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Notes -
Summary of the Lex Fridman-President Zelensky interview
https://youtube.com/watch?v=u321m25rKXc&t=1142s
This interview has attracted a lot of controversy in the weeks leading up to it, as Fridman has said that he wanted to conduct the interview in Russian, which they both speak fluently. Zelensky did not want to conduct the interview in Russian for symbolic reasons that are probably quite easy to understand. In the lead up of the interview, Fridman has a 10 minute introduction in which he tries to justify why wanted to speak Russian, and then the first ten minutes of the real interview is him trying to convince Zelensky. His main argument is that if Zelensky speaks Russian, an interpreter would not be needed, and more of Zelensky's wit and dynamism would come through, and that there wouldn't be a 2-3 second delay in their communication. Fridman even made a warning popup saying "2-3 second delay!" when Zelensky began speaking Ukrainian and it was being interpreted. I've only seen one other Lex Fridman interview, with Milei, but there were no such warnings and disclaimers despite how it was live interpreted between Spanish and English. Zelensky does say he can explain some concepts in Russian if Fridman wants clarification but refuses to do the interview in general in Russian. Zelensky says he's also fine if Fridman speaks in Russian the whole time or switches between Russian and English. Also Fridman does understand a bit of Ukrainian himself but is not fluent.
Everyone I've seen, including Zelensky and myself, has seemed rather confused/upset by Fridman's very strong desire to do the interview in Russian, since the symbolic concerns seem to obviously outweigh those. Especially since using an interpreter is not really a big deal. Especially for a Lex Fridman interview, his interviews are known for him getting really excellent guests, but he just asks them a few vague guests and do 95% of the communicating themselves. There's little benefit to Fridman understanding Zelensky slightly better when all the listener's are going to get it dubbed anyway. Adding more fire to people thinking Fridman is a Russian sympathizer, in his introduction he goes out of his way to emphasize the nuance of the conflict and that he just wants peace for both sides. Many people would call the Russia-Ukraine war a fairly one sided war of aggression by Russia where peace could be achieved whenever Russia decided to withdraw from Ukrainian borders.
Points:
In general, I got the impression Zelensky was trying hard to flatter the people he needed too and put Ukraine in the best possible light. Not that I can blame him, given his position. Lex Fridman seemed really weird in how he seemed very sympathetic to Russia but not outright saying that, despite how obvious it was.
It’s not clear to me at all why these “symbolic concerns” should “obviously” outweigh the fairly straightforward practical reasons why an interview conducted in a language both participants speak fluently would be more intimate, more personable, and less stilted than one conducted via interpreters. And in this situation reinforces one of the central arguments of the Russian-sympathetic side; having Zelenskyy conduct the interview in the language he grew up speaking would inspire uncomfortable questions about why he grew up speaking Russian, despite growing up in Ukraine (supposedly a nation with deep historical pride and cultural distinctiveness), and why (as I understand it) he only felt compelled to become fluent in Ukrainian as an adult.
I don’t have a strong dog in the Ukraine-Russia fight, and I have assiduously avoided wading into previous Motte discussions of the conflict, which have shocked me with their low quality, contentiousness, and total lack of intellectual charity. I’m just pointing out how Zelenskyy’s “symbolic” posture in this interview could be fairly described as a method of maintaining the polite fiction — Ukraine has always been culturally distinguishable from Russia, Ukrainian cities don’t have any deep Russian history, Russianness has always been imposed upon Ukraine, etc. — which the larger global community has been asked to respect since the invasion began. I can understand why he’s doing it, but can you understand why it doesn’t strike neutral observers as “weird” for Fridman to want to put aside that artifice for the sake of what he hoped would be an incisive interview?
These symbolic concerns are a price to pay for interviewing a serious politician who has to care about the image he presents to the world. It is entirely possible that for Zelenskyy, the interview would have become net-negative if conducted in Russian.
I suppose if you were to interview a US politician, even one in favor of cannabis legalization, they would refuse a joint during the interview, even if that would make the interview "more intimate, more personable, and less stilted". They would correctly conclude that a podcast of them being high would not play well with their voters. Likewise, Zelenskyy can not afford to look Russian.
If Friedmann is more interested in having cozy intimate interviews than having interviews with relevant statesmen, I am sure there would be no shortage of Ukrainians willing to talk with him in Russian, just like he would have no problem finding some random pothead willing to smoke a joint during the interview.
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Pretty much every time, not just here. I haven't seen any place anywhere that isn't completely on-sides, as it were. Same for Israel/Palestine. You will never see my opinion printed on the Interwebz. All cost, no profit.
Be the change, I guess.
In my experience, the clever both-sides arguments are usually appeals to the status quo.
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Putin used that cultural and language similarity as an excuse to invade and kill Ukrainians. I think artificially exaggerating the cultural and language differences so Putin has less of a cassus belli and ends the war, and doesn't pursue future ones, is very valid.
