Russian President Vladimir Putin’s security has been tightened to the maximum amid fears of an attack, especially with drones. Vladimir Putin has reportedly set up three identical offices across Russia so he can hide undetected. The Ukrainians will continue to attack airfields there, they will continue to attack air defense systems there.
Our drones are reaching deeper and deeper, and this is already being reflected in Crimea with the fuel shortage. Ukraine is going all out; not only does it refuse to cede the Donbas, but it also wants and can, for the first time, recover the Crimean peninsula. Our drones are already reaching deeper and deeper into this temporarily occupied territory, and this is already being reflected in Crimea with the fuel shortage.
For those who are a little confused, the Crimean Peninsula is this land located south of Ukraine. It is the first territory of Ukraine annexed by Russia back in 2014. Since then it has been a Kremlin stronghold. It was impossible for Ukraine to take it because the isthmus, which connects it to the rest of the country, is very narrow, very swampy, and above all, it is heavily protected by Putin’s troops.
However, it is now 2026 and things have changed. Now Ukraine wants to reclaim Crimea, and most importantly, they have a plan. Look at what retired U.S. Army Commandant General Ben Hoches has to say. The Ukrainians will continue attacking airfields there, they will continue attacking air defense systems there.
Uh, I wouldn’t anticipate a direct assault in the short term. No, no, they don’t need to do that right now . But I’m not quite sure that President Selensky, General Sirsky, and General Budanov still have him on their target list. Do you remember that a year ago Donald Trump told Volodymyr Zelensky that he didn’t hold the cards? Well, it turns out that now he’s dropping the cards from his pockets.
It’s safe to say that Ukraine does have cards in this conflict; we printed them. Many of you will think I ‘m exaggerating, but in recent months we have seen, for example, that a combined attack of drones and Storm Shadow missiles hit the headquarters of the Central Bank of Russia in Sevastopol, the capital of Crimea.
The building began to burn and the shockwave shattered windows and balconies of the adjacent buildings. That same night, Russian air defenses were trying to stop a wave of more than 140 Ukrainian drones over seven regions and the peninsula itself. But this is not the most symbolic thing. What is really important is that Ukraine also destroyed the RT70 radio telescope with drones.
And this was no ordinary telescope; it was a 70m, 5,000-ton parabolic antenna built in the 1970s by the Soviet Union to communicate with probes traveling to planets like Venus or Mars. He even sent messages into space in search of extraterrestrial civilizations. Perhaps if the aliens had answered them, Russia would have had better allies, but hey, since the Martians didn’t appear, Putin received the telescope to improve the accuracy of his GLONASS system, you know, the Russian equivalent of GPS.
In other words, this telescope is now used to guide missiles. However, a Ukrainian drone has turned it into scrap metal. But images released on August 31 by Ukraine’s main unit show two even more important targets achieved. A GLONASS complex under a radome and the enormous RT70 telescope, also known as PI2500. As you can see, in recent months the war in Ukraine is taking a turn, and not in the direction the orange president says .
Since the beginning of 2026, Ukraine has already liberated a net 400 km². To give you an idea, this is a territory equivalent to twice the size of Washington DC. That’s a lot, isn’t it? But for the first time in this war, Ukraine is regaining more ground than it is losing. Furthermore, it is strangling Russian supply lines with drones.
The Black Sea Fleet is functionally destroyed and Crimea, which was Vladimir Putin’s crown jewel , is becoming a rat trap. Because yes, the same creamery that Putin annexed in 2014 without batting an eye, is now full of gas stations, has a rationing of 20 L per person and its only land connection with Russia is more closely watched than José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s bank account.
The Federal Security Service claims the truck was full of explosives and had been driven from the Ukrainian port of Odessa along a circuitous route through Bulgaria, Georgia, and Armenia. He states that among those detained are five Russians and three citizens of Ukraine and Armenia, and that they were acting under the orders of Ukrainian military intelligence .
Therefore, the questions I ask myself in today’s video are: one, is it possible for Ukraine to regain the Crimean Peninsula? Second, how is he managing to influence the Russians? Third, what would happen to the war if Ukraine succeeds? Today we’re going to answer these questions, but first, would you like to delve deeper into the wonderful world of geopolitics? Well, don’t miss my summit geopolitics course, okay? Well, actually it’s not just mine, I did it together with my good friend Borja from Memorias de Pez and Memorias de Tiburón. In other words, the two
largest Spanish-language international politics channels have joined forces to offer a geopolitics course. For just €0.99 you will have access to more than 50 geopolitics lessons where we cover all the theory you need to know. This is not a monthly subscription, but a course that you can enjoy whenever you want.
