From a Ukrainian Dugout, Douglas Murray Refuses to Forget the Obvious

Lex Fridman opens by asking what Murray has understood about Ukraine from going there. Politically, everything keeps moving. On the human level, frontline troops are fighting for homes and families in a way Murray finds unavoidable, and strangely remote from the day's media noise. He was with Ukrainian forces when they retook Kherson in 2022, and he was back in recent weeks, sitting in a dugout, when the Trump–Zelenskyy meeting blew up on a phone screen.

Morale, he says, has not flipped into a frozen stalemate, but neither side has made very significant military gains in the interval. Early on, soldiers facing Crimea talked as if Ukraine might take the peninsula back by late 2022; Murray thought that was overreach even then. Three years of war will tire anyone. Fridman reports that the intense optimism of 2022, the certainty that every inch would be recovered, has faded from the front of soldiers' minds.

Watching the Oval Office from a trench was disturbing, Murray writes in the *New York Post*. The mineral deal Washington was pushing felt too early and too forced. Zelenskyy had not expected to go until almost the day before, and he looked exhausted. A soldier Murray asked about the spectacle said they were advised not to follow the ins and outs of the politics. Then the same man added that he had a job to do. The only charitable reading Murray can offer Washington is that the dressing-down was a signal to Putin. He does not think it was a successful step toward peace.

Fridman lingers on a petty detail that clip culture would not drop: a reporter, whom Murray identifies as Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend, asked why Zelenskyy was not in a suit. Murray calls the question disrespectful. When a man comes from the realm of war into the realm of peace, people in the peace room should at least concede that none of the words *destroyed*, *decimated*, or *defenestrated* are metaphors for him. Churchill wore military-style fatigues on foreign visits for the same reason: to remind the room where he had come from.

Murray tries a thought experiment. If Putin sat in that chair and a journalist asked about facial work and whether he used Berlusconi's doctor, the host would be expected to step in. Zelenskyy got the same class of insult and no rescue. Fridman adds that Putin would have answered in Russian and bought himself seconds. Zelenskyy, a comic by training, might have swatted the reporter in Ukrainian or Russian through an interpreter. Doing the meeting in imperfect English, tired, was one of several small misfortunes on which history can turn.

Murray treats the outfit fight as a symptom of a wider frivolity. Most people cannot be experts on everything, so they seize on minor, easy shorthands. American conservatives talked for eight years about the Churchill bust leaving Obama's Oval Office, he says, in lieu of actually critiquing Obama's foreign policy. "We're always tempted to that." The temptation is to let a garment, a statue, or a clip stand in for a war.

Why the U.S. right turned skeptical of Zelenskyy is, Fridman admits, sometimes as dumb as team sports. The left said Putin bad, Zelenskyy good, Ukrainian flags; therefore the right had to go the other way. Murray has a line about people who live too long online needing to wade out of the memes. He understands the irritation: so many accounts that had flown BLM, Pride, or trans flags suddenly flew Ukraine, often without knowing where it was on a map. The unthinking reply is to sock it to them. The fate of a country, he says, does not depend on anyone's tolerance for memes that day.

Fridman holds up Narendra Modi as a counter-skill: nationalist, India-first, and somehow able to sit with Putin, Zelenskyy, Trump, Biden, and Obama. Zelenskyy could have navigated the Trump room. Murray's obvious miss, which he does not want to make the whole story, is that Zelenskyy forgot the sentence he had said for three years: thank you to America. Vance leapt on that. Fridman says it is not that simple. Thank you was a pretext. The energy in the room was entitlement, a leftover of being Biden's buddy, and a failure to feed a complicated narcissist's need to be the great negotiator who could still be sold the war.

Murray grants the point and still insists on bewilderment. A week earlier Trump had called Zelenskyy a dictator, and people in the administration were implying Ukraine had started the war. For a leader in a war of self-defense, that is *Alice in Wonderland*. Murray put Putin on the front page of the *New York Post* the next day under the word dictator. You can criticize Zelenskyy, he says, without falling full Putin. A lot of people in this moment, he adds, do not have that capability.

