It is not easy to share a table with world leaders, and even harder to look malevolent and authoritarian power in the eyes — a stinging lesson learned by two editors of the Financial Times in Moscow last week.
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is a notoriously hard man to interview. He is ideologically ambiguous, intellectually flexible and cunning. He is also well-prepared, well-trained by the Soviet KGB, and comes with a strong grasp of facts, fictions and outright propaganda that he can exploit.
While some world leaders are playing a game of chess, Putin is instead engaged in the judo martial art, especially seen in interviews, where he ducks and weaves around his opponent, looking for an opportunity to turn the tables and take control.
In their 90-minute, June 26 interview with Putin at the Kremlin, FT editors Lionel Barber and Henry Foy didn’t appear to have control at any point. They were outmatched and outmuscled, ceding the floor to Putin as he transformed the interview into a largely uninterrupted chance to dissect Western values, demolish the idea of liberalism and champion anti-democratic, far-right ideologies in the West.
This so-called interview, filled with smiles, laughter, softball questions and sycophantic agreements was an embarrassment to journalism. It is not how world leaders, especially brutal tyrants, should be interviewed.
It was also an insult to countless Kremlin victims, and those struggling for liberty and life in the face of Russian aggression.
The interviewers would allow us to forget that Putin’s hands are stained with the blood of thousands of Ukrainians, Syrians, Georgians and the passengers of Malaysian Airlines flight 17. Barber and Foy had nothing to ask about these issues.
Veteran journalists should know that an opportunity to interview Putin at length must be a chance to hold his feet to the fire and bring him to task. It is the moral and professional responsibility of journalists to speak truth to authority and hold the powerful to account. The FT failed.
But at least Putin did bring some of his toxic, corrupting philosophies more clearly into the light, declaring liberalism and multiculturalism obsolete — a lazy metaphor for what was really an attack on freedom, liberal values and Western-style democracy.
Unsurprisingly, the Kyiv Post — and most Ukrainians — do not agree with Vladimir Putin. It is tyranny, corruption and the oligarchy that is obsolete.
The truth is that Putin is fearful of progress, hateful and bitter towards the Western world — and more than anything he should fear his own people, whom the Kremlin machine relentlessly oppresses. But in the words of Charlie Chaplin: the hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people.
