Matt Frei

speaker

187 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Matt Frei’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files · Q&A: Trump’s failed diplomacy and a coup in the Kremlin? With Matt Frei · 3 Sep 2026 podcast

So this thing will just grind on and on and on.

It's already lasted longer than World War One.

As we said in the podcast, he's lost something like 1.5 million men either to to death or injury.

That is a huge number.

You know, in the ten years of a disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan,

Um, which we also covered many, many years ago, they lost fourteen thousand men.

They've lost, you know, a hundred times as many in something that's lasted half as long.

I mean, this is a disaster.

Put that into context, right?

And and Afghanistan, the disastrous occupation of Afghanistan helped to bring down the Soviet Union.

So of course for Putin, he thinks if I end this war, you know, badly, or and if I'm not able to spin victory in a convincing way, that might be the end of me.

But he's also wily and he's a survivor, so he might just be able to call it quits at some stage on favorable terms, and then and then hope that he can always threaten Ukraine from the sidelines and turn that into an unviable state and therefore flummox their ability to become members of the EU and and the stuff that kind of freaked him out when he first started all this in twenty fourteen.

Exactly.

You want the ear of the president, but you also want to know what you're talking about.

And it really helps to see both sides.

Did you know, for instance, that I mean Whitkoff, Steve Whitkoff, you know, Trump's golfing buddy, real estate buddy, as we all know, the you know, the envoy to everywhere, has been to Moscow.

Eight times he has not been to Kiev once.

Not once.

How can you possibly negotiate, you know, a war?

How can he be an honest broker to both sides if he haven't even bothered to go and see one side in this war?

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