Pod Save the World - Au revoir Le Pen (for now)

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

Ben and Tommy cover the latest from Ukraine, including the Secretary of Defense and State’s visit to Kyiv and concerns that both the US and Russian mission in Ukraine might be expanding. Then they talk about major defeats for far-right candidates in elections in France and Slovenia, what Elon buying Twitter could mean for international users, worrisome news in Darfur and Trump musings on the royal family. Then Ben talks with reporters Christopher Miller and Max Seddon about the war in Ukraine and what's changed since it began two months ago.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Pod Save the World on Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, you are, I don't even know where country you're in today. You're international, though. Yeah, I'm in London. I was going to be like Ben is in Berlin today. No, you're somewhere abroad. I'm in London and going to Amsterdam tomorrow.

Oh, I love Amsterdam. Yes. And... Amsterdam's such a cool city. I'm seeing Friend of the Pod John and I'm sober tomorrow. And there'll be news TBD about that shortly. Awesome. Well, it's very cool, a little international flair.

We have a great show for you all today. We're going to talk a lot about Ukraine. We're going to talk about elections in France and Slovenia, what Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter could mean internationally and more. And then, Ben, a special interview come in. It's sort of a two greatest hits albums put into one. Tell us about it. Yeah, so I, you know, people may remember,

world those may remember that at the beginning of the war in Ukraine, two of our go-to reporters who we had on a couple of times each were Christopher Miller, then a BuzzFeed now, Politico, because BuzzFeed no longer does news, apparently. And Max said... Yeah, that's so shitty, by the way. We should just say, like, are they, like, shutting down their investigations team? This is an amazing investigation team? Yeah, they've cultivated a lot of good journals, and they're of the years, and they're just shutting

at that, right? And Chris Miller at least landed at Politico, which is good for him. He'll be back in Ukraine reporting again, short of... And then Max said in who reports the Financial Times. And I wanted, we're two months into this, even though it feels like two years. And I had them on together, which we haven't done. It's a new format to have a couple of people on like that. They know each other.

It turns out they used to report together in Ukraine in the Donvast. I didn't know that either until we got on the Zoom. And, you know, Max has covered Russia and Chris has covered Ukraine. And so I wanted to step back, do big picture with them. what's surprised on the Ukrainian side, on the Russian side, where is this going? How do people feel about that? What's it been like for them to report on this? So it's a very cool interview from two of the smartest guests we could possibly have.

So it's exciting. People should sit around and check it out. Nice. Two like Worldo Autobots combine and to a take on the deceptic. Who's the Decepticons here? I guess like Toss and RT. Yeah. Two quick things where we get to the news been.

So John Favro is like stepping on our block here and kind of like getting up in our shit because this week on offline, he had a Russian propaganda expert and journalist named Peter Pomerantsev on to talk about the distortion of truth and reality inside Putin's Russia. So if you like that kind of thing, check out John talking to Peter on Sunday. If you don't like it, just tweet out him a warning to get out of our shit. Also, another great show for you from Crooked. Check out Hot Take. It's the newest Quaker Media podcast. It's focused on the climate crisis and all the ways the media and society are talking about, not talking about dealing with it, not dealing with it.

This week they break down the origins of Earth Day. They name some of the biggest enemies in the fossil fuel industry. It's a great show. You know, it's hard, Ben, as you and I've learned, to talk a lot about climate change because it can just feel like unrelentingly depressing. But they take on the issue in a way that's really funny and is, you know, engaging and enlightening at the same time. So check out hot take every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts. So Ben, you know, you do a lot of the international perspective on Ukraine this week

in the interviews later. So I figured we can focus more on what's happening from a U.S. perspective. And there's a lot of news there too. So over the weekend, Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State, Tony Blinken traveled to Kiev. They had meetings with President Zelensky. They talked to a bunch of other Ukrainian officials. While there, they pledged, I think, 713 million in new assistance for Ukraine, which brings the total to 3.7 billion since the invasion began, which is really an eye-popping number. Tony also announced there will be a new U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. That position has been open for several years. And he said the State Department is going to reopen the embassy in Leviv and then eventually Kiev in the coming weeks.

During that trip, Secretary Austin said the U.S. goal is to see Russia so weakened that it could no longer have the power to invade a neighboring state. That comment jumped out at a lot of people as potentially expanding the mission a bit. And it became, you know, fodder for critics of the U.S. effort to say that, you know, America, the cynical take, right, as America is really involved in this war in Ukraine because they want to weaken Russia or punish Russia for the long term. Austin's team says, no, the point he's trying to make was that in advance of negotiations over a ceasefire or a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. we should weaken their military as much as we can, whatever. But Ben, you know, we're seeing this

steady escalation of U.S. involvement, right? More weapons, heavier weapons, new drones. What did you make of that comment from Austin and concerns from some folks that this U.S. mission might be growing beyond just, you know, repelling Russia from Ukraine? I mean, I think it kind of is one of those comments that says out loud what like the elephant in the room may be, right, which is that on the one hand, I think there's a very strong basis for the U.S. to be providing arms and support to a sovereign government of Ukraine. Right. Again, as we talked about, this is not like an insurgency against an existing government. This is like the sovereign country that wants help to fight off an invasion. But, you know, it's just the case that the way in which, you know, foreign policy, national

security can work sometimes is, oh, it could also be an opportunity to kind of weaken the Russian military and deal a blow to the Russian military and Russian prestige. And part of the problem with kind of applying that rationale to what you're doing in Ukraine is there's an kind of endless escalatory cycle to that. Like that suggests that the goal is less to defend Ukraine and more to kind of defeat Russia and some meta sense. And I think that is a bit dangerous. Right. And you hear in the interview, even from Chris and Max, have front row seats and have seen the worst of these atrocities, they both spoke of the kind of unease about at what point does an effort to really humiliate Putin lead to like things that feel

unimaginable, like the use of nuclear weapons, use of chemical weapons. And so this is like I'm sympathetic to Austin and the people in the U.S. government who want to do everything they can help Ukraine. and obviously you're completely repulsed by what Putin's doing. But I do think you have to kind of keep like the fuck around what you're doing as focus as possible. Right. And so the question should narrowly be how are we helping Ukraine defend itself? How, as we talk about that, may include helping Ukraine be able to go on offense against Russian military. but once we start using this as a broader opening to take on Russia,

you know, it does raise questions about where that ends, you know. Yeah. And so I see why Austin said that. It's not an unusual thing to think. You wouldn't want Russia to be able to invade a neighbor. It's a natural objective to have. But I do think that it was right to clarify it and kind of make clear that like, hey, look, this is really right now about Ukraine and not some. Putin's one who wants to conflict

with the United States. Like, we just want to help Ukraine. And that should be the framework through which we're looking at this. Yeah, it both like jumped out at me and made me cringe a little bit, but also I got it. But yeah, I mean, let's speak of escalation. I mean, Ukraine is now seeking $5 billion per month in economic assistance. Two billion of that is from the U.S. It's worth mentioning that the U.N. Secretary General is in Moscow, I believe right now, meeting with Putin, hoping for a peace deal, but I'm not sure that there's a lot of hope there. But also, Ben, you know, speaking of escalation, there is concern that Russia might be expanding its invasion to include another country, to include Transnistria, which is a breakaway province from Moldova. Transnistria is controlled by pro-Russian separatists. There are Russian troops there. If you're looking at a map, Transnistria is a tiny little sliver of territory on the border of Moldova and Ukraine. If you sort of go just west of Odessa and go up along the river there, you can sort of see it. In recent days, Russian officials have said that the Russian-speaking population is being repressed in Transnistria, which is something we've heard before from them

