Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Stalin, Hitler, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine | Lex Fridman Podcast #289

1. 0:00 – 2:19

   Introduction

   1. LFLex Fridman0:00

      The following is a conversation with Stephen Kotkin, his second time on the podcast. Stephen is one of the greatest historians of all time, specializing in 20th and 21st century history of Russia and Eastern Europe. And he has written what is widely considered to be the definitive biography of Stalin in three volumes, two of which have been published. And the third, focused on World War II and the years after, he is in the midst of writing now. This conversation includes a response to my previous podcast episode with Oliver Stone that was focused on Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. Stephen provides a hard-hitting criticism of Putin and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, weighed and contextualized deeply in the complex geopolitics and history of our world, all with an intensity and rigor, but also wit and humor that makes Stephen one of my favorite human beings. Please also allow me to mention something that has been apparent and has weighed heavy on my heart and mind. This conversation with Stephen Kotkin makes it more dangerous for me to travel in Russia. The previous conversation with Oliver Stone makes it more dangerous for me to travel in Ukraine. This makes me sad, but it is the way of the world. I will nevertheless travel to both Ukraine and Russia. I need to once again see with my own eyes the land of my ancestors, where they suffered but flourished, and eventually gave birth to silly old me. I need to hear directly the pain, anger, and hope from both Ukrainians and Russians. I won't give details to my travel plans in terms of location and timing, but the trip is very soon. Whatever happens, I'm truly grateful for every day I'm alive, and I hope to spend each such day adding a bit of love to the world. I love you all. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Stephen Kotkin.

2. 2:19 – 13:09

   Putin and Stalin

   1. LFLex Fridman2:19

      You are one of the great historians of our time, specializing in the man, the leader, the historical figure of Stalin. So let me ask a challenging question. If you can, uh, perhaps (sighs) think about the echo of 80 years between Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Putin. What are the similarities and differences between the man and the historical figure, the historical trajectory of Stalin and Putin?

   2. SKStephen Kotkin2:48

      Thank you, Lex. It's very nice to be here again with you.

   3. LFLex Fridman2:53

      (laughs)

   4. SKStephen Kotkin2:53

      It's been a while.

   5. LFLex Fridman2:54

      Yeah.

   6. SKStephen Kotkin2:54

      Good to see you.

   7. LFLex Fridman2:55

      Yeah. Good to see you as well. (laughs)

   8. SKStephen Kotkin2:56

      You're looking good.

   9. LFLex Fridman2:57

      You as well. (laughs)

   10. SKStephen Kotkin2:57

       I see this podcast stuff is doing you right.

   11. LFLex Fridman3:01

       Yeah. (laughs)

   12. SKStephen Kotkin3:02

       So we can't really put very easily Vladimir Putin in the same sentence with Joseph Stalin. Stalin is a singular figure and his category is really small. Hitler, Mao, that's really about it. And even in that category, Stalin is the dominant figure, both by how long he was in power and also by the amount of power, the military-industrial complex he helped build and commanded. So Putin can't be compared to that. However, Putin's in the same building as Stalin. He uses some of the same offices as Stalin used. On some of those television broadcasts that we see of Putin at meetings and Putin inside the Kremlin, Stalin used to sit in those rooms and hold meetings in those rooms. That's the Imperial Senate built by Catherine the Great, an 18th century building inside the Kremlin. It's a domed building and, and you can see it on the panorama, the top of the building at least you can see it on the panorama when you look over the Kremlin wall from many sites, uh, inside Moscow. So if he's not comparable to Stalin, he still works, as I said, in those same buildings, those same offices partly, and so therefore, he's got some of the problems that Stalin had, which was managing Russian power in the world from a position of weakness vis-a-vis the West, but from a, an ambition, a grandiosity, in fact. And so this combination of weakness and grandeur, right, of, of not being as strong as the West, but aspiring to be as great or greater than the West, that's the dilemma of Russian history for the past many centuries. It was the dilemma for the tsars. It was the dilemma for Peter the Great. It was the dilemma for Alexander. Uh, it was the dilemma for Stalin, and it's the dilemma for Putin. Russia is smaller now compared to when Stalin was in that Kremlin. It's got pushed back to borders almost the time of Peter the Great. It's farther from the main European capitals now than any time since that 18th century. And it, and the West has only grown stronger in that period of time. So the dilemma is greater than ever. The irony of being in that position, of sitting in the Kremlin trying to manage Russian power in the world, trying to be a providential power, a country with a special mission in the world, a country which imagines itself to be a whole civilization-...and yet not having the capabilities to meet those aspirations, and falling farther and farther behind the West. The irony of all of that is the attempted solutions put Russia in a worse place every single time. So you try to manage the gap with the West, you try to realize these aspirations, you try to raise your capabilities, and you build a strong state. The quest to build a strong state and use coercive modernization to try somehow, if not to close the gap with the West, at least to manage it. And the result is different versions of personalist rule. So they don't build a strong state, they build a personal dictatorship, they build an autocracy. And moreover, that autocracy undertakes measures which then worsen the very geopolitical dilemma that gave rise to this personalist rule in the first place. And so I call this Russia's perpetual geopolitics. I've been writing about this for many, many years. What's important about this analysis is this is not a story of eternal Russian cultural proclivity to aggression. Right? It's not something that's in the mother's milk, it's not something that can't be changed. Russia doesn't have an innate cultural tendency to aggression. This is a choice. It's a strategic choice to try to match the power of the West, which from Russia's vantage point is actually unmatchable. But it's a choice that's made again and again, and Putin has made this choice just as Stalin made the choice, right? Stalin presided over the World War II victory, and then he lost the peace. After he died in 1953, there was, of course, other rulers who succeeded him. He was still the most important person in the country after he died, because they were trying to manage that system that he built, and more importantly, manage that growing gap with the West. By the time the '90s rolled around, former Soviet troops, now Russian troops, withdrew from all those advanced positions that they had achieved as a result of the World War II victory, and it was Napoleon in reverse. They went on the same roads, but not from Moscow back to Paris, but instead from Warsaw, and from East Berlin, and from Tallinn, and Riga, and, and all the other places of former Warsaw Pact and former Soviet republics in the Baltic region. They went back to Russia in retreat. And so Stalin, in the fullness of time, lost the peace, and Putin, in his own way, inheriting some of this, attempting to reverse it when, as I said, Russia was smaller, farther away, weaker, the West was bigger and stronger and, and had absorbed those former Warsaw Pact, uh, countries and Baltic states, because they voluntarily begged to join the West. The West didn't impose itself on them. It's a voluntary sphere of influence that the West conducts. And so that dilemma is where you can put Putin and Stalin in the same sentence. And the terrible outcome for Russia in the fullness of time also has echoes. But of course, Putin hasn't murdered 18 to 20 million people, and the scale of his abilities to cause grief, uh, with the nuclear weapons aside, is nothing like Stalin's. And so we have to be careful, right? Only Mao put bigger numbers on the board from a tragic point of view than Stalin.

   13. LFLex Fridman10:08

       And numbers matter here if we compare these singular figures.

   14. SKStephen Kotkin10:14

       Yeah, Mao killed more people than Stalin because Mao had more people to kill. The most amazing thing about Mao is he watched Stalin do it. He watched Stalin collectivize agriculture and famine result. He watched Stalin impose this communist monopoly, and all of those people sent to prison or given a bullet in the back of the neck. He watched all of that and then he did it again himself in China.

   15. LFLex Fridman10:43

       Do, do you think he saw the human cost directly that, that... When you say he saw, do you think he was focused on the policies or was he also aware distinctly as a human being of the human cost in the lives of peasants and the, and the lives of the working class and the lives of the poor?

