Sam Harris speaks with Yaroslav Trofimov about the War in Ukraine. They discuss the widespread false assumptions that Russia would win a swift victory, Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia, the transformation of the Ukrainian military, Russian incompetence, Russian public opinion, the Azov Battalion and the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine, the role of the Orthodox Church, conspiracy thinking and Russian propaganda, Putin’s popularity on the Right, NATO membership, the Minsk 2 agreement, alleged failures of Western diplomacy, Zelensky’s leadership, the moral clarity of the war, Russian war crimes, the new cult of WW2 victory in Russia, the numbers of casualties and displaced people in Ukraine, delays in US aid to Ukraine, nuclear blackmail, long-range weaponry, the weakness of western sanctions, the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline, how the war might end, the complicated prospects of a Trump presidency, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.
Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.
There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one.
We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
Today I'm speaking with Yaroslav Trofimov.
Yaroslav is the Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for two consecutive years in 2022 and 2023.
He has reported from most major conflicts of the past two decades, serving as the Journal's Bureau Chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and as a correspondent in Iraq.
He's the author of several books, including Faith at War, The Siege of Mecca, And most recently, our enemies will vanish.
The Russian invasion and Ukraine's war of independence.
And that is the topic of today's conversation.
This really serves as a primer on the war in Ukraine.
We discuss the widespread false assumptions that Russia would win a swift victory, Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia, the transformation of the Ukrainian military, Russian incompetence, Russian public opinion, The Azov Battalion and the so-called denazification of Ukraine.
The role of the Orthodox Church in Russia.
Conspiracy thinking and Russian propaganda.
Putin's popularity on the right.
NATO membership of Ukraine as an alleged provocation.
The Minsk II agreement.
Alleged failures of Western diplomacy.
Zelensky's leadership.
The moral clarity of this war.
Russian war crimes.
The new cult of World War II victory in Russia.
The numbers of casualties and displaced people in Ukraine.
The delay of US aid.
Nuclear blackmail.
The significance of long-range weaponry.
The weakness of Western sanctions against Russia.
The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline.
And finally, how this war might end.
And now I bring you Yaroslav Trofimov.
I am here with Yaroslav Trofimov.
Yaroslav, was that close to the pronunciation of your name?
That is perfect.
Nice.
Well, you've written a truly gripping and harrowing book about the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and I'd love to discuss that and really take us all the way through the present and into the future insofar as we can foresee it.
Before we jump in, what's your background as a journalist?
What kinds of things have you covered beyond the war?
Well, thank you so much.
You know, I was born in Ukraine, but this is really the first time I've come back to write about it.
I spent the entire career that I've had at the Wall Street Journal since 1999 covering other people's wars and other people's miseries.
You know, I used to be our Kabul-based bureau chief for Afghanistan and Pakistan for five years.
I covered the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and then again, the war against ISIS, Islamic State in 2015, 16, and plenty of other wars, Somalia, Libya, you name it.
And the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008.
So, kind of, you know, my job as chief foreign affairs correspondent in the journal.
But a lot of the time it was the Wars and Mayhem correspondent.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it is courageous work, as anyone listening to this conversation or reading your book will quickly intuit.
Again, the book is Our Enemies Will Vanish, The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence.
And so let's start pretty much where you start with your book.
We're two years in, just over two years into the war, and I do want to cover events beyond those covered in your book.
But the beginning of the war was astonishing for a few reasons.
One was just that Russia thought that it would take just 10 days or something to accomplish.
I mean, they thought they would take Kiev in, I think, three days and maybe the rest of Ukraine in something like six weeks.
What do you make of the level of delusion that seems to have kind of shrouded the launch of the war?
I mean, what mistakes did Putin make and how do you account for the poverty of his understanding of what awaited him in Ukraine?
Yeah, well, I think the delusion was not just in Moscow.
There was also a delusion in Washington and in European capitals, because everyone, except the Ukrainians, was expecting Ukraine to fall in a matter of days.
And I think it goes, first of all, to the profound misunderstanding of Ukrainian society and how much it has changed, especially since the war really began in 2014 with the initial Russian invasion of Crimea and The proxy war that Russia fomented in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine.
And back then, you know, the Ukrainian army was pretty much non-existent and couldn't put up much of a fight.
And it was the volunteer units, ordinary civilians who picked up guns and tried to stop the Russian, little green men, you know, the Russian troops who were not wearing uniform, but were in fact, you know, Russian service members in the battlefields of Donbass.