as a pretext to invade Ukraine. Somebody bombed the building that houses the security services there. So the fear is that Russia is going to attempt to occupy all of southern Ukraine, essentially cut the country off from the Black Sea and then potentially use that land bridge as a way to extend their invasion forces into Transnistria and possibly the rest of Moldova. So that is a pretty escalatory and disconcerting development, which sort of speaks to why Austin might say, yeah, we don't want the capacity to invade another country. Yeah, no, that's right. And just very quickly on the economic aid, because I've mentioned this before, you know, one of the proposals that certainly gotten some traction,

in the left here in Europe is Ukraine has this massive amount of debt. And that's obviously growing. And one way to provide economic assistance to Ukraine would be to forgive a significant amount of that debt, which would probably be at a value of much greater than $5 billion. So there are different ways of providing assistance to Ukraine other than just weapons or just cash, although we're going to be doing both of those things. on the Moldova point, it does feel like, I talked to Chris and Max about this, but like, you know, Russia's kind of reverted in the incapacity of conquering Kiv and dislodging the Ukrainian government. They've reverted to the original playbook that most people thought that they pursue, which is conquer the Donbos, eastern Ukraine, connected down through Mariupil to Crimea. And then the more aggressive version of that is move west through Odessa all the way to Transistria. And if you think, about it, Russia's had several these frozen pieces of territory where there's this kind of de facto

separatist governance. They've had Transnistria and Moldova, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Georgia, and then the Luhanska and Denezstanetsk and Ukraine. And what Putin may just very well do is this is the moment to lift the facade on these being frozen conflicts with indigenous, you know, separatist governments and just try to make them all Russian, you know. And that would obviously be hugely eschatory in terms of political consequences in a number of ways. One, even with Mariupil, it's impossible for me to see Ukraine ever agreeing to a peace deal that like seeds Mariupil to Russia, right? I mean, it would be one thing to talk about Crimea, but then to talk about the Dombos and Maripo. So part of what this escalation does on Russia's side is make any agreement that the Ukrainians could ever accept almost impossible to imagine, right?

Then the second thing is Moldova, another non-NATO country in Europe, yeah, invading a second European country and trying to bite off a chunk of its territory, even if it's just Transnistria. You know, that, again, further ups the ante on the West and on NATO. And I'm sure that that informs part of how Austin's thinking about this, which is that we want to make this so difficult for the Russians in Ukraine that they don't try to do it in Moldova. And if they did it in Moldova, they might try to do something in the Baltics, which are NATO countries. And look, you know, that's a real issue. And so I think that informs why you would want to be providing the military support to the Ukrainians to defend themselves and to stop this kind of Russian war machine from bearing down on not just Ukrainians, but on Moldovans. Again, like, if we're really serious about this, so, like, I'm in Europe, like, there's still.

combine gas here every day, hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into finance that Russian war machine. It's not just weapons that should be on the tables as we're talking about this. But I do think that we're now in this kind of war of attrition that's about eastern and southern Ukraine and potentially Movova. And that preserves a Ukrainian government in Kiev, but it attempts to dismember Ukraine and create an outcome that the West could never accept, which is a recipe for kind of an open-ended conflict, you know. Yeah, and, you know, I mean, politically, the idea that Zelensky could accept a peace deal that leaves a huge chunk of his population under Russian rule after what we learned about

happened in Bucha or the treatment of civilians in Mariopal, I mean, it's completely politically untenable, right? So everyone pushing Zelensky to make some peace deal where he sees territory, like the Russians are making that more and more difficult every single day. And I think, like, that's just kind of the reality here. I'm not sure what people want from the guy. It's just reality. and they're consuming more territory.

And part of what they're doing that's really chilling, Tommy, is precisely because they can occupy places because there's such Ukrainian resistance. And Moroipal, what they seem to do is just try to depopulate the whole city so that you can't have resistance if there are no Ukrainians there

because you've killed so many of them, deported them, driven them out of the city. And so Odessa is another place I'd watch, right? Which is it like, if they're serious about connecting all this territory, they have to go through Odessa. And you see pretty ferocious Ukrainian offense around the desk, probably for that reason. Yeah, much more about Ukraine in the interviews

later, so check that out. But just a couple stories I saw, Ben, that I wanted to flag for viewers that they should check out too. The Washington Post had a fascinating story about our hackers and, I guess, Ukrainian intelligence folks sabotage the railways in Belarus and completely screwed up Russia's efforts to take Kiev and to get troops and material into the city. Very worth reading. There was some good reporting about former German Chancellor Gerard Schroeder and how he was on the take from Russian oil and gas companies. And it's just a total scumbag and got hammered with some New York Times reporter and was willing to just chat about Putin calling him and being his boy.

It said he drank copious amounts of white wine during the interview, which is code for he got completely hammered during the interview. And said way too much. Yeah, but fascinating to read that. You know, in the sort of pariah he's become and then see all the pressure. on Olaf Schultz to encourage Germany to do more to help Ukraine, both with weapons and cutting off oil and gas. And last thing I saw, Ben, and you and I have both sort of seized on this as being a really interesting piece of this story. There was a Twitter thread by a guy named Micah Flea, who is the head of

Info Security at the Intercept. And he was just talking about all the hacking and all the releases of Russian data that we've seen since the beginning of the war. It's like literally hundreds of gigabytes of data from state industries, mining, logging, banks, investment firms, state and local governments. Most of it has probably not even been looked at it all at this point. But it's going to be sitting there on these hacker websites for years to come. It'll get reviewed. It'll become part of Russian politics. So just a fascinating, like, long burn timeline component of this war. Yeah. And, you know, the digital war that we talked about last week, right, which is not even being waged only by states, but by individual hackers, you know, is going to have a long tail to it.

So let's talk about some elections. So first in France, we talked about this a couple of times, the round one and the polling leading to round two. President Emmanuel Macron, one second term, he'll be the first French presidents get reelected in 20 years. Macron beat right-wing, racist nut job. Marie Le Pen badly got 58% of the vote. She got 41% of the vote. But it's worth pointing out that Le Pen improved her standing from 2017 when she only got 33.9% to Macron's 66%. So, you know, look, I was a bit of a bedwetter to coin a or dig up a 2016 phrase, Ben, about this race.

