Zelenskyy, Volodymyr

President of Ukraine

Volodymyr Zelenskyy: Ukraine, War, Peace, Putin, Trump, NATO, and Freedom

Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 5, 2025

• Volodymyr Zelenskyy
• Ukraine war
• Vladimir Putin
• Donald Trump
• NATO
• ceasefire negotiations
• security guarantees
• Budapest Memorandum
• Elon Musk
• war and peace

Core ideas

Recorded in Kyiv shortly before Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration, the conversation opens on the fraught symbolism of language itself: Lex proposes speaking Russian (the language both are most fluent in, avoiding a translator), but Zelenskyy insists on speaking mostly Ukrainian, explaining that Russia invaded partly under the pretext of "defending Russian speakers" while killing Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the east, making the Ukrainian language itself a symbol of the fight for independence — "we are not one nation... different countries." The two ultimately speak in a fluid mix of Ukrainian, Russian, and English, with Zelenskyy noting he prefers using English with Lex specifically so that Trump, listening later, hears him directly rather than through Ukrainian.

Zelenskyy recounts his grandfather's World War II service (fighting the entire war after his own father and brothers were tortured and executed by occupying Nazis) as formative, and draws an extended parallel between the slow, denial-driven lead-up to Hitler's war and the world's failure to take seriously the buildup to Russia's 2022 invasion — arguing that in both cases, the world "looked the other way," negotiated with an aggressor treated as fundamentally reasonable, and paid for it. He describes the morning of February 24, 2022, in visceral detail: waking to missile strikes at 4am, telling his wife to prepare the children, and immediately shifting from father to commander-in-chief, drawing on two decades of media/production experience to rapidly build a wartime information network (dubbed "Marathon") to counter Russian disinformation and prove via constant, verifiably "real" video addresses that he had not fled, as Russian propaganda claimed. He recounts a call with Lukashenko in the war's first days in which Lukashenko denied personal responsibility for missiles launched from Belarusian territory and suggested Ukraine "retaliate" by striking a specific oil refinery — which Zelenskyy refused.

On why he distrusts negotiating with Putin, Zelenskyy details the collapse of the December 2019 Normandy Format ceasefire he personally negotiated in Paris with Macron, Merkel, and Putin (notably without US participation): Russia got its desired gas-transit deal, an all-for-all hostage exchange partly succeeded, but the agreed ceasefire collapsed within about a month as Russian-backed forces resumed killing in the "Russian-speaking" Donbas region Putin claimed to be protecting — including video-documented Russian snipers training on Ukrainian civilians as live targets before later deploying to Syria and Africa. He extends this into a broader indictment of security-guarantee history: the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (under which Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal in exchange for assurances from the US, Russia, UK, France, and China) produced no response when Ukraine formally requested consultations after Crimea's annexation in 2014, and again after the 2022 invasion — "did anyone come? No... they didn't give a damn." His central thesis: "don't wait for Putin to want to stop the war — pressure him so that he is forced to stop it," rather than assuming any ceasefire reflects genuine willingness to end the conflict.

On what peace requires, Zelenskyy lays out a concrete framework: Ukraine's admission into NATO (even if initially covering only Ukrainian-controlled territory, excluding occupied Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Crimea, which remain legally Ukrainian), continued and expanded Western arms and sanctions (including barring Russian energy from global markets to starve war financing), and using roughly $300 billion in frozen Russian sovereign assets to fund Ukraine's own weapons purchases rather than relying on Western "gifts." He argues NATO membership is as much a security guarantee for Russia as for Ukraine, since it removes any future justification for revenge-driven violence from Ukrainians who never received "justice" for the war's dead — invoking the framing that ungrieved loss without accountability inevitably produces cycles of retribution. He rejects Lex's proposed alternative of security guarantees without NATO (drawing an analogy to Israel's air-defense support from allied nations despite non-membership), calls US withdrawal from NATO an existential risk ("that's the death of NATO"), and warns that a weak, war-fatigued Europe — Ukraine's army is Europe's largest at roughly 980,000, four times France's — cannot deter Russia alone, while North Korea's battlefield involvement (troops, artillery shells, technology transfer) signals both Russia's growing military desperation and a rising, linked security risk for the Indo-Pacific (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan).

On Putin personally, Zelenskyy rejects the framing that Putin "loves his country," calling this framing an obstacle to good-faith diplomacy: he cites the assimilationist violence against Chechens, the deployment of (disproportionately non-Russian, non-Moscow) conscripts to die in Georgia, Syria, Moldova, Africa, and Ukraine, and Russia's territorial vastness as evidence that Putin's actions are about personal political legacy and reasserting Soviet-sphere influence (citing recent moves against Georgia and Moldova) rather than genuine national love. Asked whether Ukrainians and Russians could ever reconcile, he answers via the postwar German model: reconciliation requires the aggressor nation to accept guilt, apologize, pay reparations, and be held accountable — a process that "will happen," he insists, but only after Russia acknowledges responsibility, not before.

On Trump, Zelenskyy credits his 2024 win to projecting strength relative to Biden/Harris and says Ukrainians hold higher approval for Trump than perhaps any other country because they believe he alone has the leverage to compel Putin to actually stop the war — while cautioning that this depends on Trump's advisors giving him accurate, first-hand information rather than distorted narratives. On corruption, he defends Ukraine's reform record (citing EU-mandated anti-corruption bodies, judicial reforms, and the imprisonment of oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky) and reframes some US aid inefficiencies (e.g., being denied use of Ukraine's own cargo fleet in favor of paying American shipping companies) as a matter of asking "whose corruption?" rather than Ukraine's. On Elon Musk, he expresses genuine gratitude for Starlink's wartime role and respect for Musk as a self-made innovator, while noting Musk has not yet visited Ukraine. On domestic politics, he explains why Ukraine has not held elections during martial law (constitutional bars, 8.5 million refugees abroad, occupied territories, a million soldiers who can't easily vote), predicts elections roughly 90 days after the war ends, declines to say whether he'll run again, and states he considers no one — not oligarchs, not foreign politicians, not his own staff — capable of controlling his decisions except his own children and parents.

Looking to Ukraine's future, Zelenskyy emphasizes continued digitalization (the Diia e-government platform, which he says other nations including African Union members want to adopt) as an anti-corruption and efficiency tool, tax reform, and opening the country to foreign investment in oil, gas, green energy, gold, and uranium (Ukraine holds Europe's largest uranium reserves) as the path to prosperity and to giving displaced citizens a reason to return — but insists all of it depends on first ending the war. In a separately recorded reflection, Lex discusses the backlash to the interview, his three-year preparation process (reading dozens of books from multiple biased perspectives, including Anne Applebaum's Red Famine and William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich), the technical challenges of live three-language interpretation, and his stated goal of using the conversation to push toward a negotiated peace rather than to score rhetorical points against either side.

Excerpts