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My review: I also spent my Sunday afternoon listening to this. I rate my experience as a 4/10. If you're interested in listening to world leaders give a speech for 3 hours, go for it. Zelensky does share some novel anecdotes. The latter half becomes tiresome.
Lex Fridman's previous interviews (that I've seen) left a better impression. I think he takes most of the blame. Lex asks very similar questions. He "has a dream" that peace can happen if Trump, Putin, and Zelensky gets in a room. Okay, great. That's answered.
It also includes the same problems as Tucker's Putin interview. Though I would rate that one as a 7/10 for peculiarity. If a president wants to blabber, dodge, and stonewall you for 3 hour's, there's not much you can do. Unless you're a great interviewer. Then you find find a way to mine an interesting vein. For that I consider much of this interview as bloated or even wasteful.
Lex has sympathies, but he also wants to be open-minded, heterodox guy. Like Zelensky I found the "can you forgive him" phrasing juvenile and poorly designed. What was he expecting there?
For Zelensky's part, I was taken by just how direct he was in making this appearance a love letter to Trump. I would expect some flattery, but so much of his answers contained an appeal to US support-- and Trump himself. That was the goal no doubt. It was new for me to hear his (official?) position now includes the option to cede occupied territories for security guarantees for what Ukraine has left. Unless I misheard that part? Negotiations may happen in 2025. That'd be good.
From what I read, it sounds like the security guarantees would be a precondition to entering negotiations, not a bargaining chip. As in, if he enters negotiations with the security guarantees already in place, it makes his negotiating position much stronger.
I'd have to go back and listen, but I didn't understand it as a "we won't talk until" precondition. He was laying out that for negotiations to be worth anything, for anything like a ceasefire to be entertained, then meaningful security guarantees must be met. Might be saying the same thing. I came away thinking he would consider (or said he would) conceding territory for something like NATO presence. He didn't say that directly, but that was my impression.
He contextualized it with the Budapest Memorandum. So he spoke at some length about the kind of "assurances" that would not be acceptable for any form of peace to occur. Maybe he's spoken like this for awhile, but that signal alone: a suggestion lines could be frozen and and concede territory was a new thing for me to hear from him.
If his aim is to get Trump involved and on board, then seen as willing to negotiate is a precondition for that to happen. We'll see.
A lot of it was also veiled threats of what might happen if Ukraine didn't get a good enough deal. Grieving Ukrainian families might turn to terrorism against Russia. Or Ukraine might have to develop nuclear weapons (could they?).
Nuclear latency (the time taken to acquire a nuclear weapon if a blank ish cheque is given and the government says go) is low for any country with nuclear reactors. Ukraine has several, as does much of East Asia. Under a year most likely, though there would be external signs that other powers would pick up on, probably.
As a general comment, a lot of commentators seem to miss that other countries than the US/NATO have agency, and this is one ways this crops up. If the US truly throws Ukraine under the bus, as some suggest would somehow both be the moral thing to do and in the USA's own interests, both Ukraine and other non nuclear powers would need to look to their full defense within a short period. Nuclear weapons might well be a part of that, and other countries are watching too. Zelensky himself may also have limited room to resist those calls either, Ukrainians I know have settled into an awakened wrath of Kipling fame, including those actively in the conflict, there's still a lot of fight there.
"I was surprised by the reverence the United States has for Russia’s nuclear threat. It may have cost us the war. They treat nuclear weapons as some kind of God. So perhaps it is also time for us to pray to this God." Oleksii Yizhak - who apparently was dropping rhetorical fire too.
Typically once the US becomes aware of non-nuclear armed country's latency period being actively shrunk, steps to... lengthen it again are harsh and immediate.
I suggest that Russia probably has more-than-adequate intelligence assets in Ukraine to become rapidly aware of such activities (don't they de facto run a lot of the nuke plants?) and has substantial heretofore untapped capabilities that they would bring to bear in such a case. (there's already a pretty big exclusion zone around Chernobyl; what's a few more!?)
Russia's untapped capabilities here are pretty much just nuclear, their conventional force isn't enough to disable any significant section of Ukraine's industry - that's rather why we're here. And any strike on a nuclear facility is not a trivial act, it is one that would lead to incredible blowback - literally - across Europe. It would be very difficult to prevent all these small countries from acquiring weapons outside of diplomatic pressure, which abandoning Ukraine and thus undermining all your other commitments would remove any leverage across all these small non nuclear states.
It's unlikely to be a key factor in the current war anyway - Russia is likely to win or lose over the coming year conventionally and nuking your way out of sanctions isn't going to change that. It's more setting the scene for the next war - security guarantees or nukes I guess to underpin Ukrainian security. Russia has them, and if America does not wish to pay for Ukraine's guarantees isn't this the better option for thrifty US isolationist nationalists without a dog in the fight?
Only if they don't care about the (literal) fallout -- this is absolutely a red line for Russia, and I'm not even sure how unreasonable that is.
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