The U.K. Financial Times, or the FT, has faced a mix of praise and criticism following the June 27 publication of an exclusive interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin in which he argued Western values such as liberalism and multiculturalism are obsolete.
Lionel Barber, the FT editor, and Henry Foy, its Moscow bureau chief, both met with Putin on June 26 in the Kremlin for an in-depth, 90-minute interview. Barber asked all but one of the questions.
The exchange between Putin and the FT editors has received praise for highlighting some of the Russian leader’s positions and further exposing how he sees the world.
But it also faced an online backlash from critics who accused the FT of failing to bring Putin to task on a number of important issues, while offering him what many have called a propaganda platform.
Some said that the FT had given Putin soft questions and been too friendly with the Russian leader. They had allowed him to use the interview as a soapbox for his worldviews and to build support for antidemocratic and far-right ideology in the West, critics argued.
Some readers and observers were especially angered that neither FT journalist asked Putin any questions about Ukraine, Crimea, Georgia or the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.
A full transcript of the interview reveals that none of these four topics were mentioned at all by anybody in the room, which has prompted allegations that the Kremlin could have imposed conditions on what would be discussed in the interview.
The ‘end of liberalism?’
During the FT interview, Putin made a number of provocative comments that presented his views as similar to those of the right-wing populist leaders gaining strength in Western politics.
In one part of the interview, the Russian president said that liberalism “has outlived its purpose.”
“Our Western partners have admitted that some elements of the liberal idea, such as multiculturalism, are no longer tenable,” he added.
Putin suggested that European leaders — particularly German Chancellor Angela Merkel — had placed the interests of migrants from the Middle East above those of their own populations. This has brought liberalism “into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population,” he said.
He also praised U.S. President Donald Trump for taking action on the problem of illegal immigration.
“As for the liberal idea, its proponents are not doing anything. They say that all is well, that everything is as it should be. But is it? They are sitting in their cosy offices, while those who are facing the problem every day in Texas or Florida are not happy, they will soon have problems of their own. Does anyone think about them?” Putin told FT, in a comment echoing populist rhetoric against immigration.
Most controversially, Putin claimed that liberalism implies that migrants “can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants must be protected.”
Ignored topics
But while the interview elicited contentious comments from Putin, it also ignored some of the biggest issues destabilizing Russia’s relations with the West: particularly the country’s invasion and occupation of parts of Ukraine in 2014 and of two Georgian regions in 2008.
Russia has illegally occupied the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea since 2014, where widespread human rights abuses – including false imprisonment, torture and murder – have become commonplace. At the same time, Russian-led militants have been waging war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where about 13,000 people have been killed and millions displaced.
Russian forces and proxies have also continued to occupy parts of Georgia since 2008, when Kremlin forces moved into the country amid a conflict that took place “with blatant disregard for the safety of civilians,” according to Human Rights Watch.
On June 19, international investigators announced that three Russian operatives and one Ukrainian militant would face murder charges over the deaths of 298 passengers killed when Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014. Despite investigators holding Moscow responsible, the Kremlin refuses to extradite its nationals to face trial.
Barber and Foy have faced a negative response online for not taking Putin to task on any of these hot topics, preferring instead to dissect Russian relations with China, the West and Putin’s opinions on Western-style democracy.
Foy did not read or respond to a message requesting comment from the Kyiv Post while Barber did not respond to a tweeted message asking to discuss the interview. Neither journalist has addressed or replied to any of the online criticism but the FT published an editorial in which it disagreed with some of Putin’s expressed ideas.
Online backlash
“This is not the way British or American leaders are interviewed,” wrote James Sherr of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute and Chatham House.
“The FT ended up offering a platform. It is as if every question that risked being penetrating was first dissolved in milk. Most of them are gift questions,” he added.
Others drew specific attention to how Ukraine was completely ignored: “The Financial Times conducts a 24-page interview with Putin. Guess what word does not appear once in it? Ukraine, the country which Russia occupies and within which it wages unrelenting war,” wrote Adrian Karatnycky, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
“This isn’t just any interview, but an attack on universal values as enshrined in the UN Human Rights Declaration,” wrote Norbert Röttgen, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the German parliament. “I am shocked to see (the FT) give room to this worst kind of KGB propaganda,” he added.
“Putin’s interview with the FT was like dissemination of informational Novichok against the entire West,” wrote Marko Mihkelson, deputy chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Estonian parliament, in reference to the chemical weapon that Russian operatives allegedly used in the botched assassination attempt of a former Russian spy in the U.K. last year.
Easy interview
Sergei Skripal, the former spy in question, survived the chemical weapon attack against he and his daughter in Salisbury, England, but a bystander, Dawn Sturgess, was killed. The issue was touched upon in the June 26 interview but Barber was again accused of failing to properly question Putin about the event.
“Oh yes. The gentleman who had a drug problem and he died after touching the novichok in the car park,” Barber said, mistakenly identifying Charlie Rowley as the victim who died from Novichok in Salisbury last June. Rowley has survived the incident while his partner, Sturgess, died.
But Putin appeared keen to take control of the interview at every opportunity and did express an opinion on Skripal: “Treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished. I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it … but traitors must be punished,” he said.
Many observers had questions about the conditions under which the interview took place: “Could the FT enlighten us whether it failed to put questions on Ukraine or the destruction of MH17 to Putin during his latest interview because silence on these matters was a precondition for the interview, or was the omission due to the newspaper’s own editorial decision?” questioned Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute in London.
Positive response, debate
The FT interview with Putin also received some praise and sparked intense discussion among Russia watchers.
“This FT (interview with) Putin is so valuable. Confirms that he sees liberalism more or less the way (former Breitbart News executive chairman Steve) Bannon sees it, and views himself as part of a large effort to defeat it, (especially) in Europe,” Ellen Barry, a widely respected former New York Times Moscow bureau chief, wrote on Twitter. “We have assumed as much but never heard it in his words.”
A controversial figure viewed by many as sympathetic to white nationalism, Bannon spent seven months in 2017 as the White House’s chief strategist and as Trump’s senior counselor. He was also included in the U.S. National Security Council for several months, an unprecedented appointment.
Barry also acknowledged that Putin may be pushing an anti-liberal narrative for his own advantage.
And, in the days following the FT interview, journalists and commentators on Russia intensely debated the degree to which Putin’s comments could be taken at face value.
Putin “uses these interviews to troll and send calculated messages. He has no discernible ideology,” wrote Moscow-based journalist Matthew Bodner on Twitter. “At best, he has an instinctive distaste for things and ideas perceived to be Western.”
Oliver Carroll, Moscow correspondent for the Independent, responded, suggesting that Putin indeed has an ideology, albeit one that is flexible.
“After giving it a bit of thought yesterday, I think the Putin-non-ideologue line is trendy, but wrong,” Carroll wrote on Twitter. “He might not have a doctrine. But doctrine and ideology are two different things. He is from most vantage points a harsh conservative.”
However, soon thereafter, Carroll wrote that he had spoken with Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who formerly worked as an aide to the Kremlin. He claimed that Putin previously was a liberal.
“Then it was consensus, mainstream, and he swam in it,” Carroll quoted Pavlovsky as saying. “Now mainstream has changed and he wants to become its leader.”
