President Zelensky Exposed Lex Fridman’s Own Bias on Ukraine

Earlier this week the podcaster and YouTuber Lex Fridman dropped what he hopes will be the first part of a two-part special, exclusive interviews with both Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin. At the time of writing the video of his interview with President Zelenskyy has gathered almost four million views. I doubt he will ever get his hoped-for interview with Putin. And even if he does, he will certainly not get the sort of open, flowing and factual conversation, he was granted by Zelensky.

One criticism of Fridman is that he failed to be genuinely impartial in how he framed some of his questions. This is true. However, it may not be deliberate. Those who are most vociferous in pushing their version of “peace” in Ukraine are frequently those who understand least about this war and the causes of it. Fridman spent the best part of three hours demonstrating his ignorance because he failed to hear, or understand, what the Ukrainian President was telling him.

Fridman’s failure to understand, despite enormous patience from President Zelensky, was not the fault of any translation problems, as he tried to claim. His failure to understand comes from the fact that he has lived a very different reality. The host repeated his desire to see Putin, Trump, and Zelensky in a room together to hammer out a historic peace deal. Fridman failed to understand that when replying to this Zelensky acted as a representative of all Ukrainians in displaying their implacable opposition to Putin. The reality is there’s never going to be a coming together moment, guided by Trump or anyone, ever.

This Ukrainian attitude was first expressed in the opening discussion, about the language of the discussion. Fridman was genuinely puzzled by the fact that the President of Ukraine would not, for his convenience, speak the language of the aggressor. If you have not lived, or seen firsthand as Zelensky has, the horrors committed by those who speak that language, how could you understand why people would find that offensive? The answer lies in empathy and basic decency.

Fridman then went on to state the flawed notion that most people think that there has to be a compromise between the two sides. In his response, and losing his patience somewhat to drop his first swearword of the conversation, Zelensky asked how that compromise would apply to murderers? Fridman appeared to wrongly take the question as hypothetical.

“What about the murderers? If your child was killed and you asked who did it and someone said “well, that guy, but you can’t touch him” What would you do? You’d knock his fucking block off anyway” is a fair summation of Zelensky’s reply.

In spite of the faults and failings of the host and his preconceived notions, this is nonetheless a very important interview because his format afforded Zelensky the opportunity to respond at length to many important questions.

The thing about a ‘peace deal’ is that you do not have one at all until you have all elements in place. There’s no moment where we can go “ceasefire agreed, job done” because the “job” is nowhere near “done” without agreement on what happens next.

This long-form interview offered other examples of where Fridman’s inherent bias seeped out into his questions.

“What about corruption?” Fridman asked. “What about the lack of democracy since martial war was declared?” was another question. To the first, Zelensky rolled out another expletive. “When we have a shortage of weapons at the front, do you think someone is going to get away with selling trucks of guns? The other soldiers would fucking kill them.” To the second, “a state of war was introduced because of the fact that we were invaded and are therefore at war.”

The stunning thing about those last two questions is that they are falsehoods that emanate from Russian propaganda about Ukrainian corruption, when Russia is way more corrupt than Ukraine ever will be. Russian propaganda pushes the idea that because elections have to be suspended, Ukraine is not a democracy. Russia, which is very much not a democracy, pushes this line about Ukraine, which is. And, Lex Fridman thought those are reasonable topics to raise with the President of Ukraine.

In another exposé of simplistic thinking posing as intellectual prowess, Zelenskyy responded to Fridman’s questions about “security guarantees for Russia” as follows.

“This war is being fought where? On the territory of Ukraine, what happens to that place after the war, I really don’t care.” That’s the feeling in Ukraine, but in what world does one ask the victim of aggression how the aggressor should be protected in the future?

“And what of the future? When will the people of the two countries rebuild relations?” Fridman asked through his rose-coloured glasses where Russians and Ukrainians are really those fabled brotherly nations, after all this, and we should put this behind us. Zelensky responded that after they have admitted their guilt and paid for when they have done, maybe in a generation those who follow might find a way.

This generation of Ukrainians will not forgive them. I am not sure about the next. Fridman appeared not to understand this, he has not experienced what we have and as a result is added to the list of those who fail to understand this conflict and the causes of it, even after his the three-hour audience with the greatest possible authority on this subject, the President of Ukraine.