Empathy Is Not Sympathy: Oliver Stone on Putin and the War in Ukraine

Oliver Stone, three-time Oscar winner and the director of *Platoon*, *JFK*, *Nixon*, and *Snowden*, is finishing a documentary on nuclear energy when he sits down with Lex Fridman. Climate talk is everywhere, he says, but the book that woke him up was Joshua Goldstein's *A Bright Future*, written with a Swedish co-author: short, factual, not too technical. The authors favor renewables and spell out how dangerous oil, gas, and methane are. They also say those sources cannot close the gap. By 2050 and beyond, the world may need two, three, even four times as much electricity, with India, China, Africa, and Asia crowding onto the grid.

What struck Stone was the American frame. The United States uses more energy per capita than anyone, sells itself the story that it is doing well, and rarely looks at the global picture. The only way to close that gap, the authors repeat, is nuclear: a huge build of reactors over thirty years, starting now. Stone does not think the United States will take that path. It lacks the political will, and fear still rules. Environmentalists, he says, have done real good — and have also exaggerated nuclear's dangers until the landscape is a tangle of myths.

The film is about an hour and forty minutes, cut down from three and a half hours of interviews. Stone's crew went to Russia, France, and the Idaho National Laboratory, and he calls the Beloyarsk plant in the Urals among the most advanced reactors on earth. France drifted toward closing plants when the Greens gained influence under Hollande; Macron reversed it, and the Ukraine war made Europe notice that Russian gas may not be reliable. China is building fast in every direction at once, including coal. India and China are the world's largest coal users, and Germany went back to coal a few years ago. Stone does not expect a United Nations solution. Kyoto-style conferences agree and then fail to enforce. Countries will race for self-interest. If nuclear works at scale, he thinks China and India will back off coal because their cities are already unbreathable.

On Stone's telling, nuclear has the lowest casualty rate on the industrial energy scale, on the order of 0.002. Chernobyl, the worst accident, killed about fifty people. Nobody died from radiation at Fukushima. Nobody died at Three Mile Island. That is not the story the public has been sold. Environmental groups spent decades teaching that the plants are uniquely dangerous. Some people who passed through those organizations, he says, now admit they were wrong.

He traces the scare to 1956. The Rockefeller Foundation, tied to an oil family, published a study of radiation in the *New York Times*; the paper's publisher, Sulzberger, sat on the foundation's board. The radiation levels flagged in that report look minor by later science, but the publicity, Stone argues, put a thumb on the scale and started the doubt that ran through the 1950s and 1960s. Fridman asks whether that was malevolence or incompetence. Stone's answer is neither. "I don't think it was conspiracy as much as it was competition." Nuclear, he is sure, will end oil's dominance anyway, because it is the only sane way for the world to proceed — though the world may have to learn that through adversity.

Germany is his cautionary case. After Fukushima it shut functioning reactors and replaced them with coal and oil. Electricity bills rose next door to France, which stayed on nuclear and, on Stone's comparison, did better. Energy and war are tangled — Germany in World War II needed oil badly enough to shape strategy — but he has not made that film and will not pretend to have the history at his fingertips. Nord Stream 2 is closed; Nord Stream 1 is likely to be phased out; he does not see how Europe escapes Russian gas in the short term, and he does not think methane is the answer either.

Stone is half Ukrainian and half Russian in ancestry. He visited the Soviet Union in 1983, found Kyiv beautiful and the system stultifying, and says the Russian people he has met since have been open and generous. He cannot speak as honestly of Ukraine: he has not been back, and after the Putin interviews he believes he is banned. What he can speak to is the American education he grew up with. Born in 1946, he was raised on a picture of Russians in the schools and the State Department, stealing the country. His father, a Republican stockbroker and World War II colonel, was intelligent and still could not step outside that frame. In 1950s American business you needed a hard anti-Soviet line. Talk of ending the Cold War and you were a pinko.

