#358 — The War in Ukraine
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Summary
Yaroslav Trofimov is the Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for two consecutive years in 2022 and 23. He has reported from most major conflicts of the past two decades, serving as the Journal s bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and as a correspondent in Iraq. He s the author of several books, including Faith at War, The Siege of Mecca, and Most Recently, Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine s War of Independence. In this conversation, we discuss the widespread false assumptions that Russia would win a swift victory in Ukraine, Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia, the transformation of the Ukrainian military, Russian incompetence, the role of the Orthodox Church in Russia, conspiracy thinking and Russian propaganda, NATO membership of Ukraine as an alleged provocation, the Minsk-2 agreement, alleged failures of Western diplomacy, Russian war crimes, the new cult of World War II victory in Russia and the numbers of casualties and displaced people in Ukraine. And finally, how this war might end. And now I bring you the first part of this conversation with my guest: my good friend, the great writer, journalist, and author, Yaroslav Troftovskoye, who has written a gripping and harrowing book about the beginning of the Ukraine War in Ukraine and the future that we can't see any other way of describing it in a word other than as harrowing . He's a force to be reckoned with, and one of the bravest people I've ever met in the field of journalism and in the world of politics and politics, and I'm so lucky to have him on the podcast to be here to talk about it all with me. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who wants to understand the history of the conflict in Ukraine as it s actually happened, not just how it s really happened, and what it s going to be, and why it s all going to happen in the coming days, and how we should be able to make sense of it all in any way we can do it, no matter how we do it in the next five minutes. Thank you, Mr. Troftozhko! -Sam Harris - The Making Sense Podcast is a podcast made possible entirely by our subscribership program, not by the ones who can afford it? This is made possible by the subscription program, and therefore, we don t run ads on the Podcast?
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if
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Today I'm speaking with Yaroslav Trofimov. Yaroslav is the chief foreign affairs correspondent for
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the Wall Street Journal, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting
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for two consecutive years, in 2022 and 2023. He has reported from most major conflicts
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of the past two decades, serving as the journal's bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
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and as a correspondent in Iraq. He's the author of several books, including Faith at War,
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The Siege of Mecca, and most recently, Our Enemies Will Vanish, The Russian Invasion and
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Ukraine's War of Independence. And that is the topic of today's conversation. This really serves
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as a primer on the war in Ukraine. We discuss the widespread false assumptions that Russia would
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win a swift victory, Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia, the transformation of the Ukrainian military,
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Russian incompetence, Russian public opinion, the Azov Battalion and the so-called denazification
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of Ukraine, the role of the Orthodox Church in Russia, conspiracy thinking and Russian propaganda,
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Putin's popularity on the right, NATO membership of Ukraine as an alleged provocation, the Minsk-2
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agreement, alleged failures of Western diplomacy, Zelensky's leadership, the moral clarity of this war,
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Russian war crimes, the new cult of World War II victory in Russia, the numbers of casualties and
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displaced people in Ukraine, the delay of U.S. aid, nuclear blackmail, the significance of long-range
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weaponry, the weakness of Western sanctions against Russia, the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline,
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Ukraine, and finally how this war might end. And now I bring you Yaroslav Trofimov.
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I am here with Yaroslav Trofimov. Yaroslav, was that close to the pronunciation of your name?
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Nice. Well, you've written a truly gripping and harrowing book about the beginning of the war in
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Ukraine, and I'd love to discuss that and really take us all the way through the present and into
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the future insofar as we can foresee it. Before we jump in, what's your background as a journalist?
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What kinds of things have you covered beyond the war?