And at the time, You know, Russia was not unpopular in many parts of Ukraine, because before that invasion, before that, you know, the first attempt to annex large parts of Ukraine, Russia was seen by Ukrainians as a country of higher wages, job opportunities, maybe less corruption.
Volodymyr Zelensky at the time was working in Moscow.
He actually hosted the New Year's morning show on January 1st, 2014, at the time when the Maidan revolution was already underway in Kiev.
But after that, you know, every Ukrainian saw what this quote unquote Russian world that Putin wanted to bring to Ukraine means.
You know, the eight years of occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk by Russian forces was this experiment.
And people saw that Russian rule meant big collapse of law and order, gangsters taking over, taking properties of gunpoint, jobs disappearing.
And more than half the population of Russian-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk voted with their feet.
They escaped to the rest of Ukraine, to the West, to Russia.
And so by the time Putin invaded again with this full-scale invasion in February 2022, every Ukrainian knew what it means to live under Russian rule.
The cities of Eastern Ukraine had hundreds of thousands Of refugees from Russian rule.
And I think this transformation of the Ukrainian society is something that went unnoticed in Moscow and in the West, as did the transformation of the Ukrainian military, which, you know, by 2022 became a combat-tested professional fighting force that underwent reforms and had hundreds of thousands of either full-time service members or reservists with considerable combat experience fighting the Russians.
So are you saying that in 2014 something like a majority of Ukrainians would have been sympathetic to being reabsorbed by Russia?
Not a majority of Ukrainians, for sure, but a significant proportion of people in places like Kharkiv and Odessa, especially the older generation who sort of still lived in the Soviet, post-Soviet nostalgia.
Yeah.
And I'm quoting in the book, one of the Ukrainian veterans who played a key role in the defense of Ukraine, both in 2014 and after 2022, who is saying that 2014, the majority of people Kharkiv had this sort of latent pro-Russian tendencies.
But that completely flipped, and as we saw in 2022, was virtually no support for the Russians.
And the population of Eastern Ukraine, you know, joined the military, fought to protect their cities, and did all they could to stop the Russians.
Well, so there was clearly a misunderstanding of Ukrainian sentiment and the likelihood that Ukrainian society would resist or acquiesce But, it seems also that Putin and perhaps his generals, and one doesn't know how far down the hierarchy this must have gone, but it seems that the Russians misunderstood the competence of their own forces, right?
I mean, you know, you would expect, I mean, I think you would have expected that with or without Ukrainian resistance, just given the asymmetry in power, or what we imagine the asymmetry in power to be, Russia still should have just rolled into Kiev fairly quickly.
To what do you attribute certainly the early signs of incompetence on the part of the Russian forces?
Well, you know, there's a culture of fear in Russia, which also means a culture of lying.
So people are afraid to report up the chain of command, the problems that they have.
And so everything gets embellished, the higher up it goes.
And, you know, I was speaking to General Budanov, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, and he was telling me that, you know, the Americans came to us and had the intelligence, which they had from the highest levels.
So they knew what the Russian generals were telling Putin.
But we knew from our sources, lower down the food chain, The generals were lying to Putin about the readiness of Russian forces.
We knew about the corruption, we knew about the, you know, the equipment that wasn't functioning, the units that were only on paper ready, but weren't actually ready.
And in fact, it all came into play.
So the Russian army was not up to the task.
But the other flip side of it also is because Putin lived in his own world in which he convinced himself that the Russians and Ukrainians are one people.
As he wrote in his famous essay on history, several months before the war.
And the entire world plan only made sense on the premise that the Ukrainian army would not really resist.
And that the Ukrainians would welcome the Russians as liberators from this Western imposed clique, which was thinking in the Kremlin, it appears.
And so if you look at the Russian forces that were streaming towards Kyiv and Kharkiv, they were carrying parade uniforms.
They were really expecting to be celebrating Blin Days.
So, can you say more about Putin's view of Ukrainian and Russian history?
I mean, what is, how accurate or inaccurate were his claims that he's made in that essay you cite in various speeches?
And to what degree does his view pervade Russia as a whole?
I mean, do we know enough about Russian sentiment with respect to history and the war to know how much people share Putin's view?
Or is it another instance where Public opinion really can't be properly assessed given the level of fear in the society.
Well, I think what we can say is that this view really is not exceptional.
And we have to go back to the very foundational myth of Russia.