He gives John F. Kennedy more credit than the culture does. In the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy looks like a hawk to many people; Stone sees a warrior for peace who settled with Khrushchev and pulled mankind back from a war that could have reached everyone. The moment Kennedy was killed, he argues, Lyndon Johnson went straight back to the Eisenhower-Truman way of doing business. Roosevelt, from 1945, had recognized the Soviet Union, sent friendly ambassadors, and dealt with Stalin at Tehran. Kennedy, an Irish Catholic rather than an English imperialist, tried to change that mindset: Nasser in the Middle East, Sukarno in Indonesia, the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, Lumumba and Dag Hammarskjöld over the Congo. Hammarskjöld was killed, then Kennedy, and the Congo fell into Mobutu's dictatorship.

Would there have been a Cold War if Kennedy had lived? Stone says absolutely not, and points to his 2021 documentary *JFK Revisited*. After Kennedy came brief thaws and long freezes. Carter reopened a channel, then Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Pole placed by Rockefeller, took pride in setting a trap that pulled the Soviets into Afghanistan in 1979 — a trap Brzezinski said existed as early as 1978. Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire. The years Stone remembers as the best, 1986 to 1991, were Gorbachev's: a surprise, a peace dividend people could believe in. Then the union broke. Some thirty million Russians were left outside the new borders, including in Ukraine, with no home in the old sense. That number, he says, still has repercussions today.

Stone interviewed Putin four times between 2015 and 2017, a four-hour documentary begun after Snowden and the 2014 Maidan, when Putin was climbing America's enemy list. The image he cannot shake is Munich in 2007: Putin speaking about world balance, John McCain in the audience with a sneer, as if the communists were back. Putin, Stone says, is a market man who wanted a new relationship with Europe. Certain people in the United States sold that as theft — as if Washington owned the continent. The word Putin kept using was sovereignty: for China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba. Stone thinks the concept is essential to any new balance, and that the United States has never accepted it. You obey the American idea of democracy and freedom, or you are the problem.

Behind that, he puts the Project for the New American Century in 1996–97: there shall be no emergence of a rival power. The sentence is about power, not ideas, and it is broad enough to justify knocking anyone down. It will not work, he believes, and it is still the policy. The same small, durable neocon group was behind Iraq and the "with us or against us" line, was never fired, and is still around. Europe had more room for Putin then; the war, Stone says, has fulfilled an old American fantasy by making Russia the aggressor it had been pictured as for years. When he traveled in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, he found respect for a man getting Russia's job done, a "son of Russia" who still called the United States "our partners" — a word Stone told him to stop using.

Did power corrode the man? Stone says he did not see it. He saw someone reasonable and calm, who never lost his temper, who would not trash Yeltsin even on alcoholism, and who got the job because Yeltsin respected his work ethic and maturity. Charges that Putin is the richest man in the world strike Stone as ludicrous; he does not live or act like the rich people Stone has known. People say "Putin did this," but Russia did it. Personalizing a country, then repeating poisoner and murderer until it is an Orwell mantra, turns a state into a villain. American broadcasts, he adds, overdub Putin with a harsher Russian voice so he sounds ready to bang a shoe on the table. Stone kept the original and a translator. Castro and Chávez also sat for unrestricted interviews; none of them asked to see a cut.

Fridman reads from a March 3 Facebook post Stone wrote after the invasion. Although the United States has many wars of aggression on its conscience, Stone wrote, that does not justify Putin's aggression in Ukraine. A dozen wrongs do not make a right. Russia was wrong to invade. The mistakes he listed: underestimating Ukrainian resistance; overestimating what the military could achieve; underestimating Europe, especially Germany, after twenty years of resisting NATO spending; underestimating a newly activated NATO; probably pushing Ukraine into NATO; underestimating damage to the Russian economy and the backlash at home; reshuffling the oligarch class; putting cluster and vacuum bombs into play; underestimating social media worldwide. Two months later he has not withdrawn the verdict. He has watched a wall of propaganda go up instead.

