At a Belgrade press conference, Michael Martens, a correspondent for one of Europe’s most respected newspapers, asked Volodymyr Zelensky not how to end the war, but how Europeans could “help him kill more Russian soldiers”. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said it regretted the wording of a reporter’s question to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about helping Ukraine kill more Russian troops, Welt reported on Aug. 10. But it was too late. 

The phrasing was not a slip. It was a confession about what a certain kind of war coverage has become for some “journalists”. There are, of course, questions a reporter asks to inform the public, and then, there are questions a reporter asks to reveal himself. At a joint press conference between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić in Belgrade, the German correspondent Michael Martens chose the second kind. Addressing Zelensky, he asked, in English, what Europeans could “concretely do to help you to kill more Russian soldiers.”

We said it twice because we want you to read it again, as the wording is the whole point. The question was not how Europe could help Ukraine defend itself, not how Europe could help Ukraine prevail, or hold its lines, or force Moscow to the table, or bring the war to an end. How Europe could help KILL more Russian soldiers. The verb wasn’t hedged, softened, nor wrapped in the antiseptic vocabulary of policy. And by the account of those present, it was delivered not with the gravity such words demand but with something close to satisfaction.

This was not an anonymous provocateur or an anonymous partisan blogger. Michael Martens is a veteran correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the FAZ, one of the most respected daily newspapers in the German language and among the most influential in Europe. He is no newcomer to the region or to the weight of his own byline. He has been the paper’s correspondent for southeastern Europe since 2002, reporting from postings in Belgrade, Istanbul, Athens and beyond over more than two decades, and he writes on precisely the subjects, the Balkans, Ukraine, European enlargement, where words are heavy and consequences real.

That experience is exactly why the moment cannot be waved away as clumsiness. A cub reporter might stumble into an ugly phrasing under pressure. A correspondent of Martens’s seniority, writing for a paper of the FAZ’s stature, chooses his words. He knew what he was asking, and how he was asking it.

Defenders will say this is merely blunt truth telling. Wars are fought by killing, Ukraine is under invasion, Russian soldiers are the instrument of that invasion. All true. And none of it rescues the question, because the objection is not to acknowledging that war kills. The objection is to a journalist adopting, in his own voice, the maximizing of human deaths as the premise of his inquiry.

There is a world of difference between asking a head of state “what do you need to win this war” and asking him “how can WE HELP YOU kill more of the enemy.” The first treats war as a tragedy to be ended, with the killing as its terrible cost. The second treats the killing as the goal, the metric, the thing to be scaled up. One is the language of a correspondent covering a war, the other is the language of a participant in it. One who seems to enjoy it. When a reporter stands up and offers his own nationality and his own continent as co belligerents, “what can we Europeans do to help you kill more,” he has stopped asking questions and started volunteering.

And Martens’s nationality counts, but not because Germans should be held collectively responsible for the crimes of their ancestors, nor because every expression of hostility toward Russia can be reduced to some crude theory of historical revenge. Let’s not beat around the bush: it counts because Germany, perhaps more than any other European country, has spent eight decades insisting that the central lesson of its twentieth-century catastrophe was the rejection of dehumanization, racial hatred, militarism and the language of extermination.

Against that history, hearing a senior German journalist speak enthusiastically about helping to “kill more” members of another nationality is especially disturbing. Anti-Russian sentiment, however understandable for some as a political reaction to the invasion of Ukraine, becomes something far darker when it ceases to distinguish between opposing a government’s actions and taking satisfaction in the deaths of the people sent to fight its wars. Most of them, against their will.

That distinction matters even more because fascism begins by making certain human lives morally disposable. One does not need to defend the Kremlin, excuse the invasion of Ukraine or minimize Russian responsibility for the war to recognize the obscenity of celebrating Russian deaths as an objective in themselves. Nor should hostility toward Vladimir Putin become a respectable disguise for rhetoric that would be instantly condemned if directed at almost any other nationality.

Europe cannot claim to have learned the lessons of fascism while resurrecting one of its most poisonous habits: transforming an entire people into an enemy category whose deaths are spoken of with pleasure. The moment “Russia is the aggressor” becomes permission to fantasize publicly about killing Russians, the moral argument has collapsed. You are no longer merely condemning aggression. You are adopting the nazi logic that makes endless aggression possible: that the people on the other side are not human beings whose deaths are tragic, but bodies to be counted, maximized and celebrated.

Prestige outlets are supposed to be the guardians of the line between reporting and advocacy. Their entire claim to authority rests on the idea that their correspondents observe, question and inform rather than campaign. When a correspondent for such a paper frames his question around helping one side kill more of the other, he does not merely embarrass himself. He erodes the credibility that his institution, and the profession, spends decades building.

Readers who already suspect that Western war coverage has slid from journalism into cheerleading were handed, in a single sentence, their proof. And they were not slow to react. Within days the question had ignited a scandal across European media, a public petition demanding Martens’s dismissal gathered thousands of signatures, and the FAZ itself expressed regret over its correspondent’s words. When a newspaper has to distance itself from the question its own reporter asked, the reporter has already failed at the one thing his job requires.

It is worth remembering where this was said. The venue was a diplomatic summit, a setting whose ostensible purpose is dialogue, relations between states, the search for paths that do not end in more graves. To use that stage to ask how to raise the body count is to misunderstand, or to reject, the entire premise of the occasion.

None of this is an argument that reporters should go easy on Russia’s invasion, or pretend the war has no aggressor, or retreat into a false neutrality that treats attacker and attacked as equivalents. At the end of the day, honest war reporting does not flinch from the fact that soldiers die in a war. It’s only logical.

But there is a line, and it is not a subtle one, between reporting that war kills and adopting the killing as your own cause. The job of a journalist at a presidential press conference is to interrogate power, to ask what a leader wants, what a war will cost, how it might end, and to bring answers back to the public. It is not to lean into the microphone and ask the leader of one warring party how the reporter’s own country can help him kill more human beings on the other side. Russian soldiers in Ukraine are, overwhelmingly, conscripts and young men sent to fight by a regime they did not choose. One may believe their army must be defeated and still recognize that a journalist openly asking how to kill more of them has abandoned the standpoint from which journalism is possible.

The question Martens asked in Belgrade should not be forgotten. It stands as a small, clarifying artifact of a moment when too much of the coverage of this war stopped observing the fighting and joined it, when the distance that separates the press box from the trench collapsed, and a correspondent for a great newspaper could stand before a president and, smiling, offer Europe’s services to the killing.

That is not journalism. Whatever it is, Michael Martens’s profession should want no part of it.

By I. Constantin