Asked for his strongest criticism of Putin, Murray lays down a list. A bloody dictator, as repressive of internal opposition as a man can be, a kleptomaniac of Russia's resources who has enriched himself and his cronies. He does not stop at destroying opponents at home. In Murray's country of birth, polonium-210 was used in central London; a nerve agent that could kill tens of thousands was deployed in Salisbury, a cathedral city. Even if you grant Putin the right to run his own house, Murray does not grant him the right to advertise, on third-country soil, that he could take out tens of thousands of British citizens.

Are the elections real? No, Murray says; the results are fraudulent. Fridman asks whether it is possible that the opposition was simply eliminated and Putin then won fairly. "It definitely helps a chap if he's killed all of his opponents." Fridman laughs at *chap*. The *Alice in Wonderland* move, Murray goes on, is to call Zelenskyy a dictator for skipping elections in a total war of self-defense while declining to notice that Russian elections are not free or fair in any meaningful sense. That does not mean Russia is ready to become a Western liberal democracy. It means you should at least note what Putin is.

The motive for 2022, Murray says, is what Putin has said for years: reconstituting the Soviet Union. Friends in East and Central Europe take the empire-building piece seriously. The Baltic states spend the highest share of GDP on defense in NATO; Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians are not faking the fear. If Trump gets a ceasefire, Murray expects a pause, and then an advance once a later president arrives. He remembers Georgia after 2008. Ukraine does not look like the only object in Putin's vision.

Fridman puts John Mearsheimer on the table: cold realist calculation, spheres of influence, Georgia and Ukraine as military expansion. Murray is skeptical of the label, because almost everyone claims to be a foreign-policy realist and almost no one claims to be a surrealist. He is willing to steel-man the best version: Russia has, or believes it has, a sphere, and there is regrettably little to be done. Superpowers do this; China took Hong Kong with political power behind a kinetic threat. The question is how much leeway that grants a rapacious regime, a calculation that changes weekly. His Georgian friends were wildly off, he still thinks, to expect NATO or EU membership after 2008. Setting a tripwire for World War III is not a small thing. It has hung over Ukraine since the 1990s.

Murray's regretful sketch of a deal is Ukraine ceding some eastern territory and rearming in the pause. He will not lay out Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson as a menu, because that has to be negotiated. What concerns him is how easily non-Ukrainians in New York talk as if Donetsk "obviously" goes to Putin. Those regions hold hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens who do not want to live under Putin, and families in the rest of the country. Children who got out described Russian-only schools teaching Putin's history. Families who refuse hide indoors. In 2022 and 2023, summer camps took children who did not come back; around 20,000 Ukrainian children, it is thought, have been stolen. A teenage boy told Murray that while his mother was out, a woman knocked, handed him papers, and told him to report the next week for the Russian army.

Trump has floated American mineral investment as a buffer of U.S. businesses Putin would not dare touch. Murray does not follow it. There were Americans in the regions invaded in 2022, and they left fast. Hong Kong shows that international finance in a place does not stop a dictatorship from taking it, kinetically or covertly. He does not see American miners as an effective buffer. The forgotten bestseller is Norman Angell's pre-1914 argument that European war had become economically unviable, hence a lasting Kantian peace. The book was reissued after World War I. Murray never got the second edition, but he assumes it was significantly rewritten. Economic interdependence can deter some rational actors. It does not cover the motives that send people to war and to madness.

Fridman would rather implicit guarantees: military and economic partnerships with as many countries as possible, Middle East, India, perhaps China, the United States, Europe. After the Wall came down, Murray agrees, the West treated Russia with less courtesy than it required. That does not justify the last twenty years. He will not read Putin's mind, and he is not asking anyone to treat him as a millenarian madman. He will add a structural warning. If you rush, you pressure the people you can pressure. America can put extraordinary diplomatic, financial, intelligence, and military pressure on Ukraine, and significant pressure on Putin, but it is much easier to squeeze Zelenskyy. Demand peace today and the likely result stops the killing, rewards the aggressor, and punishes the victim. That, Murray says, is extremely ugly and extremely common. Fridman calls it the other boring truth at the party. Murray says they should keep being the boring people.