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Well, thank you so much. You know, I was born in Ukraine, but this is really the first time I've
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come back to write about it. I spent the entire career that I've had at the Wall Street Journal
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since 1999, covering other people's wars and other people's miseries. You know, I used to be our
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Kabul-based bureau chief for Afghanistan and Pakistan for five years. I covered the invasion of Iraq in
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2003, and then again, the war against ISIS, Islamic State, in 2015-16, and plenty of other wars in
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Somalia, Libya, you name it. And the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008. So, kind of, you know, my job as chief
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foreign affairs correspondent in the journal, but a lot of the time it was the wars and mayhem
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correspondent. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it is courageous work as anyone listening to this conversation
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or reading your book will quickly intuit. Again, the book is Our Enemies Will Vanish,
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The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence. And so, let's start pretty much
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where you start with your book. We're two years in, just over two years into the war,
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and I do want to cover events beyond those covered in your book. But the beginning of the war
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was astonishing for a few reasons. I mean, one was just that Russia thought that it would take
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just 10 days or something to accomplish. I mean, they thought they would take Kiev in, I think,
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three days and maybe the rest of Ukraine in something like six weeks. What do you make of
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the level of delusion that seems to have kind of shrouded the launch of the war? I mean,
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what mistakes did Putin make and how do you account for the poverty of his understanding of
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what awaited him in Ukraine? Yeah. Well, I think the delusion was not just in Moscow. There was also
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delusion in Washington and in European capitals because everyone, except the Ukrainians, was expecting
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Ukraine to fall in a matter of days. And I think it goes, first of all, to the profound
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misunderstanding of Ukrainian society and how much it has changed, especially since the war really
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began in 2014 with the initial Russian invasion of Crimea and the proxy war that Russia fomented in
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the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. And back then, you know, the Ukrainian army was pretty much
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non-existent and couldn't put up much of a fight. And it was the volunteer units, ordinary civilians who
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picked up guns and tried to stop the Russian little green men, you know, the Russian troops who were
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not wearing uniform, but were in fact, you know, Russian service members in the battlefields of
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Donbass. And at the time, you know, Russia was not unpopular in many parts of Ukraine because
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before that invasion, before that, you know, the first attempt to annex large parts of Ukraine,
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Russia was seen by Ukrainians as a country with higher wages, job opportunities, maybe less corruption.
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Volodymyr Zelensky at the time was working in Moscow. He actually hosted the New Year's morning
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show on January 1st, 2014, at the time where, when the Maidan revolution was already underway in Kyiv.
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But after that, you know, every Ukrainian saw what this quote-unquote Russian world that Putin wanted to
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bring to Ukraine means. You know, the eight years of occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk by Russian
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forces was this experiment. And people saw that Russian rule meant big collapse of law and order,
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gangsters taking over, taking properties of gunpoint, jobs disappearing. And more than half the population
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of Russian occupied, Donetsk and Luhansk, were with their feet. They escaped to the rest of Ukraine,
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to the West, to Russia. And so by the time Putin invaded again with this full-scale invasion in
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February 2022, every Ukrainian knew what it means to live under Russian rule. The cities of eastern
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Ukraine had hundreds of thousands of refugees from Russian rule. And I think this transformation
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of the Ukrainian society is something that one had noticed in Moscow and in the West,
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as did the transformation of the Ukrainian military, which, you know, by 2022 became a
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combat-tested professional fighting force that underwent reforms and had hundreds of thousands
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of either full-time service members or reservists with considerable combat experience fighting the
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So are you saying that in 2014, something like a majority of Ukrainians would have been sympathetic
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Not a majority, but of Ukrainians for sure. But a significant proportion of people in places
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like Kharkiv and Odessa, especially the older generation who sort of still lived in the Soviet,
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post-Soviet nostalgia. Yeah. And I'm quoting in the book, one of the Ukrainian veterans who played
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a key role in the defense of Ukraine both in 2014 and after 2022, who is saying that in 2014,
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the majority of people in Kharkiv had this sort of latent pro-Russian tendencies. But that
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completely flipped. And as we saw in 2022, there was virtually no support for the Russians. And
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the population of Eastern Ukraine, you know, joined the military, fought to protect their cities,
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Well, so there was clearly a misunderstanding of Ukrainian sentiment and the likelihood that
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Ukrainian society would resist or acquiesce. But it seems also that Putin and perhaps his generals,
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and one doesn't know how far down the hierarchy this must have gone, but it seems that the Russians
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misunderstood the competence of their own forces, right? I mean, you know, you would expect,
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I mean, I think you would have expected that with or without Ukrainian resistance,
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just given the asymmetry in power, what we imagine the asymmetry in power to be,
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Russia still should have just rolled into Kyiv fairly quickly. To what do you attribute
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certainly the early signs of incompetence on the part of the Russian forces?