Again, you’re asking everyone to just play along with these retarded polite fictions, in the belief that if everyone just converged on the right metapolitical narrative, there would no longer be any compelling material/geopolitical reason for conflict. Any person with a modicum of historical knowledge of the region would be well-aware of the extremely complicated cultural, linguistic, and political realignments within the patch of territory currently known as “Ukraine”. Putin’s casus belli isn’t made any more or less valid by Zelenskyy refusing to conduct an interview in a language which everybody already knows that he speaks. Nor is Ukraine’s desire to resist forceful reabsorption into the Russian Federation made any more or less justified by crafting an easily-falsifiable narrative about the proud and independent history of the Ukrainian/Ruthenian-speaking nation. None of these things are actually materially important.
If propaganda isn't materially important why are both sides doing it?
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The language of a single podcast of course isn't the sole hinge on which Putin's justifications turn. But it is a small piece. I think Putin's casus belli is made very slightly more valid if Zelensky speaks Russian. And very slightly less valid if he doesn't. Putin talked about the medieval history of Ukraine and Russia being one country to Tucker for so long because that type of thing does matter to Putin, and to many other Russians.
Hard disagree. Annexations to culturally unite a people are /so/ 1930s. We don't do that any more. If Olaf Scholz was to invade Austria, which shares a lot of cultural history with Germany, that fact would not make it better or worse than an invasion of the culturally more distinct Poland.
Want to unite your people in the 2020s? Let them vote to join you, don't invade.
Tell that to Putin then, cause that's exactly what he did
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For what it's worth, I recall literally zero episodes of anyone in my life going on about "actually Ukraine is just Russia" before the war. On my screen, people were perfectly fine having it as just a quaint almost-Russia, similar but separate, until the TV turned on the propaganda tap.
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Sure, but the masses buy the first narrative someone with a modicum of credibility sells them. Find a friendly historian, find a friendly journalist, have the latter cite the former and voila: Russian was never spoken by more than 5% of the population of Ukraine, citable on wikipedia. Find a friendly linguist and friendly journalist, and you can create the West-East Slavic Languages or add Ukranian to the Western Slavic ones. Again, a single article in an Reliable Source is all that is needed for wikipedia to consider it a fact on par with the Earth being round. And since most people will not delve to discover and possible dissent, a consensus among the masses can be manufactured by a wikipedia editor, skilled in the art of wiki bureaucracy and lacking in appreciation for the truth.
Records can be destroyed, and lied about. Have a reliable source claim Zelenskyy speaks Russian at such a low-level he is unable to discuss politics live, and it will believed by the masses whos willingness to research the truth ends at wikipedia, if that.
See above.
But lets ignore the deceivers, and focus on the language nationalism. In many Slavic countries the idea of a Nation (not as a synonym for a country) includes at its heart a language which is a distinct property of the members of a nation and which is meaningfully distinct from other languages. From the Spring of Nations a crucial demand was to be allowed to speak ones native tongue, usually associated with the peasentry, in official everyday business with the state and in parliaments also. This is probably the history, particularly within the context of Austria-Hungary, Zelenskyy is much more familiar with than Americans who never had to think about their native tongue and the wider society and any possible conflicts between them. And it is not like such conflicts do not exist today: A lawmaker just a few months ago protested to make Greenlandic an official language in the Danish parliament by making a speech only in Greenlandic, and ommiting the legally demanded Danish.
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We aren't discussing any person with a modicum of historical knowledge of the region. We're talking a podcaster and a podcast audience, who are in turn being used to shape the perceptions of an even less informed broader audience whose opinions have collective weight and impact on American policy makers decisions.
These framings are actually materially important, because the go on to shape the material inputs for the capacity to wage war.
Part of the insight 'war is politics by other means' is that the extension of policy into war also entails the inverse- politics is war by other means, because politics is what establishes policy that governs the conduct of war.
Policy may be boring, it may involve a lot of non-material elements, but it absolutely is materially important, hence why every serious power-building or power-seeking institution in the world invests non-trivial amounts of effort and thinking on information advantages. Part of information conflict is the language you choose to pursue it in- and that is a choice, because the choice itself has impacts.
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I think you nailed it with why does Zelensky speak Russian first?
And to steel man the point: the people Zelensky really needs to convince are the citizens of the LNR and DNR; those people consider themselves Russian, they speak Russian, and they want to be a part of Russia, not Ukraine. Speaking in Russian does have some symbolism, and the symbolism is “I’m not your enemy”. Refusing to even speak the language of the people you are supposedly fighting a war over certainly signals something.
Imagine Mexico invaded the US because El Paso, TX votes to secede from the US and rejoin Mexico.