   16. SKStephen Kotkin11:01

       I think the prima facie evidence is that he didn't value human life. Otherwise, I don't think after seeing the amount of lives that were taken in the Soviet experiment he would have done something similar after that. I think the answer, Lex, is it's very hard to get inside Mao's head and figure out what he was really thinking. But if you just look at the results that happened, the policies that were undertaken and the consequences of them, you would have to conclude that there was, let's say, no value or little value placed on human life. Unfortunately, that's characteristic not only of communist dictators, right, of post-communist dictators as well, but the scale of the horrors that they inflict, as horrific as they are, just can't compare. And so we're in a situation where Eurasia, that is to say the ancient civilizations of Eurasia which would be Russia, Iran, China, uh...... all have some version of non-democratic, you know, illiberal, autocratic regimes. And they're all pushing up against the greater power of the West in some form. Sometimes they coordinate their actions and sometimes they don't. But this is a very longstanding phenomenon, Lex, that predates, uh, Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping or the latest incarnation of the supreme leader in Iran.

   17. LFLex Fridman12:37

       So we'll talk about this, uh, I think, really powerful framework of five dimensions of authoritarian regimes that you've put together. Uh, but first, le- let, let's go to this Napoleon in reverse retreat from Warsaw back. Uh, Putin is called, from the perspective of Putin, this retreat, this collapse of Stalin is one of the great tragedies of, uh, that region of Russia.

3. 13:09 – 36:01

   Putin vs the West

   1. LFLex Fridman13:09

      Do you think there's a sense where, as Putin sits now in power for 22 plus years, he really dreams of a return to, uh, the power, the influence, the, the land of Stalin? So while you said that they're not in the same place in terms of the numbers of people (sighs) that suffered due to their regime, do you think he hopes to have the same power, the same influence for a nation that was in the '30s and the '40s and the '50s, f- uh, uh, of the 20th century under Stalin?

   2. SKStephen Kotkin13:54

      If he does, Lex, he's deluding himself. We don't know for sure. Very few people talk to him, very few people have access to him. A handful of Western leaders have met with him for short periods of time. Those inside Russia barely meet with him. His own minions in the regime barely have face time with him. We don't know exactly what he thinks. It could be that he has delusions of reconquering Russian influence, if not direct control over the territories that broke away. But it's not gonna happen. Let's talk a little bit about this guy, Nikolai Patrushev. Nikolai Patrushev is probably not well known to your listeners. He's the head of Russia's Security Council. And so you could probably call him the second most important or second most powerful man in Russia, certainly inside the regime. Arguably, Navalny is the second most important person in the country.

   3. LFLex Fridman15:06

      (laughs)

   4. SKStephen Kotkin15:06

      And we'll talk about that later, I'm sure.

   5. LFLex Fridman15:08

      In terms of influence, yes.

   6. SKStephen Kotkin15:09

      Yes. But, but Patrushev is a version of Putin's right-hand man. A- a- and Patrushev has been giving interviews in the press. You probably saw the interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta not that long ago. He writes also his own blog-like interventions in the public sphere using, um, the few channels that are left. And what's interesting about Patrushev, and, and this could well reflect similar thinking to Putin's, which is why I'm bringing this up, is that he's got this conspiratorial theory that the West has been on a forever campaign to destroy Russia, just like it destroyed the Soviet Union, and that everything the West does is meant to dismember Russia, and that Russia is fighting an existential battle against the West. And so, for example, the CIA and the American government wanted to bring down the Soviet Union. Never mind that the Bush administration, the first Bush, the father, was trying desperately to hold the Soviet Union together because they were afraid of the chaos that might ensue and the nukes that might get loose as a result of a Soviet collapse. And it wasn't till the very last moment where Bush decided, his administration decided to back those Republican leaders who were breaking away from Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union, right? So never mind the empirics of it. Never mind that Bill Clinton's administration, following George Bush, sent boatloads of money, Western taxpayer money, to Russia. We don't know exactly how much because it came from different sources. People talk about how there was no Marshall Plan. It was tens of billions of dollars from various sources, from the IMF and other sources, and, Lex, it disappeared. It's gone. Just like the German money that went to Gorbachev for unification disappeared even before the Soviet collapsed, the money disappeared. But the West sent the money. So how was that a plot? And then you could go all the way, Obama's administration, uh, George Bush trying to do business deals and reset the relations, and Obama administration trying to reset the relations and, and, and doing nothing after the Georgian War and slapping, uh, Putin on the wrist following the seizure forcibly. And you could go on and you could go on all the way through the Trump administration, telling Putin that he's right, t- Trump believes Putin and doesn't believe US intelligence about Russian efforts to interfere in American domestic politics. So despite all the empirics of it, you have Patrushev, and likely Putin, talking about this...... multi-decade Western conspiracy to bring Russia down. At the same time as that's happening, the Germans are voluntarily increasing their dependence on Russian energy, voluntarily increasing their dependence on Russia. And so, here's the conspiracy to bring Russia down. The French, who f- fantasize about themselves as a diplomatic superpower, are constantly, the French leaders are constantly running to the Kremlin to ask what Russia needs, what concessions from the West Russia needs to be feel, to feel respected again. The British provide all manner of money laundering and reputation laundering services for the whole Russian oligarchy, including the state officials who are looting the state and using the West, British institutions, to launder their money. So all of this is happening and yet Patrushev imagines this conspiracy to bring Russia down by the West, and so that's what we've got in the Kremlin again. Stalin had that same conspiratorial mentality of the West. Everything that happened in the world was part of a Western conspiracy directed against the Soviet Union, and now directed against Russia. Even though the West is trying to appease, the West is offering its services, the West is trying to change Russia through investment in a positive way, but- but- but instead, the West is what's changing. The West is becoming more corrupt. Western services are being corrupted by the relationship with Russia. So- so you have to ask yourself, who are these people in power in the Kremlin who imagine that while they're availing themselves of every service and every blandishment of the West, while they're availing themselves of this, that they're fighting a conspiracy by the West to bring them down? So this is what they call the обезьяне, right, in Russian, which is a term, as you know, that means those who are resentful, or you might call them the losers, the losers in the transition. So when the Soviet Union fell and there was a diminishment of, a very substantial diminution in Russian power and influence in the world, a lot of people lost out. They weren't able to steal the property, they weren't able to loot the state in the '90s, and they were on the outside. They gradually came back in. They were the losers in the transition domestically. And for them, right, they wanted to reverse being on the losing side, and so they began to expropriate, to steal the money, steal the property from those first thieves who stole in the '90s. And the 2000s and on have been about restealing, taking the losers in the transition, taking the money from the winners and reversing this resentment, this loser status. Those are your Patrushevs and your Putins. But at the same time, this blows out to let's reverse the losses, being on the losing side, the roiling resentment at the decline of their power internationally, let's try to reverse that too. So you have a profound psychological, uh, uh, whole generation of people who are on the losing end domestically and reverse that domestically. That's what the Putin regime is about. Remember Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Yukos? Remember all the companies that are now owned by Putin cronies because they were taken away from whoever stole them in the first place. And now they're trying to do that on the international scale. It's one thing to put domestic opponents in jail, it's one thing to take away someone's property domestically, but you're not going to reverse the power of the West with the diminished Russia that you have. And so that project, that Patrushev project, which we see him expressing again and again, he speaks about it publicly. It's not something that we need to, uh, go looking for it, a quest, a secret, we can't find it, what are they thinking? It's right there in front of our face. And Putin has spoken the same way for a long time. People point to the 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference that Putin delivered, and certainly your listeners could use a snippet or two of that, just like they could use a couple of quotes from Patrushev to- to contextualize what we're talking about. But it predates the 2007 Munich speech, uh, uh, the reaction to Ukraine's uprising in 2004, attempt to, uh, steal the election inside Ukraine, right, which the Ukrainian people rose up valiantly against, and risked their lives, and overturned, right? So there were public statements from Putin already back then, the- the statements about Khodorkovsky in 2003 when he was arrested and expropriated. This is a longstanding psychological, deep, deeply psychological issue, which is about managing Russian power in the world, as I was saying, the gap with the West, but has this further dimension of feeling like losers and wanting to reverse that. That's their life experience.