The trajectory of the polling seemed bad going in, but obviously he won handily and a win is a win. Macron has five more years. But, you know, the flip side of this is like, Macron is now term limited. the left doesn't seem to have it together in France. Macron's party on Marsh is really just like a vehicle for him. It's not like a big political movement. That setup worries me a little bit, right? Because France is facing a tough political environment, energy prices,

maybe a recession, the war in Ukraine. Le Pen is like a racist, like Velociraptor, testing the fences for political weakness. They have parliamentary elections in June that are going to be key in determining what Macron can or cannot get done. The early polling shows that he could get a clean majority in parliament, but Le Pen's party could see huge gains in terms of parliamentary representation. I saw one poll that showed her party winning

between 75 and 100 seats. They only have eight of them now. So I don't know, Ben, when you looked at these results, what was your read? Like how optimistic or pessimistic did it make you feel? And then let's, after that, talk about the broader trends in Europe. So I think you're at a really good summary because I did look at. at the glass half full in the immediate result in the sense that, look, it's set up pretty ideally for like a Le Pen. McCrone, not very popular, totally alienated the left. He's dealing the same crap that Biden is, right? Inflation, COVID fatigue, all the rest of it. And the fact that in that environment, you know, she still kind of had a ceiling or like she crested

it, you know, what, 41%, which is a lot. It's, you know, more than I would like a far-right candidate in France, but let's face it, like, we've had a far-right candidate in the United States who did, who was dumber than Le Pen and did better than that and actually won, right? That's good news that, like, there was a center that held in France pretty healthily, right? 58 to 41 is not that close. But what you said is the more worrisome trend, which is, okay, well, where does French politics go from here because Macron is succeeded by kind of almost splintering exploding the traditional

parties to left and right, which has just left him in the kind of radical neolib center and then Le Pen on the right. And they're making inroads at the local level on the far right at the parliamentary level. And so I think that while we breathe a sigh of relief about this result, like there has to be like on Mars when he built it, he thought he thought he said it was going to become. this political party, not really. It's basically been something of a vehicle for Macron's political ambitions. And he's not going to be around after this term. So this does mean that the battle is going to take place in different spaces. Like there needs to be a new movement on the left or on the

center right that is strong enough to withstand the next wave of far right politics. And Macron is not necessary is not the answer to that because he just won re-election for the last time. So, So I think that the center of gravity shifts to can France generate a new political movement? There's five years to do it such that you beat back Le Pen or whoever the Le Pen flavor is next time. And that's going to be some, you can't just breathe the side. As we've learned in the United States, you can't just breathe the side of relief and then expect the far right to go away. They tend to redouble their efforts in that environment. Yeah.

We're learning that one the hard way. Yeah. To your point about like half glass full, there was more good news out of Europe Sunday from Slovenia, where a right-wing nationalist populist party lost a bunch of ground in parliamentary elections. The centrist pro-Europe party beat the right-wing party by about 10%. So Robert Golub, I'm probably not saying that right, but the leader of the Freedom Party, which is the more centrist party, is likely to form a government with some smaller left-wing parties that'll topple the current right-wing government. This is the leader of the freedom movement. This is the leader of the freedom. This is a leader. It's a leader. is great because your favorite leader, Victor Orban, the right-wing dictator in Hungary, had poured money into this race to try to juice the media in this race. So it does feel like, you know, there was a period, I know, a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, how long we'd be doing this fucking show, where we were quite worried about right-wing government's kind of ascendant. And now you are seeing two pretty significant losses for these right-wing populace. So it's interesting to see. Yeah, no, it's a big deal. And because we mentioned this,

you know, not to sleep on Slovenia, a couple weeks after the Hungarian election, I have a friend who's been involved in the organizing there who kept telling me they're going to win big, they're going to win big. And I'd heard that confidence from some Hungarians, not that they win big, but that they had a better shot. But I think what we learned, though, is that... I thought you were going to say that Hillary can't lose Pennsylvania. I heard that from Hillary, too. So let me just not just put this in the poor Hungarians. We've heard this in the United States. what we learned, though, is that, you know, number one, the far right is not like ascending across Europe, right? Like, they held serve in Hungary, which I'll come back to in a second.

But, like, you know, Slovenia, they're losing ground in central Europe, which is a place where they had been gaining ground. And I think that is a bellwether, right? Like if France held where it was and Hungary held where it was, well, here's a place that flipped. And it's a small country. But, like, it does show you that the playbook is not, you know, infinitely. replicated, you know, from Hungary on to other places. And it does also show you that, like, look, in Hungary, like, as we've talked about, that wasn't a fair fight. Like, Orban dominated, controlled the media, intimidated the opposition, intimidate people from even thinking they could

vote for the opposition. And Slovenia, like, there was some of that present, but not enough of it, and people were able to overcome that. So I think it does show you that, like, you know, the far right is not 10 feet tall here. They're losing in France. They're losing Slovenia. just Orban got reelected, but he got reelected because he fixed the system to his whims. And there's stuff to build on there. And people should go to Slovenia. And what did you guys do? Like, what worked there? It can be replicated in some of these other countries in central and eastern Europe where there have been, you know, trouble getting traction on the, on the center left. Yeah, I mean, to sort of round out this conversation about democracy in Europe. I mean, it is worth noting that there's been some considerable democratic backslide. in Turkey, where recently courts sentenced several well-known activists to very long jail sentences,

in some cases, life in prison, for charges related to protests. So Erdogan is certainly clamping down on any semblance of an opposition to him or free speech or, you know, the ability of people to protest his regime. Yeah, and he's probably, like Erdogan has been very skillful over the years, including in the Obama years, which we have to obviously acknowledge. in like leveraging when like Europe and the United States needs him for other stuff. Like, you know, whether it's refugees or ISIS or whatever, you know, he would leverage that to like, don't mess around in my politics. Don't criticize what I'm doing because you need me on this. And right now he's in the middle of a lot of stuff on Ukraine and being generally supportive of the Ukrainians and probably thinking that that should inoculate him against criticism.

I hope it doesn't, right? because like a Turkey that is drifting further and further away from the democratic world in its internal politics is ultimately going to get there in its foreign policy too. So I think I just hope that there's a capacity to call out these kind of abuses and excesses while recognizing that Turkey has other reasons to support Ukraine for its own interest. Yeah, well said. So if you've turned on Twitter lately, Ben, you've probably seen many and over- overwrought tweet about Elon Musk and Twitter itself. We can litigate that. We can not. But I also

thought it would be fun to take a minute to think about the impacts that Musk's purchase could have from an international perspective. Because there's a few different pieces of this. There's a lot we don't know yet. But I mean, big picture, obviously, if Donald Trump gets back on the platform, that has a global impact. It's been nice not having a president tweeting nuclear threats. For example, if Elon and rolls back moderation on Twitter. That makes life generally suck for users. But more specifically, there's some things Elon has said he wants to do that I think would really impact people in foreign countries.

First, he says he wants to get rid of anonymous accounts. So he wants all accounts to be from verified humans. I get the sentiment there. I understand the thinking. Maybe it's a good idea. I don't know. But I think it also could be chilling for journalists and activists who use anonymous accounts to publish information about government officials in terms.

places where they don't have as robust of freedom of speech as we do. Second, Elon says he wants to open source the Twitter algorithm. Again, I have zero technical understanding of what that would entail. But it does seem worth thinking about which entities would have the ability to understand that information and use it to their advantage. It seems more likely that it would be a government or an Intel agency or whoever that could manipulate that information. And then third, I mean, I wonder what leverage this sale could give foreign actors who want Twitter to do stuff. For example, we know that in 2021, the Indian government demanded that Twitter censor critics of their handling of COVID. How will Elon respond to those demands? How will Elon respond if the Indian

government says censor these accounts or we're not going to let you sell Tesla's in Mumbai? you know so like a lot to think through i mean i saw eulan just tweeted that free speech to him is complying with the law no more no less he doesn't seem to understand that there isn't a global set of laws around speech you know maybe he's referring to the united states but what does that mean for a user in nigeria i don't know any thoughts on this one yeah i mean first of all like it's kind of fucked up to have like an economy where two billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg kind of personally control the means of, it used to be the means of production now they control the means of information and communication, right?

