#456 – Volodymyr Zelenskyy: Ukraine, War, Peace, Putin, Trump, NATO, and Freedom
Lex Fridman Podcast
Lex Fridman
4.7 • 13K Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2025
⏱️ 193 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Transcript:
https://lexfridman.com/volodymyr-zelenskyy-transcript
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EPISODE LINKS:
President Zelenskyy's X: https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa
President Zelenskyy's Instagram: https://instagram.com/zelenskyy_official
President Zelenskyy's Website: https://www.president.gov.ua/
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OUTLINE:
(00:00) - Introduction
(20:17) - Language
(30:06) - World War II
(46:54) - Invasion on Feb 24, 2022
(53:30) - Negotiating Peace
(1:13:47) - NATO and security guarantees
(1:26:39) - Sitting down with Putin and Trump
(1:46:09) - Compromise and leverage
(1:51:38) - Putin and Russia
(2:01:30) - Donald Trump
(2:12:01) - Martial Law and Elections
(2:24:21) - Corruption
(2:33:06) - Elon Musk
(2:37:10) - Trump Inauguration on Jan 20
(2:40:18) - Power dynamics in Ukraine
(2:43:50) - Future of Ukraine
(2:48:32) - Choice of language
(2:58:02) - Podcast prep and research process
(3:06:27) - Travel and setup
(3:12:13) - Conclusion
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The following is a conversation with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine. |
| 0:07.2 | It was an intense, raw, and heartfelt conversation, my goal for which was to understand and to do all I can, |
| 0:15.3 | to push for peace. Please allow me to say a few words, first about language, then about the president, and finally, about history. |
| 0:24.6 | Please skip ahead straight to our conversation, if you like. |
| 0:28.6 | We spoke in a mix of languages, continuously switching from Ukrainian to Russian to English. |
| 0:35.6 | So the interpreter was barely hanging on. It was indeed, |
| 0:41.2 | in many ways, a wild ride of a conversation. As the president said, the first of many. |
| 0:48.5 | Language, like many other things in a time of war, is a big deal. We had a choice, speaking Russian, Ukrainian, or English. |
| 0:57.0 | The president does speak some English, but he's far from fluent in it. And I sadly don't |
| 1:03.0 | speak Ukrainian yet. So Russian is the only common language we are both fluent in. In case you |
| 1:10.0 | don't know, the Russian language |
| 1:12.0 | is one that the president speaks fluently and was his primary language for most of his life. |
| 1:17.4 | It's the language I also speak fluently, to the degree I speak any language fluently, as does |
| 1:24.8 | a large fraction of the Ukrainian population. |
| 1:34.5 | So the most dynamic and powerful conversation between us would be in Russian, without an interpreter, |
| 1:42.3 | who in this case added about two to three second delay and frankly translated partially and poorly, |
| 1:47.7 | for me at least, taking away my ability to feel the humor, the wit, |
| 1:53.4 | the brilliance, the pain, the anger, the humanity of the person sitting before me, that I could clearly feel when he was speaking fluently in the language I understand, Russian. But all that said, |
| 2:05.1 | war changes everything. The Ukrainian language has become a symbol of the Ukrainian people's fight for freedom and independence. So we had a |
| 2:11.9 | difficult choice of three languages. And faced with that choice, we said yes to all three, to the consternation and |
| 2:21.6 | dismay of the translators. We make captions and voice over audio tracks available in English, |
| 2:30.0 | Ukrainian, and Russian. So you can listen either to a version that is all one language |
... |
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