Lex Fridman's Analysis of Putin and Ukraine

The thing is, there is, if you look at the details, a fundamental difference between what Vladimir Putin is doing and what the United States is doing. Now, everybody is a victim of somebody's propaganda. Now, I talked to Russians, which is a very interesting thing. Both Russians and Ukrainians say that they are not at all under the influence of propaganda. Russians believe there is no propaganda in Russia. And Ukrainians believe there is no propaganda in Ukraine. That the West is influenced by their propaganda. By the CNNs and the Foxes, and Ukraine is influenced by their propaganda, by the limited number of news channels they have that are state controlled. From our Western perspective, that seems ridiculous. Because it's obvious that Russia is under the influence of propaganda. So it's hard to know what is true or not. But the reality seems to be that Russia is currently an authoritarian regime that tries to appear as much as possible as a democracy. Because there is an election, and there's an extra hard truth on top of that. I don't know what to do with it, but Putin is still and even more so popular in Russia. He's very popular in India, in China, and in Russia, and some small countries around former Soviet Union. What do you do with that? That's real objective, well, as far as we can tell, data taken from outside of the polls, taken from outside of Russia. Do you give any credence to the rumors that he has cancer? I'm not an investigative, because there's a lot of rumors of this nature. Oliver Stone even discussed it. He said it was the case while he was there. Yes, he said it very nonchalantly, and I thought that was a known fact. And then later I looked and I'm not sure that was objectively publicly known. But if Oliver said it, then perhaps there's some truth to it. He stayed there for quite a while when he was interviewing Putin. Yeah, two years. No, he visited multiple times, and he spent time with him. Yeah, but according to Oliver, he beat it. He beat the cancer. But he's 69 years old, so it's going to be 70. Yeah, but beating the cancer when Oliver was there versus what he has now. Oh, what he has now? He looks like Puffy, which is oftentimes—we were talking about this with the Christus Deveno podcast. I had a friend who had gout, and they gave him prednisone. He had something else, too, sarcoidosis, and they gave him prednisone. His face got big. Yeah. He looked Puffy. He said it's just a side effect of the steroids. Yeah, his face is Puffy. Yeah, Oliver Stone says, Vladimir Putin has struggled with cancer during his time in which the filmmaker focused on his work on the Russian president, pictured about Putin waves during the Victory Day Parade, Red Square, May 9th. Well, I'm much less concerned about the puffiness of his face and more concerned about what's going on with his mind. It seems like he's a different man now than he was even a year ago. So this is what Oliver Stone commented on, and I agree. He's formed a much stricter information bubble around him, that there is that isolation that a lot of us have experienced with COVID. I honestly think it might have to do with just the isolation due to COVID. You know, the basic distance you have to keep and all that kind of stuff. As a political leader, you have to have extra precautions. Especially a political leader that assassinates his enemies. Yes. Well, that is one too. No, but that was always the case that has less to do with COVID. But don't you think that increases his paranoia? Yes, that's paranoia. The paranoia is the thing that's what gets dictators. That's what gets you start mistrusting everybody, not just on the outside of the circle, but the inner circle. And so you don't know who to trust, even though the closest advisors, you don't know who to trust. So your flow of information is really flawed. It's very limited. And so you start making really poor decisions, even more so than before. And that's where, I mean, if you – and I hate thinking of it that way, because to me, the war in Ukraine is a humanitarian thing, not a geopolitics thing. But if you think geopolitically, invading Ukraine was just a giant miscalculation on Putin's part, on every level. Geopolitical, social, militarily. Unless there's very few scenarios in which this was calculated all along. The only scenarios of Putin thought through – first of all, maybe he thought that Zelensky would just back down. Which is crumble under the pressure of even a minor invasion. And obviously, you have to give credit. This is really important. So Ukraine got its independence for the first time in many centuries, in 91, 30 years ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed. So they're dealing with independence, with sovereignty, which is a difficult process, as the United States knows. We had a civil war about it. The same thing in Ukraine. There's factions. There's a lot of corruption. It's the second most corrupt country in Europe, next to Russia. Did you see when The New York Times was questioning Candace Owen, and where is she getting her information that – because The New York Times was trying to push this while the Ukraine invasion was happening. They were trying to push this thing that Ukraine was good and Russia is bad. And she was saying, well, this is one of the most corrupt countries on Earth. So they said to her, like, where are you getting this information? They sent her an email, and she sent them back links to The New York Times and all these articles about how badly corrupt Ukraine was, which just makes me go, God damn. If I can't trust a fucking New York Times to get it right, like, you're supposed to be the paper of note. But a lot has changed, though. So Zelensky, the president, he got into