So Russia traces its glory and its greatness to the Kiev Rus, which was a state established in Kiev by, you know, Princess Volodymyr, after whom Zelensky and Putin are named, and you know, Yaroslav, after whom I'm named, and who ruled in the 10th, 11th centuries, well before Moscow and who ruled in the 10th, 11th centuries, well before Moscow even existed as a
And so in the Russian historical narrative, that is the narrative of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union, Moscow is a direct descendant who has the legacy of that Kievan Rus, and the historical right to rule all the lands once ruled from Kiev.
Obviously, Ukrainians see Kievan Rus because it's in Kiev.
as their own heritage.
And the Russian narrative has a problem because you cannot trace your roots to the capital of another country, of a foreign country.
And so the very existence of an independent, separate Ukraine completely undermines Russia's narrative, the view of itself.
And so there was always a hostility to the very idea of the Ukrainian separate identity.
Hmm.
Putin famously said in a recent interview that Ukrainian language was invented by the Austro-Hungarian General Staff before World War I, which is complete nonsense, because there were centuries of literature in Ukrainian before that, even when it was banned by the Russian authorities specifically.
And so we have a tradition of Russian luminaries, even the liberal ones, kind of believing the same things.
You know, Joseph Brodsky, the famous Russian dissident poet, who was exiled to America, became the poet laureate of the United States.
He famously wrote a poem on independence of Ukraine in 1991, saying, I want to spit into the Dnieper River, and I wish it would flow backwards.
And then he used a pretty derogatory name for Ukrainians.
So, unfortunately, that is part of the Russian mindset.
That is fostered by Russian education, which has never been decolonized.
You know, everybody knows about the greatness of Pushkin or Dostoevsky, but we've never looked at them through the same lens through which we look at, for example, Kipling, because they're all, you know, pretty imperialist and pretty aggressively imperialist in their writings.
And Ukraine is the centerpiece of that.
Hmm.
Where does Tolstoy come out in his writings?
Well, Tolstoy was more of a pacifist, obviously, and having seen war in the Caucasus and the horrors of war.
But during his time, Ukrainian language was officially non-existent, and Ukraine was called Little Russia in Russian documents and literature.
What do you make, or what are we to make, of the claims of denazification in Ukraine that Putin has said is part of the purpose of the war?
And, you know, as spurious as those almost certainly are, given that Zelensky is Jewish and, you know, this sounds like an SNL sketch more than anything else, What about the Azov Battalion and the historical links between it and various Nazi groups?
This is some version of a half-truth that is, you know, in the main ridiculous and cynical on the part of Putin, I have to think.
But can you untangle this for us?
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, let's first go back to what does it mean to be a Nazi in Russian official lexicon?
It's pretty much anybody who opposes the government or Russia is a Nazi by definition.
This is their definition of a Nazi.
And this comes at the time when, you know, it's forbidden to mention in Russia that the Soviet Union was a co-belligerent with the Nazis in the first third of World War II, you know, invading Poland together in 1939 and kind of being on the same side until during 1941.
Now, as for the Azov battalion, which then became a regiment, you know, in 2014, when the Ukrainian army unraveled, you know, all these volunteer formations were created to try to stop the frontline.
And there were a lot of far-right extremists and soccer hooligans and all kinds of other unsavory characters who have flocked to groups like Azov.
But since then, it has changed.
Since then, it became a professional unit of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
The professional military officer, Denis Prokopenko, became its chief ahead of 2022.
ahead of the 2022.
And it certainly repudiated, you know, any far right ideology, you know, and declared when the war began that, you know, we have Jewish and Muslim members in our ranks, and we firmly reject the ideology of communism and of Nazism, the two ideologies that and we firmly reject the ideology of communism and of Nazism, the two ideologies that have caused so many
And if we look at the, you know, the electoral history of Ukraine, you know, yes, it has far-right parties, you know, one would even say neo-Nazi parties, maybe.
But none of them have ever managed to get more than 1% of the vote, which is a lot less than pretty much every other European country, I would think.
What is the role of the Orthodox Church in Russia in supporting the war, if any?
Well, you know, the Patriarch Kirill, you know, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has come out very strongly in favor of the war.
I mean, he declared it to be a holy war, you know, Russian Orthodox priests are blessing the weapons of the Russian troops, which is kind of remarkable considering that, you know, these are the weapons that are killing, you know, thousands of fellow Orthodox civilians.
Is there any explicitly religious framing of the war on the part of Putin or most Russians?