The conversation turns to Israel and to Murray's new book, *On Democracies and Death Cults*, a mix of reporting and a longer argument about people who love death more than life. On October 7th, 2023, Hamas mounted a brigade-sized attack, blew through the fence, and went for the softest targets. They overwhelmed the observation base at Nahal Oz, then the southern kibbutzim, communities of peaceniks who had wanted to live with their Palestinian neighbors. Murder, rape, burning, kidnapping. They had the fortune, from their point of view, of hitting a dawn dance party: RPGs, Kalashnikovs, grenades, hammers. They reached some twenty kilometers in, to towns such as Ofakim and Sderot.

The plan, Murray says, was that Hezbollah would do the same from the north, meet in the middle, and garrote Israel at the center. Hezbollah joined within 24 hours with massed rockets from southern Lebanon, but the simultaneous invasion did not happen. His judgment is that Hamas trusted no communications line to name the hour that would not be intercepted. The Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran, which funds, trains, and arms both, knew the plan. It was a bid to annihilate the state. They did not get there. They got closer than people thought they could.

For Israel it was among the worst intelligence and military failures since the founding. The first layer is what commanders called "the conception": that Hamas was content to govern Gaza corruptly, line its pockets, live as billionaires in Qatar, and let ideology go secondary, as other terrorist groups have. That conception collapsed completely. Survivors told Murray they had promised their children the army would be there in minutes. In many places it was hours. Some units, including one he places at a junction within about an hour to ninety minutes, got there fast; self-starters broke orders and fought for hours and days. Fog of war was not a metaphor. Hamas stripped uniforms off dead Israelis. An Arab Israeli Muslim doctor in United Hatzalah, heading to a 6:30 a.m. shift, answered a crash alert, saw men in soldier kit, and was fired on. They used him as a human shield against air attack, shot him, and left him. He lived. A girl fleeing the Nova party was told to stay put by a man she took for a policeman. He was Hamas in police uniform. She was killed.

Hamas is, Murray says, easy to understand because it says what it wants and tends to do it. Yahya Sinwar, generally regarded as the architect of October 7th, had been in Israeli prison in the 2000s for murdering Palestinians in Gaza, then released in the Gilad Shalit swap of more than a thousand prisoners. A prison dentist found a brain tumor; Israeli doctors cut it out and saved his life. The dentist later told *The New York Times* that Sinwar had said Israel was strong for now, but one day it would be weak, and then he would come. The Hamas charter quotes the hadith that the end times will not arrive until rocks and trees cry, "Oh Muslim, there's a Jew behind me, come and kill him." People who wave the charter away, Murray says, are doing the same sleight of hand as the World War II debate: forgetting the basic fact.

Among the people Hamas brought hell to were the neighbors most invested in peace. Vivian Silver spent weekends driving Gazan children with rare conditions to Israeli hospitals and worked for the left-wing peacenik groups. After the 7th her neighbors thought she had been taken hostage; posters went up. She had been burned alive in her home. There was so little DNA that identification took a long time. Critics began demanding a "proportionate" Israeli response on October 8th, before Israel had done anything. Murray does not accept that the law of war means 1,200 killed and 250 kidnapped entitles the other side to the same. Scale it to America, he says, and you get 44,000 dead and 10,000 hostages in a day. Nobody, in his view, can claim the United States would not then do whatever it needed to destroy the group and bring people home. Fridman agrees America would hit back, and adds the Iraq and Afghanistan warning: the machine can run past the aim and make more terrorists than it kills.