   7. LFLex Fridman24:03

      Обезьяне. So there's that resentment that fuels, uh, this narrative, uh, fuels this geopolitics and, um, internal policy. But, so resentment is behind some of the worst things that have ev- ever been done in human history. Hitler was probably fueled by resentment, so resentment is a really powerful force, yes. Uh, just to-... maybe not push back, but to give fuller context on the West. You said the, there's a narrative, uh, from, from Putin's Russia that the West is somehow an enemy, you position everything against the West. But is there a degree, and to what degree, is the West willing to feed that narrative? That it's also convenient for the West to have an enemy. It seems like in the place, in the span... (sighs) It seems like in geopolitics, having an enemy is, um, useful for forming a narrative. Now, having an enemy for the basic respect of humanity is not good, but in terms of maintaining power, if you're a leader in a game of geopolitics, it seems to be good to have an enemy. Uh, it seems to be good to have something like a cold war, where you can always point your finger and says, "All our actions are fighting this evil." Whatever that evil is. It could be like with, uh, George W. Bush, the War on Terror, "Terrorism is this evil." You can always point at something. So you've made it seem that the West is trying, there's a lot of forces within the West that are trying to reach out a friendly hand, trying to help, sending money, uh, sending compassion, trying to sort of, uh-

   8. SKStephen Kotkin25:48

      Trying to integrate Russia-

   9. LFLex Fridman25:49

      Integrate.

   10. SKStephen Kotkin25:49

       ... into global institutions.

   11. LFLex Fridman25:51

       Exactly.

   12. SKStephen Kotkin25:51

       Which was a longstanding, multi-decade effort across multiple countries and multiple administrations in those countries.

   13. LFLex Fridman25:59

       But is there also warmongers in the West that want war?

   14. SKStephen Kotkin26:02

       Of course, Lex. Of course, you're right about that. But let's put it this way. People talk about the Cold War, and they usually looking to assign blame for the Cold War, as if it's some kind of mistake, a misunderstanding, or a search for an enemy that was convenient to rally domestic politics. So Lex, there's a coup in Czechoslovakia, and somebody installs a communist regime in February 1948. No reaction to that? That's just okay? There's a blockade of Berlin. Is that cool by you? Where they try to strangle West Berlin so that they can swallow West Berlin and add it to East Berlin. You cool with that? How about Korean War? Invasion of No- North Korea, invasion of South Korea by North Korea. You cool with that? How about the murders and the show trials up and down Eastern Europe in the late '40s, after the imposition of the clone regimes? You good with that? Yeah, it's very convenient to have an enemy. I agree with you. But, you know, there were some actions, Lex. There were some threats to people's freedom. There were some invasions. There was some aggression and violence on a mass scale, like collectivization of Eastern Europe, and... We could go on, Lex, with the examples. I'm just giving a few of them. And so the Cold War was not a mistake. It was not a misunderstanding. We don't have to blame someone for the Cold War. We have to give credit for the Cold War. The Truman administration deserves credit for standing up to Stalin's regime, for standing up to these actions, for saying, "Yeah, we're not just gonna take this. We're not gonna let this go on. We're not gonna let this expand to further territories. We're gonna create the NATO alliance, and we're gonna rally democratic, liberal regimes to stand up to this illiberalism, this violence, and this aggression." And so yeah, Lex, it, it's always convenient to have an enemy. But there was an enemy.

   15. LFLex Fridman28:21

       And-

   16. SKStephen Kotkin28:22

       Nikolai Leonov, who recently died, he died in April 2022 and he had a major funeral, he was the last, um, head analyst of the Soviet KGB. And Leonov is one of the most important figures for understanding the Soviet collapse. And he has the best memoir on the Soviet collapse, which is known in Russian as (speaks Russian) . You will understand that, and, and, and you'll help your, your podcast listeners understand. There's a singularity to that kind of expression.

   17. LFLex Fridman28:59

       Yeah.

   18. SKStephen Kotkin28:59

       (speaks Russian) Leonov just died, but one of the things he... And in fact, the people who were supposedly arrested by Putin as scapegoats for the Ukraine war, the main one, Sergey Beseda, gave the eulogy at Leonov's funeral in April 2022, showing that it's a lie that all of these people have been arrested and purged, and, and all the nonsense in social media. But to get back to what Leonov said, and get back to your enemy point, Leonov said, "You know, the West spent all this time blackening the image of the Soviet Union." All these resources and propaganda a- and covert operations to blacken the Soviet image. And they did, Lex, the West did do that. And then Leonov wrote in the next sentence, "And you know what? We gave them a lot of material to work with to blacken our image."

   19. LFLex Fridman29:57

       (laughs) Yeah, the, so the... You're saying a kind of sobering reality, which it is possible to some degree to draw a line between the good guys and the bad guys.

   20. SKStephen Kotkin30:07

       Freedom is better than unfreedom, Lex. It's a lot better than unfreedom, and a guy like you understands that really well.

   21. LFLex Fridman30:15

       Well, so yes. Uh, but those are all... You know, there's words like justice, freedom. (sighs) Um, what else? Love. You can use a lot of words that Hitler himself used to describe, uh, why he is actually creating a better world than th- those he's fighting. So, some of it is propaganda. The question is, on the ground, what is actually increasing the amount of freedom in the world here on-

   22. SKStephen Kotkin30:44

       Institutions, Lex. Right? We're not talking about propaganda here. When we use words like freedom, we're talking about rule of law. We're talking about protection of civil liberties. We're talking about protection of private property. We're talking about an independent and well-funded judiciary. We're talking about an impartial, non-corrupt, competent civil service. We're talking about separation of powers, where the executive branch's power is limited, usually by an elected parliament. In fact, yes, let's talk about elections. Let's talk about freedom of speech and freedom of the public sphere. We're not talking about freedom as a slogan here. We're talking about a huge array of institutions and practices and norms, ultimately. Right? And if they exist, you know and you live under them. And if they don't exist, you fully understand that as well. Right? Ukraine was a flawed democracy before Russia invaded. It's utterly corrupt, many ways dysfunctional, especially the elites were dysfunctional. The gas industry in Ukraine was absolutely terrible because of the corruption that it generated, the oligarch problem, a handful of people stealing the state resources. And yet, Ukraine had an open public sphere, and it had a parliament that functioned. And so despite its flaws, it was still a democracy. The regime in Moscow, you can't say that, Lex. It's not a comparable regime to Ukraine. You could say, "Oh, well, there are oligarchs in Ukraine, and there are oligarchs in Russia. There's corruption in Ukraine. There's corruption in Russia. So really, what's the big difference?" And the answer is, well, Ukraine had the open public sphere. Ukraine had a real parliament. Can you call Russia's Duma a real parliament? I don't think so. I don't think you can. Can you say that there were any checks whatsoever on the executive branch in Russia? Can you say that the Russian judiciary had any independence or really full level of competence, even compared to the Ukrainian judiciary, which was nothing to brag about? No, you can't say that, Lex. So, we can differentiate between the very flawed, corrupt oligarch- oligarchic democracy in Ukraine and the very corrupt, oligarchic autocracy in Russia. I think that's a fair distinction.

   23. LFLex Fridman33:28

       (laughs) Yeah. We should say that Russia and Ukraine have the great honor of being the number one and the number two most corrupt nations in Europe, uh, by many measures. But there is a fundamental difference, as you're highlighting. Uh, Russia is a corrupt autocracy. Ukraine, we can say, is a corrupt democracy. And, um, to that level, there's a- th- th- there's a fundamental difference (inhales sharply) .

   24. SKStephen Kotkin33:53

       Ukraine is not murdering its own journalists in systematic fashion. If journalists are killed in Ukraine, it's a tragedy. If journalists are killed in Russia or Russian journalists are killed abroad, it's regime policy.

