Lex Fridman: commitment

Transcript context

…… Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, that this was an internal coup, and it showed dissent and weakness of Putin. And none of that is true. That insurgency, which wasn’t even an insurgency… He only got 4,000 of his men to follow him out of 20,000. And they were quickly stopped. And nobody in the Russian military, the oligarchy, the political system, nobody supported it. But we’re being told, “Oh yeah, it’s the beginning of the end for Putin. He’s weakened. He’s wounded. He’s on his way out.” And all of these things are just lies that we are being fed. To push back on a small aspect of this that you kind of implied, so I’ve traveled to Ukraine, and one thing that I should say, similar to the Battle of Stalingrad, it is not only the Russians that fight to the end. I think Ukrainians are very lucky to fight to the end. And the morale there is quite high. I’ve talked to nobody… This was a year ago in August with Kherson. Everybody was proud to fight and die for their country. And there’s some aspect where this war unified the people, gave them a reason and an understanding that this is what it means to be Ukrainian and, “I will fight to the death to defend this land. ” I would agree with that, and I should have said that myself at the beginning. That’s one of the reasons my son went over there to fight because he was inspired by the valor of the Ukrainian people and this extraordinary willingness of them. And I think Putin thought it would be much easier to sweep into Ukraine, and he found a stone wall of Ukrainians ready to put their lives and their bodies on the line. But that, to me, makes the whole episode even more tragic, is that I don’t believe… I think that the US’s role in this has been… There were many opportunities to settle this war, and the Ukrainians wanted to settle it. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, when he ran in 2019, here’s a guy who’s a comedian, he’s an actor. He had no political experience, and yet he won this election with 70% of the vote. Why? He won on a peace platform, and he won promising to sign the Minsk accords. And yet something happened when he got in there that made him suddenly pivot. And I think it’s a good guess what happened. I think he came under threat by ultra-nationalists within his own administration and the insistence of neocons like Victoria Nuland and the White House, that we don’t want peace with Putin. We want a war.…

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