Peace in Ukraine won’t be won on a podcast

Lex Fridman is one of the many inexplicable products of the YouTube age. Despite his enormous profile, he remains almost entirely without presence – diminutive, unassuming and perpetually wearing an expression somewhere between serious and confused. He provides something close to a perfect blank space on which his famous guests can project their views.

His blockbuster interview with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, published last weekend, immediately exposed Fridman’s limitations. Claiming Russian fluency, he wanted to conduct the interview in that language – partly to serve his growing Russian-language YouTube channel, partly from a bizarre belief that Vladimir Putin might watch and could be moved towards peace. Zelensky, a native Russian speaker, refused to use the ‘aggressor’s language’ and teased Fridman’s Russian skills in the process.

Peace is certainly a noble aim, but Fridman’s approach to it was kumbaya-ish. In the interview’s key moment, Fridman switches from the reasonable question of what give-and-take Zelensky is prepared for at the negotiating table to the bizarre question of whether he is ready to personally forgive Putin. Zelensky, with appropriate incredulousness, asks Fridman to imagine asking this question to one of the thousands of Ukrainians who have lost relatives, lost children, in the war. ‘Can murderers be forgiven?’, asks Zelensky.

Most of those demanding an immediate peace in Ukraine share Fridman’s naivety. Peace for them is something you can almost wish into being. Fridman’s belief that a podcast could bring Putin to the table is a prime example of this thinking. He often speaks of a ‘dream’ he had in which Zelensky and Putin are negotiating together. In a hilarious moment, Fridman tells Zelensky about this dream, insisting Putin is ready for talks. When Zelensky asks, ‘Did you talk to him?’, Fridman responds that he hasn’t, ‘but I have a feeling he is ready [for talks]’. For Fridman, peace is a state of mind.

Zelensky remains a compelling speaker, if a perplexing one to those far away from the region. In the interview, he switched between reservedness, anger, jokes, emotion and swearwords – a slightly manic mix but rather characteristic of Ukrainians. He explained the long history of the conflict and corrected the most common falsehoods about it. Sometimes Zelensky spoke for too long, but he clearly speaks from the heart.

Zelensky was at his best when he tried to explain the delicate balance of the situation. Fridman pushed him on what can bring both sides to the negotiating table. Zelensky insisted that the security of Ukraine was paramount. He reminded Fridman of the failure of previous ‘security guarantees’, calling them ‘wastepaper’, and stressed the importance of Ukraine maintaining its own power and weapons supplies. Both had plenty of praise for US president-elect Donald Trump, although Fridman reminded Zelensky to be cautious about NATO, given Trump’s threats to withdraw from the alliance.

Overall, little new emerged from the discussion – although Zelensky may well have benefitted from addressing Fridman’s audience, which tends to be very sceptical about support for Ukraine. Fridman’s mammoth, AI-assisted effort to open the discussion across multiple languages deserves some praise, even if he also exposed how dangerous and difficult instantaneous translation can be.

Zelensky was certainly convincing on why Ukraine can’t just lay down their weapons at the first opportunity. But he was too vague on what it would take to bring the fighting to an end. Perhaps the detail can be saved for the real negotiations with Putin and Trump, but Zelensky does need to acknowledge that no realistic peace deal will leave him and his countrymen totally satisfied.

Ultimately, the interview just went to show how far we are from peace. No number of naive paeans to forgiveness can change the reality on the ground. A phrase from Golda Meir, a former Israeli prime minister who was born in Kyiv, is often quoted today in Ukraine:

‘We intend to remain alive. Our neighbours want to see us dead. This is not a question that leaves much room for compromise.’

If future negotiations do manage to produce an acceptable compromise, it will not be because of feel-good talk of peace and forgiveness. It will be down to a mutual, hard-faced assessment of the balance of power established on the battlefield. Fridman has done us a service broadcasting Zelensky to the world. But simply dreaming of peace seems like a dead end.

Jacob Reynolds is a writer based in London and Brussels.