Don't love it. We have oligarchs of our own and it's just not healthy that a guy can spend $54 billion buying Twitter as like a personal tool. That said, on the anonymous point, look, I totally agree with you that there are points there are individual cases where anonymous accounts on social media are critical to the safety and security of important work that's being done. And I should add, to get at the issue he wants to deal with, I think, presumably what he wants to do with is bots and the distortion of speech and the distortion of the Twitter algorithm by the kind of mass scaling up of the use

of automated speech. Elon Musk is the technologist, right? There are, there have to be, I think, and I'm pretty sure from the conversations I've had, there are technological ways of determining what is a bot and what is a human without getting rid of anonymity in general. So it requires a little extra work and probably a little extra resources, of which Ilama seems to have a lot. But if his objective is to get box automated speech off the platform, I think that's different than saying you're getting rid of anonymity in general.

Because if he says he only wants humans on there, I think that should include anonymous humans who choose to tweet themselves anonymously, which I think is different than a bot, which is like an algorithm running its own play to amplify and juice speech. That's one point. On the open sourcing of the algorithm, I don't quite understand what he means. I don't really there. At a minimum, there is a need for tech companies to be more transparent about their algorithms, how they function, what speech is getting juiced, how that's working. that doesn't necessarily mean you like publish the algorithm online and let other users impact it. It should mean like government regulators.

Like Obama used this example in a speech you gave on disinformation at Stanford the day, which I thought was pretty good. So I'll use it too, which is it like, okay, you're a hot dog company. You don't want to share your recipe for your hot dogs publicly so that your competitors can steal it. But you know what? You got to share it with the food inspector so they know. that the hot dogs are healthy, right? So like what we have to get to with Twitter or anybody else is is a regulatory capacity where there's somebody who's able to look over these algorithms

and determine whether they are prioritizing a dissemination of sensationalist speech and disinformation all the rest of it. That's different than this kind of, I'm going to publish the algorithm online. And so here too, I think, you know, we need more details. And then on the free speech kind of absolutism, yeah, like, He's going to run into the fact that most countries have different laws on this. And he's, like you said, vulnerable to leverage from places where Tesla operates. That's a big, bright, blinking flag as it begins with. But then also, like, if we're just open season here, there's a reason people when,

Tommy, you're the one who first really got me looking into 4chan, Nate Chan and the places where QAnonan and other conspiracy theories really took off. like Twitter was clearly doing something that pushed those people off that platform. I mean, I don't think it's necessarily like good for anybody if Twitter just becomes the kind of repository of every completely insane QAnon-type conspiracy theory in the name of Elon Musk's kind of personal, you know, Silicon Valley salon view of free speech, you know. So look, the intentions he's articulating or not like bad ones? like we'd like to get rid of bots and automated speech that we'd like to be more transparent about algorithms we want to protect free speech but like how that's implemented could go badly wrong too so so yeah and then and you know it's not clear to me that Elon Musk like listens

to a lot of people around him so we'll have to watch this one yeah like I don't hate the guy Tesla's great SpaceX is cool he's obviously a genius but like I don't think he's thought hard about any of this stuff. And all the recent tweets seem to confirm that feeling. Like, if you think free speech is just about one set of laws in one country, that doesn't suggest you've spent a lot of time thinking about how hard these questions are. Yeah. I mean, and it just, it just, there's like a cult of personality from the, I mean, look, at Jack wasn't that much better, your buddy. No. For his founder of Jack Dorsey, like, you know, he, he, created a platform that, or he helped create a platform with a lot of help, I'm sure,

from people who knew what they're doing. And it became wildly successful, mainly because of its users. And that guy acted like, you know, he was personally responsible for, like, these guys equate their wealth with knowledge. You know, I mean? Like, if you have $100 billion, you're 100 billion times smarter than somebody with $1. Like that's not like how this works. Like you made some smart bets and you know,

gutsy business decisions maybe or you had one good idea and now put you in this position. This is why we need regulation around social media is because this shouldn't be us like sitting around hoping. Like we regulate airplanes. Like we don't sit around and hope that a billionaire buys an airline is going to make sure that it's safe. We like expect the government to make sure that planes aren't falling out of the sky. There's such a public safety and health component to these platforms that I know it's hard to do legislatively right now, but at some point we've got to get to a place where it's not just Elon Musk's decision or anybody else. It's not a shot of Elon Musk. I don't think any one human being should make all these decisions about a platform that impacts the lives of billions of people. That's not how we look at food or medicine or frankly traditional media for that matter. I don't know why there's this carve out infinitely for technology. deep problems. Yeah, man. And I also just like, I don't believe these guys really have some deep-seated libertarian pro-free speech set of values. I think for a lot of them, it just is the easiest thing to say

when you really mean, like, keep the government out of the way of me making as much money as I want, however I want, period. You know, I mean, it just drives me crazy. Libertarianism seems to conveniently overlap with maximum profit model, you know. Yeah, it really does. Two other quick things where we get to your interview. Just one issue to keep an eye on. Over the weekend, we saw members of an Arab militia group called the Janjaweed attacking villages in Darfur, killing hundreds of civilians. It's a very troubling development, given the history of horrific violence we've seen in Darfur over the past two decades.

And then just the generally unstable political situation in Sudan following the military coup last year. So just want to put a pin in that one. Because, you know, I don't know that I've seen, there's been some reporting on it, Ben, but I don't know that I've seen a lot of discussion, statements, conversation from the UN, from the U.S., from any of the sort of normal actors who might kind of jump in and try to calm things here. Yeah. You're right to flag it. And it's a sign that things have been going not great for Sudan's transition, you know, stop and start.

transition away from authoritarianism to democracy, then back to authoritarianism. And these are the kind of knock on effects that happened, right? I mean, when the center doesn't hold and you've got that kind of tug of war in Khartoum, like, you know, these problems regenerate. So it reminds you that the cost of like that civilian transition to democracy getting derailed, you know, ripples out in other ways. Yeah, sure does. Last topic. Last topic. and it's very appropriate been the year in London. Have you ever read about or watched one of those science shows about how when two supermassive black holes collide,

it can actually warp the fabric of space and time? Yeah, I actually have mainly because my youngest daughter is obsessed with space in black holes. And so I've done some reading just so I can sound like I know what I'm talking about, which I don't. There we go. I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm like Elon Musk,

but I need to know just enough to describe what a black hole is. That's exactly what I feel. As soon as I read it, it goes away out of my brain. Well, Ben, something very similar happened recently, but it was the collision of two super massive assholes that sent a ripple through space and time. I'm, of course, talking about Pierce Morgan, Donald Trump, the interview, kind of heard around the world. It wasn't that big a deal. It was mostly, I think, Trump stormed out. They both looked pretty sweaty and stupid.