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Well, you know, there's a culture of fear in Russia, which also means a culture of light.
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So people are afraid to report up the chain of command, the problems that they have.
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And so everything gets embellished the higher up it goes. And, you know, I was speaking to General
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Budanov, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, and he was telling me that,
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you know, the Americans came to us and had the intelligence, which they had from the highest
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levels. So they knew what the Russian generals were telling Putin. But we knew from our sources,
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lower down the food chain, that the generals were lying to Putin about the readiness of Russian
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forces. We knew about the corruption. We knew about the, you know, the equipment that wasn't
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functioning, the units that were only on paper ready, but weren't actually ready. And in fact,
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it all came into play. So the Russian army was not up to the task. But the other flip side of it also
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is because Putin lived in his own world, in which he convinced himself that the Russians and Ukrainians
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are one people, as he wrote in his famous essay on history several months before the war. And the
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entire war plan only made sense on the premise that the Ukrainian army would not really resist.
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And that the Ukrainians would welcome the Russian soldiers' liberators from this Western-imposed clique,
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which was thinking in the Kremlin, it appears. And so if you look at the Russian forces that were
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streaming towards Kiev and Kharkiv, they were carrying parade uniforms. They were really expecting
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to be celebrating within days. So can you say more about Putin's view of Ukrainian and Russian history?
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I mean, what is, how accurate or inaccurate were his claims that he's made and that essay you cite
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in various speeches? And to what degree does his view pervade Russia as a whole? I mean, do we know
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enough about Russian sentiment with respect to history and the war to know how much people share Putin's
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view? Or is it another instance where public opinion really can't be properly assessed, given the level
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of fear in the society? Well, I think what we can say is that this view really is not exceptional.
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And we have to go back to the very foundational myth of Russia. So Russia traces its glory and its
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greatness to the Kiev Rus, which was a state established in Kiev by, you know, Princess Volodymyr,
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after whom Zelensky and Putin are named, and Yaroslav, after whom I'm named, and who ruled in
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the 10th, 11th centuries, well before Moscow even existed as a town. And so in the Russian historical
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narrative, that is the narrative of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union, Moscow is a direct
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descendant who has the legacy of that Kiev and Rus and the historical right to rule all the lands
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once ruled from Kiev. Obviously, Ukrainians see Kiev Rus, because it's in Kiev, as their own
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heritage. And the Russian narrative has a problem, because you cannot trace your roots to the capital
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of another country, of a foreign country. And so the very existence of an independent, separate Ukraine
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completely undermines Russia's narrative view of itself. And so there was always a hostility to the
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very idea of the Ukrainian separate identity. Putin famously said in the recent interview that
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Ukrainian language was invented by the Austro-Hungarian general staff, you know, before World War I,
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which is complete nonsense, because there were, you know, centuries of literature in Ukrainian before
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that, even when it was banned by the Russian authorities, specifically. And so we have a tradition
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of Russian luminaries, even the liberal ones, kind of believing the same things. You know,
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Joseph Brodsky, you know, the famous Russian dissident poet, who was exiled to America, you know,
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one became the poet laureate of the United States. He famously wrote a poem on independence of Ukraine in
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1991, saying, I want to spit into the Dnipro River, and I wish it would flow backwards. And then he used
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a pretty derogatory name for Ukrainians. So unfortunately, that is part of the Russian
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mindset that is fostered by Russian education, which has never been decolonized. You know,
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everybody knows about the greatness of Pushkin or Dostoevsky, but we've never looked at them
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through the same lens through which we look at, for example, Kipling, because they're all,
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you know, pretty imperialist and pretty aggressively imperialist in their writings. And Ukraine is the
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centerpiece of that. Hmm. Where does Tolstoy come out in his writings?
