A video shows the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, calling Vladimir Putin a “butcher” and commenting on his “war crimes” during a press conference with US president Donald Trump.
This isn’t quite right. Mr Macron referred to killings in the Ukrainian town of Bucha and mentioned war crimes, but did not describe President Putin as a “butcher”.
Posts on social media have shared a video of the French president talking about the war in the Ukraine and claimed that it shows him describing Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin as a “butcher”. But that isn’t what the French president actually said.
The clip is from a press conference held by Emmanuel Macron and US president Donald Trump at the White House on 24 February.
A short clip from the conference has been shared on Facebook and Instagram with the caption: “The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, calls Putin a ‘butcher’ and comments on his ‘war crimes.’
“Donald Trump looks mad his master was insulted.”
But this isn’t quite right. President Macron did not use the term “butcher” to describe President Putin, but was instead referring to the killings of hundreds of Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha, in 2022.
In the video, Mr Macron says: “I stopped my discussion with President Putin after Bucha and the war crimes because I considered that—I mean, we had nothing to get from him in the time.”
This wording is audible in the video clip and similar wording was recorded in a transcript of the press conference, while President Macron's reference to Bucha was also included in media reports of the visit.
Honesty in public debate matters
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At the end of March 2022, after Russian forces withdrew from the occupied town of Bucha, around 30 kilometres north of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, evidence of mass killings of civilians emerged.
The Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office says 637 civilians were killed in the town of Bucha.
Russia denied at the time that it was responsible for civilian executions in Bucha, and the country’s UK ambassador claimed they were “staged” by Ukrainian forces.
However, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights concluded in a report published in July 2022 that there were numerous incidents where the Russian military had disregarded international humanitarian law, and where its actions constituted war crimes. Journalists found evidence of civilians having been killed in the streets before President Putin’s forces left.
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This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because President Emmanuel Macron did not call the Russian president Vladimir Putin a “butcher” during a news conference with Donald Trump, but instead referred to killings in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.
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