Israel's two stated aims were the hostages and the destruction of Hamas. Many said you could have only one. Murray thinks they have gone a long way toward both: most hostages back, leadership and the second tier almost gone, the group badly degraded, not finished. Early plans, including a rush on the Shifa complex, a hospital that was also at least a Hamas headquarters, were held back because the death count would have been too high. Gaza's population has almost doubled since Israel's 2005 withdrawal, a fact he says genocide-talk never mentions. Hamas fights in civilian clothes from hospitals, schools, and mosques, a two-for-one: operate everywhere, and any Israeli reply is a war crime. A Hamas leader, quoted in the book, said the tunnels were for weapons, fighters, and hostages, not for civilians under air attack. Every dead Hamas leader Murray names died a billionaire, with a B, on Qatari, American, and European money. Soldiers he was with estimated every second or third house held weapons or a tunnel mouth. After 2005 Gaza could have become a thriving statelet. Hamas, like the PLO before it, chose destroying Israel over building Palestine.

Gazans elected Hamas. The Bush administration's push for those elections was, Murray thinks, unwise, but Hamas won, then in 2007 threw Fatah rivals off rooftops and dragged corpses behind motorbikes. Eighteen years is a childhood through the end of school. They could have raised a generation useful to their own society. They spent it, he says, inducting children into a death cult and a genocidal hatred, disastrous for Gazans as well as for Israelis. Soldiers from 2014 and earlier rounds describe a marked radicalization: Arabic *Mein Kampf*, the *Protocols*, in ordinary houses. Collective punishment, as he defines it, would be purposeless carpet bombing. That is not, he says, what the IAF and IDF have done. No released hostage he has spoken to met a Gazan who showed them even slight kindness; Hamas's own footage of women brought into Gaza is celebration, not horror, and escapees from civilian houses were walked back by residents. Fridman will not project evil onto a whole people. Murray says you do not have to project. Listen to the young man who calls home: he has killed ten Jews with his own hands; put Mother on. An army facing an army is one thing. A terrorist group in civilian clothes facing unarmed dancers at 6:30 a.m. is, he argues, not describable without the word *evil*.

A lot of people, Fridman notes, are reluctant to put the word *evil* on Hamas and eager to put it on Benjamin Netanyahu. Murray thinks the asymmetry is telling. Democracies get the harshest criticism because they might listen, the way you show your worst temper to the people who will still be there in the morning. British ministers talk about putting more pressure on Israel; they do not seriously talk about persuading the ayatollahs. Hostage families protest outside Netanyahu's house with klaxons and bloodied-hands posters because Sinwar did not care, Qatar did not care, and the Qatari emir's mother praised Sinwar when he was killed. The elected prime minister is simply the only person they can pressure.

The most devastating charge, Murray says, is that October 7th happened on Netanyahu's watch. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Golda Meir, a distinguished prime minister, took the political hit for an invasion on her watch; fair-minded critics will always hold this one against Netanyahu. The year of judicial-reform protests tore the country, tired the police, and shut highways. Some argue Hamas and its backers in Qatar and Iran saw the division and heard Sinwar's old line about weakness. Others note the attack was being planned before the reforms began. Critics in the war cabinet said he stared too hard at Hamas and not enough at Hezbollah, or the reverse. Murray has interviewed nearly every Israeli leader from right to left. He does not think any of them would have answered October 7th in a fundamentally different way.

Global loathing of the prime minister of eight or nine million people still strikes him as strange. When people inventory thirty years of Republican foreign-policy failure, a certain type of person goes straight to Paul Wolfowitz, deputy under secretary of defense, as if he had guided everything. Mark Steyn's joke, which Murray quotes, is that the name starts with a nasty animal and ends Jewish. The case for Netanyahu is a life's mission to defend the only Jewish homeland, years of warnings about Tehran's reach through Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, and then holding a brutal set of war aims: most hostages returned, Hamas's leadership almost gone, capability nowhere near November 2023. In September 2024, after Assad fell, the Israeli Air Force took out Syria's air force in a day so it would not go to a new jihadist administration; it was story four on the BBC site. Hezbollah's leadership and the next two tiers gone or wounded; Iran's "Rolls-Royce" destroyed. No democracy on earth, Murray says, could have failed to answer such an atrocity.