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Well, Tolstoy, you know, was more of a pacifist, obviously, and having seen war in the Caucasus and
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the horrors of war. But during his time, you know, Ukrainian language was officially non-existent,
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and Ukraine was called Little Russia in Russian documents and literature.
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What do you make, or what are we to make, of the claims of denazification in Ukraine that
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Putin has said is part of the purpose of the war? And, you know, as spurious as those almost
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certainly are, given that Zelensky is Jewish and, you know, that sounds like an SNL sketch more than
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anything else. What about the Azov battalion and the historical links between it and various Nazi
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groups? Which is, what is it? This is a, some version of a half-truth that is, you know, in the
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main ridiculous and cynical on the part of Putin, I have to think. But can you untangle this for us?
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Sure. Yeah. I mean, let's first go back to what does it mean to be a Nazi in Russian official
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lexicon? It's pretty much anybody who opposes the government or Russia is a Nazi, by definition.
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This is their definition of a Nazi. And this comes at the time when, you know, it's forbidden to
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mention in Russia that the Soviet Union was a co-belligerent with the Nazis in the first third
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of World War II, you know, invading Poland together in 1939, and kind of being on the same side until
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during 1941. Now, as for the Azov battalion, which then became a regiment, you know, in 2014, when the
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Ukrainian army unraveled, you know, all these volunteer formations were created to try to stop
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the front line. And there were a lot of far-right extremists and soccer hooligans and all kinds of
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other unsavory characters who have flocked to groups like Azov. But since then, it has changed. Since then,
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it became a professional unit of the Ukrainian armed forces. The professional military officer,
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you know, Denis Prokopenko became its chief ahead of the 2022. And it certainly repudiated, you know,
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any far-right ideology. You know, it declared when the war began that, you know, we have Jewish and
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Muslim members in our ranks, and we firmly reject the ideology of communism and of Nazism, the two
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ideologies that have caused so many millions of deaths in Ukraine. And if we look at the, you know,
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the electoral history of Ukraine, you know, yes, it has far-right parties, you know, one within, say,
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neo-Nazi parties, maybe. But none of them have ever managed to get more than 1% of the vote, which is a lot
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less than in pretty much every other European country, I would think.
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What is the role of the Orthodox Church in Russia in supporting the war, if any?
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Well, you know, the Patriarch Kirill, you know, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church,
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has come out very strongly in favor of the war. I mean, he declared it to be a holy war,
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and the Russian Orthodox priests are blessing the weapons of the Russian troops, which is kind of
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remarkable considering that, you know, these are the weapons that are killing, you know,
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thousands of fellow Orthodox civilians. Is there any explicitly religious framing of
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the war on the part of Putin or most Russians? I mean, is there some kind of, beyond the history
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in the sense that Ukraine isn't a nation and its existence as a separate nation is a perpetual insult
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to Russia? Is there a religious, spiritual, you know, apocalyptic framing of it, or is just the
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church just a supporter on the sidelines? Well, I think the church is not just a supporter. The
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church is an instrument of state power in Russia and has always been, you know, subordinate to state
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power. And a lot of the clergy in Soviet times were also KGB officers. And, you know, it's working
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very closely with the military right now. You know, Putin himself, you know, doesn't speak much about
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religiosity. And, you know, he was asked in a recent interview, you know, does he believe in God?