I mean, is there some kind of, beyond the history in the sense that Ukraine isn't a nation and its existence as a separate nation is a perpetual insult to Russia, is there a religious, spiritual, you know, apocalyptic framing of it?
Or is just the church just a supporter on the sidelines?
I'm sure the Church is not just a supporter.
The Church is an instrument of state power in Russia and has always been, you know, subordinate to state power.
And a lot of the clergy in Soviet times were also KGB officers.
And it's working very closely with the military right now.
Putin himself doesn't speak much about religiosity.
And he was asked in a recent interview, does he believe in God?
And he didn't say so.
But certainly the regime is playing this card of defender of Traditional values, you know, there's a whole crusade against, you know, gay, lesbian and transgender rights.
And it's part of its instrument of messages that it's sending out.
And in the Russian official narrative, you know, Ukraine is taken over by satanists who want to force everyone to become homosexual and, you know, and every child to change the gender and all that.
So, you know, the propaganda can be quite ridiculous.
The ridiculousness of it is, I mean, obviously there are analogs to this craziness in other countries, and even in America, you have something like QAnon, where it's hard to believe that anyone actually believes what they say they believe.
I mean, in the case of QAnon, you've got this imagined cult of pedophile cannibals that includes some of the most famous people in Hollywood and democratic politics.
So it's literally imagined, or at least it's alleged to be imagined by seemingly millions of people, that you have celebrities like Tom Hanks and Michelle Obama, etc., drinking the blood of children so as to stay youthful.
I think they're taking some magical substance, adrenochrome, out of the bodies of children and perhaps additionally raping and cannibalizing them.
And this is, it's a strange performance of, I mean, it's a kind of pornography of suspicion that gets amplified on social media.
Much of it does appear to be in earnest.
How much of the conspiracy thinking that exists in Russia do you think is believed, and how much of it is just, we know that on some level we can't trust information, and so, because there's so much propaganda, there's so much lying, there's so many half-truths, we're basically declaring epistemological bankruptcy, and we'll just entertain any string of sentences that anyone wants to produce.
I think I have a point here.
I think the main strategic goal of Russian propaganda is the removal of truth as a concept.
So they're throwing out a whole variety of competing storylines that are incompatible with each other and seeing sort of what sticks.
But the ultimate overarching goal is to foster cynicism and make people believe that, you know, there's no right and wrong and there is no true or untrue.
What do you make of the fact that Putin now appears to be some kind of hero of right-wing populists in the US and elsewhere?
I mean, he's the face of many things.
I mean, he's the antithesis of the woke elitist who, not to say Satanist, who's trying to turn your kid gay or trans.
But he's also, I guess, primarily he's the face of anti-globalism.
On some level.
How has this happened?
I mean, you would think that Republicans in the US, above more or less anyone, would have recognized that Putin is antithetical to more or less everything America thought it represented in the world.
Again, right of center even more than left of center.
How did we get here where Putin is just celebrated without much of a qualm, it seems?
I think it's really interesting to see this and also the dynamic of this in America and in Europe, because we're sort of on the same page with parts of the Republican Party in the U.S.
and much of the European far right before the full-scale invasion.
Putin was celebrated as a virile, macho man who is standing up for tradition, against the woke, and is defending the old truth.
And because of all these different messages to different audiences, you could appeal both to some on the far left, but also some on the far right, and the propaganda was tailored.
But I think what happened after 2022 in Europe is that Ukraine became a very real thing.
You know, Ukraine in America is this sort of imaginary abstract construct that doesn't factor into daily life.
But in Europe, after several million Ukrainians arrived, most are women and children fleeing the war, and it became a factor of daily life.
It became very difficult for the far-right parties to openly support Putin.
And so if you look at the, you know, in Italy, for example, you know, Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni, who was partly, you know, Used to be quite pro-Russian, and whose deputy prime minister, Salvini, was very much pro-Russian, used to wear a Putin t-shirt.
They are now one of the most active and clear supporters of Ukraine.
And you see the same transformation in many other countries.
Even in France, Marine Le Pen no longer openly supports Putin.
But in the US, you've seen the opposite.
In the US, we have seen that the Putin messaging is being repeated more and more, including by members of the House and the Senate.
And somehow Putin seems to have a hold on the mind of many parts of the American electorate at a time when Russia has absolutely no economic leverage over America.
A big difference from Europe, which has had to pay a very heavy price for severing its energy dependence and actually would have a lot to gain from appeasing Russia, but doesn't.
How has the Wall Street Journal done editorially on this?
Well, you know, I work for the news side, so I can only speak for the news side.
