Douglas Murray: Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Israel, Netanyahu, Hamas & Gaza

The excerpt opens partway through a thought from Douglas Murray. He describes people who “end up chanting in front of him, “Viva la Muerte. Long-lived death.”” and then draws a line to the present: “They have their counterparts today.” He says these are the people who taunt Americans, Westerners, Israelis and others with the claim that they love death more than their opponents love life. This contrast between those who celebrate death and the societies they target runs through the title of his new book, On Democracies and Death Cults.

Lex Fridman then introduces Murray as the author of The War in the West, The Madness of Crowds and On Democracies and Death Cults. He says the conversation will cover Russia and Ukraine and Israel and Gaza. Fridman says Murray holds “very strong views on these topics” and promises to also talk to people who disagree with him, starting with the next episode. He describes online discourse as a place where “grifters, drama farmers, liars, bots, sycophants, and sociopaths” roam. His position is that “no one is in possession of the entire truth, but some are more correct than others,” and that telling the insightful from the delusional takes intellectual humility and rigor.

Fridman gives listeners concrete advice: listen to many sources who disagree with each other, and visit the places in question, as both he and Murray have, or at least talk face-to-face with people who have spent most of their lives in Israel, Palestine, Ukraine or Russia. He asks the audience not to be “cogs in the machine of outrage” and instead to “reach toward reason and compassion.” His framing includes a claim that sits uneasily with the stark moral language Murray opens with: “There is no Hitler, Stalin, or Mao on the world stage today.” He adds that thousands of nuclear weapons are ready to fire and that “Human civilization hangs in the balance.”

Fridman asks what Murray has learned from his visits about the invasion of February 24th, 2022, and the three years of war since. Murray separates the war's political angles, which he calls “forever changing,” from what he saw on a human level: admiration for frontline troops defending their country, homes and families. He says this reality stands apart from the political and media noise, and calls it “the single thing that struck me most in my visits there.” He describes the soldiers as fighting for a cause that, at that level, is “unavoidable, undeniable.”

When Fridman sums this up as the reality of war, Murray points to two groups. The first are people who lived under Russian occupation and were then liberated, as happened in late 2022. The second are the soldiers he met in recent weeks, who were “just getting on with their job as soldiers whilst the world was talking about them.” His first visit came when he was with the Ukrainian Armed Forces as they retook Kherson. He returned in recent weeks and was in a Ukrainian dugout at the front lines when he watched the Trump–Zelensky blow-up.

On how things changed between the two visits, about two years apart, Murray says “nothing has changed much” on one level. He pushes back on calling it a total standoff, because “intermittently each side gains territory from the others,” but says “there’d been no very significant military gains by either side in the interim period.”

Fridman describes the early mood among Ukrainian soldiers and civilians as intense optimism, with victory understood as winning back all territory. Murray partly agrees and adds a note of skepticism. On the front lines facing Crimea, he met people who believed Ukrainians in late 2022 might even retake Crimea, and he says, “I thought that that was an overreach,” even then. Fridman, framing it as “at least in my experience,” says the soldiers on his second visit seemed more exhausted, and that the certainty of victory “has maybe faded from the forefront of their minds.” Murray's reply is short: “Well, three years of war will tire out anyone.”

Asked what he thought watching the Zelensky–Trump confrontation from the dugout, Murray calls it “a very disturbing place to watch it from,” while noting that perhaps anywhere would have been. His central judgment is that “it was a meeting that shouldn’t have happened. It was far too early.” When Fridman asks whether there were too few real pathways to peace on the table, Murray turns to the mineral deal. Both men joke about how everyone online has become an expert on geopolitics and now on Eastern Ukrainian mineral deposits, and Murray admits, “I’m really speaking of the edge of my mineral deposit knowledge here.”

With that caveat, Murray argues that the deal the American administration wanted the Ukrainian government to sign was too early to force. “The Ukrainians were ready to sign a deal, but were obviously under intense pressure.” He says Zelensky was not expecting to go until “pretty much the day before” and was visibly tired and exhausted after a long stretch of pressure.

Murray recounts an exchange he also described in his New York Post column, filed from Ukraine. When he asked soldiers what they made of the meeting, one said they were advised not to follow the politics too closely, although everyone scrolls past the news on Instagram among dog pictures and other content. What struck Murray was that the same soldier said:

I’ve got a job to do.

Fridman grants the clarity of that view but presses Murray: “your job is bigger than that, right?” He calls the meeting a real opportunity to make progress on peace that was, by all accounts, not a successful step forward. Murray goes further: “I don’t think by any account, it was a successful step forward.” He offers one speculative alternative, and labels it as speculation. The meeting might have been a play from Washington to tell Putin, in effect, that they had dismissed Zelensky and now wanted something in return. He calls this “the only remedial idea I have about what might have been behind it,” and otherwise describes the episode as an awful political moment.

Murray places Zelensky's reaction in the context of the preceding week. He says “Zelensky was obviously deeply irritated by the interpretation of the war that he was hearing from Washington.” The meeting came only a week after Trump's comments calling Zelensky a dictator, and after people in and around the administration implied that Ukraine had started the war. Murray calls this “a pretty Alice in Wonderland situation to be in” and says “I had significant sympathy for him in finding it bewildering.”

