Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast, this is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this you're not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.

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don't run ads on the podcast and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.

So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Yeroslav Trofimov.

Yeroslav is the chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal

and was a finalist for the Pulitzer

Prize in international reporting for two consecutive years in 2022 and 2023.

He has reported from most major conflicts of the past two decades, serving as the Journal's

Bureau Chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and is a correspondent in Iraq.

He's the author of several books, including Faith at War, The Siege of Mecca,

and most recently our enemies will vanish, the Russian invasion and Ukraine's war of independence.

And that is the topic of today's conversation.

This really serves as a primer on the war in Ukraine.

We discuss the widespread false assumptions

that Russia would win a swift victory,

Ukrainian attitudes toward Russia, the transformation of the Ukrainian

military, Russian incompetence, Russian public opinion, the Azov Battalion and the so-called Russian

and public opinion, the Aizov Battalion and the so-called denazification of Ukraine,

the role of the Orthodox Church in Russia,

conspiracy thinking and Russian propaganda.

Putin's popularity on the right.

...