I recorded this podcast with Vladislav Davidzon on Zoom on Wednesday. I thought we’d covered some interesting ground. But when I listened to it, I was horrified to discover that something was seriously wrong with the audio. Vlad’s voice was mostly fine, but mine was often inaudible. I don’t know why. I record conversations on Zoom several times a week, and this has never happened before.
I spent yesterday trying to salvage the recording, but I could only improve it so much. Finally, tired and frustrated, I gave up and decided to deal with it today. Having slept on it, I decided that it didn’t merit my wasting another full day trying to fix it. Too much is happening in the world that I want to write about, and I didn’t want to see another day go down the tubes.
So I’m putting it up as is, with the transcript, below—read the transcript, listen to as much as you feel like, or don’t. I also gave the transcript to Google’s NotebookLM, which created a completely new podcast, with perfect audio. in which two slightly dopey AI speakers discuss the transcript in a chirpy tone. It’s just as good as the original, really. Voilà:
Claire: Welcome to the Cosmopolitan Globalist Podcast. I’m here with my friend Vladislav Davidson, who is in Amsterdam. Is that right?
Vlad: I am in Amsterdam indeed, Claire. Hi.
Claire: Hi! Are you coming back to Paris?
Vlad: I should be back in about a week or so. I’m waiting for a meeting with a politician. As soon as he tells me what his schedule is, I should pop back in.
Claire: Right.
Vlad: I’ll stay with you. Don’t worry. I know you missed me.
Claire: You going to be back for the 14th?
Vlad: Um, possibly. What do you think, you mean the parade?
Claire: Firemen’s ball. I thought it might be fun to go this year.
Vlad: You're going? Do you have extra tickets?
Claire: You don’t need tickets.
Vlad: I only have a white jacket with me while I’m on the road. What do you think?
Claire: Oh, you don’t need to dress up. It’s for the whole neighborhood.
Vlad: Is it on the street? Where is it?
Claire: It’s at the firehouse. It’s just across on the rue de Sévigné.
Vlad: I think it’ll be nice.
Claire: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.
Vlad: Let me know. Actually, I’ve never done that.
Claire: You absolutely should.
Vlad: Right?
Claire: Yeah, speaking of the 14th, they’re practicing now for Bastille Day with the planes overhead, the fighter jets, and you know, when they pass overhead, the sound terrifies the cats—they run under the bed and they can’t be coaxed out for hours. And it actually terrifies me, too. I find these sounds terrifying. Just—
Vlad: I have flashbacks to the war. I can’t, even now in Amsterdam, sometimes the car back stops, sometimes it takes me a few seconds to realize I’m not in Ukraine. I’m not at the frontlines that—when some alarm goes off, I’m continuously thinking, are the Shaheds firing? So, uh—
Claire: It scares me and I know that they’re not coming for me. They’re just practicing for a parade. What is it like to deal with that for real, knowing that they are coming for you night after night? It’s just—
Vlad: It’s terrifying. And I have an extremely high appetite for risk, more than most people. But it’s really, really scary when you are in a situation where you’re getting bombed and you know you’re getting bombed. It’s not pleasant
Claire: Night after night. It must just leave people—it must just leave people beyond exhausted, beyond, beyond empty.
Vlad: Yeah. Well, that’s the point. That’s why they do it. They know that this is a way to grind down the population. They purposely do it in the middle of a night in order to wake people up and not allow them to sleep and to grind out the population’s capacity to resist.
Claire: I feel so bad for everyone who's living with this. I feel bad for the people in Gaza living with this. Obviously, I’m not a great enthusiast of Gaza’s political leadership, but—
Vlad: One has to have empathy for ordinary people who are caught in between the bad decisions of the leaders or the decisions of other leaders, right. I support Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas, and I also feel bad for every collateral casualty, for the suffering, by innocent people. Obviously it’s terrible. War is terrible.
Claire: Yeah, I know. I—that’s not a very original observation, but I—
Vlad: It’s not, it’s not.
Claire: But still, I just really feel bad for everyone who’s going through this, and I don’t understand why my fellow Americans don’t seem to feel for what Ukrainians are going through.
Vlad: Well, they did. They did and they still do. The polling is very obvious on this. But some people on the NatCon MAGA right have been, I wouldn’t say manipulated, but it’s become a partisan issue, and it’s easy for people not to care when they feel they're not being taken care of by the state.