He says he has never in his lifetime seen such a curtain in the West, including in France and especially in England. German and Italian friends told him they were shocked. Finland and Sweden talked about joining NATO. European countries, on his intuition, no longer feel they have sovereignty over themselves. He remembers Chirac and Schröder refusing to join the United States in Iraq in 2003, and de Gaulle pulling France out of NATO because an American war fought from your soil is not a choice. Sarkozy put France back in. Macron talked to Putin and, within days, rolled up into the American position. Stone asks why war-crimes language that never attached to Bush in Iraq attaches to Putin now, and why the killings in Donbas and Luhansk from 2014 to 2020 never received it.

Fridman asks how Putin could have stopped the killing in Donbas without invading. Stone has not spoken to him in about two years and will not pretend to know. What the Western press has not said, he claims, is what OSCE observers logged in the field: heavier and heavier artillery from the Ukrainian side into Donbas in the days before February 24. Ukraine, on his account, had about 110,000 troops on the border, planning to go into Donbas; Russia brought about 130,000. Both sides built up. In Western coverage you would think Russia alone had stacked men for a drive on Kyiv and a decapitation of the government — all assumption, he says. Many people thought the invasion talk was itself a buildup. When it came, the United States and its allies were ready.

Why did Putin walk into that? Madness, bad intelligence, or a cold calculation that then went wrong. Stone cannot answer faithfully because he does not know what Putin was told. He notes cancer, then Covid isolation: meetings across ten yards, a hundred yards, contact thinned out. He also notes that the Ukrainian army had folded before, stiffened, in his telling, by Nazi-oriented battalions that Russians take as a serious factor. Since 2014, he says, Ukraine has been a "terror state": anyone expressing understanding of the Russian-Ukrainian position was threatened. He interviewed Viktor Medvedchuk, cast in the West as a villain, whom Stone describes as a thoughtful figure from Kuchma's 1990s government who wanted an independent, neutral, functioning Ukraine — the neutrality Ukraine had from 1991 to 2014. Under Poroshenko it became an anti-Soviet American ally. Zelensky, elected on a peace platform with seventy percent of the country behind talks with Russia, did not go to Minsk, did not go to Russia, and, Stone is convinced, was told by the militant right that there would be no deal.

Fridman brings him back to the humanitarian cost: millions of refugees, a war Russia initiated. Stone calls it horrible, then repeats his line: whatever NATO, whatever the pressure, Russia was wrong to invade. He also wants the other number in the frame. From 2014 to 2022, he says, 14,000 people were killed in the Ukrainian east, a large share of them by the Ukrainian military and Nazi-related battalions he compares to the death squads he filmed in *Salvador*. American support for right-wing paramilitaries in Colombia and Central America never drew this kind of coverage. He is not on the ground and calls the next part speculation: that the Russian military has slowed in part to keep civilian corridors open, and that some Ukrainian battalions have kept civilians locked in cities because it serves them. You cannot, he says, talk about the 2022 invasion without the full war since 2014.

Stone runs a counterfactual. It is February 23. Ukrainian artillery is peppering Donbas. Separatists will fight. Russia can tell them it cannot help: they will be absorbed by Kyiv, without autonomy, and there will be a price. It can also open the border, take refugees, and resettle them — the reasonable approach, he thinks. Nationalists at home would call Putin weak, and weakness, he says, is the worst rap you can hang on a Russian leader. The deeper problem is what he believes the United States wants: regime change, another Yeltsin, Ukraine as a step, China next. "This is the equivalent frankly of Germany's goals in World War II, world domination," he says, only "we're going about it in our way as opposed to Hitler's way."

Fridman asks him to finish the thought. If Ukraine takes Donbas back, people die in large numbers, Minsk II is finished, and Russia waits for the next provocation, perhaps in Georgia. The United States cannot say Russia used violence to stop Donbas returning. Sanctions do not land. Nuclear weapons are still on the board, and the game rearranges. Could Putin have lived with that? Stone does not know. Fridman steelmans Zelensky as a leader fighting for his nation's sovereignty, using the United States as a temporary ally. Stone does not think Zelensky thinks that way. Sovereignty, on his account, was stolen in 2014 by a coup that brought the right sector into power. There is no real opposition; a person like Stone would have been on a death list by day five. He would not get into Ukraine except through Donbas, and he does not think Zelensky would sit with him — not after *Ukraine on Fire*, his film on Maidan.