Why so much hatred of Jews? Murray's first answer is that it is the lowest-grade explanation of chance and unfairness: a small group did it. Fridman resists *stupid*; the human mind craves a clean theory of everything, including why the Roman Empire fell. Murray calls it the lowest-resolution analysis imaginable, the personal version of why you lost the job or the marriage. Jews are few, sometimes prominent beyond their numbers in sciences, arts, and, for historic reasons, banking. Scots were in banking too, he notes, and few people blame international finance on Scotland. Antisemitism, in his account, is an almost ineradicable cheap temptation of the spirit, and it can hold opposite charges at once: rich and poor, religious and Marxist, cosmopolitan without a state and guilty for having one.

Vasily Grossman, in a few pages of *Life and Fate*, says antisemitism tells you nothing about the Jews and everything about the accuser. The line Murray has been trying to popularize: tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I will tell you what you are guilty of. The Iranian revolutionary government calls Israel colonial while colonizing the Middle East in our lifetimes. Turkey accuses the Jewish state of occupation while occupying northern Cyprus, an EU member, since the 1970s, as a NATO member. Hamas's supporters call Israel indiscriminate; Murray asks what they were doing on the 7th. People who said "believe all women" after 2016, then excepted Jewish women who said they had been raped, then called Jews rapists, are in his view carrying water both ways. There was not one protest against Hamas in New York after October 7th. On October 8th, he watched Times Square fill against Israel while the attacks were still going on.

In *The War on the West* he had described a moral system with no exit: America's original sin is slavery, the living cannot be forgiven for the eighteenth century, and no one alive can accept the apology. After October 7th, a certain kind of person found a trapdoor. Accused of settler colonialism, white supremacy, genocide, and ethnic cleansing in a burden that cannot be put down, they found a country they could accuse of all of it in the present, unload onto, and perhaps even end. He tweaks Grossman: tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I will tell you what you have been told you are guilty of. His test is blunt. If you had no interest in Muslims murdered in Syria, genocide in Sudan, or hundreds of thousands killed in Yemen, but you were on the street with a placard against Israel on October 8th, he is sorry: you are an antisemite, and you may not know it. The two-state slogan that would magically fix Yemen's economy and Tehran's treatment of women is, on its face, preposterous. Salman Rushdie, a lifelong defender of the Palestinian cause, has said another Palestinian state would at best be another front for the Iranian regime.

Fridman's Iranian friends, educated and worldly, all oppose the regime, which confuses him: one of the great cultures on earth, led since 1979 by the sponsor of most of the region's terror groups. Murray starts *On Democracies and Death Cults* with Ayatollah Khomeini's flight from Paris to Tehran, one of the two worst journeys of the twentieth century. The other is Lenin's train to Petrograd. The Finland Station brought the basilisk of Bolshevism into Russia; the Paris flight brought the basilisk of Khomeinism, the most radical Shiite politics, into Iran. A late friend who grew up under the Shah, her father an ayatollah before the overthrow, taught him the conservative insight that things can always be worse. You can have a shah with political prisoners, or Khomeini butchering them, including the communists and trade unionists who had been useful against the Shah until they were not.

The Western mind, especially the American one, forgets real fanaticism because it has not seen it for a while and is highly attuned to faint domestic echoes. Why has the regime lasted? Murray reaches for Solzhenitsyn in *The Gulag Archipelago*: when the footsteps were on the stairs and the knock was on the neighbor's door, why did we not stop them? Everything changes if the other guy might kill you. The 2009 Green Movement was put down because the Basij will shoot you in the head, take you to prison, rape students with bottles, and kill them. A little of that goes a long way. Films teach the scene; too few people understand that Tehran runs it at scale, with ultimate brutality. That is how they stay in power.

