It should be evident to anyone who watched it that there was some news value to Tucker Carlson’s interview of Vladimir Putin. The former Fox host might even have moved the ball forward on the unjust detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, whom the Russian government is transparently holding hostage. Carlson pressed the Russian president on this case several times, and Putin implied during the exchange that he wants to trade Gershkovich for a Russian assassin who was jailed for killing a Chechen man in Germany five years ago.
Unfortunately, Carlson didn’t take a similarly dogged approach to pressing Putin on Bucha, the Kyiv suburb made infamous by the Russian military’s mass slaughter of civilians there. In fact, the massacre didn’t come up once during the two-hour interview.
Getting Putin’s comments on Bucha would’ve been newsworthy and of crucial value. The Russian ruler has spoken about it once before, in 2022, to deny the involvement of Russian forces in the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians there. His foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, regularly denies it during his confrontations with foreign journalists. He did this a few times during a press conference at the U.N. headquarters in New York last month, referring to the “staged incident in Bucha, where they showed us human corpses, although we have yet to receive a list with their names.” Lavrov’s comments echo Putin’s assertion that the massacre at Bucha is “fake.”
Their denials are flimsy, not to mention obviously craven. When Ukrainian forces reclaimed the town after a brief occupation by Russian troops at the start of the war, they found corpses strewn across the streets and hidden in cellars. Media reporting indicates that there were signs of torture. Some of the corpses were found with their arms bound. The world saw the aftermath through the lenses of photographers who documented the efforts of morgue workers to collect the bodies; there was no shortage of these images in the press. Subsequent reports documented the specific Russian units that took part in the occupation of the town. Among them: A Reuters investigation implicated an elite unit led by an officer who reports directly to Putin. It’s not clear what the Russian president knew as the killings were being carried out, or what his response was when he learned of them. These would have been worthy things to ask.
Putin’s responses to substantive questioning on Bucha would undoubtedly have been revealing to many Americans. Putin’s answers would have helped them to better understand how he operates. To see him lie about something so obvious would have helped to add context to the litany of false historical claims that he advanced in the first half of the conversation (i.e., that Poland provoked Hitler into invading) — and to his assertions that he has no territorial ambitions beyond Ukraine. This was a missed opportunity.