Stone, Oliver

filmmaker; director of Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, Nixon, Snowden; documentarian who conducted extended interviews with Vladimir Putin, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chavez

Oliver Stone: Vladimir Putin and War in Ukraine

Lex Fridman Podcast · May 17, 2022

• Oliver Stone
• Vladimir Putin interviews
• war in Ukraine (contested account)
• NATO and neoconservative foreign policy
• nuclear energy documentary
• JFK and Cold War history
• Zelenskyy legitimacy dispute
• false-flag speculation
• media censorship and propaganda
• empathetic interviewing philosophy
• Stephen Kotkin rebuttal (companion episode)

Core ideas

Stone frames the conversation around a documentary he was completing on nuclear energy, arguing (drawing on Joshua Goldstein's book A Bright Future) that nuclear power is the only realistic path to closing the growing global electricity gap without catastrophic carbon emissions, and that public fear of nuclear energy stems largely from decades of what he characterizes as media and environmentalist-driven misinformation (citing a 1950s New York Times campaign he says was influenced by Rockefeller oil interests) rather than the technology's actual safety record, which he cites as having a very low fatality rate compared to fossil fuels. He recounts touring nuclear programs in Russia, France, and the U.S. for the film, and argues each country will move toward nuclear "for its own self-interest" rather than through any coordinated global agreement.

Turning to the Cold War and JFK, Stone argues Kennedy was an "anti-imperialist" whose assassination reversed a brief thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations, and that Lyndon Johnson's administration returned America to what he calls the entrenched Cold War posture inherited from Truman and Eisenhower — a throughline he connects to his own films (JFK, JFK Revisited, Nixon, W.) and to a broader argument that U.S. Cold War hostility toward Russia has been continuous and largely unexamined across administrations, intensified in his account by Zbigniew Brzezinski's Carter-era policy and by neoconservatives associated with the 1990s "Project for the New American Century," whose stated doctrine — that no rival great power should be allowed to emerge — Stone presents as the throughline explaining U.S. policy toward Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba alike.

Describing his personal impressions of Putin from roughly 15 hours of interviews conducted between 2014 and 2017, Stone characterizes him as calm, disciplined, unusually restrained compared to Western politicians, devoted to his family, and — in Stone's assessment — not personally corrupted or enriched by power, describing him as a "son of Russia" primarily motivated by restoring Russian sovereignty and stability rather than territorial expansion; Stone states he sees "no evidence" of imperial ambition in Putin's record prior to 2022, citing the absence of territorial claims beyond Georgia and Chechnya. He is sharply critical of Western press coverage of Putin, calling American interviews of him (e.g., by NBC) "aggressive" and "shallow" compared to his own approach, which he frames as empathetic understanding rather than adversarial judgment — extending this stated interviewing philosophy to a hypothetical of how he would have approached interviewing Hitler in 1938–41: not excusing the atrocities, but seeking to understand the interior logic and grievances of a historical actor rather than performing contempt for the camera.

On the war itself, Stone advances a detailed, contested account: that Ukraine, since the 2014 change of government (which he calls a coup, not a revolution), became what he terms a "terror state" run in practice by nationalist and "Nazi-oriented" battalions who suppressed pro-Russian voices, that Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected on a peace platform he never pursued and lacks genuine sovereignty because he cannot act independently of these hardline factions, and that fourteen thousand ethnic-Russian Ukrainians in Donbas were killed by Ukrainian forces between 2014 and 2022 — a period he says the Western press has ignored while focusing solely on Russia's 2022 invasion. He argues both Russia and Ukraine had built up troops on the Donbas border before February 24, 2022, and speculates, explicitly as his own guesswork rather than confirmed fact, that Putin may have miscalculated due to bad intelligence, possible COVID-era isolation, or an expectation of a quicker resolution — while also entertaining, again as speculation, that the invasion may have been a calculated response to a perceived existential threat of U.S.-driven regime change. He states unambiguously (quoting his own March 2022 Facebook post) that "Russia was wrong to invade," while devoting most of the conversation to context he believes exonerates or explains that decision.

Stone raises, as explicit speculation rather than an accusation he claims to have evidence for, the possibility that the United States could stage or tolerate a false-flag nuclear or chemical incident in Donbas and blame Russia, drawing a parallel to what he describes as unresolved doubts about U.S. allegations of Syrian government chemical attacks. He criticizes Western and European media as functioning as a unified "wall of propaganda," argues censorship of Russian outlets like RT in Europe and the U.S. reflects fragility rather than confidence in democratic institutions, and states he personally feels afraid to speak freely in the current American media climate, comparing it to 1950s McCarthy-era anti-Soviet conformity. He closes on more personal reflections: love as what makes life bearable and meaningful, hard-won comfort with mortality drawn from his experience as a Vietnam veteran, skepticism of academic or scientific arrogance that dismisses non-specialist perspectives, and an argument that a classical, broad education (citing a formative NYU course on Greek classics) matters more for young people than narrow technical specialization.

Excerpts