What would be the symbolism if the Governor of Texas, in this thought experiment, spoke Spanish first, but refused to talk to the people in El Paso in that language, but instead insisted that he and by extension they, all spoke English.
The symbolism in this case is "I am, indeed, your wayward little brother as your propaganda has been claiming all along, and only persisted in having my own language out of spite and stubbornness".
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Does he? Even if he magically manages to reconquer the 2014-2022 LDNR, Ukraine has no real need to cater to them. Other Russian-speaking cities have accepted Ukrainian as the primary language even if Russian remains common. Those who can't accept that are free to pack up and leave.
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Insofar as I've understood, while Ukrainian has always been widely spoken in the countryside, Russian has been a prestige language, which is one of the reasons why it has had a strong stature in the cities (other reasons include internal immigration inside Russian empire etc., of course). The Ukrainian national project is not just about making Ukrainian acceptable but making it the prestige language inside Ukrainian; Zelensky speaking Russian in an interview like this would obviously go against that project.
If the starting assumption is that Zelensky and the Ukrainian govt has already tacitly accepted that (the occupied areas) of Donbass are not going to be within Ukrainian suzerainty for the time being, it also means that the people currently residing in those areas are not really the ones to convince about anything any more.
This certainly has been true in the western Ukraine, but I don’t think it has been true in the East. Pre-war, less than 20% of population of Donetsk Oblast spoke Ukrainian at all. Given that pretty much all Ukrainian speakers spoke Russian too, probably less than 10% of all conversations happened in Ukrainian.
If your definition of "East" is mostly just the specific areas that were taken by separatists/Russia in 2014 then sure - if you go by a map like this, the areas where Russian was given as the main language in the census outside of the cities pretty much cover those areas, with an additional zone in the Zaporozhye oblast.
Presumably many of those answering that they're Ukrainian-speaking would have indeed used mostly Russian in their daily lives, but that's precisely the difference between a prestige language and a non-prestige language. If Ukrainian-speakers have to become fluent in Russian to get by in life but the Russian-speakers feel it's not their duty to tarnish their mouths with what they see as a peasant dialect, it's Russian that gets spoken, and increasingly so as the years pass by, unless there's a concrete intervention to this matter.
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This reminded me of a question I had: how well did Mannerheim speak Finnish?
Apparently he started seriously studying it quite late in life (i.e. at 50, when he returned to Finland from Russian active service), but most sources I've seen say that by WW2 he knew if quite well. He retained a notable Swedish accent (it's obvious to me from a clip like this), but it's generally these days just seen as a part of his mythos as the last true aristocrat in Finland.
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If Zelensky will give up the disputed territories the war ends today, and young Ukrainian men stop dying.
If these Ukrainian people are so intent on fighting to keep control of the Donbas and Crimea, then why the need for conscription?
Since 2022, Putin has been pushing for a regime change in Kiev. What he is trying to do should be familiar to any player of Paradox games, it is building an empire. If you simply appease such people, you might get a few years of peace. But sooner or later, they will come for the next slice of territory, and then people will again argue "just give them what they want to stop the fighting".
I don't give much of a damn about Donbas and certainly none about Crimea. A peace deal where Putin gets them and in return Ukraine joins NATO (so that he can't come for the next Oblast in a year) would seem preferable -- but will not happen because Putin is not willing to let Ukraine move outside his sphere of influence.
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And if Putin gave them up the war would end as well. Why is the onus only on Zelensky here? You talk about Ukraine using conscripts but Putin doesn't even have the political capital for that. His first draft was limited to outlying areas and provoked a mass exodus, and he won't even consider drafting out of Moscow or other major cities. He's resorted to using North Korean mercenaries to retake occupied areas inside Russia. Doesn't Putin have an obligation to prevent the deaths of young Russian men?
Because he demands the west to spend money on him.
And why shouldn't he? His country is at stake. That's more a question to be leveled at the people who he's asking for money and not at Zelensky.
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In such a scenario, what makes you think Putin would either respect the ceasefire (see point 7 in the OP) or not just use the time to prepare and re-arm for another invasion?
Where does this logic lead you other than genocide of the Russian people and complete destruction of Russia as a nation?
This is the exact logic that the US has used for every ridiculous war we've gotten into for the last 70 years.
A whole range of possibilities. There are choices between "give them what they want" and "we have to exterminate them all".
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It's worth pointing out that the breaking of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese war machines did not require the genocide of thier respective peoples.
Ummm... Maybe not the complete genocide of their peoples. But certainly the destruction of millions upon millions of civilians, the castration of their independence and self respect as nations, and a permanent pall of suspicion cast over any effort to emerge.
