While I was in Moscow last December, people who had just been to the ghastly front-lines in Ukraine recounted stories of how members of the same family were often seen fighting against one another from dueling trenches: blood relatives of the same Slavic clan speaking the same language—Russian—hurling explosives in opposite directions over the same desolate no-man's-land.
How anyone could look at this situation and come away with triumphalist notions of war grandeur, rather than a deep sense of avoidable tragedy, seemed like a cruel farce. So that was exactly the sentiment I conveyed to the Russian hosts of the meeting I attended, some of whom did harbor such triumphalist notions (those present included a senior-ranking Kremlin official).
"Chatham House" rules were stipulated for the gathering, precluding me from making any public disclosure of the attendees' identities or what anyone else specifically said. But I can certainly reveal what I said: that the war in Ukraine was an obvious disaster for all involved. The brutish, World War I-style trench warfare that had become the war's grisly signature cannot possibly warrant any other conclusion. That was a message I was happy to deliver in Moscow, just as I'd be happy to do in Kyiv, and had previously done in Washington, D.C.
I explained to my hosts that when the opportunity to come to Russia arose, I accepted without hesitation, because bilateral relations between the world's leading nuclear superpowers had perilously deteriorated since the invasion of Ukraine. The grand cosmological treatises articulated by some of the meeting's participants, about how Russia was waging a godly war of civilizational purification, were both wildly over-aggrandized and beside the point, I argued: A giant, man-made calamity was unfolding in real time, and it could always get exponentially worse given the ever-present risks of escalation.
Obviously Russia, as the invading power, bore a major share of the culpability for this disaster. But sadly for those who crave comforting moral simplicity, the Russia/Ukraine war is not the first in world history with a single cause or a sole culprit.
Even getting to Russia in the first place required making a special trek to the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., where I received a "humanitarian" visa with strict limitations for the duration of my stay. Though it would be pompous to claim I was embarked on anything like a "humanitarian" mission—I had no plans to deliver medical supplies to the Donbas, for instance—there did strike me to be a kind of humanitarian value in doing whatever small part I could to maintain some semblance of interpersonal exchange between the two countries, which, lest anyone forget, maintain the world's two largest nuclear arsenals. (The last remaining mutual arms control mechanism was ominously suspended in 2023.) A top Russian official remarked that relations with the United States were at a lower point than any time since the founding of the Soviet Union; even basic diplomatic communications between the two governments had become negligible to non-existent.
Yet these obstacles to normal U.S.-Russia engagement only heighten the obligation for any respectable journalist, if presented with the opportunity, to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin without a second thought. It's worth recalling that Putin was relatively accessible to American media before the Ukraine war broke out. Take this 82-minute interview in 2021 with NBC News, or this similar-length 2019 interview with the Financial Times.
Can anyone imagine Joe Biden sitting for an interview with Russian journalists for any length of time at all, even before relations dived post-invasion? He barely does interviews in the United States!
Of course, whatever interview Tucker Carlson might conduct with Putin is subject to reasonable scrutiny. There is a balance to be struck between hyper-moralizing condemnation, gratuitous flattery, and appropriately probing interrogation—though few journalists manage to strike this balance. (Watch almost any interview with Donald Trump: they are all either total sycophancy or "Resistance" shrieking.)
But it's tediously, unbearably stupid for anyone to suggest that Carlson, simply by virtue of going to Russia with the intent of interviewing Putin, should therefore be assumed guilty of treason—probably the most overused smear in the present American political lexicon.
Anyone who blurts out that tired charge has probably not had an original thought since at least the Steele Dossier, and is clearly just interested in monomaniacal villainization of the world leader they love to revile—not ascertaining information to improve public understanding of critical world affairs.
As we speak, Congress is lurching toward eventual passage of the largest disbursement of U.S. military "aid" since the beginning of the war, justified by the endlessly recycled premise that if Putin is not defeated in Ukraine, he's sure to rampage through the rest of Europe, fulfilling his destiny as the latter-day incarnation of Hitler.
Isn't it about time someone journalistically scrutinizes that proposition by going directly to the source?
Over the past two years, the U.S. media has overflowed with cheap war punditry purporting to divine what's going on inside Putin's head, or what he really "wants." Now, ironically, many of those same pundits will throb with fury that a journalist has finally done something other than uselessly speculate.
Michael Tracey is an independent reporter with Substack. Find him at www.mtracey.net. Follow him on Twitter @mtracey.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