   25. LFLex Fridman34:08

       And the degree to which a nation is authoritarian means that it's suffocating its own, uh, spirit, its capacity to flourish. It's, uh ... We're not just talking about, um, sort of, um, the f- the freedom of the press, those kinds of things, but basically all industries, um, get suffocated. And you're no longer being able to, to, to, yeah, flourish as a nation, grow the- the production, the GDP, the scientists, the art, the culture, all those kinds of things.

   26. SKStephen Kotkin34:39

       Yes, Lex. You're absolutely right. And so before the invasion, the full-blown invasion of February 2022 into Ukraine, because as you know, the war has been going on for many years at a lower level compared to what it is these days, but still a tragic war with many deaths prior to February 2022. Before this latest war, we could have said that the greatest victims of the Putin regime are Russian, domestic. That the- the people who are suffering the most from the Putin regime are not sitting here in New York City, but in fact are sitting there in Russia. Now, of course, with the invasion of Ukraine and- and really the atrocities that have been well documented and more are being investigated, uh, it, we can't easily say anymore that Russians are the greatest victims of the Putin regime. But in- in ways other than bombing and murdering civilians, uh, children, mothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, after you include that, then of course the larger number of victims of the Putin regime are not Ukrainians, but ultimately Russians. And- and there's how many of them now that have fled?

   27. LFLex Fridman36:00

       (inhales)

4. 36:01 – 47:07

   Response to Oliver Stone

   1. LFLex Fridman36:01

      So your powerful, precise, rigorous words are, uh, stand in a, uh, stark contrast, I would say, to my very recent conversation with Oliver Stone. And I- I would love you to elaborate to disagreement you have here with his words and maybe words of people like, uh, John Mearsheimer, uh...... the idea is that Putin's hand in this invasion of 2022 was forced by the expansion of NATO, the imperialist imperative of the United States and the, the, the NATO forces. Um, you disagree with this point in terms of placing the blame somehow on the invasion on, uh, f- forces larger than the particular two nations involved, but, um, more on the geopolitics of the world as driven by the most powerful military nation in the world, which is the United States.

   2. SKStephen Kotkin37:04

      Yeah, Lex. So let's imagine that, um, a tragedy has happened here in New York and a woman got raped. We know the perpetrator. They go to trial and Oliver Stone gets up and says, "You know what? The woman was wearing a short skirt and there was no option but for the rapist to rape her." The woman was wearing lipstick, or the woman was applying for NATO membership and just had to be raped. There's, I mean, didn't want a raper, but was compelled because of what she was doing and what she looked like and, and the clothes she was wearing and the alliances that she was under international law signed by Moscow, all the treaties, that sovereign countries get to choose whatever alliance they belong to. A treaty is that, uh, the UN Charter, signed by Russia, the Soviet Union. The 1975 Helsinki Agreement, signed by the Soviet Union. The 1990 Charter of Paris for a New Europe, signed by the Soviet Union. The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, signed by the Russian government, the post-Soviet Russia. All of those documents signed by either the Soviet regime or the Russian regime, which is the legally recognized international inheritor, right, successor of the Soviet state. All of those agreements are still enforced and all of them say that countries are sovereign and can freely choose their foreign policy and what alliances they want to join. Let's even go farther than that. I mean, you don't have to go farther than that, but let's go farther than that, Lex. Is an autocratic repressive regime that invades its neighbors in the name of its own security something new in Russian history? Did we not see this before? Is this... does this not predate NATO expansion? Does this not predate the existence of NATO? Would Oliver Stone sit here in this chair and say to you, "You know, they had to impose serfdom in the 17th century because NATO expanded. They had no choice. Their hands were tied. They were compelled to treat their own population like slaves because, you know, NATO expanded." I mean, I could go on through the examples of Russian history that predate the existence, let alone the expansion of NATO, where you have behavior, policies, actions very similar to what we see now from the Kremlin and, and you can't explain those by NATO expansion, can you? And so that argument doesn't wash for me because I have a pattern here that predates NATO expansion. I have international agreements, founding documents signed by the Kremlin over many, many decades acknowledging the freedom of countries to choose their alliances, and then I have this problem where when you rape somebody, it's not because they're wearing a short skirt. It's because you have raped them.

   3. LFLex Fridman40:29

      (inhales deeply)

   4. SKStephen Kotkin40:32

      You've committed a criminal act, Lex.

   5. LFLex Fridman40:35

      That's a... I think there's a lot of people listening to this that will agree to the emotion, the power, and the spirit of this metaphor. And I was s- struggling to think how to dance within this metaphor because it feels like it wasn't ex- precisely the right one, but I think this... it captures the spirit, um...

   6. SKStephen Kotkin40:55

      I'm not suggesting, Lex, that everything the West has done has been honorable or intelligent. Fortunately, we live in a democracy. We live in liberal regimes. We live under rule of law. Liberal in the classical sense of rule of law, not liberal in the leftist sense. We live in places like that and we can criticize ourselves and we can criticize the mistakes that we made or the policy choices or the in-actions that were taken, and there are a whole lot of things to answer for. And, and, and you can now discuss the ones that are your favorites, the dishonor or the mistakes-

   7. LFLex Fridman41:38

      (laughs)

   8. SKStephen Kotkin41:39

      ... and, and I could discuss mine, and we could spend the whole rest of our meeting today discussing the West's mistakes and problems.

   9. LFLex Fridman41:47

      And we won't end up in prison for it.

   10. SKStephen Kotkin41:49

       Yeah, w- Lex, and so-

   11. LFLex Fridman41:51

       (laughs)

   12. SKStephen Kotkin41:51

       ... that's... I'm thankful for that.

   13. LFLex Fridman41:53

       Yes.

   14. SKStephen Kotkin41:53

       And I'm thankful that people may disagree and that people make the argument that NATO expansion is to blame. But, but you see, I'm countering two arguments here. I'm countering one argument which is very deeply popular, pervasive, about how Russia has this cultural tendency to aggression and it can't help but invade its neighbors and it does it again and again and it's eternal Russian imperialism and you have to watch out for it. This very popular argument in the Baltic states, it's really popular in Warsaw, it's really popular with the liberal interventionists, and it's, it's very, very popular with those who were part of the Iraq War squad that got us into that mess.So, I'm against that. And the reason I'm against it is 'cause it's not true. It's empirically false. There is no cultural trait, inherent tendency for Russia to be aggressive. It's a strategic choice that they make.

   15. LFLex Fridman42:53

       Every time, it's a choice made. It's not some kind of momentum. Every time, it's a choice that we should judge for the choice that it is for the decision-making.

   16. SKStephen Kotkin43:01

       And, and therefore, they could make different choices. They could say, "We don't have to stand up to the West. We don't have the capabilities to do that. We can still be a great country. We can still be a civilization unto itself. We can still be Russia. Uh, we can still worship in Orthodox cathedrals, or we can still be ourselves, but we don't have to pursue this chimerical pursuit, this elusive quest to stand up to the West and be in the first ranks of powers." So, I'm countering that argument. I'm saying it's a... It's perpetual geopolitics. It's a geopolitical choice rising out of this dilemma of the mismatch between aspirations and capabilities. It's not eternal Russian imperialism. And I'm also countering the other argument here, Lex, which is to say that it's the West's fault. It's Western imperialism. Uh, very popular on the left, very popular with realist scholars, very popular with some of the people recently on your podcast.