office with 70 percent approval, and before the war he had less than 30 percent approval. There's factions. There's divisions. The west side of Ukraine is pro-let's say Ukrainian, and then the right side is pro-Russia. So he got into office, and he had a high approval rating, and then before the war it dropped very low? Yeah, it had been dropping gradually over because of the division, because of the factions. He wasn't able to bring the country together. And the war, turns out, his great leadership was catalyzed, was made possible. Like, he was sometimes sort of a catastrophe brings out the best in us, and that was the case with him. W. George W. Bush. Yeah, that's exactly what happened post-9-11. Yes, exactly. But in his case, he wasn't able to hold that for a long time. Let's see what Zelensky does. But at the moment, Zelensky united a previously divided country, which is very difficult to do. That's a historic event for Ukraine in its sovereign history. And so in terms of corruption, that might be a really big blow to corruption, that kind of unification. So I think there's a fundamental difference between the corruption in Ukraine and the corruption in Russia. What is the conflict in Ukraine, beside Russia? What is the internal conflict, the factions? What do they want? What is the dispute? Well, no, it's just factions that are vying for power. That's just at the basic level. So it's basically like right versus left in America. Yeah, but okay, so there's a bunch of differences, what they stand for, what they're looking for. A lot of it in the recent years has been centered around the war with Russia, starting with 2014. And so some parts are Ukrainian-speaking, pro-Ukraine. Some parts are Russian-speaking, or primarily Russian-speaking and pro-Russia. So on the east, you have the Donbass region, but around that as well, they want to be closer to Russia. And the west part wants to be closer to Europe, closer to NATO, closer to the European Union. That's one of the divisions. You want to be pro-democracy, or you want to be pro-whatever-the-heck Russia is. So it's like, are you pulling towards the west, the western civilization, or are you pulling towards the east? The way of Russia, the way of China, the way of those powers. And I'm sure they're influenced, and the ones that are pro-Russia, they're getting some signals from Putin, or meeting with them, and he's giving them indications that they would best be served to be aligned with him and be better for them. Yeah, but he is still popular. I don't know exactly why he's popular, but there's a longing, as there is in a lot of nations, to be the greatest nation on Earth. Isn't there always just a longing for a strong man, like the strong man leader? I would say a strong vision, and that sometimes can coincide, or often does, with a strong man. Isn't it like a natural inclination that people have to be led by a strong man? Like Putin, like him or hate him, thinks he's evil. That's all good, but there's no doubt that he's strong. He's a strong leader, and he's been running Russia for a long time, and the way he's been doing that, sort of unopposed in a ruthless manner, is very impressive. It's evil, but in terms of its efficacy, it's impressive what he's been able to do. I think strength is one of the things we admire in leaders, but it's not the entirety of it. That's why Zelensky is extremely popular. He stepped up, the famous thing, Biden offered him a ride, and he said, fuck that. I'm staying put, give me more bullets, and he stayed in Kiev, and held his ground where most leaders would have fled. This is the failure we had in Afghanistan, where we fled. Here's a leader that stepped up and held his ground, and that's rare in this world, and we admire that kind of strength, yes. The same could be said by the Russian people, the Indian people, the Chinese people that admire strength, and Putin. But we also admire other values that make this country great. The United States of America is this kind of respect for human freedom, human rights. The embodiment of this ideal of all men are created equal, that's not exactly communicated very clearly by Vladimir Putin. There's also a difference between, and this again, the Oliver Stone perspective, is between the messaging and the actual execution. Hitler's messaging was also very beautiful sounding. What is he talking about? National socialism, respect for workers, like the downtrodden workers. Germany is a great nation that deserves to be respected, among other nations, and was not respected because of World War I. Are you also going to mention that you're going to murder and imprison and torture millions of people? You're not, you're not. The same things with America, not moral equivalence at all, obviously, but we talk a lot about freedom, what does freedom actually look like? When we fight terrorism and evil in the world, what does that actually look like? It turns out that it looks like you're bombing civilians, children, lose their fathers and mothers. Hundreds of thousands of civilians die when you're spreading freedom all over the world. So we have to be very careful separating the messaging from the actions. As Americans, we have to make sure we live up to the ideal, and we don't always. I think when you just paint the whole world as black and white, it's easy for us to say America good, China, Russia bad, instead of the full complexity of that. There's war mongers that watch Ukraine now with the money that we're sending there, and they get excited because they can escalate. And if they escalate, they can get more and more money from manufacturing weapons to both sides, to all sides. And what if China enters with Taiwan, that tension, that military conflict, and there's nukes on the ready everywhere?