Fridman points to what he calls mundane but consequential details. Zelensky was exhausted, and a reporter, whom Fridman insults bluntly, asked about Zelensky's outfit. Fridman describes Zelensky as “an emotional being, for better or for worse.” Murray identifies the reporter as Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend, and Fridman jokes that this is what makes Murray a real journalist.

Murray says he supports opening up the White House press pool, while acknowledging that doing so admits people from the blogosphere who may ask questions like this one. He argues the question was disrespectful because “when a man comes from the realm of war into the realm of peace,” people in the realm of peace owe him some respect or concession. In a political environment that talks casually about people being destroyed, decimated and defenestrated, Murray says that for Zelensky “none of that is metaphorical.”

He supports this with a historical comparison: Churchill wore his fatigues on foreign visits during World War II, which Murray reads as a way of reminding hosts that one comes from the realm of war. Part of this passage is marked inaudible in the transcript. Murray then imagines what may have gone through Zelensky's head: if Putin were being assaulted by a journalist, you would hope your host stepped in to defend you. He offers a pointed hypothetical, a journalist in the Oval Office telling Putin he has had a lot of facial work done, possibly by the same person Berlusconi used. Murray says that would rightly be called disrespectful and off-topic, and that the outfit question was the same: “I think it was just petty and threw things off in a bad way.”

Fridman notes that Zelensky explained his clothing three years ago, at the start of the war, and has worn it consistently since. Murray widens the point to “the frivolity of a lot of the attempts to understand what’s going on.” Since no one can be an expert on everything, he argues, people seize on minor details, and every side does it. His example comes from the American right: for years during the Obama administration, it talked about the Churchill bust leaving the Oval Office instead of seriously critiquing Obama's foreign policy. “It was just an easy shorthand,” he says, and he adds that everyone is tempted to do the same.

Fridman adds a final factor. Putin, he says, could have answered such a reporter effectively himself, and would have done so in Russian. With an explicit note of respect, Fridman says Zelensky's English “sometimes is not very good.” Murray agrees and turns it into a practical point. Had Zelensky spoken through an interpreter instead of in English, “he would’ve bought himself the extra seconds in some of his replies that he needed.”

The limits of this section are worth noting. Its evidence is mostly first-hand impression: two visits by each speaker, a few frontline conversations, and one anecdote from a soldier. Both men hedge in places. Murray admits the edge of his knowledge on minerals and calls his reading of Washington's motives the only remedial idea he has. Fridman frames his observations on morale as limited to his own experience. The two largely agree on the Oval Office meeting. Their main differences are of emphasis: Fridman pushes Murray past the soldier's “job to do” stance toward political analysis, and early in the war Murray was more skeptical than the optimism Fridman described.

The section opens with Lex Fridman thinking about what Volodymyr Zelensky lost in his meeting with Donald Trump. Fridman calls Zelensky funny, witty and intelligent. He suggests Zelensky could have shown that better by speaking in his native Ukrainian or Russian and working through an interpreter. He calls the meeting a missed opportunity: "it’s a dance, and there’s an opportunity there." Fridman grants that the Republican right in the United States is generally skeptical of Zelensky. But he insists this is not fixed: "It can turn, it can change, it can evolve."

Douglas Murray asks why the skepticism arose in the first place. Fridman gives a deliberately blunt answer. He says American politics was polarized from the start: the left took up "Putin bad, Zelensky good," so the right went the opposite way. Murray agrees. Fridman adds that sometimes the reasoning really is that simple.

Sometimes it’s literally as dumb as that. Let’s each pick a side and call the other dumb.

Murray puts it in terms of online culture. He mentions a line he used recently about people who "live too long online" needing to "wade their way out of the memes." He says he understands why people were irritated when users who already had BLM, pride or trans flags in their bios added Ukrainian flags, despite "almost suddenly not knowing where Ukraine was." The unthinking reaction, he says, is to want to "sock it to them." His argument is that this reaction has to be resisted, because a geopolitical outcome should not depend on how annoyed people feel about online signalling.

Actually, funnily enough, the fate of a country doesn’t depend on my tolerance for memes online today.

Fridman argues that face-to-face meetings like the one between Zelensky and Trump can break through the memes and build real camaraderie. His example is Narendra Modi, whom he says he recently researched in depth and interacted with. In Fridman's account, Modi managed to be friends with Putin, Zelensky, Trump, Biden and Obama. Murray agrees that Modi was "very skillful."

Fridman stresses that Modi did this without giving up a firm national stance. He describes Modi as "fundamentally a nationalist figure who’s very non globalist," committed to "India First, Nation First," with "a very specific idea what that nation represents." The lesson Fridman draws is that Zelensky could stay just as committed to his own country while learning to navigate "the Trump room," because "every single leader has their own peculiar quirks that need to be navigated."