   17. LFLex Fridman44:04

       (laughs)

   18. SKStephen Kotkin44:04

       And so it's neither eternal Russian imperialism nor is it Western imperialism, right? The mere fact that the West is stronger than Russia is not a crime on the part of the West. It's not a crime that countries voluntarily want to join the West, that beg to get in either the EU or NATO or other bilateral alliances or other trade agreements. Those are voluntarily entered into, and, and that's not criminal. If the West's sphere of influence, which is open, an open sphere of influence, which as I say, people voluntarily join, if that expands, that's not a crime nor is that a threat to Russia ipso facto, right? NATO is a defensive alliance, and the countries that are largely pacifists who are members of NATO. And NATO doesn't attack. It defends members if they are attacked. And so the idea that Ukraine, which had the legal right, might want to join NATO and the EU, which was not gonna happen in our lifetimes and was not a direct threat to the Putin regime since it was n-... Since the Western countries that make up the EU and NATO, uh, decided that Ukraine was not ready for membership, there was no consensus, it was not gonna happen, but it's Ukraine's free choice to es- express that desire. And if your government is elected by your people, freely elected, meaning you can unelect that government in the next election, and that government makes foreign policy choices on the basis of its perceived interests, that's not a crime, Lex. That's not a provocation. That's not something that compels the leader of another country to invade you, right? That is legal under international law, and it's also a realist fact of life. The realists like to tell you, you know, that, um, uh, Russia here was, was, uh, disrespected, Russia's interests were not taken into account, et cetera, et cetera, but the real world works in such a way that treaties matter, that international law matters. That's why people like me were not in favor of the US 2003 invasion of Iraq, Lex, because it wasn't legal, in addition to the fact that we thought it might backfire. But, you know, Lex, like I said, there are a lot of things about the West that w- we ought to criticize as citizens and we do criticize. But, but we have to be clear about where responsibility lies in, in these events that we're talking about today.

   19. LFLex Fridman46:48

       So, you get into trouble, it's largely, uh, erroneous to think about both the West or the United States from an imperialist perspective and Russia from an imperialist perspective. It's better, clearer to think about each individual aggressive decision on its own as a choice that was made.

5. 47:07 – 1:26:35

   Russian invasion of Ukraine

   1. LFLex Fridman47:07

      So, let's talk about the most recent choice made by Vladimir Putin, (sighs) the choice to invade Ukraine or to escalate the invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. Now, we're a few months removed from that decision, initial decision. Why do you think he did it? What are the errors in understanding the situation, in calculating the outcomes, and, um, everything else about this decision in your view?

   2. SKStephen Kotkin47:44

      Yeah, Lex, when you don't... When a war doesn't go well, it looks like lunacy to have launched it in the first place.

   3. LFLex Fridman47:52

      Does it ever go well?

   4. SKStephen Kotkin47:54

      War never goes according to plan. All war is based upon miscalculation, but not everybody is punished for their miscalculation. All aggressive war, we're talking about, not defensive war, is based upon miscalculation. But you can adjust. You can recalibrate. You know, when, when you're driving down the road and that very annoying voice is telling you i- in 1,000-

   5. LFLex Fridman48:20

      (laughs)

   6. SKStephen Kotkin48:20

      ... uh, uh, feet, "Make a right."

   7. LFLex Fridman48:23

      (laughing) Yeah.

   8. SKStephen Kotkin48:23

      And you fail to make a right-

   9. LFLex Fridman48:24

      Yeah.

   10. SKStephen Kotkin48:24

       ... it recalibrates, right?

   11. LFLex Fridman48:26

       Yeah.

   12. SKStephen Kotkin48:26

       It tells you, "Okay, now, you know, go, uh, turn around or U-turn or make a left or..." It doesn't say, "You're an idiot," and turn around and make a U-turn, but it does recalibrate. So, you can miscalculate. And the problem is not the miscalculation usually, it's the failure to do that adjustment.Right? People I know who are hedge fund traders, they, I asked them, you know, "What's your favorite trade?" And the line from them all, and this is a cliché, is, "My favorite trade is when I made a mistake, but I got out early before all the carnage." So it's, their favorite trade is not when they made some brilliant choice, but it's when they miscalculated, but they reduced the consequences of their miscalculation by recalibrating quickly, right? So let's talk about the calculation and miscalculation of February. Let's imagine, Lex, that you've been getting away with murder. I don't mean murder in a figurative sense. I mean you've been murdering people. You've been murdering them domestically and you've been murdering them all across Europe. And you've been murdering them not just with, for example, a car accident, a staged car accident, or using a, a hand gun. You used Novichok, or you used some other internationally outlawed chemical weapon. And let's imagine that you did it and nothing happened to you. It wasn't like you were removed from power, it wasn't like you paid a personal price. Sure, maybe there was some sanctions on your economy, but you didn't pay the price of those sanctions. Little people paid the price of those sanctions. Other people in your country paid the price. Let's imagine, not only were you murdering people literally, but you decided to, uh, entice the idiotic ruler of Georgia into a provocation that you could then invade the country, and you invaded the country and you bit off these territories, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and what price did you pay for that? And then you decided, "You know, I think I'll now invade Crimea and forcibly annex Crimea. And I'll instigate an insurrection in the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine, in Luhansk and Don-" Let's imagine you did all that and then you had to stick out your wrist so that, you know, it could be slapped a couple of times.

   13. LFLex Fridman51:04

       Mm-hmm.

   14. SKStephen Kotkin51:04

       And you said, "You know, I can pretty much do what I want. They're putting a few- a sanction here and there and they're doing this and they're doing that and, and you know what? They're more energy dependent on me than before. I got better money laundering and reputation services than anybody has." Maybe if the Middle East and the Chinese would disagree with you that, that you have better than them, but yours are pretty good. And the Panama Papers get released, revealing all of your offshoring and your corruption, and, and what happ- nothing happens, Lex. So the first and most important consideration here is, in your own mind, you've been getting away with murder, literally as well as figuratively, and you think, "You know, I probably can do something again and get away with it." And so the failure to respond at scale, in fact the indulgences, the further dependencies that are introduced, the illusion that trade is the mechanism to manage authoritarian regimes. You know that great, uh, German cliché, Wandel durch Handel, right? Change through trade, or transformation through trade, one of Angela Merkel's favorite expressions, right? You're, you're gonna get the other side to be better, r- rather than confront them in a Cold War fashion, where you stand up to their aggressions and you punish them severely in order to deter further behavior. So that's the first and most important part of the calculation miscalculation. There are a lot of other dimensions.

   15. LFLex Fridman52:43

       So can we pause on that really quick? (sighs) So this is kind of idea of it's okay to crack a few eggs to make an omelet, um, which is a more generous description of what, what you're saying, uh, that, uh, you don't incorporate into the calculation the amount of human suffering that the decisions cause. But instead you look at sort of the success based on some kind of measure for you personally and for the nation in- not in terms of in a humanitarian sense, but in some kind of economic sense, in a power, geopolitical power sense.

   16. SKStephen Kotkin53:22

       Yeah. You're not sentimental, Lex. You say to yourself, "The cause of Russian greatness is greater than any individual life. Russia being in the first rank of the great powers, Russia realizing its mission to be a special country with a special mission in the world, a civilization unto itself, the first rank of the great powers, maybe even the greatest power. That's worth the price that we have to pay, especially in other people's lives." Right? We have a lot of literature on the Putin regime which talks about the kleptocracy. The place is a kleptocracy. And it is a kleptocracy. We all can see that and anybody in London living the high life servicing this kleptocracy can testify that it's a kleptocracy. And not only in London, of course. Right here in the United States, in New York. But, you know, it's not only a kleptocracy, Lex. That was the problem of the Russian studies literature. It wasn't just about stealing, looting the state. It was about Russian greatness. You see those rituals in the Kremlin, right? In the Grand Kremlin Palace, in the St. George's Hall-... some of the greatest interiors in the world, and you see award ceremonies, and you see marking holidays. And all of these looters of the state have their uniforms on with their medals, and someone's giving a speech or singing a ballad and their eyes are moist. Their eyes are moist because they're thieves and looters? No, Lex, because they believe in Russian greatness. They have a deep and fundamental passionate commitment to the greatness of Russia, which in unsentimental fashion, they're all sentimental to the max. That's why their, their eyes are moistening. But they imagine unsentimentally that any sacrifice is okay, a sacrifice of other people's lives, a sacrifice of their conscripts in the military, a sacrifice of Ukrainian women and children and elderly. That's a small price to pay for those moist eyes about Russian greatness and Russia's position in the world.