But I wanted to ask you, because Trump did weigh in on Prince Harry and Megan Markle. he called Prince Harry an embarrassment who's being led around by his nose he said Harry is whipped like no person I think I've ever seen wants them stripped of their royal titles said I'm not a fan of Megan and I wasn't from the beginning

I think poor Harry's being led around by his nose I guess my question is have you heard an adult man call another man whipped ever? I kind of thought that I was like a high school, middle school phrase that people kind of left back there? Yeah, this is the thing about Trump is like people describe him as like having like his

finger on the pulse of like the zeitgeist and you know, some way, you know, and yet like the terminology uses is like decades out of date and was juvenile to begin with, right? I mean, like it's like this is the man who like really knows where culture is heading. the guy who's talking about people being whipped, you know? It's just the child. And like what a shock, right? That he doesn't like the African-American woman in this equation. That's the one he has the harshest words for here.

Well, and he goes on with Pierce Morgan, who he knows, like, famously claims he went on some date with Megan Markle and stormed off, like, the British Morning Show. And then doesn't like that Pierce Morgan asks about something other than bashing Megan. Like, literally his whole communication. strategy for doing an interview with Pierce Morgan, who's a dick, was just what, so he could like try it out as good Megan Markle shots, you know, like, and then he's shocked to be asked like a quite an actual question. Like, this is not a very tough, like Pierce Morgan was the guy

walked off the set when somebody challenged him on his attacks of Megan Markle. Neither of these guys, you know, for all their faux toughness, like there's a snowflake quality here that Yeah. Should be noted. Should be noted. Pierce, yeah, I think Trump criticized Pierce for walking out of that conversation on the set of, like, Good Morning UK or whatever the hell it was. And then kind of walked out of the interview with Pierce because Pierce didn't agree with him that he,

like, that the election was stolen. I don't know. It was just the most childish nonsense ever. Yeah, not ideal. Okay. We are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, you'll hear Ben's interview with Christopher Miller and Max Settin about all things Ukraine.

So stick around for that. Well, I'm very pleased to be joined by two extraordinary journalists who we've heard from before on this podcast. And we thought we'd take the opportunity to get them here together. Christopher Miller, who is previously a BuzzFeed news, but recently shared with the world that he's now joined Politico, where he'll once again be returning to Ukraine to report on the war. And Max Seddon, who was at the Moscow Bureau of the Financial Times is now in Riga because of I don't know, Max, of Russian laws and enforcement of Russian laws that make it harder to report on the special military operation in Russia. But thank you guys for joining. Thanks for having us back. Thanks, everyone. So I wanted to start by just pulling back and I,

because I went back and listened to kind of some of our interviews right around the time of the invasion, right? And Christopher, I'll start with you. I was really struck by you, you talked to us from Eastern Ukraine. I think you're in Kharki. And you described, I think, what a lot of people expected, which is a potential Russian effort to consolidate control the Donbos, to take Murielpo, and to pretend, you know, to kind of connect Russian-controlled territory in the east and the south. And we obviously went through a very different war in the initial weeks. And yet now it feels like what you initially described may be what's happening. I mean, what do you think? how did we get to where we are now?

What do you think Russia tried to do and couldn't do? And how do you think they adjusted their strategy based on your experience covering a war? Yeah, I think when we spoke last, and what I laid out for you was more along the lines of what I think most of us expected to see, which was a more limited invasion, focused predominantly on the Donbos and in the south. and, you know, this concerted effort on the part of Russian forces to create this land bridge that they now have, you know, that would connect Russia's mainland with annexed Crimea. And, you know, I think, I forget exactly when we spoke, and if Putin had already signed the decree recognizing the Dyneski and Lugansk so-called separatist republics or not, if they had, you know, I think that was a big reason why we thought that, right, that this would be very focused on taking the broad. border borders of the Donbos region, not just, you know, a couple of towns here or there or sending in troops to reinforce their separatist proxies, but rather, you know, his recognition

of all of Donetska Oblast and all of Lugansk Oblast being a part of, you know, those so-called separatist republics. We thought that's what the, the military operation would be focused on. But, you know, obviously what we saw was a full-scale invasion along the lines of, you know, I think what we were hearing from Western intelligence agencies could happen. And, you know, I'm not sure many people truly expected it to happen on that scale. You know, I think, I think, you know, Russia may have, you know, I'd be curious to know what Max and has heard from some of his, you know, sort of like more Kremlin insider, Moscow, folks who were a little closer to the, like, sort of center of decision making there. But, you know, I wonder if the, if a full-scale

invasion on the, you know, to the extent that we saw early on was what was planned all along, or if things shifted in some kind of way in the days or, you know, a couple of weeks just before it to focus attention on Kiev. You know, what we saw was, I mean, a pretty frantic, you know, military operation and effort to try to encircle Kiev. And, you know, obviously the Ukrainians, you know, put up an incredible fight and defeated them in a way in which I think, you know, many people were surprised to see. And, you know, I would not expect Russia to admit defeat, and certainly they haven't. You know, they've said that all along the idea was to weaken Kiev and to attack in various other places and then to, you know, focus efforts on the Donbos.

And this has been part of the plan all along. You know, in reality, I think that they suffered a pretty humiliating defeat and don't want to admit to it publicly. And so now we're seeing this refocused effort in the double. Don Boss, where they already have a large collection of forces where they can more easily mobilize and get things across the border. You know, they've got better logistics and supply lines heading into the northeast and east of the country. And, you know, they had success in the south very early on.

So I think they're now, you know, using the territories that they've gathered down there to, you know, push a little bit further in and potentially even further west of Kyrsson. you know, depending on, you know, how seriously you take recent comments from one Russian commander who said that they'd like to take territory as far west as Moldova. But yeah, I think that's how we got to where we are. You know, a pretty messy failed operation in the north has forced them to refocus efforts in the east where, you know, I think they do have the upper hand given the number of forces that they have and the type of weaponry being used. And, you know, I think the Ukrainian

success there is really going to depend heavily on what the U.S. and the West is able to get to them and how quickly they're able to get it there. Well, Max, I was going to ask you. I mean, one of the things I was going to ask you is what do you think kind of surprised the Russians in the initial weeks of this war? I mean, you at the time, I think you, I remember talking to you and you notably raised the alarm bells about the kind of extremism of the Putin's speech, that lengthy history lesson that accompanied the beginning of the war as kind of foreshadowing more maximalist, almost eliminationist ends when it came to Ukraine. Now that seems less militarily feasible, but how have you seen the Russian thinking change on this and what might have surprised them that

caused them to evolve their strategy? Well, one of the reasons why the initial Russian bliskrieg failed was because they just had this completely distorted view of what Ukraine is as a country and what they were going to be able to achieve. They seemed genuinely thought that they were going to get this over in a couple days. So Zelensky said that they even found among the first wave of Russian forces, they found some parade uniforms suggesting they were actually going to have some tank parade down for Shatik, the main dragon, Kiev, on the third or the fourth day of the war and there was this piece that was published by mistake on the renoisse, the Russian State Newswire, that was clearly pre-written to be run. Oh, it's, you know, four days in, we've

conquered Ukraine now. Here's what happens next. And that's because, you know, it's a sort of classic colonial power mistake of this sort of, you know, overconfidence that they actually understand Ukraine much better than they did, that there was a lot more sympathy for the, for Russia and the Revolution in Ukraine than there was. And, you know, I remember hearing this from some invasion cheerleaders, the ones they're most excited about the war in Moscow before it happened. And they were basically talking about it, you know, in the way that the supristic way that the U.S. talked about Iraq before,

before they went in 2003, you know, they will breed us as liberators. And that obviously them happened. And also, we have, you know, the Ukrainians turned out to be much, much better than a lot of people expected. And the Russians turned out to be a lot worse. One of the problems the Russia had was, you know, in addition to these, you know, these horrendous intelligence failures, and there are some reports, they've already been reprisals domestically within the security services and the Army for these intelligence failures. You also saw there was just this failure of Russian military tactics. I'm not a military expert.