Yeah.
And as a news site, we have invested a lot of effort into covering Ukraine, blow by blow.
And I think, you know, as much or more than any other publication, because our readers care very much about what's happening there.
And everybody knows, you know, everybody wants to know.
I think people realize just how much it matters, despite all the noise and proclamations that it's not our war.
Ukrainian society because, you know, I think people realize just how much it matters despite all the noise and proclamations that it's not our war.
I mean, the fact is that after hundreds of billions of dollars spent by the US and European allies and all the proclamations that we will stand with Ukraine as long as it takes, it You know, you can say it's not our war, but a Russian victory in Ukraine will be seen as an American defeat by everybody else in the world.
What do you make of the apparent confusion on that point in America?
I'm thinking mostly right of center.
Maybe there's a left-wing version of a similar confusion and spirit of isolationism, but As I look right of center, I often encounter the claim that the US and the EU are, to some considerable degree, culpable for Putin's invasion.
It's often described as the result of Western provocations.
We crossed one of his red lines, which we knew to be a red line.
The failures of Western diplomacy, for which America, above all, is culpable.
You know, did the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine force Putin's hand here?
I mean, how do you how do you view this allegation that it's basically the war is our fault and Putin is acting as we would under similar circumstances?
And, you know, it's just we we just failed to understand our adversary and, you know, what really mattered to him.
And, you know, it's largely on us that we're in this situation.
Yeah, it's really strange to watch that exercise and trying to exculpate the guilty party by finding flaws in yourself.
And, you know, if we go back to the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin, you know, he asked him repeatedly, you know, was it NATO's fault?
Putin's response for half an hour was, well, actually, you know, Ukraine is Russia.
Let me tell you the story of how since Vladimir the Great and Yaroslav the Wise, it was always Russia.
You know, NATO membership was not something that was happening.
In 2008, there was a declaration at the summit in Romania that Ukraine and Georgia will become members of NATO.
And that was the end of it.
There was no membership plan, no negotiations, nothing practical happening.
It's not like Ukraine was about to join NATO or was even negotiating to join NATO.
It was just empty words.
So there was really not much for Putin to fear from that, if he was really fearing that.
And he wasn't, because again, it's, if you look at his mindset, you know, he has said famously that the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The greatest tragedy was the Holocaust.
And he was working very hard to reverse that tragedy and to collect Russian lands once again.
That was it.
It's just pure imperialist land grab.
What happened at the Minsk II agreement?
Yeah, so in 2014, when Russia fomented the armed uprising in Donbass, it was started by an officer in the Russian intelligence service, FSB, Igor Girkin, who has been sentenced by a court in the Netherlands since then for his key role in downing a Malaysian Airlines jet in which hundreds of people died.
Russia more and more overtly was sending troops to Donbass.
And there was one agreement, the Minsk one.
It failed because Russia decided to take more land and send tank units.
And then, as Ukrainian troops were being surrounded, talks began in Minsk again.
Sponsored by Germany and France, and between Russia and Ukraine.
And with the gun to its head, Ukraine agreed to the ceasefire, which stopped violence for now.
And so as part of the agreement, you know, there were several conditions.
And it started with, you know, Russia withdraws all its forces, restores Ukrainian control over the border crossings.
Then there will be elections in these areas.
And then eventually Ukraine will change its constitution to accommodate autonomy and a certain role for the elected authorities of Donbass in the future running of Ukraine.
What Russia said after this was done was that, well, actually, we're not going to withdraw our forces.
We're not going to allow you to reclaim the border.
We will just demand that you change your constitution to give us veto power over your foreign policy through our proxies in Donbass.
And that was the stalemate for the following eight years.
And obviously, you know, Ukraine was not going to give veto power over its foreign policy to people that rushed and stole the gunpoint in Donbass and controlled 100%.
I think I've heard this, the failure of Minsk II described as yet another failure of Western diplomacy, or worse, that the US and the UK just dismantled it for their own reasons, whatever those are.
Well, you know, let's go back to 2014 and 2015, January 2015.
At the time, nobody was interested in helping Ukraine.
President Obama at the time famously said in an interview with The Atlantic that there's nothing the U.S.
can do to prevent Russia from dominating Ukraine.
He washed his hands of Ukraine.
No lethal aid was forthcoming.
And everybody was really eager to do business with Moscow.
The U.S.
was focused on the nuclear deal with Iran.
The Germans wanted to do the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, you know, for lots of cheap Russian gas.