Fridman puts the walls on the table: propaganda in the West, in Russia, in China, in India. What do we do with them? Stone starts in Venezuela. Washington said Chávez controlled the press; Stone landed and found the papers full of attacks, because oligarchs owned them. That is why Chávez built state television. In Russia he met a Nobel-winning publisher whose line, a few years earlier, was that criticism exists but you cannot call for overthrow — which, Stone adds, is also true in the United States. Fridman pushes back. He has family in Russia. The people he speaks to carry a mix of fear and apathy with a different texture than in America. He wants Russians, among others, to be able to live without shrinking.

Stone's impression is still that Russian media is freer than the West pictures, and more argumentative: more intellectuals in Moscow than outsiders expect, a contentious streak going back to the 1870s. He does not appreciate émigrés who attack Russia without feeling the size of the American pressure. Putin, he says, connects with the common man and has no imperial agenda — Georgia and Chechnya as defense, nothing else for years. Then he turns the gun around. Losing a Facebook page, a YouTube channel, a Twitter account is not unscary; it affects your business, the way sympathy for the Soviet Union endangered jobs in his father's 1950s. Britain cut Gerry Adams off the air during the IRA years. France banned Kubrick's *Paths of Glory* for something like twenty years around the Algerian War. "A healthy democracy would take all the criticism in the world and shrug it off." China, with its internet wall, scares him more than Russia; he got in trouble there for saying a Mao film should show the negatives.

He likes Elon Musk, at least as a man who speaks freely and as a point of resistance against what he calls censorship city on the major platforms. Free speech, rich or not, sounds a certain way. He also notes that Musk has come around on nuclear after betting on ever-larger batteries, a path Bill Gates has said will not get the world there. The reception of the Putin interviews in America was hostile among people who had not watched them. Stone went on Stephen Colbert's show and found the host had seen none of the four hours, only a Putin supporter to attack. The audience clapped. It was, he says, one of the worst television appearances of his life. He had to shut up and get off the air.

If Stone could talk to Putin again, he would ask what the man was thinking on February 23. He would put the phase-two question directly: surrender Donbas without ego, take the refugees, and then what is Washington's next move? That unanswered fork, he says, may be the key question of the time. Knowing the person he interviewed, he does not think the choice was madness. He thinks it was calculated, and that something in Putin has shifted over the past months — Covid isolation, perhaps, or the long grind of power. He also flags talk, just before the invasion, that nuclear weapons might come into Ukraine, which would have set off alarms.

What worries him now is the noise. American media has begun talking about Russia using nuclear or chemical weapons, and when the United States starts a conversation like that, he says, it is not idle. It would be possible, he argues, to explode a low-yield, one-kiloton device in Donbas, kill thousands, and have no one know at first who did it. Blame would go to Russia even without a motive. A false flag of that kind would not be beyond the United States, and it would seal the war as a dramatic American victory. Fridman calls it terrifying. Stone says yes — and it can happen. Once you walk across that line, you may not walk back. Neoconservative arrogance, on his reading, believes it can push the advantage to the max. He notes a billion dollars already in weapons for Ukraine against a Russian defense budget of some sixty billion, about a fifteenth of America's, and priorities he finds distorted next to Covid spending at home.

Chemical accusations against Assad and Russia in Syria are, for him, the rehearsal: White Helmets famous and, he says, corrupted; Robert Parry and others tracing inconsistencies; investigators on the chemical-weapons commission quitting and calling the work illegitimate. After one Syrian incident, American newscasters said Trump was finally acting like a real president when he dropped missiles. Victoria Nuland is back, the "fuck the EU" voice of 2014, now warning of a horrible price if Russia uses any nuclear weapon — after which, Stone says, every U.S. show started saying nuclear. "The United States scares me." He showed Putin *Dr. Strangelove* so the man would see Kubrick's picture of American escalation, the absurdity of nuclear war. The United States, he notes, never gave up first strike: SIOP-62 in the Kennedy years was an Eisenhower-era plan to hit the Soviet Union and China. Russia, on his contrast, postures more defensively. Washington broke the ABM Treaty in 2002 and the INF Treaty in 2019. Can we walk back? Yes, he says: reason, plus diplomacy. Biden should calm down, fly to Moscow, and sit across the table without falling into ideology.