   17. LFLex Fridman55:53

       Well, that human thing, that sentimentality is a thing that can get us in trouble in the United States as well and lead us to wars that, illegal wars and so on. But the United States, there's repercussions for breaking the law. Uh, you're going to pay for illegal wars in the end. You're saying that in authoritarian regimes, the sem- sentimentality can really get out of hand. And you can, by charismatic leaders that can take that to manipulate the populous to make, uh, to, that in, in the span of history, led to atrocities and, uh, in today's world, lead to humanitarian crises.

   18. SKStephen Kotkin56:30

       It's not just a kleptocracy. It's a belief system.

   19. LFLex Fridman56:32

       Yeah.

   20. SKStephen Kotkin56:33

       It's passion. It's conviction. It's, it's, it's... You can call them illusions, you can call them fantasies, whatever you wanna call them, they're real. They're real for those people. And so yes, they're looting that very state that they're trying to make one of the great powers in the world, and they resent the fact that the West doesn't acknowledge them as one of those great powers, and they resent that the West is more powerful. People talk about how Putin doesn't understand the world, and that he gets really bad information. Lex, if you're sitting there in that Kremlin and you're trying to conduct business in the world and you're getting reports from your finance minister or your central bank governor, your whole economy, everything that matters, somehow all your trade is denominated in dollars and euros. Do you have any illusions about who controls the international financial system? I don't think so, Lex. You're looking over your industrial plan for the next year and you're looking over how many tanks you're gonna get, and how many cruise missiles you're gonna get, and how many submarines you're gonna get, and, uh, uh, and, and fill in the blank. And you know what? It says right there in the paperwork where the component parts come from, where the software comes from. It comes from the West, Lex. Your whole military-industrial complex is dependent on high-end Western technology. And then, and let's, and let's say you're in Beijing, not just in Moscow, and you go to a meeting in your own neighborhood. You're the leader of China. You go to a meeting with other Asian leaders. Do they all speak in Chinese with you? No, Lex. They don't speak Chinese. You go to an international meeting as the leader of China, and guess what language is the main language of intercourse? Yes, the same one you and I are speaking right now. And so you live in that world. You live in the Western world, and it's very hard to have illusions about what world you live in when you're under that pr- you need those Western banks, you need that foreign currency, right? You need that high-end Western technology, that technology transfer. You're speaking or you're forced to speak or your minions are forced to speak at international gatherings in English. And, and I could go on. All the indicators that you live... And so Putin lives in that world. He's no fool.

   21. LFLex Fridman59:04

       Well, to push back, isn't it possible that y- as you said, the minions operate in that world, but can't you, if you're the leader of Russia or the leader of China or the leader of these different nations, um, still put up walls where actually when you think in the privacy of your own mind, you exist not in the international world, but in a world where there's this great Russian empire or this great Chinese empire?

   22. SKStephen Kotkin59:32

       Yes.

   23. LFLex Fridman59:32

       And, and then you forget that there's English, you forget that there's technology and iPhones. You forget that there's all this, uh, S- US keeps popping up on all different paperwork that just becomes the blurry details that dissipate, because what matters is the greatness of this dream empire that I have in my mind as a dictator.

   24. SKStephen Kotkin59:54

       I would put it this way, Lex. After you absorb all of that from your minions and, and it impresses upon your consciousness where you live, you live in a Western-dominated world, that the multipolar world doesn't exist, your goal is to make that multipolar world exist. Your goal is to bring down the West. Your goal is for the West to weaken. Your goal is a currency other than the dollar and the euro. Your goal is, is an international financial system that you dominate. Your goal is technological self-sufficiency made in China 2035, right? Your goal is a world that you dominate, not that the West dominates. And you're gonna do everything you can to try to attain that world, which is a Russian-centric world or a Chinese-centric world, or what we could call a Eurasian-centric world.And it's not gonna be easy, Lex, just for the reasons that we're, we enumerated before. But maybe you're gonna get a helping hand. Maybe the West is gonna transfer their best technology to you. They're gonna sell you their best stuff. And then you're gonna absorb it and maybe copy it and reverse engineer it and... And if they won't sell it to you, maybe you'll just have to steal it. Maybe the West is gonna allow you to bank even though you violate many laws that would prohibit the West from extending those banking services to you. Maybe the West is gonna buy your energy and your palladium and your titanium and your rare metals like lithium because you're willing to have your poor people mine that stuff and die of disease at an early age, but Western governments, they don't wanna do that. Right? They don't wanna do that dirty mining of those very important rare earths. But you're willing to do that because it's just people whose lives you don't care about as an autocratic regime, right? So, that's the world you live in, where you're trying to get to this other world. You're at the center of the other world. You dominate the other world. But the only way to get there, Lex, is the West has to weaken, divide itself, maybe even collapse. And so you're encouraging, to the extent possible, Western divisions, you know, Western disunity, a Western lack of resolve, uh, Western mistakes, and West- invasion of the wrong country, and, and Western destruction of its credibility through international financial crises, and one could go on. So the... If the West weakens itself through its mistakes and its own corruption, you're gonna survive and maybe even come out into that world where you're the center. And so Russia's entire grand strategy, just like China's grand strategy, Iran, it's hard to say they have a grand strategy because they're so... so profoundly weak. But Russia's grand strategy is, "We're a mess. We don't invest in our human capital. Our human capital flees, or we actually drive it out. It goes to MIT, like you did, or it goes to fill in the blank," right? "We, we can't invest in our people. Our healthcare is terrible. Our education system is in decline. We don't build infrastructure, Lex. We don't improve our governance. We don't invest in those attributes of modern power that make the West powerful. We can't because when we try, the money is stolen." We try these grandiose projects of... National projects, they're called. "We're gonna invest in higher ed, we're gonna invest in high tech, we're gonna build our own Silicon Valley known as Skolkovo, we're gonna do all those things," and what happens? They can't even build an airport without the money disappearing. The Sochi Olympics, Lex-

   25. LFLex Fridman1:04:06

       Yeah.

   26. SKStephen Kotkin1:04:07

       ... it cost them, officially cost them $50 billion. You look around at the infrastructure that endured from that $50 billion expense, and you're thinking, you know, that's like the Second Avenue subway. You get almost nothing for your money.

   27. LFLex Fridman1:04:23

       (laughs)

   28. SKStephen Kotkin1:04:23

       And so yeah, it's corruption, Lex. But it's also because they don't wanna do that. They don't wanna invest in their people. They couldn't do it if they wanted to, and when they try, it doesn't work. But why invest in your own people? Invest in your hardware, your military hardware, right? Invest in your cyber capabilities, invest in all your spoliation techniques and your hard power. And invest in cur- further corrupting and further weakening and further dividing the West. Because as I said, if the West is weak, divided, lacking resolve, you don't invest in your people, you don't build infrastructure, you don't improve your governance, but you'll muddle through. That's Russian grand strategy.

   29. LFLex Fridman1:05:13

       So, invest in the hard power, weaken the West. Those combined together means you're going to be-

   30. SKStephen Kotkin1:05:21

       Survive.
6. 1:26:35 – 1:34:33

   Putin's plan for the war

   1. SKStephen Kotkin1:26:35

   2. LFLex Fridman1:26:35

      Can we go to the mind of Vladimir Putin? Because what you just said, China, India, they seem to sit back and say, "We're not going to condemn the actions of Vladimir Putin or Russia, but we would really like for this war to be over." So there's that kind of energy of, "We don't... Just stop this because you're putting us in a very, very bad position." And yet Vladimir Putin is continuing the aggression. What is he thinking? What information is he getting? Is it the system that you've described of authoritarian regimes that corrupts your flow of information, your ability to make clear-headed decisions? Um, just as a human being when you go s- to sleep at night, is he not able to see the world clearly or is this all deliberate, systematic action that does have some reason behind it?