Claire: Well, you have to be pretty stupid to allow that to be a partisan issue. For most of American history, there was an edict that politics stopped the water’s edge. And to make this partisan issue—
Vlad: It became a partisan issue because of the stupidity of some people, on both the Democratic Party and on the Ukrainian leadership side. The Ukrainians obviously have made a lot of mistakes in their dealings with Donald Trump over the last nine years.
Claire: I really think you’re blaming the victim on this one.
Vlad: I was a US law enforcement witness on this. I was there and I saw this, the Ukrainians got off on the wrong foot with Donald Trump from the very beginning. And obviously there was no playbook for how to deal with an insurgent Trump campaign in 2016, and the Ukrainian Embassy made some unfortunate calls in a difficult situation—I discussed this very recently with the Ukrainian ambassador at the time, and he’s very grateful to me for what I did back then.
Claire: You mean by handing over the information from the Party of Regions?
Vlad: That was one of the things they did. Yeah. Hmm.
Claire: What else?
Vlad: Uh, how discreet do I wanna be? The Ukrainians made a bad decision about, thinking that the Clinton campaign was gonna win and they made they made less effort to talk to the Trump people in the beginning, Ambassador Chaly—and I’ve told him this to his face—made a bad call with the way he published an article on The Hill in the spring of 2016, when Donald Trump was talking about Crimea as Russia—I mean, it should have been done at the level of the Foreign Ministry. It shouldn't have been the Ukrainian ambassador to Washington that made that call and wrote that op-ed.
Claire: Mm-hmm. I still think you’re blaming the victim. No normal administration would pay attention to that. They would act in the American interest.
Vlad: I mean, obviously he got embroiled in the Ukraine impeachment stuff. Obviously, that’s his own fault. But he did get embroiled in Russiagate, which was a lot of psychosis from the legacy media. And he saw the Ukraine stuff as an extension of Russiagate psychosis. So, he should get over it, but there’s multiple instances of things that he continuously got involved in. As a MAGA guy says to me, the Ukrainians somehow keep getting involved in Trump’s business. It’s a very vulgar but not incorrect way of explaining why Ukraine kept getting involved. And for whatever bizarre reason, as I put in one of my articles, Ukraine was fodder for presidential elections, three cycles in a row, 2016, 20 and 24, and that’s weird.
Claire: I don’t want to spend all of our time on this, but I still think that you're blaming the victim. The abnormality here is—
Vlad: I’m not blaming the victim because these are my people. I’m on the Ukrainian side. I think the Ukrainian leadership, before Zelensky, has a lot to answer for. Zelensky inherited a bad hand and a bad relationship. I don’t like the way they were treated. I don’t like what happened with him in the White House, that’s all terrible. But certain things happened between 2016 and 2019 that when Zelensky came into office, he already inherited a not-great relationship with the Trump administration. There’s a bad relationship, why there’s bad blood, why there’s lack of trust, you know?
Claire: What are you hearing about the latest insane episode in which it was reported that Pete Hegseth and perhaps Elbridge Colby unilaterally decided to hold up arm shipments to Ukraine? Is that true?
Vlad: Look, I don’t want to discuss Mr. Colby because I don’t want him to stop replying to my DMs on Twitter.
Claire: At some point you’ve gotta stop DMing and report what he says, right?
Vlad: Yeah. I mean, I don’t wanna—
Claire: He doesn’t listen to this podcast.
Vlad: I put a lot of effort into having conversations with those people and a lot of people told me it was a wasted effort, and it turns out—
Claire: So your sources are so carefully cultivated that you can’t ever use them?
Vlad: Yeah. Right, right. I don’t know, I tried, and a lot of other people tried to have conversations with the other side on this stuff, and some of them have come around, some of them have not, and I think it’s—
Claire: Well, you don’t have to say anything. But if he’s responsible for it, chuckle. And if not, I—
Vlad: I’ve read the same reporting that you have. Ha ha ha, ha ha.
Claire: I see.
Vlad: So, I really wish that wasn’t the case. They are really committed to their pivot away from Ukraine to Taiwan. They are committed to having the Europeans deal with this, and they are committed to offsetting this situation onto, NATO and European.