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And he didn't say so. But certainly the regime is playing this card of, you know, defender of
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traditional values. You know, there is whole crusade against, you know, gay, lesbian, and
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transgender rights. And it's part of its instrument of messages that it's sending out. And in the Russian
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official narrative, you know, Ukraine is taken over by satanists who want to force everyone to become
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homosexual. And, you know, every child to change the gender and all that. So, you know, the propaganda
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The ridiculousness of it is, I mean, obviously, there are analogs to this craziness in other
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countries. And even in America, you have something like QAnon, where it's just, it's hard to believe
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that anyone actually believes what they say they believe. I mean, in the case of QAnon, you've got
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this imagined cult of pedophile cannibals that includes some of the most famous people in
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Hollywood and democratic politics. So, you know, it's literally imagined, or at least it's alleged
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to be imagined by seemingly millions of people that you have, you know, celebrities like Tom
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Hanks and, you know, Michelle Obama and et cetera, drinking the blood of children so as to stay
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youthful. I think they're taking some magical substance, adrenochrome, out of the bodies of
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children, and perhaps additionally raping and cannibalizing them. And this is, it's a strange
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performance of, I mean, it's a kind of pornography of suspicion that gets amplified on social media.
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But much of it does appear to be in earnest. How much of the conspiracy thinking that exists in
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Russia do you think is believed? And how much of it is just, we know that on some level, we can't
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trust information. And so, because there's so much propaganda, there's so much lying, there's so
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many half-truths, we're just, we're basically declaring epistemological bankruptcy and we'll
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just entertain any string of sentences that anyone wants to produce.
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I think I have a point here. I think the main strategic goal of Russian propaganda is the removal
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of truth as a concept. So they're throwing out a whole variety of competing storylines that are
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incompatible with each other and seeing sort of what sticks. But the ultimate overarching goal is
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to foster cynicism and make people believe that, you know, there's no right and wrong and there is
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no true or untrue. What do you make of the fact that Putin now appears to be some kind of hero of
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right-wing populists in the U.S. and elsewhere? I mean, he's the face of many things. I mean,
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he's the antithesis of the woke elitist who, you know, not to say Satanist, who's trying to turn
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your kid gay or trans. But he's also, I guess, primarily he's the face of anti-globalism on some
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level. How has this happened? I mean, you would think that Republicans in the U.S. above more or less
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anyone would have recognized that Putin is antithetical to more or less everything America
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thought it represented in the world. Again, right of center, even more than left of center.
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How did we get here where Putin is just celebrated without much of a qualm, it seems?
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I think it's really interesting to see this and also the dynamic of this in America and in Europe,
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because we're sort of on the same page with parts of the Republican Party in the U.S. and much of the
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European far-right before the full-scale invasion. Putin was celebrated as sort of virile, macho man
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who is, you know, standing up for tradition against the woke and is defending, you know, the old truth.
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And, you know, because of all these different messages to different audiences, you could appeal
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both to, you know, some on the far left, but also some on the far right. And, you know, the propaganda
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was tailored. But I think what happened after 2022 in Europe is that Ukraine became a very real thing.
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Now, Ukraine in America is this sort of imaginary abstract construct that doesn't factor into
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daily life. But in Europe, after several million Ukrainians arrived, most of women and children
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fleeing the war, and it became a factor of daily life, it became very difficult for the far-right
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parties to openly support Putin. And so if you look at the, you know, in Italy, for example, you know,
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Prime Minister George Meloni, whose party, you know, used to be quite pro-Russian and whose
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Deputy Prime Minister Salvini was very much pro-Russianist to wear a Putin t-shirt, you know,
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they are now one of the most active and clear supporters of Ukraine. You know, you see the
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same transformation in many other countries, even in France, you know, Marine Le Pen, and
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no longer openly supports Putin. But in the U.S., you've seen the opposite. In the U.S., you
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know, we have seen that the Putin messaging is being repeated more and more, you know, including
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by members of the House and the Senate. And, you know, somehow Putin seems to have a hold
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on the mind of many parts of the American electorate. At a time when Russia has absolutely
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no economic leverage over America, a big difference from Europe, which has had to pay a very heavy
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price for severing its energy dependence, and actually would have a lot to gain from appeasing
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How has the Wall Street Journal done editorially on this?
