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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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Sure, though also in ways contrary to what you probably meant. The crux of the stance, after all, is recognizing the nature of the dilemma.
The Tyrant's Dilemma, to reiterate, is the decision to resist conquest or join the expansionist conquering empire. Unlike the Tyrant Dilemma, the Israeli-Tyrant did not want them to join the empire. The Palestinians of yester-years ago were not facing conquest. The lands they wanted were already conquered, and where the final borders might be was in dispute, but one of the major basis for conflict was the Tyrant not taking and incorporating the people for its own purposes (i.e. absorbing as Israeli citizens for use in further wars of expansion).
The dilemma facing the Palestinians was not 'do or do not resist the Tyrant's claim on you.' In some aspects, the Tyrant willingly released them from the Empire, and tried another form of co-existence, which in turn could have led to another. This is certainly un-Tyrant behavior, and while there is plenty of behavior- many may even say tyrannical- to condemn, it is not the Tyrant of metaphor.
There are certainly dilemma to be found, but it isn't the Tyrant's Dilemma. Choosing to frame it as a Tyrant's Dielmma is itself a false dilemma, which does indeed explain why the Palestinians keep losing to Israel.
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