Claire: But Colby isn’t committed to Taiwan. He’s said so, explicitly. He said that he doesn’t think Taiwan is a vital American interest, and he thinks we should reach some kind of accommodation with China. It’s all just stuff he say. He’s a total opportunist. I know you don’t want to ruin your relationship with him, So I—
Vlad: Honestly, I don’t want to attack this gentleman. He has power, and there are a lot of vindictive people in the world, and people in power typically have egos and or sometimes thin egos. And I really hope that this is just a more of a kabuki game, which it very well could be. A lot of what happens with the Trump administration is kabuki games, allowing Trump to have his daily change of mood on whatever it—
Claire: Trump just said something about the Russians b**********g him, to which the entire world said, “Um, yeah.”
Vlad: But he knew this for months. I mean, he’s frustrated enough to actually call them out publicly on it because he knows he’s not getting anything from them. The Russians are just really stubborn, and they don’t want deal, and they don’t want anything and they’re just pushing Trump around. So at a certain point, even Donald Trump, whose policy was not to publicly criticize them and try to get them to make some sort of small concessions privately, said, “Okay, f**k these people.”
Claire: So why is he trying to rescue them economically?
Vlad: I mean, he has, again, a complicated relationship with Russia. He has a difficult relationship with the Russians and he obviously, like several other administrations, wants to park the Russian relationship and see if we can just get back to business as usual. Of course, there’s no going back to business as usual, and I think even he gets that, but he’s trying. Did you read my piece from December with Mark Galeotti?
Claire: The one about Trump scheming to get a Nobel Prize? I read about a third of it before you called.
Vlad: What’d you think of a first third?
Claire: You know what, just let me tell you something interesting that I heard, which I haven't written about yet.
Vlad: Yes?
Claire: Actually Trump has done something important in Congo. Something that
Vlad: Is that right?
Claire: He could legit get the Nobel Peace Prize for if anyone paid any attention to it. You know, that is the worst armed conflict since the Second World War. And it was heating up again. I found this out—it wasn’t reported anywhere—from my cab driver. I know it’s a cliche to cite the cab driver, but what can I do, it was a cab driver who told me this. My cab driver was from Congo, and we ended up talking about it. He was kind of surprised that I knew anything about the conflict. But he said “The Americans have really helped us”— and did you know there are American troops there in quite large numbers?
Vlad: When?
Claire: Now.
Vlad: I had no idea.
Claire: No, me neither. I mean, I’ve taken this from my Congolese cab driver, I haven’t tried to find out if it’s true. But why would he make that up? That’s kind of a hard thing to be mistaken about, right?
Vlad: I’m going to Google this. Immediately. US troops in Congo. I’m gonna Google this. It should be—I mean, unless it’s a secret and we’re secretly—
Claire: We pushed back M23, which is a significant achievement. Negotiated a ceasefire. And apparently, Donald Trump is popular there because he’s credited with stopping the war.
Vlad: Al Jazeera reported three years ago that President Tshisekedi authorized the deployment of US counterterrorism forces in the Eastern DRC. And the US Embassy says US Congo Military Cooperation continues. “A new chapter opens military cooperation.” This is on the US Embassy Congo website and “The need for US action for Democratic Republic.” Amnesty, USA. It seems that there are troops.
Claire: There are indeed. I was surprised to hear that, and surprised to hear the first non-American person I have encountered, probably, who was genuinely enthusiastic about Trump.
Vlad: African News has a piece on us deploying Army to secure the DRC election last summer. So it’s obviously true
Claire: —and this is a significant accomplishment. Now, obviously, the only reason, I’m sure, that we’re there is because it’s such a significant source of absolutely essential minerals. But—
Vlad: —but so what? You stop a war. You stop a war.
Claire: —you stop a war, you stop a war. So why isn’t Trump talking this up? Is it because he thinks his base will disapprove of sending troops to Africa?
Vlad: This may not be even in his top priority list. He may not even understand how successful his own policy may be. It’s entirely possible.
Claire: Well, he is a much more realistic candidate for a Nobel Prize for that achievement than for anything else.
Vlad: Well, I’m not against him getting the Nobel Prize if he actually does something worthy of it. Yeah. At this point he probably deserves it more than Barack Obama did.
Claire: Well, Barack Obama didn’t deserve it at all. He hadn’t done anything when he got it.
Vlad: Right. And in fact, he caused wars, and caused a lot of people to die.