And so Ukraine, you know, was basically left to its own devices.
Having lost, you know, 14,000 people died in that war at the time.
It's not a small number.
And so, you know, everybody had a pause.
Russia had a pause to prepare a full-scale war, and Ukraine had a pause to also prepare for a full-scale war that happened.
But I think everybody was cognizant that Minsk was just a reprieve, and there will be a next round.
Which is why the Ukrainians are very reluctant to sign on to another deal with Russia that would leave Russia in control of Ukrainian land, because that would just mean giving Russian time to prepare for another round in which they could be more successful than this time around.
So take me back to the beginning of the war, and I want to ask you about the emergence of Zelensky as really a hero here.
And I'm wondering, what can you say about him?
Is it appropriate to view him just as a hero?
Is he a more complicated figure?
How do you view Zelensky and his leadership from the beginning of the war?
Yeah, obviously, every person is complicated and every person has many shades of black or white or gray.
Zelensky was very popular when he was elected in 2019.
He got three quarters of the vote, the highest vote in the history of Ukrainian elections.
And he was not very popular by the time the illusion happened.
What he did do is stay.
And I was in Afghanistan in the summer, in August 2021, and I remember very well how one morning President Ashraf Ghani walked the ramparts of Kabul and said, you know, we will fight, defend the city.
And by lunchtime the next day, on August 15th, He was in a helicopter to Abu Dhabi, and the Taliban were in my hotel. - Yeah. - Zarensky had the same option.
Boris Johnson, among other leaders, called him and said, "On the morning of the invasion, come to London, set up a government in exile, like the Poles did in 1939." But he didn't.
And I think that sort of the heroic decision to stay and come out in the open and record this video address with his closest aides saying, we are here, we are staying, everybody's staying, we will fight, was a very important moment.
And I'm writing the book about how the next morning I was driving through Kiev and seeing hundreds of young men and women coming out of their high-rises and going to a stadium to pick up weapons and head off to the front line on the city's outskirts.
To stop this advancing thousands of Russian troops.
But, you know, he's human.
He, like everybody else, has made mistakes, and there are plenty of Ukrainians who are not happy with all of his decisions.
But the fact is that he's legitimately elected, he's the president, and he represents the continuation and legitimacy of the Ukrainian state.
And so I think there is sort of unspoken consensus among many Ukrainians to defer criticism of his actions, especially before the war, to a time after the war ends.
And, you know, will he be re-elected in the next elections?
Who knows?
The Ukrainians... He's the sixth president of Ukraine since independence in 1991.
Only one of the six won re-election.
So Ukrainians don't really like to re-elect their incumbents.
So your book covers the war from its outset.
I mean, you were there when it began, and I forget when your coverage ends.
Do you go through the first year of the war?
Yeah, so the book really begins the day before the full-scale invasion, you know, when I went to see Zarensky's predecessor, President Poroshenko, who leaned towards me and whispered into my ear, you know, it's gonna be tomorrow at 4 a.m., you have time to go to the airport and get out of the country.
And lots of people did.
Obviously, I didn't because I had come there for the war.
And it ends with the blow by blow Travel through the front lines and detailed descriptions of all the pivotal turns of the war, and on the one-year anniversary of the war in February 2023, you know, where Zelensky is having this three-hour press conference, and the words that he said that really stuck in my mind, that, you know, we've learned a very painful lesson here.
It may be unfair, but nobody likes losers, so we have to be winners.
And then there is a little, well, not a little, but there is an afterword that kind of takes us all the way to the Israeli war in Gaza in October 2020.
So, how would you compare the war to other wars you've covered, both in the kinds of atrocities, the rightness or wrongness of, you know, tactics, the implications for neighboring countries?
I mean, as you say, in America, Ukraine is not often thought about, and I would say it's not often thought about even in the midst of, you know, what is the first proper land war in Europe since World War II.
It is really an afterthought.
To say that most Americans can't find Ukraine on a map is bound to be an understatement.
How do you view its significance?
You were there and you've reported directly on other wars.
What should we understand about what the Russians have done, what the Ukrainians have had to do?
Just give us some details as to how you view this war.
Yeah, well, actually, I kind of want to go back to what you were asking about Zelensky and his achievements.
And I think his biggest achievement was that because he was a showman, he is a showman, he is from the world of entertainment, he was able to speak directly to the publics in the West, in America and in Europe over the heads of politicians and make the moral case for Ukraine.
If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.
Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast.
The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program, so if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website.