Murray first offers a concrete explanation, while saying he does not want to make it sound "like it was all Zelensky’s fault." He suggests the obvious move would have been to open by thanking America, its people and politicians "from across the aisle" for their support, as Zelensky had done "for three years." Murray says that this time Zelensky "for once forgot to say that." Fridman pushes back: "I think it’s not that simple." Murray concedes the point and calls the omission "one reason." He notes it was what Vance "leapt in on."

Fridman's diagnosis is broader. He says Vance was "just picking a thing to leap on" and that the real problem was "a whole energy." In his view, Zelensky needed to acknowledge, in how he carried himself, that he had been "very Biden buddy buddy with the left for the last four years." Fridman frames the task as managing difficult personalities, and he does not exempt either president.

Listen, these people are complicated narcissists, all of them, Biden, Trump. You have to navigate the complexity of that.

Fridman then suggests a script: feed Trump's ego by calling him one of the world's greatest negotiators, someone who can bring "a successful resolution." He contrasts this with what he calls an air of assumption that "it should be obvious to everybody that Ukrainian are the good guys and Russia is the bad guys." He describes this as "a whole energy of entitlement." Zelensky, he says, "forgot that there’s a new guy" who had to be persuaded that the war, which Fridman calls "in many ways, the West versus the East," is "a war worth winning."

Murray accepts that the Ukrainians "obviously failed on that occasion." He adds a note of sympathy: it must be "bewildering" to land somewhere people were seriously discussing Ukraine starting the war, and Zelensky rather than Putin being the dictator. Murray mentions that he did a New York Post front page the day after the president's comments, which made the case that Putin is the dictator. He separates criticizing Zelensky or the Ukrainians from siding with Putin. He laments that "a lot of people in our time don’t have that capability."

Asked for his strongest criticism of Putin, Murray gives an itemized indictment. He starts with domestic rule:

He’s a dictator who’s very bloody, as repressive as you can be of political opposition, internal opposition.

Repression: Murray says Putin has crushed political and internal opposition inside Russia. Kleptocracy: he calls Putin a "kleptomaniac" of Russia's resources who has enriched himself and "the cronies around him." Killings abroad: Murray says Putin has gone to other countries, including Britain, Murray's country of birth, and "killed people on our soil." Weapons of mass destruction: he cites polonium used "in the Center of London." He also cites nerve agents in Salisbury that, he says, "could kill tens of thousands of people."

Murray anticipates the apologist's defence that Putin is "just a sort of tough man who’s looking after his house business." He answers that even if one granted Putin that right at home, it would not justify deliberately using weapons abroad that are "meant to show that you could take out tens of thousands of British citizens." He adds that this is "just for starters."

Fridman asks whether Putin is popularly elected. Murray answers "No," and says yes, the election results are fraudulent. Fridman then offers an alternative: perhaps the opposition has been eliminated and Putin is otherwise genuinely popular. Murray replies drily, and Fridman remarks on the word "chap."

It definitely helps the chap if he’s killed all of his opponents.

Murray then turns to the claim that Zelensky is a dictator because he has not held elections. He calls this one of the "slightly Alice in Wonderland things" in recent debate, since Ukraine is fighting "a total war of self-defense." His point is about consistency: anyone truly passionate about free and fair elections in the region should at least notice that Russian elections "are not free and fair in any meaningful sense." He also limits his claim. Saying this does not mean Russia should have Western-style elections, or that it is "ready to go and become a western liberal democracy." The minimum, he says, is to "note that this is what Putin is."

On Putin's motivation for the 2022 invasion, Murray points to Putin's own rhetoric.

Well, it’s what he’s said for years, which is basically the reconstitution of the Soviet Union.

Asked whether this includes empire building, Murray relies on the judgment of friends in East and Central Europe, who he says do think so. As evidence of how seriously the region takes the threat, he says the Baltic countries spend the highest percentage of GDP on defense. He insists the fear is real: "I don’t think they’re faking it." He says Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and others are "genuinely worried for the first time in some decades."

Fridman asks whether the war might continue indefinitely, with a ceasefire only pausing it and Putin later expanding beyond Ukraine. Murray answers yes. He predicts that if Trump negotiates a ceasefire, "it’ll be a temporary pause," and that Putin will use the next presidency after Trump "to advance again." He disputes the view, which he attributes to parts of the American right and others, that "all he wants is Ukraine" and that nothing in Putin's rhetoric or actions suggests otherwise.

Murray's evidence here is first-hand. He recalls being in Georgia "after Putin tried to invade in 2008" and says traveling to see things "your own eyes" is useful. He frames his conclusion as one that does not require strong support for Ukraine. People "don’t have to be the greatest supporters of the Ukrainian cause" to recognize that "it doesn’t seem to be the case that Ukraine is the only thing in Putin’s vision."

Fridman invites Murray to engage with the realist reading associated with John Mearsheimer. On that reading, the invasions of Georgia and Ukraine are uses of military power to expand a sphere of influence, "in a cold calculation of geopolitics." Murray is dismissive of the messengers. He calls the recent revival of certain figures "an act of sort of necromancy." He names Mearsheimer on Ukraine and Finkelstein on Israel, and calls them people who were "totally, totally debunked" and not listened to for years, "usually, for good reason." That is Murray's assessment, and the conversation does not argue it in detail.