I won't go into this any great detail, but you would see, and Chris mentioned in Harkiv. That was one place where they would just send a few units without proper support, often even without proper equipment to wage some sort of street battle. They would just drive into Harkov and get completely slaughtered by Ukrainian, you know, And you look at Russia starts suffering these huge casualties. A lot of senior officers have been killed, including between seven to 10 generals, depending on who's counting and what you count as confirmation.

That's because one thing that Russia never did was when it was modernizing his military was reform the command structure. And so that creates both issues on the ground, because the generals have to be there to make anything actually happen, whereas Ukraine, it did reform its command structure, and if you have a much smaller unit out in the field with a much lower ranking commander, they're empowered to make decisions on their own. And then, you know, the conditions they've been fighting in,

that's very important. It also creates issues of perception because what gets relayed up the channel, and this is, you know, anyone who studied, I think, any authoritarian state or just read the emperor by Richard Kapashinsky will have this dynamic, where they just tell the bosses what they think they would like to hear. And it's clearly still a problem because, the best of my knowledge, Putin is very much still under the thrall of the world view of these getting misgeneral and from Russian TV.

And, you know, for example, some people try to tell them, no, you know, please, please don't bomb the Azostal steel plant, which is the last place for Ukraine forces, holding a M.R. Upol and they're about you know, a thousand civilians there, including children. And, you know, they're shown him videos of these children saying, please don't bomb us. And Putin says, no, this is a fake. I know this is a fake because my generals, they, they proved me about this.

They told me it was a fake. And he's really in for all this. Obviously, he has had to collide with reality to a certain extent because, you know, he thought they were going to take Kiev in a few days. And that obviously hasn't happened. So they've, you know, they've redone their strategy somewhat. They pulled out of Kiev and Terniga in central Ukraine. They're focusing on the Dombas.

They have a single field commander now, which they didn't before, which Western Intelligence, I remember, were very surprised by that they appeared to be just running the whole thing out of Skype, out of the sort of little war room. They have this kind of James Bond style layer in Moscow. And they were just telling everyone what to do long distance, rather than letting the commanders on a ground run things. I do have on such commander as the General Alexander Vortnikov.

And that means they're able to secure the logistics better. It's it's more, there won't be spread so, so thin. But the problem is, is that that doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, oh, we've, you know, suffered all these, all these losses. Then, you know, we're going to actually have to dial back our aims. The indication is that even if the tactical goals may have changed so much, you know, they're not trying to get Kiev, but the goal has always been the same. You could argue it's been the same for years, which is to destroy Ukraine as we know it, Nikolai Patrushiv, who is, you know, he's a secretary of security counsel. He's one of Putin's post advisors, one of a few people that appears to have actually known in advance what exactly they were doing because most of the Russian elite, you know, had no idea.

Summit Security Council and the presidential administration even had no idea that they were, this is what they were preparing. He said today that, that the West had tried to turn Ukraine into a, he used the word, an antipode, so some sort of, you know, opposite or, you know, Putin has used the phrase before and he used it in his scary declaration of war speech, anti-Russia, because they see this as this existential, Ukraine as this existential threat. because it's showing Russia to actually you can have people who you know we're in in you know the minds of the Russian leadership they are you know one people with with Russians but they're living under a completely different different political structure and are aligned with with the West rather than with Moscow and that's an existential threat and so that's why they are going to pursue it it seems you know as far as they possibly can and the results if they if they if they other way are going to be pretty grim.

You know, Podishev was saying that Ukraine was going to collapse into, you know, break up into several states as a result of Western support. So, yeah, that seems to be how they're thinking about it. It's distorted and pretty grim. I would add to just to Maxis thing there, just that like, yeah, you know, the goal, the goal, if the goal ever was to occupy Ukraine, to control Ukraine, to put in a public government, now it seems that after failing to get Kiev, it really does seem like that the policy has just become one of like essentially scorched earth.

Like we're just going to burn the place down. Like we're going to destroy it and, quote, unquote, deliberate you. But our form of liberation is really just going to be to, you know, destroy as much as possible in hopes of, you know, also destroying the Ukrainian state and spirit, you know, while doing so. Yeah, I mean, Chris, I was going to ask you about Muriel and how it might fit into this strategy because one of the things that became apparent, again, not a military expert,

either, but their capacity to hold territory where the Ukrainians have a significant presence is going to be very complicated because not only do you have the resistance of the Ukrainian military, like clearly there's a resistance element to the population that would make kind of occupying big chunks of Ukrainian territory difficult. That said, if you look at Maripal, it just depopulate a city, you know, by mass killing and deportations. And I mean, I hate even kind of talking about this. But then there's less resistance if there's nobody there.

And so I was just, when you look at the potential for the Russian kind of scorched earth campaign in the Donbosin and the south, what is the capacity for Ukraine to resist or what is the possibility of Russia to literally just try to almost repopulate territory? in ways that obviously would make like a peace, you know, Zolensky couldn't agree to a peace deal that, that recognized essentially like an amputation of a big chunk of Ukraine. I mean, how do you see the Ukrainian resistance dealing with this kind of scorched earth campaign? How do they think about Mariupil and whether, you know, how you someday reclaim that? Yeah. I think, I think Mariupil is, is, is emblematic of how Russia wants to, you know,

carry out its war now. You know, it tried occupation outside of Kiev. It saw how difficult it was, right? We saw the results, which were, you know, horrific, you know, dead bodies in the streets, a lot of resistance from the local population. You know, people didn't, didn't know they needed to flee until it was too late. And Russians had already, you know, rolled into the towns of Buccia and Irpin and Bordyanka and Bostomil. You know, I think, I think Russia learned a lot of lesson from there, and that is, you know, how difficult occupation can be. You can't just, you know, storm in and take control of a place without facing significant resistance in Ukraine. You know, Mariupil is, I think, how Russian forces are going to proceed here on out, you know, just

completely bombarding a place with heavy artillery, you know, forcing people to flee, depopulating towns and cities and villages. Like you said, that is going to make it a lot. easier for them to move in, you know, after they've essentially scorched the earth and blown up everything imaginable. You know, if they move into a town or city, they're going to have a lot easier time holding that territory. If there's nobody there who will actually resist them. And, you know, the governors of Lugansk and Donetsk are rightfully, you know, like asking, pleading with civilians to flee these areas because they know what's coming. Everybody has seen what's happened in Miriupil. But unfortunately, what that also means is there's not going

to be many people left to actually resist the Russians when they move into these areas. So I think, you know, what what could happen and what the big fear is, is that, you know, this area of the Donbos, where both sides are, you know, really well dug in and have, you know, really fortified positions over eight years of war, you know, Russia is just going to continue to, you know, essentially like carpet bomb these towns, you know, with multiple launch rocket systems, you know, air raids and continue to do so while people flee and then, you know, try to try to encircle probably Ukrainian forces in a move that will see them come up from the north from Maryupil, sort of swinging a little bit west and swinging southwest from

the Izum area and try to essentially create this, you know, kettle around Ukrainian forces in Krematoursk and Slaviansk, where a lot of the Ukrainian military is positioned. And if they can do so, then it's really going to be a pretty grim, you know, tough battle for the Ukrainians. A lot of their forces could get caught up there. And, you know, there won't be a lot of, I think, a resistance left to help them. Yeah. And I guess a lot of this will also depend on the scale of support from the West in terms of weapons and resupply and heavier weapons. I mean, Max, I was going to ask you, like, there's this, I've been in these rooms where you, you know, I think to a fault, right?