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Well, you know, I work for the news site, so I can only speak at the news site.
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And as a news site, we have invested a lot of effort covering Ukraine, blow by blow. And
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I think, you know, as much or more than any other publication, because our readers care very
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much about what's happening there. And everybody knows, you know, obviously everybody wants to
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know the detailed ground truth of what is actually transpiring on the front lines and in the Ukrainian
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society. Because, you know, I think people realize just how much it matters, despite all
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the noise and proclamations that it's not our war. I mean, the fact is that after hundreds
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of billions of dollars spent by the US and European allies, and all the proclamations that
00:24:31.680
we will stand with Ukraine as long as it takes, you know, you can say it's not our war, but
00:24:36.840
a Russian victory in Ukraine will be seen as an American defeat by everybody else in the world.
00:24:42.060
What do you make of the apparent confusion on that point in America? I'm thinking mostly
00:24:49.600
right of center. I mean, maybe there's a left-wing version of, you know, a similar confusion and
00:24:55.000
spirit of isolationism. But, you know, as I look right of center, I often encounter the claim
00:25:01.600
that the US and the EU are, to some considerable degree, culpable for Putin's invasion, right?
00:25:08.920
And, you know, it's often described as the result of Western provocations. You know, we crossed one
00:25:15.140
of his red lines, which we knew to be a red line. There are failures of Western diplomacy for which
00:25:20.720
America, above all, is culpable. You know, did the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine force
00:25:27.460
Putin's hand here? I mean, how do you view this allegation that it's basically the war is our
00:25:32.460
fault and Putin is acting as we would under similar circumstances? And, you know, it's just, we just
00:25:40.320
failed to understand our adversary and, you know, what really mattered to him. And, you know, it's
00:25:49.500
Yeah, it's really strange to watch that exercise and, you know, trying to exculpate the guilty party
00:25:55.320
by finding flaws in yourself. And, you know, if we go back to the Tucker Carlson interview
00:26:00.140
with Putin, you know, he asked him repeatedly, you know, was it NATO's fault? Putin's response
00:26:04.660
for half an hour was, well, actually, you know, Ukraine is Russia. Let me tell you the story
00:26:09.020
of how since Vladimir the Great and Yaroslav the Wise, it was always Russia. You know, NATO
00:26:14.280
membership was not something that was happening. In 2008, there was a declaration at the summit
00:26:21.180
in Romania that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO. And that was the end
00:26:26.000
of it. There was no membership plan, no negotiations, nothing practical happening. It's not like Ukraine
00:26:31.800
was about to join NATO or was even negotiating to join NATO. It was just empty words. So there
00:26:38.980
was really not much for Putin to fear from that, if he was really fearing that. And he wasn't,
00:26:45.860
you know, because again, it's, if you look at his mindset, you know, he has said famously
00:26:50.680
that the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The greatest
00:26:56.360
tragedy was in the Holocaust. And he was working very hard to reverse that tragedy and to collect
00:27:04.520
Russian lands once again. That was it. That's just pure imperialist land grab.