Claire: Yeah, no. But Trump does seem to be quite obsessed with getting a Nobel prize. He’s having everyone who visits him submit his application to the Nobel Committee. He’s not going to get it, of course. And I don’t know—
Vlad: I had lunch with a very prominent Anglo-American journalist the other day, and he told me that he’s talking to his Norwegian friends and Swedish friends about getting their governments to back the committee to get it. And that’s the one way that we’re going to get influence on them, is the thinking. So, some serious people have had this thought.
Claire: Yeah. Pakistan came over and offered to nominate him for having negotiated a ceasefire with India, which India completely denies, and then the Israelis are nominating him for … having bombed Iran, I guess. Can you make any sense of this proposal in Gaza? I mean, what is he talking about when he talks about taking control of it and turning it into the Gaza Riviera? Does he—
Vlad: Is there an actual proposal, or that was just him—
Claire: —there was a press conference, a couple days ago. And I actually happen to have the transcript. Someone asked me about it. Let me just pull it up. His speech is so incoherent that it’s really hard to figure out what he’s getting at, in even the most literal sense.
Vlad: Do we just annex Gaza, make it into the 51st state? Is that what you're asking?
Claire: Well, he seems to be talking about “taking ownership,” which has to mean annexation, right? Or maybe it means taking ownership in the sense of “taking responsibility.” And—
Vlad: Anything?
Claire: Okay, here’s the transcript. Here we go. “We brought peace and stability to the Middle East like we haven't seen in decades. Together, we defeated ISIS, we ended the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, one of the worst. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
Vlad: Blah, blah, blah.
Claire: “We starved Hamas,” which is a really unfortunate turn of phrase, “and other terrorist proxies. And, we starved them like they had never seen before.”
Vlad: Cool.
Claire: Blah, blah, blah. Says we’re going to have a lot of people signing up for the Abraham Accords very quickly.
Vlad: Good.
Claire: And then he says, “The horrors of October 7th would never have happened if I were president. The Ukraine and Russia disaster would never have happened if I were president”—
Vlad: By the way, I agree with that. It’s actually the case. It happened because we had a very weak and brain dead cadaver in the White House, and Putin made the decision to go all in because he saw weakness. I do believe that actually if Trump had been president of the war, and that sort of—
Claire: I am sure the debacle in Afghanistan was a significant part of his decision making, but I also think he felt internal pressures that had nothing to do with us. I think it was an act of regime consolidation.
Vlad: Yeah, I know, but he made a decision to go thinking that, it was not gonna have any kind of—
Claire: The ones he really thought were weak, compared to reality, were the Ukrainians. And that was obviously a major miscalculation.
Vlad: Yeah. Obviously there were miscalculations all around. But, that doesn't mean the Biden administration doesn’t have a lot to answer for.
Claire: Hey, we dispatched Bill Burns, the CIA Director, to Moscow before the war. Do you have any idea what he said to them?
Vlad: No, that’s top secret. But he threatened them. Obviously. They didn’t care. They didn’t believe him or care. Yeah. So—
Claire: I’m just wondering what he threatened them with. Alright, so here's what he says:
“Gaza strip has been a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades and so bad for the people anywhere near it, and especially those who live there and frankly, who’ve been really very unlucky. It’s been very unlucky. It's been an unlucky place for a long time. Being in its presence just, uh, has not been good. And it should not go through a process of rebuilding or occupation by the same people that have really stood there and fought for it, lived there and died there, and lived a miserable existence there. Instead, we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this and build various domains, which will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living Gaza, ending the death and destruction and frankly, bad luck.
“This can be paid for by neighboring countries of great wealth. It could be the numerous sites, or it could be one large site, but the people will be able to live in comfort and peace and we’ll get, I’m sure, we’ll get something really spectacular done. They’re going to have peace. They’re not going to be shot at and killed and destroyed like this civilization of wonderful people has had to endure.
“The only reason Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative. It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down. They’re living under fallen concrete, and that’s very dangerous, precarious. They instead can occupy all of a beautiful area with homes and safety, and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony instead of having to go back and do it again. The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site. Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings. Level it out.
“Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area. Do a real job, do something different. Just can’t go back. If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has for a hundred years. I’m hopeful that the ceasefire could be in the beginning of a larger and more enduring peace that will end the bloodshed and killing once and overall, but the same—”
Vlad: Claire, okay. I’ve had enough. Claire, what are you parsing there? What are you getting out of it?