Like you impose restraints on what you're doing because you're kind of trying to discern what might be seen as escalatory by Putin, you know, an offensive weapon system versus a defensive weapon system or an offensive weapon system that could be used into Russian territory versus a system that could be used in a more localized battle, you know, this, you know, where you, this is that stepping stone, you know, tank military artillery and howitzers to helicopters to potentially aircraft and longer range artillery. The question for you is just, do you think, like, you know, Putin is still abiding by the kind of unwritten rules of of mutual escalation.

I mean, it just seems like a guy, and I read your reporting and Twitter feed and the FT's been great on this, but it seems like someone who's, like you said, living in just kind of a parallel universe, he's decided he's at war with kind of the entire West.

I mean, do you think there are types of weapon systems or types of steps by the West that could, that would still invite some kind of different response from Russia? Or does it feel like we're just, Russia's at war? And we shouldn't necessarily, I mean, I'm not asking to make the policy recommendation, but shouldn't necessarily think that there are these different categories of Western support that would invite different responses from Russia. I think you have to remember, you know, how Russia went to war and what are the reasons that, you know, Russia's seat itself is having gotten to war.

You know, Putin has explained to everyone, you know, in private, as best as I know, in public, that, you know, he feels that he was really forced to do. this because he felt threatened by what what ukraine was turning into which is the on country that was you know increasingly western aligned even though it wasn't going to to join NATO it was uh he he felt it was basically being turned into a NATO country by by another name given given all the increasing military cooperation that was going on which of course you know what was happening before the war of the fraction of of what the Ukrainians have have now but this is um uh in essentially he sees themselves as responding to this essential threat.

And there was a bit of the chicken or the egg issue. You know, was it Ukraine or was it, you know, the paranoid about the West encirclement, NATO expansion, all this stuff over decades. It's obviously both because he's, you know, he's very paranoid about Ukraine. He has to be so specific really imperial views about Ukraine, but it's obviously about a lot more than just Ukraine. And he's made it pretty clear that, you know, the big war at the end of the day for Russia, isn't with Ukraine. He doesn't think that Ukraine and Ukrainians have any agency. He thinks it's just a puppet regime run by the West. There's a sense where Putin is really the master of projection in that everything that he is doing, he loves to project back onto the West. And he did create these

puppet regimes that basically are just as complete tools to the Russian government in the Saffiriask and Lagansk, and he has said many times that he thinks that the Zelensky's government is the same thing, except that the U.S. is running it. And the issue is that I think there appears to be from Western governments, you know, less concerned than there was before the war. You know, the fact that just today, Germany finally sent some armored, they're called Gepaards, So the cheetah, the mobile anti-aircraft armored weapons to Ukraine, which is a huge U-turn for Germany. They were dragging their heels in more than any country.

And I think the months of Ukrainian, you know, shaming of the German government for 30 years, completely with Russia, it seems to work. But there's a sense where, you know, on the one hand, this is a dilemma that I imagine that, you know, the policymakers and the U.S. and Europe have it on the one hand, you don't want. to antagonize him anymore, because there's still a lot more that he could do. He hasn't used chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in Ukraine yet.

It's he also remember, the conflict is currently limited to Ukraine. This may not go on forever. Right now we are seeing a lot of worrying rumblings around Moldova, the separatist, a region of Françistria, which borders Ukraine. And suggestions that Russia could start something, there, Poland is, and the Baltics are, you know, always, always the first to be worried because they have

borders of the Russia that something could happen to them. And, you know, that is a danger, you know, you know, you don't want to do that. That's why some of, you know, the most dramatic things that Ukraine is called for, like a no-fly zone, which is, you know, no-fly zone, something, you know, more about than me, but they seem to have, you know, dialed that one back a bit, but, you know, the sort of things that, you know, would directly lead to World War III if they were implemented by the U.S. Yeah. The problem is, is that, you know, if Russia already fakes that it is fighting World War three just, you know, in a sort of proxy fashion with the West, or this is, you know, some sort of particularly, you know, nasty version of, you know, say, or the various conflicts in Africa

during the Cold War that were essentially proxy wars. Or, you know, in Afghanistan and the 80s is the best example between the U.S. and Russia were, and, you know, quite a few American policymakers and, you know, the good report about the CIA. They've, you know, seen, seen this in, in, in, in the very same frame as U.S. court for the Mahadjanian in 1980s, you know, they're, they've been giving Ukrainians, you know, the same missiles, you know, stingers, which have been very effective against, against Russian air power. And the other side is, you know, you know, what's, what's he going to do? You know, there was some, I, I thought it was quite funny, the reaction that the, um, Alexanolani, you know, the jailed Russian opposition

leader, his people been campaigning a lot recently for the U.S. sanction, Alina Kupai, who is Putin's reported mistress, according to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. has confirmed that, you know, she has at least three kids with him. And apparently they backed out at the last minute because they were worried that Putin would react in some sort of unpredictable and dangerous way. And then of all the people, you know, did have a good point, which is, you know, what's he going to do? Invade Ukraine, you know, raid, raise the city to the ground, do that execute. hundreds of civilians and occupied towns, you know, God forbid he should do that, you know, we should provoke him. So I mean, it's a problem to which there is no good answer. And that's, that's why

it's so difficult. But it does seem that we're already in some sort of escalatory spiral. And the question is, you know, how long prevents, because I know that Ukrainian officials are certainly worried, you know, there seems to be some, you know, renewed optimism in Ukraine that they could win, that they could actually drive Russia back and take back more territory. But then does that push Putin to do something really horrible, like use a tactical nuclear weapon, you know, we don't know. But the fact that we're not ruling this out off the bat is itself pretty worrying and indicative, I think. Yeah. Yeah, no, you never like to have that in your head. Well, one last question for both you guys. I mean, you know, you guys have both covered this war

from different perspectives, you know, for many years. back to the earlier days in the Donbos and then up through today. I'm just wondering in the last couple months, I mean, is there an image, a conversation, an experience that really jumps out as like the most vivid manifestation of where we ended up here, which is someplace that, you know, even I think in 2014 or 15, you would have hoped that something like this would never happen. I mean, something, you know, that is really kind of driven home for you guys, um, just how much has changed in people's lives, you know, in the course of the last,

um, two months. I mean, Chris, you were obviously in Ukraine. Max, you had to basically deal with having to leave a country that I'm sure, you know, you had a lot of relationships in. I mean, what's a, what's an image that you would leave our listeners with of, like, um, of something that stands out to you guys. I know, Chris, if you want to go first. Sure.