Fridman asks for advice on interviewing someone as fortified as Putin, including across a language barrier. Stone's method is simple to state and hard to do: keep an open mind, ask challenging questions without an agenda, seek what is actually going on. He does not think he could get anywhere with Biden, Bush, or Obama. An American president has to stand for imperialism and control of the world, and no one comes out and says that; they blame Iran or China. After leaving office, maybe. George W. Bush, in Stone's film *W.*, ends by complaining to his wife that he tried to do good and people do not understand — a man who cannot get outside himself.

That is the distinction he lives on. Empathy is walking in someone's footsteps. Sympathy is approval. He made *Nixon* because he understood a part of the man through his own father, not because he liked Nixon or thought he helped the American cause. People were shocked that *W.* was in any way receptive. "Dramatists don't have political positions. They walk in the shoes." Villains usually see themselves as the hero. You have to ask what it is like to live in a world where that person is the hero. American journalists interviewing Putin do the opposite: why did you poison this person, why are you a murderer — blunt, negative television that earns brownie points and understands nothing. Rapport first, then the hard questions, with an underlying wish to see the human being.

Fridman raises the hardest case: Hitler in 1939, or 1941. Stone would sit down and empathize. What is your beef? Where have you been? Why do you hate Jewish people? The grievance after World War I is the psychological ground, and it has to be understood. In 1938, he notes, Chamberlain was talking and Churchill was still trying to make a deal; Churchill's real hope, on Stone's reading, was to point Hitler at Russia and destroy the Bolsheviks. Hitler had an eastern objective and an admiration for England, and Churchill fought the whole war to preserve the British Empire. By 1939, after Poland, it is another game — but at whatever point, an interviewer should ask what the man is thinking, not perform contempt. Kremlin translators, he adds, are excellent; what still drops out is the dry, slightly sad Russian humor between the lines. You catch that on the face, sitting across the table.

Fridman asks about love after a conversation full of war. Stone says he could not carry on without it. The ability to love is the greatest virtue he can name: extending yourself into family, children, a partner, and then into the human race. That extension is the strength behind great novelists and artists, and it is what he misses in some scientists. He has met researchers who will not talk to you if you do not already live in their world — a closed circle, an arrogance next door to closed-mindedness. Closed minds, he says, can be used by charismatic leaders, as in Nazi Germany. Scientists can become pawns in a cruel game.

Advice to the young does not come easily. He has three children, raised with a sense of freedom, and long ago gave up on making them wake at a chosen hour. If he were teaching film, he would tell students to get an education. Film is not a full spectrum. At NYU, on the G.I. Bill and older than his classmates, he took a Greek classics course outside the film school. The teacher, Professor Leahy, opened Homer for him; Stone wrote about it in his memoir *Chasing the Light*. Two words stayed: consciousness, the Homeric theme of the *Odyssey*, and lethe, sleep and forgetting. Most of Odysseus's crew lived in lethe. The necessary thing was to stay awake. Computer work, like filmmaking, is a skill. It is not a life unless there is literature and history under it.

Is he afraid of death? Yes, though less than when he was young. In Vietnam he thought he had settled it; when he came home he found he wanted to live, because living was better than being one of the corpses in the jungle. The meaning of life, asked as an absurd last question, comes out Buddhist: realize more of what you are, honor the concept of life, see how precious it is. Death's causes are all around. Life is a lantern in a strong breeze. In this short span, wake up to the preciousness — something he did not have when he was young and took for granted. Fridman closes with a line from Stone's *The Untold History of the United States*: to fail is not tragic. To be human is.