Claire: I’m just trying to figure out what on earth he’s getting at. What is his idea here? Who is he talking about, even?
Vlad: I think he is sending signals to whichever Sunni Arab allies of ours we're trying to blackmail into paying for it and policing it. That’s what I would guess. But who knows?
Claire: Americans are not going to be happy with the idea of sending troops into Gaza.
Vlad: No, no. And we shouldn’t. And I personally want nothing to do with that. And that’s a bad idea. Obviously no one needs to do that. And—
Claire: On one thing, he’s right. Doing the same thing will get the same results.
Vlad: It’s totally right. Yeah.
Claire: It’s just—I just don’t know what he’s proposing as an alternative,
Vlad: Both the Egyptian and Jordanian regimes will collapse if they take on more responsibility for it. And the other Sunni Arabs don’t want to do it and the Palestinian authority doesn’t want to do it. I don’t have an answer anymore than anybody else does to, sorry to say.
Claire: I saw something—was it coming from the administration or was it just something I saw online?—about turning the Sinai into Palestine?
Vlad: People have been wanting to do that for a long time, but that would lead to the collapse of Egyptian regime, one way or another. And we’ve promised our Egyptian friends that we wouldn’t make them do that. So no one serious is actually demanding that they do that because it would bring the war to Egypt.
Claire: Trump doesn’t care what we promised.
Vlad: He understands power dynamics extremely well. He has an extraordinarily predatory and clear-eyed understanding of power. He is the president who is most comfortable, and most understanding of, power dynamics that we’ve had in a very long time.
Claire: That's why he can’t figure out how to handle Russia?
Vlad: He sees Russia as having nuclear weapons and very difficult to deal with and rightly so. I mean, what are you gonna do if the Russians don’t want to make peace? What are you going to do? You could.
Claire: Arm Ukraine! Give weapons to Ukraine!
Vlad: Yeah, I know, I know. And that, yes—I’m calling for that, obviously, but, still. It is a difficult situation. I don’t know why I’m defending him. I mean, I just like being on the contrarian side of things. Anyways, what did you make of my piece with Galleoti, as much as you read of it?
Claire: So far it was interesting. I just didn’t finish it. I mean—
Vlad: Basically we predicted that he would put a lot of pressure for some of the Ukrainians and that when that wouldn’t work, he would put the pressure on the Russians, and that's exactly what happened. Sadly, it didn't happen quickly enough.
Claire: He’s not putting a lot of pressure on the Russians.
Vlad: No, he is not. He’s not, and he doesn’t think he has a lot of sticks.
Claire: When we spoke to about this when you were here the other day, you said that Ukrainians are holding on for Russia’s economic collapse, which I think really could come quite quickly.
Vlad: The system is very shaky. It’s shakier than anticipated. And the Ukrainians are extremely smart and they know what they're doing and they are really putting a lot of effort into blowing up stuff like oil refineries, right? And so they are very good at blowing up oil refineries and oil tankers and arms munition sites. So they’ve—according to Ukrainian intelligence—created US$10 billion worth of economic damage inside Russia already just with drones, right? Just a couple of days ago, the Ukrainian drones shut down all of the flights, the entire night, in one of Moscow’s four major international airports. So nobody was flying in and out of Moscow that night, and the cell phone jammers were turned on in order to jam the drones. But basically, all those people in the airport didn’t have cell phone service, so they sat there for hours waiting for their flight, which didn’t happen until maybe the next day. They couldn’t call anyone and couldn’t go home. So that’s a knock-on effect. No one likes that. You get on a plane and then you have to sit at the airport and then you have to go home, right? So the idea is to make life very difficult for the Russian population and also to blow up a bunch of stuff that the regime needs to consolidate its economic control. So do Ukrainians think they’re gonna kill every last Russian soldier? No, they don’t. But they think they can, they can wait this out. And, um, maybe they—
Claire: Then what?
Vlad: Then? I don’t know, honestly. We’re waiting for the regime to collapse. He’s only human. You don’t make a deal with with him, because he doesn’t want to make a deal. You just wait it out.
Claire: There’s been an impressive number of Russians falling out of windows recently.
Vlad: Yeah. Like three of them just over the last three days. Yeah. Regime consolidation is real.
Claire: So these are people who were suspected of disloyalty in some way?