   3. SKStephen Kotkin1:27:31

      We gotta talk a little bit about China too, but let's answer your Putin question directly. So on Twitter, you've lost the war or as they say, you know, there are these two Russian soldiers having a smoke in Warsaw and, you know, they're, they're taking a break, having a smoke, and they're sitting there in Warsaw on top of their tank, and one says to the other, "Yeah, you know, we lost the information war." And there they are sitting in Warsaw having that smoke, right? So yeah, on Twitter, Russia has completely lost the war. In reality, they failed to take Kiev, they failed to capture Kiev, and they failed in phase two, as they called it, or plan B, which is to capture the entirety of the Donbas. We're three months into the war. If you had made a judgment about, let's say, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, a definitive judgment after three months, you might have got the outcome wrong there. If you had judged the Winter War, the 1939-40 Soviet invasion of Finland after three months, you would've got that wrong too of what the outcome was gonna be. So we're early in the game here and we have to be careful about any definitive judgments, but it is the case that so far, they failed to take Kiev and they failed to capture the entirety of the Donbas, Luhansk, and Donetsk, uh, provinces, eastern Ukraine, a part of eastern Ukraine. And they've been driven out of Kharkiv and, and the area immediately surrounding Kharkiv. They never captured Kharkiv, but they came close, but now the Ukrainians drove them back to the Russian border in that very large and important region. So those look like battlefield losses that are impossible to explain away if you're the regime in Russia except by suppression of information. And as you know from Russian history, Lex, um, um, leaders in Russia have an easier time with a state of siege and deprivation than they do with explaining a lost war. But let's look at some other facts that are important to take into account. One, the Russian army has penetrated farther into Ukrainian territory since February 2022, including in Kherson region, um, uh, the famous Mariupol siege that just ended. They have, uh, built a large, uh, presence in areas north of Crimea on the Sea of Azov, the Black Sea Littoral ultimately, that they didn't previously hold. They're still fighting in Luhansk for full control over at least half of the Donbas, and Ukrainians are resisting fiercely, but nonetheless, you can't say that they've been driven out. On the contrary, farther penetration than the beginning. Ukraine doesn't have an economy anymore. They have somewhere between 33 and 50% unemployment. It's hard to measure unemployment in a war economy, but their metallurgical industry, that Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol is a, is a ruin now. And a lot of farmers are not planting the fields because the harvest from the previous year still hasn't been sent, sold abroad because the ports are blockaded or destroyed. And so you don't have an economy and you need five billion or seven billion or eight billion dollars a month ex- uh, to meet your payroll.... to feed your people, to keep your army in the field. That's a lot of money, per month. And that's indefinite. That's as long as this blockade lasts. And so you don't have an economy anymore, you're indigent. And, uh, even if you take the lower number, five billion as opposed to Zelenskyy's s- ask for seven billion, five billion is 60 billion a year. That's 60 billion this year, that's 60 billion next year. And so who's got that kind of money? Which Western taxpayers are ready? And if you use the seven or eight billion, you get up to 100 billion a year. The Biden, uh, the, the, just signed, the Bi- J- President Joe Biden just signed the bill making it law, uh, $40 billion in aid to Ukraine. It's just an enormous sum. The economic piece of that is a month and a half, two months of Ukrainians r- uh, covering U- Ukrainian expenditures. That's it. And th- they're asking the G7, they're asking everybody for this. So you have no economy and no prospect of an economy until you evict the Russians from your territory. And then you have a Western unity, Western resolve, it lasts or it doesn't last, Lex. So you're President Putin and you've got more territory than before, and you've got a stranglehold over the Ukrainian economy, and you've got a lot of the world neutral, and you've got the Chinese propaganda supporting you to the hilt with those Oliver Stone and Mearsheimer lines about how this is really NATO's fault. And you've got Hungary dragging its feet on the oil embargo against Russia, and you've got Turkey dragging its feet on the recent applications of Sweden and Finland for NATO expan- And you're saying to yourself, "Lex, maybe I can ride this out." I got a lot of problems of my own and we can go into the details on the Russian side's, uh, challenges. But he's got, uh, he's, he's on Ukrainian territory unless he's evicted, and he's got a stranglehold on their economy, and he's got the possibility that the West doesn't stay resolved and doesn't continue to pay for Ukraine's economy or supply those heavy weapons. And so you could argue that maybe he's deluded about all of this, and maybe he should go on Twitter, you know, I'm not on Twitter but maybe Putin, who famously doesn't use the internet, should go on Twitter and see he's losing the war. Or you can argue that maybe he's calculating here, that he's got a chance to still prevail.

   4. LFLex Fridman1:34:30

      Wow. That is, um, darkly insightful.

7. 1:34:33 – 1:40:28

   Henry Kissinger

   1. LFLex Fridman1:34:33

      If I could go to Henry Kissinger for a brief moment, and people should read this op-ed he wrote in The Washington Post in March 5th, 2014, after the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine b- but before Crimea was annexed. Uh, there's a lot of interesting historical description about the division within Ukraine, the corruption within Ukraine, that will, if people read this article, give context to how incredible it is what Zelenskyy was able to accomplish in uniting the country. But I just want to comment, because Henry Kissinger is a interesting figure in American history. He opens the article with, "In my life, I have seen four wars begun with great enthusiasm and public support, all of which we did not know how to end, and from three of which we withdrew unilaterally. The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins." So he's giving this cold, hard truth that we get, we go into wars excited, are able to send $40 billion, financial aid, military aid, uh, our own men and women, but the excitement fades. Twitter outrage fades. And then a country that's willing to wait patiently, or is, is willing to, to pay the cost of siege versus the cost of explaining to its own people that the war is lost, that country just might win, outlast.

   2. SKStephen Kotkin1:36:12

      Let's hope not, because, uh, the Ukrainians' resistance deserves to prevail here. Russia deserves to lose. No war of aggression like they've committed here against Ukraine should prevail if we can do anything about it. I support, 1,000%, the continued supply of heavy weapons, including offensive weapons, to the Ukrainians as long as they're willing to resist, and it's their choice. It's their choice when to negotiate. It's their choice how much to resist. It's their choice what kind of sacrifices to make. And it, and it's our responsibility to meet their requests more quickly than we have so far and at greater scale. But ultimately, wars only have political ends. They never have military ends. You need a political solution here. So if the Ukrainians are able to conduct a successful counteroffensive at scale in July or August, whenever they launch... Right now, the heavy weapons are coming in and they're being moved to the battlefield, and more are coming. You know the dynamic. Russia bombs a school, Russia bombs a hospital.... Americans and Europeans decide to send even more heavy weapons to Ukraine, right? That's the self-defeating dynamic from the Russian side. They commit the atrocities, we send more heavy weapons. Once those heavy weapons are on the battle lines, we'll see if Ukrainians cannot just defend, which they've proven they're able to do in breathtaking fashion, not just conduct counterattacks, where the enemy moves forward and you cut behind the enemy's lines and you counterattack and push the enemy back a little bit, but whether you can evict the Russians from your territory with a combined arms operation where you have a massive superiority in, in infantry and heavy weapons, but more importantly, you coordinate your air power, your tanks, your drones, your infantry at scale, which is something the Ukrainians have not done yet. It's something the Russians failed at in Ukraine. And they come from the same place, the Soviet military. We hope this Ukrainian counteroffensive at scale, this combined ar- arms operation succeeds, and if it does succeed, there is the possibility of a battlefield victory. Whether that also includes Crimea, which, as you know, is not hostile, on the contrary, uh, to, to the Russian military, remains to be seen. But, but however much they regain territorially back towards the 1991 borders, which is their goal, their stated goal, and which we support them properly in trying to achieve, however much they achieve of that in this counteroffensive that we're anticipating, that will set the stage for the next phase. And either Russia, the, which is to say one person, Vladimir Putin, will acknowledge that he's lost the war because the Ukrainians won it on the battlefield, or he'll try to announce a full-scale mobilization, conscript the whole country, go back, and instead of acknowledging defeat, try to win with a different plan, recalibrate, remains to be seen. Will the Ukrainians negotiate any territory away or must they capture also Crimea, which puts a very high bar on the win- on the summer counteroffensive that we're gonna see which could last through the fall and into the winter as a result. We don't know the answers to that. Nobody knows the answers to that. People are guessing. Some people are better informed because they have inside intelligence.

