in occupied territories, or the rapes in Bucha, or the mass graves in Izium…
Instead, he just provided Putin a platform to pull his weird trick of making himself both victim and strongman. No one learnt anything, no one discovered anything new, no one was challenged except, perhaps, Carlson, who was challenged in arranging his face as Putin insulted him with a smirk.
But that was never the intention of the interview, was it? And if we understand the interview’s intent, we understand that for Putin (if, perhaps, not for Carlson), it was a success. Because it spoke to the people who were willing to believe Putin’s lies and act on his demands for compliance.
People like Republican Senators.
Yesterday, I saw a tweet from Republican Senator Tuberville - sent on 9 Feb - where he praised Carlson’s interview for showing that Putin is open to a peace agreement, and it was “warmongers in D.C who want to prolong the war”. This was why, he continued, he was voting against the aid package to Ukraine.
Senator Tuberville describes himself as “pro life”. And yet, he had nothing to say about the murder of three children in Kharkiv, the same night he sent his tweet. Oleksii, aged 7, Mikhailo, aged 4, and Pavlo, aged 10 months, were killed with their parents by Russian shelling, asleep in their beds when their house was hit and burnt to the ground. He had nothing to say about how Putin’s murderous regime meant that a baby’s body was impossible to identify because his little bones were burnt to ashes. Instead, he and other Republican leaders, have all opted to believe Putin’s lie that these horrific deaths, the violence and brutality wreaked upon Ukraine and its people, are the fault of Washington, of NATO, of Boris Johnson - and that the violence can only be stopped by stopping aid to Ukraine.
The ignorance is astounding. And it is a deliberate ignorance, because anyone thinking for more than two seconds about Putin and his actions would know that the only way to end this war is to stand with Ukraine, to arm Ukraine, to aid Ukraine.
And then there is Trump, who last night spoke in South Carolina and said that he would not protect NATO allies if attacked by Russia, and he would “encourage them [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want”. This statement is, you must understand, completely terrifying. It is sending a message to Putin that, should Trump win in November, he would have free rein to invade more countries, to attack more countries, be that through a full-scale invasion as in Ukraine, or via stealth warfare such as the Skripal poisonings.
Both Putin and Trump are acting from the fascist playbook, here. Putin can say he wants peace and that peace is possible - only if Ukraine submits to occupation. Trump and his Republican supporters can say they want to end the war and stop the warmongers, although only on Putin’s terms of violent occupation. But both, in fact, want a constant state of war – because that is what fascists need, in order to achieve their goals. It is certainly what fascist leaders need in order to maintain their power. Fascism demands a constant state of war, and Putin and Trump are both working to create those circumstances.
It’s important to understand that through the interview and through the South Carolina speech, Putin and Trump are talking to one another. Putin is asking - demanding - things from Trump, via his spinning of conspiracy theories and his lies about his aims in Ukraine, and who he blames for his own continuing aggression, violence and murders. And Trump is submitting to those demands. He is signalling to Putin that he will be Putin’s man in the White House. He is openly saying that should he win, the US will be a friend to Russian fascism and aggression.
There is another issue I want to raise re the Trump speech, and that is about his relationship with the current UK Conservative Party.
In recent weeks, two former Prime Ministers, as well as prominent Tories such as Jacob Rees-Mogg have come out in favour of Trump winning in November. Liz Truss said she wants to see a “return” to “conservative leadership in the US”, while Johnson said Trump could be “a big win for the world”. Rees-Mogg said he would “prefer” Trump in the White House as he is “better disposed” to the UK.
Now, for all my dislike of Johnson and everything that he stands for, he did the right thing on Ukraine in 2022. But that is trashed, should he support Trump to win the White House.
Any UK politician or political figure endorsing or supporting Trump after last night’s speech is not only failing to stand with Ukraine in its fight for freedom and democracy, they are allying with a man who would allow for Putin’s untrammelled aggression across Europe. Last night’s speech, and its relationship to the Carlson interview, put Trump as Putin’s man. Anyone who believes in democracy, in freedom, in the values that Ukraine is fighting for, for all of Europe, cannot stand with Trump.
I could go even further and say that support for Trump is now a threat to national security. After all, he is, in this speech, giving the green light to Putin’s current and future aggression, after Putin was implicated in murders on UK soil in the Litvinenko and Skripal poisonings.
Regular readers know how much I love Kharkiv. Recently I learned that Makers Cafe in the city, where me and my fixer hid in the bathroom during the missile attacks in September, was damaged by Russian shelling last month. The bombardment of Kharkiv has been relentless, and it breaks my heart to see this pain and death in this wonderful city.
So I want to end this short, slightly rambling, essay with a note about how frustrating it is to see so much chatter on my Twitter timeline about Putin and Carlson, and barely any response to the murders of three children this weekend. Because while we analyse and speculate and discuss and debate what the interview meant or didn’t mean, Putin is ordering his forces to kill Ukrainian children. That is his intention, that is his goal. To distract us from the daily deaths of Ukrainian people.
Oleksii, aged 7, Mikhailo, aged 4, and Pavlo, 10 months. Remember them.
This photo is from Izium
An announcement
I am sure you all know by now, via the social media gossip channels, but this week I started my new job at openDemocracy where I have joined the UK Investigations Team as Senior Investigative Reporter.
I have a few broad themes I am planning to deep-dive into over the next 12 months and I am super excited to be taking on this challenge.
As regular readers may remember, it was not the easiest year for me last year on the whole job front, and I am really proud of what I managed to achieve from hitting a bit of a professional rock-bottom, to thriving as a freelancer with multiple national newspaper headlines, to getting a top job at a top investigative news outlet. So yay, here’s to me!
Obligatory book plug
Of course, one of my big achievements of 2023 was my book coming out!
And it’s still out, and you can still buy it! 20% off when you get it direct from Verso.
What I’m writing
Quite a few for you this week…
For The Dial:
England’s New Surveillance Regime Over Reproductive Rights
For the i:
‘Every day there’s a new body’: Kenya’s wave of deadly violence against women
For the Observer:
‘The waiting is terrible, I wake up screaming’: thousands living in limbo amid UK asylum backlog
The ‘what I’m writing’ section will be a bit sparse from now on, as I move to long-term investigations, but I am keeping up my SubStack to write mostly about abortion and Ukraine.
What I’m loving
There was only one really obvious choice for this week’s spotlight on an awesome investigation, which is Patrick Radden-Keefe in the New Yorker writing about the mysterious death of a teenager in London.
A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld
But I also wanted to give a shout-out to my “media pal'“ Chaminda Jayanetti in today’s Observer writing about the DWP and its treatment of severely mentally ill people:
‘Seriously ill’ mental health inpatients told to attend jobcentre or risk losing benefits
And to my new employers at openDemocracy for this report by Mael Galisson into deaths in the Channel:
The silent serial killer: 391 deaths in 25 years at the UK border
What I’m reading
LOADS TO CATCH UP ON
I finished Dead Souls by Gogol.
I quite enjoyed Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan
I read the first three Tudor Queens novels by Alison Weir because I love a bit of Tudor historical fiction.
I absolutely, head over heels, fell in love with Helen Palmer’s Pleasure Beach
And found much to enjoy in Gerald Murnane’s Inland
I also read Fiona Hill’s impressive memoir/call to action There is nothing for you here
I am also reading We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins.
Oh, and I read Kirsty Sedgeman’s On Being Unreasonable for an event we did together at Book Haus.
What I’m watching
Hey if you thought Saltburn was a bit too tame, then may I recommend Triangle of Sadness
That’s it for this week! Thank you for reading.
Ciao ciao!