Oriana Fallaci, one of the few Western journalists to reach Khomeini in 1979, told him the revolution was hate. He said no, it was love. The same turn appears in Rushdie's *The Satanic Verses*. How do you explain, to a Western head, hate that calls itself love? Murray remembers Miguel de Unamuno at Salamanca in the 1930s, trying to defend the principles of a lifetime while students already falling into Falangist ideology chanted *Viva la muerte*, long live death. Those young men have counterparts now. They are the people who taunt Americans, Westerners, and Israelis with "We love death more than you love life." If that is the premise of a life, Fridman says, you are a danger to the world, and a good foundation for evil. It is the line that opened the episode, and the one Murray keeps returning to because a modern brain can barely load it.

Fridman expects to sit with Netanyahu and possibly Putin, and wants a historian's advice on interviewing people you might hate. Murray starts with the weight. Everyone tells you that you must ask this and cannot skip that. A political interview should not be supine, but it cannot be endless prosecution either. You are not the prosecutor, and they are not in the dock. Plenty of interviewers walk in with a list; at some point the other party can simply say they do not need this. Critics on the sofa do not realize you cannot actually do the walk-out fantasy they came for.

Robin Day, himself skilled at being carefully rude to politicians, said of Jeremy Paxman's 1990s style that if you think the person is a liar, you should get them to reveal it. Do not just call them a liar. Calling them one may satisfy the viewers. It reveals nothing. If they are a liar and they expose themselves, that is another matter. Fridman never scripts, and world leaders' teams, unlike CEOs' comms shops, rarely try to steer him; when they nudge, he smiles and does not have to comply. Murray's friend once raised Hafez al-Assad's massacre of Palestinians at Hama to the Syrian ambassador in London. The ambassador stood up and said that was none of his business. The friend had been hoping for a denial.

Life is long, Murray says. You do not blow everything up at the request of some twat online. A kind of superpower is to identify the people whose opinion you care about, worry about those, and no one else's. Keep your own guiding light. He wants Fridman to read Churchill's 1940 eulogy for Chamberlain, delivered when Churchill had just become prime minister and might have said he had been right all along. He did not. He never named Hitler. Chamberlain's flaw was desiring peace; his curse was being led astray by a very wicked man. It is not given to men, Churchill said, to foresee the unfolding of events, or life would be intolerable. The only guide is conscience; the only shield is the rectitude and sincerity of one's actions. However the fates play, with that shield you march in the ranks of honor. Hold that, Murray says, and a million billion foes do not matter.

What puts a smile on Murray's face after books on the madness of crowds, geopolitics, and war? Endless things, he says, especially smart young people. In Kyiv the other week he spoke at a university, hung around answering questions, and listened to what students wanted to do. He remembered being goofy at that age, how much he would get wrong, how much he would enjoy learning. If things go right, the opportunities in front of them are huge. You can resist cynicism, he adds; living only in irony covers too little of life.

Has seeing so much war in Ukraine and Israel dimmed the warmth? He does not know; it differs day to day. Sometimes there is a heaviness. He does not regret the front. For a writer, war is close to the ultimate subject because you see life at its limit. Death in front of you throws a terrible clarity over everything. People love, and sometimes laugh, more. Montaigne's essay on why we weep and laugh at the same thing stays in his mind. You see the very best of people and the very worst, and they stand beside each other.

Fridman has found frontline soldiers stripped of civilian niceties, more honest. Murray agrees. In 2022 some Ukrainian soldiers wanted a cigarette, were not allowed to smoke in the hotel, and stepped outside with him while rockets were falling. He asked whether it was not strange that fear of secondhand smoke had superseded that. On the line, Fridman says, the joke is perfectly delicious, the absurdity honest and beautiful, which is why soldiers destroyed by war also miss it. Everyone says they never felt more alive, Murray answers, and would not trade it. Fridman hopes he keeps fighting the good fight and not listening. The sign-off, after the sponsors, is Bertrand Russell: fools and fanatics so certain, wiser people so full of doubts.