Vlad: Even a former defense minister, Timor what’s-his-name, went to jail for 13 years for corruption. There is a lot of internal politics in Russia and some of the regime elites are unhappy. Some of them are looking for quiet ways of making a deal. And some of them are falling out of windows because the regime both needs to scare some of them and also to take away their assets in order to pay off others, right? The system cannibalizes its own, once in a while, and even very high-level guys, a former transport ministry guy, a former defense minister, going to jail. This is just the way they run the regime, you know?
Claire: Yeah. Of the elites who aren’t happy, are there more of them who are unhappy in the direction of wanting to make a deal, or more of them who are unhappy in the direction of wanting to become more aggressive and take more risks?
Vlad: Well, there are those of them who just want to keep going and keep fighting. And then there are also those who are like, “This is stupid. This isn't going anywhere,” right? I think the ones who were okay with the war have consolidated their support for a really long time, and they’ve just priced in the fact that this war’s going to go on for a long time.
Claire: Who are the notable figures? Who would like to cut a deal, do you know?
Vlad: No, because if we had their names, they wouldn’t be in the game anymore. So I know that people do talk to them, and I have two names that have been bandied about, but I’m told I can’t make that public. There are regime insiders who do talk to Western intelligence agencies, but if they get caught, they do get killed.
Claire: So, do we have any insight to Putin’s state of mind right now?
Vlad: I personally don't know. There are people who look at that all day long, but it’s very difficult. And he does sit in a bunker, and Kremlinology is real, of course, but that’s a very difficult one. So I can’t say for sure. He thinks he’s winning.
Claire: Does he?
Vlad: Yeah, he absolutely does. Yeah. Why wouldn’t he? He is winning on the merits of his own position. He’s kind of winning. Yeah. So why wouldn’t he think that?
Claire: Certainly in the larger sense of demoralizing the West, leaving it too confused to understand the difference between its allies and its adversaries, bringing allies to power in Europe, and—
Vlad: The Russian Army’s grinding—at tremendous, unspeakable, inhumane costs, 1,300 Russian men dead and wounded every single day—they are making gains, they’re making substantive gains. And the Ukrainian army will run out of men at this point. It’s just the way it is.
Claire: Are Russians noticing all these wounded men coming back, do they—
Vlad: Well, it’s a good question actually. The Russians have made a point of not cycling people out of the war zone. Unless you’re really terribly maimed, you’re not going to be allowed out of a war zone by the Russian authorities. They try to keep the mobilized men in the war zone or in the regions around Russia in order to keep them from going back to their hometowns in Siberia and telling everybody how terrible things are.
Claire: Well, they remember 1917.
Vlad: Yeah, it’s a real policy at the presidential administration level. The number of demobilized guys is tiny. Actually, most people who were mobilized since September 22 have not been demobilized. There’s no demobilization structure. All the contracts that have been signed, with exception of the six-month ones that were given to the Prighozin guys, the Wagner guys, those have been honored, but everyone else, their stop-loss stuff has prevented them from going home. So the Russian regions are sort of getting information and if 200,000 Russian men are dead, those are substantive losses and—
Claire: People must have noticed that their loved ones are not in contact anymore.
Vlad: There’s a lot of that, but again, people will find out how bad it is when the demobilization starts, and there are gonna be huge, huge knock-on effects to the Russian economy and Russian society for decades to come as veterans come back, and crime, PTSD-related incidents skyrocket and roil the society. But that’s in the future. In the meantime, they’re not being let out of the staging grounds. And the population of Russia doesn't really know quite how bad the war’s going for them in terms of losses.
Claire: The POWs that were released recently, they didn’t even let them go home. They just sent them right back to combat.
Vlad: That wouldn’t surprise me in the least. That’s Russia. Ukraine is worse. You know, there’s a new term in Ukraine. It’s called a double widow. Do you know what a double widow is? A double widow is a Ukrainian woman who lost her husband to the army, remarried after 23, and lost her second husband. Can you imagine that’s a social term?
Claire: “Ukraine is worse”—not in the sense, however, of keeping people at the front so to conceal the extent of losses, I presume?
Vlad: No, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, in terms of per capita dead, per capita wounded. Probably a lot worse for the Ukrainians, but the population is a quarter or a fifth of the Russian population, so it’s not the same.,
Claire: It’s an utter catastrophe. An utter catastrophe for Ukraine, for Europe, for Russia too. I mean, it’s just, just—
Vlad: It’s their own fault, but yes.