Furthermore, it is the perfect gift for all lovers of international politics. So I’ll see you all at thegeopoliticalsummit.com. And now, let’s look at a little history. I am Fonseca. Welcome to Only Fons. The Kremlin idiots, because I don’t know what to call them anymore, repeat day and night that Cremea is part of Russia, that it has always been Russia, that it historically belongs to Russia.
But come on, their strongest argument is that it’s Russia because they feel like it , because you only have to watch something other than Pablo Iglesias’s channel to understand that the history of Crimea is much more complicated. When Putin decided to send the flagship soldiers to Crimea, uh, I think he went way overboard , but they were already there.
And the emergence of a new superpower that tends towards a multipolar world. For centuries, the Crimean Peninsula was home to the Crimean Tatars, a Muslim Turkic people who even had their own khanate. And what is a Canato? You might be wondering. Well, it’s an independent state, a state that lasted from the 15th century until 1783, when Catherine the Great annexed it in the Russian way, that is, with a knife in front.
From then on, the Russian Empire colonized the peninsula with Lava populations, while the Tatars were persecuted, eliminated, or deported. That was wild. We are talking about Stalin deporting the entire Tatar people to Central Asia in cattle cars in 1944. Between 18 and 46% died during the transfer.
That was a true genocide in the style of the time. And in case anyone wasn’t wondering, no, tartar has nothing to do with tartar sauce. It was invented by the French and they named it tartar sauce. Well, I don’t know why she’s such a chic mistress. But let’s continue with the story. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Crimea remained within Ukraine.
And I know what many of you are wondering. What if the people of Crimea feel more Russian than Ukrainian? Why can’t they continue to worship the motherland? Well, you’ll see. It turns out that in December of that year, 1991, a referendum was held throughout Ukraine on independence and 54% of Crimean voters voted in favor of Ukrainian independence.
So yes, the Crimeans themselves voted to stay in Ukraine. And what happened next? Well, in 1994 Ukraine handed over its nuclear weapons, the third largest arsenal in the world, and did so in exchange for security guarantees. signed by Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom in the so-called Budapest memorandum.
Russia pledged to respect the territorial integrity of Ukraine, including Crimea. Of course, Putin’s word is worth about as much as a Monopoly bill. And in the end, this is what happened. Why did they come? So that we cry here and don’t sleep at night. Vladimir Putin saw his window of opportunity, so in 2014 he took advantage of it.
Ukraine was in chaos after the Maidam revolution, which had overthrown the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych. So while Kybardia, a handful of soldiers without badges, the famous little green men, appeared in Crimea, they took over the local parliament, installed a puppet government and organized a referendum in 16 days, you know, a Russian-style referendum that is about as impartial as Bath Bunny choosing guests for her cottage.
We are talking about a celebration of democracy without international observers, without public debate, and with soldiers armed to the teeth at the doors of the polling stations. The official result was 96.7% in favor of joining Russia. Come on, that made North Korea look like Sweden in terms of democratic transparency.
Even Lukashenko, who usually settles for 80%, would have said, “Guys, are you going too far? It just wo n’t fly.” to leave Ukraine and join Russia. The head of the referendum committee, Mikhail Malichev, said the initial result came after more than 50% of the ballots had been counted. Of the votes counted so far, 95.57% were in favor of joining Russia and 3.
3% in favor of remaining part of Ukraine. But pay attention to this fact, because Crimea was not just a piece of land with beautiful beaches. Cremea was a nerve center for Russian operations. From Cremea, Russia can launch missiles against all of Ukraine. I mean, from the capital, Sevastopol, the Black Sea fleet was operated .
