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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.
My review: I also spent my Sunday afternoon listening to this. I rate my experience as a 4/10. If you're interested in listening to world leaders give a speech for 3 hours, go for it. Zelensky does share some novel anecdotes. The latter half becomes tiresome.
Lex Fridman's previous interviews (that I've seen) left a better impression. I think he takes most of the blame. Lex asks very similar questions. He "has a dream" that peace can happen if Trump, Putin, and Zelensky gets in a room. Okay, great. That's answered.
It also includes the same problems as Tucker's Putin interview. Though I would rate that one as a 7/10 for peculiarity. If a president wants to blabber, dodge, and stonewall you for 3 hour's, there's not much you can do. Unless you're a great interviewer. Then you find find a way to mine an interesting vein. For that I consider much of this interview as bloated or even wasteful.
Lex has sympathies, but he also wants to be open-minded, heterodox guy. Like Zelensky I found the "can you forgive him" phrasing juvenile and poorly designed. What was he expecting there?
For Zelensky's part, I was taken by just how direct he was in making this appearance a love letter to Trump. I would expect some flattery, but so much of his answers contained an appeal to US support-- and Trump himself. That was the goal no doubt. It was new for me to hear his (official?) position now includes the option to cede occupied territories for security guarantees for what Ukraine has left. Unless I misheard that part? Negotiations may happen in 2025. That'd be good.
From what I read, it sounds like the security guarantees would be a precondition to entering negotiations, not a bargaining chip. As in, if he enters negotiations with the security guarantees already in place, it makes his negotiating position much stronger.
I'd have to go back and listen, but I didn't understand it as a "we won't talk until" precondition. He was laying out that for negotiations to be worth anything, for anything like a ceasefire to be entertained, then meaningful security guarantees must be met. Might be saying the same thing. I came away thinking he would consider (or said he would) conceding territory for something like NATO presence. He didn't say that directly, but that was my impression.
He contextualized it with the Budapest Memorandum. So he spoke at some length about the kind of "assurances" that would not be acceptable for any form of peace to occur. Maybe he's spoken like this for awhile, but that signal alone: a suggestion lines could be frozen and and concede territory was a new thing for me to hear from him.
If his aim is to get Trump involved and on board, then seen as willing to negotiate is a precondition for that to happen. We'll see.
A lot of it was also veiled threats of what might happen if Ukraine didn't get a good enough deal. Grieving Ukrainian families might turn to terrorism against Russia. Or Ukraine might have to develop nuclear weapons (could they?).
Nuclear latency (the time taken to acquire a nuclear weapon if a blank ish cheque is given and the government says go) is low for any country with nuclear reactors. Ukraine has several, as does much of East Asia. Under a year most likely, though there would be external signs that other powers would pick up on, probably.
As a general comment, a lot of commentators seem to miss that other countries than the US/NATO have agency, and this is one ways this crops up. If the US truly throws Ukraine under the bus, as some suggest would somehow both be the moral thing to do and in the USA's own interests, both Ukraine and other non nuclear powers would need to look to their full defense within a short period. Nuclear weapons might well be a part of that, and other countries are watching too. Zelensky himself may also have limited room to resist those calls either, Ukrainians I know have settled into an awakened wrath of Kipling fame, including those actively in the conflict, there's still a lot of fight there.
"I was surprised by the reverence the United States has for Russia’s nuclear threat. It may have cost us the war. They treat nuclear weapons as some kind of God. So perhaps it is also time for us to pray to this God." Oleksii Yizhak - who apparently was dropping rhetorical fire too.
Typically once the US becomes aware of non-nuclear armed country's latency period being actively shrunk, steps to... lengthen it again are harsh and immediate.
I suggest that Russia probably has more-than-adequate intelligence assets in Ukraine to become rapidly aware of such activities (don't they de facto run a lot of the nuke plants?) and has substantial heretofore untapped capabilities that they would bring to bear in such a case. (there's already a pretty big exclusion zone around Chernobyl; what's a few more!?)
Russia's untapped capabilities here are pretty much just nuclear, their conventional force isn't enough to disable any significant section of Ukraine's industry - that's rather why we're here. And any strike on a nuclear facility is not a trivial act, it is one that would lead to incredible blowback - literally - across Europe. It would be very difficult to prevent all these small countries from acquiring weapons outside of diplomatic pressure, which abandoning Ukraine and thus undermining all your other commitments would remove any leverage across all these small non nuclear states.
It's unlikely to be a key factor in the current war anyway - Russia is likely to win or lose over the coming year conventionally and nuking your way out of sanctions isn't going to change that. It's more setting the scene for the next war - security guarantees or nukes I guess to underpin Ukrainian security. Russia has them, and if America does not wish to pay for Ukraine's guarantees isn't this the better option for thrifty US isolationist nationalists without a dog in the fight?
Only if they don't care about the (literal) fallout -- this is absolutely a red line for Russia, and I'm not even sure how unreasonable that is.
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