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Notes -
Not everybody noticed that Lex's Russian is actually poor. He is a native Russian speaker but his vocabulary is stuck at the level of 11-year-old and is not sufficient for discussing complex and abstract ideas. When speaking Russian, he takes long pauses and uses simple sentences. Somewhere he even mentioned that he is not fluent in Russian.
Zelensky's Russian is much better but clearly he decided against it, apparently he thought that it will not improve his chances to be better accepted by Russian speaking community. He explained that he tried speaking in Russian shortly after invasion in 2022 and no one listened to him. He is probably right. While translation is less effective than direct address, Ukrainian is actually similar sounding to Russian and if a Russian speaking person has a positive attitude towards Zelensky, he will enjoy listening to his Ukrainian (it has some nice sounding vibes) while reading subtitles.
Zelensky is also right – if someone doesn't want to hear, he will not hear what you are saying, regardless which language.
I think this is a Lex problem, not a Lex-speaking-Russian problem.
Do you speak Russian?
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