Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll 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 samherris.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 the Yaroslav Trophy Move. 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 denocification 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 is an alleged provocation, the Minsk-2 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 USAID, 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.
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 and so far 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. I used to be our Kabul-based Aburicheev for Afghanistan 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, my job was chief foreign affairs correspondent of the Journal, but a lot of the time was the wars in Mayhem's era. Wars in Mayhem corresponded. 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. I mean, 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 and 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 delusion in Washington and in European capitals because everyone, except the Ukrainians, was expecting
Ukraine to fall in the middle 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 fermented in the Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine. And back then, 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 man, you know, the Russian troops who were not wearing uniform, but wearing facts, 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 1, 2014, at the time when my dandervolution was already underway and key.
But after that, you know, every Ukrainian saw what this quote-unquote Russian world that put in order to bring to Ukraine means, you know, the eight years of occupation of the Netsk and Ohansk by Russian forces was this experiment. And people saw that Russian rule meant a bit collapsible order, gags, tears, taking over, taking properties of gunpoint, jobs disappearing, and more than half the population of Russian occupied, then Netsk and Ohansk were able to defeat
they escaped to the rest of Ukraine, to the west, 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 Istinia, Ukraine had hundreds of thousands of refugees from Russian rule. And I think this transformation of the Ukrainian society is something that went the noticed in Moscow
and in the west. As did the transformation of the Ukrainian military, which, you know, by 2022 became a combat-stretched professional fighting force that underwent reforms and had hundreds of thousands of either full-time service members or reservists with considerable combat experience of 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, but 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 in I'm quoting in the book one of the Ukrainian veterans who played a key role in the defensive Ukraine, bought in 2014 and in after 2022, we're saying that 2014, the majority of people in
Kharkiv had this sort of latent per-Russian tendencies, but that completely flipped. And as we saw in 2022, was virtually no support for the Russians. And the population of Istinia, Ukraine, you know, joined the military, fought to protect their cities and 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 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 whether without Ukrainian resistance, just given the asymmetry and power, or what we imagine the asymmetry and power to be, the Russia still should have just rolled into Kiev fairly quickly, to what do you attribute the, 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 the culture of lying. So people are afraid to report at the China command the problems that they have. And so everything gets embellished, the higher up it goes. And 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 they had the intelligence, which they had from the highest levels.
So the new, what the Russian generals were telling Putin. But we knew, from our sources, lower down the food chain, that 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 quite 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 the Ukrainians are one people, as he wrote in his famous essay on history several months before the war. And the entire war plan only made sense on the premise that the Ukrainian army would not really resist. And the Ukrainians would welcome the Russians and the liberators from
Western and post-Clic, which was thinking in the Kremlin, it appears. And so if you look at the Russian forces that were streaming towards Kiev and Harkiv, they were carrying prayed uniforms, they were really expecting to be celebrating balloon 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 and that essay is cited in various speeches? And to what degree does his view
pervade Russia as a whole? 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 Princess Vladimir, after Humselensky and Putin are named and Yarislav, after whom I'm named, and who ruled in the 10th, 11th centuries well before Moscow even existed as a town. And so in the Russian historical narrative, that is the narrative of the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union, Moscow is the direct descendant who has the legacy of that
Kiev and Rus and the historical right to rule all the lands once ruled from Kiev. Obviously, Ukrainians see Kiev 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 before in the country. And so the very existence of an independent, separate Ukraine completely undermines Russia's narrative of view of itself. And so there was always a hostility to the very idea of
the Ukrainian separate identity. Putin famously said in the recent interview that Ukrainian language was invented by the Austrian-Gerry and General Staff before World War I, which is a brief nonsense, because the centuries of literally 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. And Joseph Brotsky, a famous Russian descendant poet who was
exiled to America, one became the poet laureate of the United States. He famous to wrote a poem on independence of Ukraine in 1991 saying, I want to spit into the knee-prorever and I wish you 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. Everybody knows about the greatness of Bushkin or Dostoyevsky, but we've never looked at them through the same lands through which we'll look at, for example, Kipling, because they're all pretty imperialist and pretty aggressively imperialist in their writings. And then Ukraine is the centripes of that. What where does Tolstoy come out in his writings?