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I think it's true that the Axis war machine was broken without genocide, but after the war both nations had their borders redrawn at bayonet-point, with Germany being split in two and millions of Germans forcibly relocated. Hundreds of thousands of them died and others (including civilians) were sent to forced labor camps. This policy was (in part, at least) approved by the "big three" (UK, US, USSR) during the Potsdam Conference and wasn't just something the Russians "got away with" after the Iron Curtain came down, and Western countries, including the US, UK, and France used POWs as forced labor until the late 1940s. Similarly in Japan, the Kurils were occupied by Russia with American assent and the Japanese inhabitants removed. It seems fair to say that no genocide was committed, but it might be worth remembering that what we would today call ethnic cleansing was a part of the Allied postwar strategy.
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You can stop a nation from invading its neighbors without committing genocide and destroying the nation. The US has also done this, for more than 70 years.
Do you sincerely believe Putin would just stop at Donbas and the Crimea, with no further designs on Ukraine or any other neighbors?
How many other countries has he invaded since the Ukraine war began? If he had any interest in other territories, why hasn’t he tried to take them?
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let's see
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Why believe that, when the disputed territories are disputed on the basis of Russian fiat beyond any sort of linguistic borderline and an ethnic dispute that resolved to 'we deny the existence of a Ukrainian nation, you are misled russians'?
And previous claims that Russia had no territorial disputes were later reversed?
And that war-start propaganda- including the pre-emptive victory lap way- identified Kiev itself in the realm of disputed/contested (vis-a-vis the weath) and mocked anyone for thinking Kiev wasn't part of the Russian claim?
The war did not start over a dispute over border territories. The war started as an attempt to take over the country in it's entirely. All of Ukraine is 'disputed territory,' it's just that much of the disputed territory is beyond Russia's military-industrial capacity to take.
This raises a more interesting question: is it better to die as a Ukrainian or to live as a Russian? Suppose Zelensky decided to capitulate unconditionally on the 25th of February. How many people would Russian occupying forces have killed? Right now the documented deaths stand at 68+ thousand.
Any regime installed by Putin would work pretty much like the current Russian system: a few oligarchs (picked for personal loyalty, not competence) own monopolies on most resource extraction.
Generally, those states favor rather simple production processes for most of their revenue where some goon can be put in charge, not complicated ones where they depend on some nerds with questionable loyalty. Competitive private enterprise is only tolerated while it is too small to form a power base.
Now, I will grant you that Ukraine certainly had its share of oligarchs as well, but they were at least in the process of transitioning out of a kleptocratic regime. If they become a puppet state of Putin in the way Belarus is, they will be stuck in that state for the foreseeable future, which will leave most of the population poor. This has some QALY costs.
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All of them, since they'd die as russian also because everyone dies regardless. Same as how every Ukrainian would have still died if Russia didn't invade at all. Since net death over time is the same, you can either quibble on the timeliness or you can quibble on the nature, but trying to do both is often smuggling a conclusion. 'Is it better to die a Russian or die a Ukrainian' would be a more like-to-like framing, let alone 'Is it better to die killing for Russia or die killing a Russian.'
As far as nature goes, the Tyrant's Peace dilemma has always been a false dilemma, because submission doesn't escape the fate supposedly avoided (death), and the submission to the tyrant entails the consequence and the usual depravities of being used by the tyrant to fight the next war, which repeats the same dilemma except the conscript is on the other side fighting for rather than against the warmonger.
LNR and DNR were being bled white even before the war, and Putin's revanchist ambitions went well beyond Ukraine. It's not like Ukrainian human dignity mattered any more than the Russians Putin has pushed into his sunk cost fallacy meat grinder. Putin's stupidity was always going to end up getting a lot of people killed, and would only grow in scale of risk if Ukraine had validated his myopia. If he had the ability to invoke the Ukrainians as his canon fodder before the Russians of Saint Petersburg and Moscow regions, he would, and we know because he did just that when he had the means.
Your stance also explains why Palestinians keep losing to Israel, but keep rejecting its (steadily worsening) peace terms.
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If he gives them up for nothing, the likelihood is he’ll be overthrown and killed.
So what's the plan? Just keep the war going until there's nobody left to kill him?
Give them up for something. EU membership and sufficient security guarantees, and put the contested territories in legal limbo so the god Terminus doesn't set down his lines.
The positive path forward for Ukraine goes through the EU, a Poland type trajectory economically, and perhaps using their vast store of veterans in those Cossack fantasies they have sometimes for cash and political capital.
If in 20 years Ukraine looks like Poland and Russia looks like Russia, contested provinces and people will be trying to join Ukraine.
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(1) Fight until the army collapses
(2) Cultivate stab-in-the-back myth that the war was eminently winnable if Ukraine had gotten just gotten more aid and gotten it faster
(3) Flee to a friendly country
I mean I don’t blame the guy, if he didn’t do it the hardliners would shoot him in the head and get someone who would.
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If I am in his position, the plan will be to keep the war going, stay in power as long as posible using the war til I die
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