You know, there are a lot of, a lot of, I was a, I say, you know, specific moments or or interviews that I did or things that I cover on the ground that have really stuck with me. But I think something that I get the sense that a lot of people were shocked by that seems to be this really scary new reality is actually something that Max ended on in that last answer. And that is, you know, we, I think, you know, speaking and interviewing a lot of Ukrainians, you know, I think a lot of people knew what Russia was capable of, but didn't think that we would be where we are now, that it would invade in a, in a massive, full-scale way, you know, with missiles

falling across the country on civilian areas and we have like, you know, the thousands and thousands of deaths and casualties that we've seen and just like an unimaginable level of like destruction and lives torn apart. And, you know, I think the, I've had a lot of conversations with Ukrainians, you know, regular civilians and government types and military types. who said, you know, that they, they fear that nothing is off the table for Putin now. And that, you know, really we need to be prepared for anything. And I think that's terrifying, you know, and something that is, you know, very much in the minds of people in Ukraine and probably many people outside of Ukraine's borders as well is what Max

said. And that is, you know, if the Ukrainians continue having the success that they're having, if Western support does end up, you know, bolstering the Ukrainians' defense and they're able to start taking back territory or just humiliate, you know, just defeat Russian forces in this really humiliating way. You know, what is he going to do next? I think you have to be prepared for whatever the next worst thing is because we didn't expect, most people didn't expect what we're seeing now to happen. And I think that's something that, you know, is, is something I'm constantly concerned about and thinking about and, you know, having conversations about with the, you know,

the people I speak with in Ukraine. You know, outside of that, I would say, you know, it's really difficult to get out of my mind the amount of and the type of atrocities that have been carried out by Russian forces. It's worse than, you know, the biggest scaremongers could have imagined and put out there. It's absolutely horrific. And, you know, there's no way to not think about it. And unfortunately, I think there's going to be a lot more of that. That happens before there's any sort of, anything resembling a resolution, unfortunately. I just jump in there, based how what Chris said, something I think that, you know, some of some listeners might not really realize the extent to which no one in Moscow thought that this was

possible, including, you know, people have known Putin for decades, and the best of my knowledge, are really a staggering number of people within Putin's own government, within a presidential administration, even some members of security council, my understanding, they had no idea that this is going to happen. They thought, you know, that something, you know, was possible that would be limited. You know, the answer that I would hear most would be, you know, the Georgian War, you know, some sort of quick, you know, four, five, they think to teach Ukraine is a lesson and get a new, a new peace deal. The idea that it would be this absolutely enormous, full-on invasion was completely shocking to people. I remember I went to see.

someone a few days after the war started, the last night seen him was a few weeks earlier. And he had insisted to someone who had known Putin for decades. He'd insisted, you know, up and down to me, you know, Putin is a really smart, rational guy. He's, you know, more isolated. But he has less, you know, broad information available to him. But he still makes rational decisions based on the invasion he has. He tries to, you know, balance things. And I see him and the guy says, you know, Putin's lost his mind.

And I said, So when do you think that Putin lost his mind? He thought for a long time when he thought, you know, you could start, you know, thinking about it now. You know, you could start seeing it in 2007 when he, you know, he made his famous speech at the Munich Security Conference against the U.S.-led World Order. And I guess he finally, you know, he went crazy in 2014. He just didn't feel that he'd been backed into a corner to the extent that he did until now. So this is why we're only seeing seeing the full extent of it now. But it's really amazing, you know, people I speak to, you know, people are going around the Kremlin,

oligarchs, you know, you, you, you call them up and they're in complete shock. And one question I ask people is that there's this great Russian phrase means to be in a state of total shock and disbelief. And I ask everyone, you know, like, khto waqwe. And I know, everyone is losing their mind. you know, this head of a state company was so depressed by the war that he didn't come out of his office or several weeks. He wouldn't sign, you know, any documents, all the papers backed up. This guy, you know, he wanted to leave Russia, but then he maybe even did leave Russia, but that change his mind. And the extent to which even people in the system didn't see this coming, I think, is really astonishing.

the problem is, is that now more people feel like they're backed into a corner, because what's funny is if you talk to people who, you know, from various, various backgrounds, Russian society, the extent to which they feel like they do have some sort of collective responsibility for this, some sort of collective guilt, which is something that a lot of Ukrainians will say, this isn't just Putin. This is, you know, Putin is reflecting some imperial tendencies in Russian society, which is, I think, partly true to a certain extent, but not the whole story. But when you talk to people in the elite about this, you know, I've talked to people who are on a sanction list and I say, well, you do not feel that there's a certain, you know, you, you know,

maybe some of these people were in the room with Putin when he had the oligarch meeting. You have a day that he did the invasion or they, you know, that they've had businesses. that have become, you know, multi-billion-dollar corporations based on their ties to the state, they've run major state corporations that, you know, are parts of the system. And I'm saying, you know,

there were things that happened in your life that you brought you to that Rome on that day or that, you know, put you in, in contact with Putin. And, you know, some people do have a kind of, you know, decent amount of introspection about this, but a lot of others don't. And you will hear people say things like,

this is really unfair that I was placed under sanctions. You know, why, why me, you know? I didn't start the war. You think, well, what about, you know, I've got friends in the Harkiv. You know, it's not, it's not fair that, you know, they have to hide in their basements because their cities being destroyed by artillery and an airstrike. So what's dangerous is that you seem to see this tendency where, because a lot of these people are, you know, they're completely cut off from the West where they used to be, you know,

have one foot in Russia, one foot in the West or, you know, someone would even spend the vast majority of their time in the West now. Now they're kind of, you know, stuck with Putin. And the danger that you hear from some of these people is that they will, you know, be kind of bittered against the West. And this will actually create some kind of rally around the flag effect. They'll say, oh, you took my out of way. Well, you know, fuck you.

I'm going to go, you know, help Putin to do all the things that, you know, I may have been, you know, against to a certain extent before. And it's also a kind of logic in a system. You know, I've been told I, you know, I asked, you know, who's against the war? like out of people, people in the government, oligarchs, you know, state corporation heads, whatever. And you'll hear these absolutely astonishing names. And you'll think, well, that's true. Why did, you know, this guy, why did he just give some, you know, big, big, bouchy statement by just saw saying,

oh, yes, I support the special operation to deliberate the dumbhouse. And I fully support our president. And you have to understand inside, you know, he feels very conflicted about this, but he feels like he has no choice. His duty is support the president. And yeah, and that's the implication is that people are going to come rally around Putin. And there isn't really much that anyone can do about that. Yeah, well, sobering place to end here, which, I mean, from what both you guys said, you know, suggests that we've got a lot more to this and it can get worse, but I guess we can hope it doesn't. But thank you guys so much for for checking in here is really, we've really, I know everybody's been following you guys,

you're reporting, your social media. So it's great to have the chance here to check in with you. So Chris stays safe when you get back out there. And, you know, we'll look forward to checking in the future. Thanks, Ben. Right. Thank you. Thanks to Chris.

Thanks to Max for joining the show. Who else we need to thank? Pierce Morgan, Megan Markle, Elon Musk. That might be it. I think our team for putting up with my, like, shifting schedule. tonight, UK time. You gotta love the fact that I'm eight hours ahead of you and I'm the guy who's late.

Dude, you're eight hours ahead? Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's brutal. Well, we'll let you go to bed. I'll be back in studio next week so that'll be easier to manage. All right, thanks everybody.

Talk to you next week. All right, see it. Pazzi of the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Saul Rubin for production support

and to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montuth, who upload our episodes as videos at YouTube.com slash crooked media.