Well, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky was more of a pacifist, obviously, and having seen war in the Caucasus and the Chorazavur, but during his time, you know, Ukrainian language was officially non-existent, and Ukraine was called to little Russia in Russian documents in the future. What do you make or what are we to make of the claims of denocification in Ukraine that Putin
has said is part of the purpose of the war? And as spurious as those almost certainly are, given that Zelensky is Jewish and that sounds like an SNL sketch more than anything else, what about the Ezov battalion and the historical links between it and various Nazi groups? So it's just what is it? This is a 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 in 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 copilot with the Nazis in the first third or fourth or two, you know, invading Poland together in 1913 and kind of being on the same side until
during 1941. Now, as for the Ezov battalion, which then became a regiment, in 1714, when the Ukrainian army unraveled, you know, all his 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 advanced saber characters who have flocked to groups like Ezov. But since then, it has changed. Since then, it became a professional unit of the Ukrainian armed forces, the professional
military officer, you know, Denise Prakopenko became its chief head of the 2022. And it's certainly repudiated, you know, any far-right ideology, you know, 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 ideologists that have caused so many millions of death in Ukraine. And if we look at the, you know, the electoral history of Ukraine, you know, yes, it has far-right parties, you know, one within say new and anti-parties maybe. But none of them have ever managed to get more than one percent of the vote, which is a lot less than in 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 Kurel, you know, they had a Russian Orthodox Church. It's come out very strongly in favor of the war. I mean, he declared to be a holy war and a Russian Orthodox priest 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 not just a supporter, the church is an instrument of state power in Russia and has always been, you know, a supporter of the state power and a lot of the clergy and so many
times were also KGB officers. And it's working very closely with the military right now. You know, Putin himself, you know, doesn't speak much about religiosity and, you know, he was asked in the recent interview, you know, that's he'd even got and he didn't say so. But certainly the regime is playing this card of, you know, defender of traditional values, you know, there's 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 create and he's taken over by satanists, who want to force everyone to become homosexual and, you know, and every child can change the gender and all that. So, you know, the propaganda can be quite ridiculous. The ridiculousness of it is, I mean, obviously, they're analogs to this craziness, you know, the countries and even in America, you have something like QAnon, where it's
just 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, this imagined cult of pedophile cannibals that includes some of the most famous people in Hollywood and democratic politics. So you it's literally imagined or at least it's alleged to be imagined by seemingly millions of people that you have, you know, celebrities like Tom Hanks and, and you know, Michelle Obama and etc. drinking the blood of children.
So it's to stay youthful, I think they're taking some magical substance, a dream of chrome 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. But much of it does appear to be an 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 line, there's so many half-truths, which are basically declaring epistemological bankruptcy and will just entertain any string of sentences that anyone wants to produce. As I think I have a point here, I think the main strategic goal of Russian propaganda is to remove all 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 of a Russian goal is to foster cynicism and make people believe that there's no right and wrong and there's 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. He's the the antithesis of the woke elitist who, you know, 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 Republican in the US, above more or less anyone, would have recognized that Putin is the 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 quam, it seems? I think it's really interesting to see this and also
the dynamic of this in America and in Europe. We're sort of on the same page with parts of the Republican Party in the US and much of the European far right before the full-scale invasion. Putin was celebrated as a sort of virile, much a man who is standing up for tradition against the woke and is defending the old truth. Because of all this 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 12-22 in Europe is that Ukraine became a very real thing. Now, 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 of 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, in Italy, for example, in a Prime Minister George Emilogno, who was partly 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. You see this transformation in many other countries, even in France, in Amaril, Japan, and Nolonga,
openly supports Putin. But in the US, it was in the opposite. In the US, we have seen that the Putin message 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 of America, a big difference from Europe, which has had to pay very heavy price, for severe energy dependence, and actually would have a lot to gain from a peace in Russia. But it doesn't. How is the Wall Street Journal done editorially on this? Well, you know, I work for the news site, so I can only speak for the news site.
Yeah. And as a news site, we have invested a lot of effort to cover 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, if you say everybody wants to know the detailed ground truth of what is actually transpiring on the front lines, and in the 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, 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. Hmm. Well, what do you make of the apparent confusion on that point in America?
I'm thinking mostly right of center. I mean, maybe there's a left-wing version of, you know, a similar confusion and spirit of isolationism. But, you know, 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, right? And it's often described as the result of Western provocations, you know, we crossed one of his red lines, which we knew to be a red line.
There were failures of Western diplomacy for which America, above all, is culpable. Did the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine force Putin's hand here? I mean, how do you view this allegation that it's basically that the war is our fault and Putin is acting as we would under similar circumstances. And, you know, it's just 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 techic Carlson and to 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 the whole day we were the great and year us loved 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. It was no membership plan, no negotiations, nothing practical happening. It's not like Ukraine was about to join NATO, it was even negotiating to join NATO. It was just empty words.
