3min chapter

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#289 – Stephen Kotkin: Putin, Zelenskyy, and War in Ukraine

Lex Fridman Podcast

CHAPTER

The Greatest Victims of the Putin Regime Are Not Russians

Russia and Ukraine have the great honor of being the number one and the number two most corrupt nations in Europe by many measures. But there is a fundamental difference as you're highlighting. Russia is a corrupt autocracy. Ukraine, we can say, is a corrupt democracy. If journalists are killed in Ukraine, it's a tragedy. If Russian journalists are killed abroad, it's regime policy. And the degree to which a nation is authoritarian means that it's suffocating its own spirit, its capacity to flourish.

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