00:27:13.140
Yeah. So in 2014, when Russia fomented the armed reprising in Donbass, you know, it was started by
00:27:21.460
an officer in the Russian intelligence service, FSB, Igor Gyrkin, who has been sentenced by a court
00:27:30.000
in the Netherlands since then for his key role in downing a Malaysian Airlines jet in which hundreds of
00:27:34.860
people died. Russia more and more overtly was sending troops to Donbass. And there was one
00:27:42.380
agreement and Minsk won. It failed because Russia decided to take more land and send tank units. And
00:27:49.260
then as Ukrainian troops were being surrounded, talks began in Minsk again, sponsored by Germany
00:27:56.460
and France and between Russia and Ukraine. And with a gun to its head, Ukraine agreed to the ceasefire,
00:28:02.220
which stopped violence for now. And so as part of the agreement, you know, there were several
00:28:07.980
conditions. And it started with, you know, Russia withdraws all its forces, restores Ukrainian control
00:28:14.060
over the border crossings. Then there will be elections in these areas. And then eventually,
00:28:21.100
Ukraine will change its constitution to accommodate autonomy and a certain role for the elected
00:28:27.420
authorities of Donbass in the future running of Ukraine. What Russia said after this was done was
00:28:32.940
that, well, actually, we're not going to withdraw our forces. We're not going to allow you to reclaim
00:28:36.620
the border. We will just demand that you change your constitution to give us veto power over your foreign
00:28:42.780
policy through our proxies in Donbass. And that was the stalemate for the following eight years.
00:28:48.300
Hmm. And obviously, you know, Ukraine, you know, was not going to give veto power over its foreign
00:28:54.620
policy to people that Russia installed a gunpoint in Donbass and controlled a hundred percent.
00:28:59.900
I think I've heard this, the failure of Minsk too described as yet another failure of, of Western
00:29:07.740
diplomacy or worse that, uh, the U S and the UK just dismantled it for their own reasons, whatever those
00:29:15.660
are. Well, you know, let's go back to 2014 and 2015, January, 2015, at the time, nobody was
00:29:23.340
interested in helping Ukraine. President Obama at the time famously said in an interview with the,
00:29:29.580
with the Atlantic that no matter, there's nothing the U S can do to prevent Russia from dominating
00:29:35.260
Ukraine. He washed his hands off Ukraine. No lethal aid was forthcoming. And everybody was really
00:29:41.020
eager to do business with Moscow. You know, the U S was focused on the nuclear deal with Iran.
00:29:46.700
The Germans wanted to do the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, you know, have lots of cheap Russian gas.
00:29:52.620
And so Ukraine, you know, was basically left to its own devices, having lost, you know, 14,000 people
00:29:58.220
died in that, in that war at the time. It's not a small number. And, uh, so, uh, you know,
00:30:05.260
everybody had a pause. Russia had a pause to, you know, prepare a full-scale war. And Ukraine had
00:30:11.580
the post to also prepare for, for a full-scale war that happened. But I think everybody was cognizant
00:30:16.300
that Minsk was just to reprieve and there will be a next round, which is why the Ukrainians are very
00:30:21.820
reluctant to send on to another deal with Russia that would leave Russia in control of Ukrainian land,
00:30:27.420
because that would just mean giving Russian time to prepare for another round in which they could be
00:30:32.220
be more successful than this camera. So take me back to the beginning of the war and the,
00:30:40.060
I guess I want to ask you about the, the emergence of Zelensky as a, really a hero here. And, uh, I'm
00:30:46.460
wondering what, what can you say about him? Is he, is it appropriate to view him just as a hero? Is he
00:30:52.060
a more complicated figure? What, what is, how do you view Zelensky and, and his leadership from the
00:30:58.140
beginning of the war? Yeah. Obviously no, every, every person is complicated and every person has
00:31:03.260
many shades of black or white or gray. Zelensky was very popular when he was elected in 2019. He got
00:31:10.700
three quarters of the vote, the highest vote in the history of Ukrainian elections. And he was not
00:31:15.580
very popular by the time the illusion happened. What he did do is stay. And I was in Afghanistan in the
00:31:23.020
the summer in August, 2021. And I remember very well how one morning president Ashraf Ghani
00:31:28.460
walked the ramparts of Kabul and said, you know, we will fight and defend the city. And by lunchtime
00:31:33.580
the next day on August 15th, he was in a helicopter to Abu Dhabi and the Taliban were in my hotel.