8. 1:40:28 – 1:51:01

   Nuclear war

   1. SKStephen Kotkin1:40:28

      People are also worried about Russian escalation to nuclear weapons or chemical weapons if they begin to lose on the battlefield to Ukraine.

   2. LFLex Fridman1:40:38

      Are you worried about nuclear war, the possibility of nuclear war?

   3. SKStephen Kotkin1:40:44

      I think it's necessary to pay attention to that possibility. That possibility existed before the February 2022 full-blown invasion of Ukraine. The doomsday arsenal that Russia possesses is enough to destroy the world many times over, and that's been the case every year since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. And so of course we're concerned about that. We do know, however, Lex, that they have a system known as dual key. Dual key for their strategic nuclear weapons. Strategic nuclear weapons means the ones fired from silos, the missiles, the ones delivered from bombers or the ones fired from submarines, right?

   4. LFLex Fridman1:41:34

      And they're ready to go.

   5. SKStephen Kotkin1:41:35

      They're intercontinental. We watch that very, very closely. We watch all the movement of that and the alerts, e- et cetera. We have tremendously, let's say, um, tremendous inside intelligence on that. But dual key means that President Putin alone cannot fire them. He has one key which he must insert. He must then insert the codes for a command to launch. That then goes to the head of the general staff, who must... Has his own key and separate codes and must do the same, insert that key and codes for them to launch. And so will the general staff chief go along with the destruction of the world over a battlefield loss in Ukraine? I don't know the answer to that, and I don't know if anybody knows the answer to that. Will those people flying those bombers, if they get the order from... If the dual key system goes into action and both keys are used and all the codes are, are, are implemented, will those young guys flying those bombers let those bombs go? Will those at the missile silos decide to engage and fire? We don't know, but you can see that it's more than one man making a decision here in a system of strategic nuclear weapons. As far as the tactical, the so-called low-yield or battlefield nuclear weapons, we're not sure the system that they have in Russia these days for their implement- for their use of such tactical nuclear weapons. It could well be that, that Putin and just himself, he alone can fire them or order them be fired. But, you know, Lex, there's no tactical nuclear weapon fired at Ukraine that's not also fired simultaneously at Russia.If the Kremlin is 600 miles from Ukraine, and if the wind changes direction or the wind happens to be blowing east, northeast, the fallout hits your Kremlin, not just Ukraine. Moreover, you have all those border regions which are staging regions for the Russian offensive, and they're a lot closer than 600 miles. They're actually right there.

   6. LFLex Fridman1:44:06

      (sighs)

   7. SKStephen Kotkin1:44:06

      And so you fire that weapon on Ukrainian territory and you can get the fallout, just like the Chernobyl fallout spread to Sweden, which is how the, the, we got the Kremlin to finally... First, they denied. They said, "Oh, we don't know why there's a big nuclear cloud over Sweden. We don't know where that came from."

   8. LFLex Fridman1:44:26

      (sighs)

   9. SKStephen Kotkin1:44:26

      But eventually, they admitted it. So Russia can actually use a nuclear weapon tactical battlefield one in Ukraine without also firing it at itself. And in addition, it's that same dynamic I alluded to earlier, which is to say, you bomb a hospital, you bomb a school, there's more heavy weapons going to Ukraine from the West.

   10. LFLex Fridman1:44:52

       You can't get away with any of the... There's always going to be a response that's either proportional or greater than proportional.

   11. SKStephen Kotkin1:44:59

       You could well have Europe signing on to NATO direct engagement, both Washington-

   12. LFLex Fridman1:45:06

       Oh, boy.

   13. SKStephen Kotkin1:45:06

       ...and Brussels, direct engagement of the Russian army on the territory of Ukraine.

   14. LFLex Fridman1:45:13

       You, you think that's possible to do that without dramatic escalation from the Russian side?

   15. SKStephen Kotkin1:45:19

       Yes, I do think it's possible, but it's very worrisome, just like you're saying. But, but if Putin were to escalate like that, he's firing that weapon at himself and he's potentially provoking a direct clash with NATO's military, not just with the Ukrainian military. If you're sitting in the Kremlin looking at those charts, Lex, of NATO capabilities, and you can't conquer Ukraine, which didn't really have heavy weapons before February 2022, at scale, a- and you're thinking, "Okay, now I'm gonna take on NATO," that would be a bold step on the part of a Russian leader. And, and, and let's also remember, Lex, that there's another variable here. You're a despot as long as everyone implements your orders. And so if people start to say, quietly, not necessarily publicly, "I may not implement that order 'cause that's maybe a criminal order," or, "My grandma is Ukrainian," or, "My wife is Ukrainian," or, "I don't wanna go to The Hague. I don't wanna spend the rest of my life in The Hague," or whatever it might be. At any point along the chain of command, from the general staff all the way down, right, to the platoon, you're a despot provided they implement your orders. But who's to say that somewhere along the chain of command people start to say, "You know, I'm gonna ignore that order," or, "I'm gonna sabotage that order," or, "I'm gonna flee the battlefield," or, "I'm gonna injure myself so that I don't have to fight," or, "I'm gonna join the Ukrainian side"? And so it could be that w- what's left of the Russian army in the field begins to disintegrate. W- even if the Ukrainians are not able to mount that counteroffensive at scale, that combined arms operation, the Russian military in the field, which has taken horrendous casualties as far as we understand, something like a third of the original force. So you're talking about 50 to 60,000. That includes both dead and wounded to the point of being unable to return to the battlefield. Those are big numbers. Those are a lot of families. A lot of families affected. Their sons or their, their husbands or their fathers are either missing in action or the regime won't tell them that they're dead, as you know from the sinking of that flagship, uh, Moskva, right, by the Ukrainians. And so a disintegration of the Russian military because there are orders that they either can't implement or don't wanna implement is also n- not excluded. And so you have these two big variables, the Ukrainian army in the field and its ability to move from defense to offense at scale, and we're gonna test that soon, and then the Russian ability in the field to hold together in a war of conquest and aggression where they're, they're conscripts or they're fed dog food or, or, or they don't have any weapons anymore because there's no resupply. And so, so the disintegration of the army can't be excluded, and then of course all bets are off on the Putin regime. More long term, there are these technology export controls. We were talking about how the military industrial complex in Russia is dependent on foreign component parts and software. And so if you have export controls and you have firms voluntarily, even when they don't fall under export controls, leaving Russian business, refusing to do business with Russia, and we see this not just in the civilian sector like with McDonald's or many other companies. We see this in the key areas like the oil industry, with the executives fleeing.That is the Western executives fleeing, giving up their positions. So Russia's ability to resupply its tanks, resupply its missiles, resupply its uniforms, resupply its food to its soldiers in the field, and, and, and their boots, we see a lot of stuff under tremendous stress. And in the long term, there's no obvious way they can rebuild the military industrial complex to produce those weapons, because they're reliant on foreign parts that they can't get anymore. And there are no domestic substitutes on the immediate horizon. Th- that's at, at the earliest a two-year proposition to have domestic substitutes. And for some things like microelectronics, they've never had domestic substitutes going back to the Soviet times, as you know well. And so there's that pressure on Russia from the technology export controls, which if you're in the security ministry or the defense ministry, if you're in that side of the, uh, o- of the regime, you're feeling that pain as we speak. And you're wondering about the strategy.

Episode duration: 2:41:09