Claire: It’s their own fault in one sense, but there’s—really, I cannot think of anything that would make a country deserve this.
Vlad: The Russians put up with this regime for years and years, and actually in some ways they do deserve it, to be honest. There was a reckoning coming and they absolutely got what they deserved. Any Russian man who wound up in the war zone and was not forcibly thrown into it, with no agency of his own, deserves this in one way or another. I’m sorry to say that. I have very little sympathy.
Claire: I think I’d agree with that, but I wouldn’t agree that the whole society deserves what’s coming to them.
Vlad: I’ve asked soldiers, Ukrainian officers, on the front line, “Do you feel bad for anybody?” And they're like, “No. Look, you go to jail. Just say no to mobilization orders. Go to jail. Don’t kill anybody. Don't wind up dead in a ditch.”
Claire: I think I would agree with that—but—
Vlad: The Ukrainian officers do not have even the least bit of empathy for any Russian man who wound up there, and it’s completely normal. You have to dehumanize totally. You have to dehumanize your opponent in order to win. Obviously. That's a normal thing to do.
Claire: Sure. But I cannot condemn Russian civilians for being easily propagandized and incurious about the wider world, and willing to accept things that a free society shouldn’t accept, because if I use that standard, I’d have to condemn my own country, and I’m not willing to do that.
Vlad: Yeah. Yeah, no, I have more empathy for MAGA guys who see this as one more lie from an elite that has been lying to them and sending them to Iraq and Afghanistan than I do for any Russian on the frontline. I’m sorry to say.
Claire: Guys who think that are not the ones who were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Those guys are actually much more aware of what’s going on and they tend to be extremely supportive of Ukraine.
Vlad: No, actually I do talk to people who were in Iraq and Afghanistan who are like, “What was I there for?” Like. “This is the one more lie. This is just—”
Claire: Well, I understand that bitterness about Iraq and Afghanistan for the veterans of those wars, but I don’t think that, by and large, that people who served are completely ignorant of why there’s a war in Ukraine, and who’s the bad guy.
Vlad: The Americans aren’t stupid. They know what’s going on anyways. Um, anything else we can talk about in terms of—
Claire: I contest that statement. I have to contest that statement.
Vlad: Really?
Claire: Yeah. I don’t think Americans know what’s going on. No. I think by and large Americans exhibit very little understanding of foreign relations and would be very hard pressed to answer simple factual questions about this conflict..
Vlad: Well, why is that?
Claire: Most people, not just Americans, but most people are not interested in international relations, or even politics. They become interested when it touches them personally. And Americans have a long history of feeling insulated from the rest of the world, different from the rest of the world, and they’re also unbelievably badly served by the media. It’s not really even the media’s fault either. We all know that the media’s been destroyed by the internet.
Vlad: Well, and their own stupid decisions.
Claire: A lot of them too. A lot of them too.
Vlad: Yeah. Anyway, Claire, thank you so much for this. It’s been a lovely, lovely time talking to you. I’m a bit miffed by all this also, so I, I can’t really—
Claire: Come back on the 14th and we’ll go to the firemen’s ball.
Vlad: Yeah, lemme try it. Lemme try. Okay. Okay.
Claire: A little plug for your new Substack?
Vlad: Are people gonna listen to all the way to the end?
Claire: You don’t want the ones who don’t as readers.
Vlad: Okay, I’m Substacking about art and politics, so I really hope everyone will tune in to my Substack about art and politics. And I think I'm good at what I do. I know a lot of interesting things,
Claire: Lots of lively writing and very informed commentary about both art and politics.
Vlad: Yes I just had my first piece. Claire was nice enough to cross post it. Claire, what was it about?
Claire: It was about the Rijksmuseum.
Vlad: Oh. And, hanging out, looking at arts. Yep. Right. You, you feel like you’re on a little walk through the Rijksmuseum, in art—
Claire: I left you a comment saying, “I got hung up on the word ‘garrulous’ to describe Otto Dix.” He had a fine pictorial feel for what things looked like after an exchange of artillery. You could say that.
Vlad: Right? That’s right. Alright, so do I. So do I. Thank you. Thank you Claire. Okay.
Claire: Alright.
Vlad: Bye bye.
Claire: Bye
Vlad: Bye.
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