Learn English with Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel is a venture capitalist and venture capitalist who has invested heavily in venture capital and has been a long-time supporter of Ukraine s struggle to maintain its independence. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times and the Financial Times, and is one of the most well-known critics of Vladimir Putin. In this episode, he explains why he thinks it s time to call an end to the Ukraine conflict.
00:00:30.480The great American investor Peter Thiel said in a speech in 2014 that in the modern West,
00:00:36.320courage is in shorter supply than genius.
00:00:38.900It doesn't feel like it, but 2014 is now a full decade in the past,
00:00:43.020and in that time, the supply of courage has continued to fall off a cliff.
00:00:47.000There could be no greater example of this than our increasingly abhorrent treatment of Ukraine.
00:00:51.720By way of brief reminder, I am a staunch supporter of Ukraine's struggle to maintain its independence.
00:00:56.520My mother is Ukrainian. So is my wife.
00:00:59.100I have aunts, uncles, cousins, and other relatives living in almost every part of the country,
00:01:03.720many of them within an hour's drive of the front line.
00:01:06.580While many Western commentators were claiming Russia would never attack,
00:01:10.080even as Putin's troops were amassing on Ukraine's borders,
00:01:12.940I warned that an invasion was imminent.
00:01:15.700When it did inevitably happen, I went on every media platform I could find
00:01:19.620to encourage Western leaders to help the Ukrainians fight off the invaders.
00:01:23.640On a single trigonometry livestream, we raised over £55,000 in an hour to help with the humanitarian effort.
00:01:31.080My wife and I have spent thousands of pounds in supplies and cash to support our friends and family in Ukraine.
00:01:36.500And yet, four months ago, I wrote an article in which I argued that it was time to bring the war to an end.
00:01:41.960My argument was simple. As I said at the time, to be clear, none of what follows is to suggest that Ukraine was wrong to defend itself,
00:01:49.620that we were wrong to encourage them, that we were wrong to commit considerable financial and other resources to supporting them or anything of the kind.
00:01:57.660On the contrary, with our support, Ukraine has achieved what almost no one could have predicted when Putin first invaded.
00:02:03.860Using our help, the Ukrainians first repelled their attacks on Kiev, Chernigov and Kharkov,
00:02:09.000before recapturing huge swathes of land and even forcing Russia to withdraw from Kherson.
00:02:13.880As a result, Ukrainian sovereignty is no longer in question.
00:02:17.560Vladimir Putin has paid a heavy price for his invasion, and the West has discovered a unity few expected, myself included.
00:02:24.660But all of these gains occurred many months and tens of thousands of deaths ago.
00:02:28.660The last major Ukrainian victory, the liberation of Kherson, took place exactly a year ago, in November 2022.
00:02:36.460Since then, the lines on the map have barely moved, while Ukrainian boys pay with their lives for every nameless village they take and retake.
00:02:44.220That was what I said at the time, four months ago.
00:02:47.040And it is entirely the fault of Western leaders, who are too cowardly to admit a truth that sources in the British Ministry of Defense confessed with heavy sighs.
00:02:55.320We failed to give the Ukrainians what they needed after their initial successes.
00:03:00.220Last summer's much-vaunted counter-offensive failed for two reasons.
00:03:03.960We did not give the Ukrainians the hardware they needed, and we made them wait too long for what we did provide.
00:03:09.260The result of this is that the bravery of Ukrainians is becoming their own worst enemy.
00:03:13.880In the words of one British military officer who spoke to me on condition of anonymity,
00:03:18.400our main focus now is to make any equipment we send as user-friendly as possible.