Comedian Bill Maher and actor Russell Brand debated over whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a war hero in a recent episode of Maher’s “Club Random” podcast.
Brand took the position that powerful interests in the United States were working to inhibit a negotiated peace and to advance the simplistic “narrative that Zelenskky’s a hero, and Putin’s a monster.”
Brand said to Maher that it was “naïve” to accept a purely “humanitarian” explanation of the conflict and ignore the “opportunity for profit for the military industrial complex” that the war has enabled, a consequence that Brand compared to pharmaceutical companies profiting from the COVID-19 pandemic.