So there was really not much for putting to fear from that. If he was really fear that, and he wasn't, you know, it goes 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 into collect Russian lands once again. That was it. That's just pure imperialist land grab.
What happened at the Minsk to agreement? Yeah. So in 2014, when Russia fermented the armed uprising in Dumbass, you know, it was started by an officer in the Russian intelligence service, a physicist, Igor Girkin, who has been sent into the by a court in the Netherlands since then, for his key role in downing the emulation airlines jet in the Chinese people died. Russia more and more overtly was sending troops to Dumbass. And there was one agreement,
the Minsk one, it failed because Russia decided to take more land and send tank units. And then as the Ukrainian troops were being surrounded, dogs began in Minsk again, sponsored by Germany and France and with been Russia and Ukraine. And with the country its head, you create an agree
to the ceasefire which stopped the violence for now. And so as part of the agreement, you know, there were several conditions and it starved it with, you know, the Russia would draw all this forces, towards the Ukrainian control, over the border crossings, then there will be elections in this areas. And then eventually, a credible changes constitution to accommodate autonomy and a certain role for the elected authorities of Dumbass in the future running of
Ukraine. What Russia said after this was done was that, well, actually, you know, we're not going to have to throw 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 Dumbass. And that was the stalemate for the following eight years.
And obviously, in a Ukraine, you know, was not going to give veto power over its foreign policy to people at Russians toward the gunpoint in Dumbass and control 100%. I think I've heard this, the failure of Minsk to describe as yet another failure of western diplomacy or a 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 view of the Atlantic, that no matter there's nothing the US can do to prevent Russia from dominating Ukraine. He washed his hands off Ukraine. No lethal aid was forthcoming. And everybody was really eager to do business with Moscow. The US was focused on the nuclear deal with Iran. The Germans wanted to do the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, you know, lots of cheap
Russian gas. And so Ukraine, you know, was basically left with so many 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 the pause to also prepare for a full-scale war that happened. But I think everybody was cognizant
that Minsk was just to reprieve that would be an extra round. Which is why the Ukrainians are very reluctant, because I know into another deal with Russia, they would leave Russia in control of Ukrainian land because that would just mean giving Russia time to prepare for another round in which it could be more successful in this time. So take me back to the beginning of the war. And I guess I want to ask you about the emergence of Zelensky. It's 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? What does 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 election happened. What he did do is stay. And I was in Afghanistan in the summer and August 2021. And I remember very well how one morning President Ashraf Ghani walked around parts of Kabul, and said in a Google fight, defend the city, and by lunch time the next day, on August 15th, he was in a helicopter to Abu Dhabi, and they tell him,
I'm going to my hotel. Yeah. Zelensky had the same option. Boris Johnson, among other leaders, called him and said, on the morning of the invasion, you know, come to London, set up a government exile like the polls did in 1939. But he didn't. And I think that here, the heroic decision to stay and come out in the open and record this video address with his closest aide saying, we are here,
we are staying, everybody staying, we will fight. It 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, going to 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, like a man, he has many 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 of the 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 will he be reelected in the next elections? Who knows, the Ukrainians, he's the sixth president of Ukraine since independence 1991, only one of the six of one religion. So, Ukrainians really like to reelect 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. And so, do you go through the first year of the war?
Yes, so, but it really begins the day before the full-scale invasion, you know, what I want to see. I was going to ask his predecessor, President Poroshenko, who leaned towards me, was sprinting to my ear, you know, it's going to 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 there, the blow-by-blow travel through the front lines and it hailed the descriptions
of all the pivotal churns of the war. And on the one-year anniversary of the war in February 2023, you know, where Zadansk is having this three-hour press conference. And the war that he said, that really stuck in my mind, we've learned a very painful lesson here, maybe 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 afterward that takes us all the way to the Israeli war in Gaza
in October 2022. Three. So how would you compare the war to other wars you've covered, both in the kinds of atrocities, the 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 in, 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 it significance? And just 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, what just give us some detail as to how you view this war?
Yeah, well, actually, I kind of want to go back to what you were asking, but Zarenzki. And he's a choo-man. And like, I think he's the biggest achievement was that because he was a choo-man, he is a choo-man, he is from the World Management. He was able to speak directly to the publics in the West and America and in Europe over the heads of politicians and make the moral case. You're very great. And in every, it is.
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