00:31:39.820
Yeah. Zelensky had the same option, you know, Boris Johnson, among other leaders, called him and said,
00:31:45.660
on the morning of the invasion, you know, come to London, set up a government in exile,
00:31:49.340
like the Poles did in 1939. But he didn't. And I think that sort of the heroic decision to stay
00:31:57.020
and come out in the open and record this video address with his closest aid saying, we are here,
00:32:02.780
we are staying, everybody's staying, we will fight, was a very important moment. And I'm writing
00:32:08.540
the book about how the next morning I was driving through Kyiv and seeing hundreds of young men and
00:32:13.660
women coming out of their high rises and going to a stadium to pick up weapons and head off to the
00:32:18.140
front line on the city's outskirts to stop this advancing thousands of Russian troops. But, you
00:32:25.740
know, he's human. He, like everybody else, has made mistakes. And there are plenty of Ukrainians who are
00:32:31.340
not happy with all of his decisions. But the fact is that he's legitimately elected, he's the president,
00:32:37.260
and he represents the continuation of legitimacy of the Ukrainian state. And so I think there is sort of
00:32:42.780
unspoken consensus among many Ukrainians to defer criticism of his actions, especially before the
00:32:49.980
war, to a time after the war ends. And, you know, will he be reelected in the next elections? Who
00:32:56.060
knows? The Ukrainians, he's the sixth president of Ukraine since independence in 1991, only one of the
00:33:01.980
six, one re-election. So Ukrainians don't really like to re-elect their incumbents.
00:33:06.940
So your book covers the war from its outset. I mean, you were there when it began. And I forget
00:33:15.180
when your coverage ends. Is it through the first year of the war?
00:33:19.420
Yeah. So the book really begins the day before the full-scale invasion, you know, when I went to see
00:33:25.180
Zarensky's predecessor, President Poroshenko, who leaned towards me and whispered into my ear,
00:33:31.340
you know, it's going to be tomorrow at 4 a.m. You have time to go to the airport and get out of the
00:33:35.180
country. And lots of people did. Obviously, I didn't because I had come there for the war.
00:33:40.780
And it ends that the blow-by-blow travel through the front lines and detailed descriptions of all the
00:33:49.420
pivotal turns of the war. And on the one-year anniversary of the war in February 2023, you know,
00:33:55.180
where Zarensky is having this three-hour press conference and the words that he said that really
00:34:00.220
stuck in my mind. You know, we've learned a very painful lesson here. It may be unfair, but nobody
00:34:05.420
likes losers. So we have to be winners. And then there is a little, well, not little, but there is
00:34:10.380
an after war that takes us all the way to the Israeli war in Gaza in October 2023.
00:34:18.380
So how would you compare the war to other wars you've covered, both in the kinds of
00:34:24.860
atrocities, the rightness or wrongness of, you know, tactics, the implications for
00:34:31.740
neighboring countries? I mean, as you say, in America, Ukraine is not often thought about,
00:34:37.980
and I would say it's not often thought about even in the midst of, you know, what is the first
00:34:43.980
proper land war in Europe since World War II. It is really an afterthought. To say that most
00:34:50.060
Americans can't find Ukraine on a map is bound to be an understatement. How do you view its
00:34:54.620
significance? And just, you were there and you've reported directly on other wars. What should we
00:35:00.540
understand about what the Russians have done, what the Ukrainians have had to do? Just give us some
00:35:07.340
detail as to how you view this war. Yeah. Well, actually, I kind of want to go back to
00:35:12.220
what you were asking about Zelensky and his achievements. And I think his biggest achievement
00:35:17.020
was that because he was a showman, he is a showman, he is from the world of entertainment,
00:35:23.020
he was able to speak directly to the publics in the West, in America, and in Europe,
00:35:28.380
over the heads of politicians and make the moral case for Ukraine. If you'd like to continue
00:35:35.740
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00:35:41.260
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