From there he controlled the grain trade routes that feed half the world. In fact, when Russia blockaded Ukrainian ports in 2022, wheat prices skyrocketed by 60%. That means millions of people in the Horn of Africa starved to death while their governments ironically supported Russia at the UN. And let’s not forget that when Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, it also allowed them to transport weapons to their naval base in Syria, giving them the ability to intervene directly in the Syrian war and support Bashar al- Assad. In other words, the occupation of
Crimea not only affected Ukraine, it also affected millions of displaced Syrians, many of whom ended up knocking on Europe’s doors . What analysts would say is that Crimea is a piece of the global chessboard, and Volodymyr Zelensky knows that. The fact that Russia has routinely used bases in Crimea to attack Ukrainian infrastructure has cemented the conviction in Kyiv that reclaiming Crimea is essential to decisively ending the threat posed by Russia.
You see, there is a historical precedent worth remembering. In 1853, the Crimean War pitted Russia against a coalition of France, the United Kingdom, and the Ottoman Empire. Russia lost, and the Treaty of Paris of 1856 demilitarized the Black Sea. For a time, no major power was able to exert unilateral control over these waters.
And some of you will say, “But Fonseca, why don’t you release this now?” Well, because this music sounds familiar to me. That could serve as a basis for negotiating lasting security guarantees for Ukraine. I know he’s ambitious, but 3 years ago the ambitious thing was for Ukraine to survive one more week. And it is certainly difficult to imagine peace for Ukraine that does not involve Crimea somehow returning to K’s control.
Even more so since February 2022, when Zelensky has always made it clear that he wants to recover Crimea. The question everyone is asking now is, is it really possible to recover it? Well, we’re going to see it right now. How to recover Crimea? To understand what Ukraine is doing , you have to think in layers. Like an onion.
Yes, exactly like an onion. The strategy is not to launch a frontal offensive against Crimea, because that would be military suicide. Pay attention to the map. The land access points are two very narrow corridors. Perecop and Chon Har, which are fortified and too narrow for an armored force. What Ukraine is doing is much smarter.
They want to strangle the Russians until the occupation of Crimea becomes completely unsustainable. And this starts with the numbers, think of it that way. Each Russian soldier needs about 20 kg of supplies per day. Here we talk about food, water, fuel, ammunition, protective equipment, batteries, tools for the trenches, medicines.
For the 150,000 soldiers on the front lines. That’s 3,000 tons per day. If you add up the fuel to move everything, the artillery, and the supplies for another 450,000 occupation troops, you get a minimum of 6,000 tons per day. That means each Russian truck carries 6 tons, which means they need to move 1000 trucks daily along routes that are under constant drone attack.
In other words, 1000 trucks trying to cross a highway full of drones on a battlefield. It’s like playing Mario Kart, but without being able to restart the game. And that’s where the onion comes in. Ukraine has created four rings of destruction around the occupied territory. The first one reaches up to 20 km from the front.
That’s where FPV drones operate, which, as you know, are those little ones that are piloted with virtual reality goggles and crash into the target. These are responsible for 70% of Russian casualties. A remotely controlled operator can wipe out an entire platoon without risking a single Ukrainian soldier. The second ring ranges from 20 to 70 km.
There, they operate heavy drones like the Baballaga, which are recoverable and can launch several projectiles per mission. They attack fuel depots, command centers, air defenses, artillery, and areas where the Russians repair armored vehicles. Before drones, the last mile was the danger zone. Now the danger zone begins 70 km from the front.
The third ring extends up to 300 km and is where drones like the Hornet operate. Some were dated using artificial intelligence, all with the help of friends. Look at what the company’s boss, Alex Carp, said about Ukraine. Our role in Ukraine has been widely discussed, I won’t say much about it, but as a matter of theory, ah, the old way of setting goals where algorithms are not used is clearly a failure.
But anyway, let’s continue with the story. Anyway, that’s what I was getting at . It is in that ring where they hit the M14 motorway, which is the main artery connecting southern Russia with Crimea. We are talking about Ukraine carrying out 1000 attacks since the beginning of 2026, hitting 150 trucks, 15% of the total traffic.
Each truck destroyed means one less air trip, and they’re not going after the trucks. Since spring 2026, Ukraine has attacked at least 10 freight trains and tankers carrying military supplies in the occupied areas of Crimea, Donezsk, Zaporizhzhia and Luhansk, and also in the Russian area of Kursk. And why is this so important? Because a single Russian rail convoy of 50 cars carries between 3,000 and 3,500 tons, that is, half a day’s worth of supplies for the entire front in a single train.
Destroying just one of these convoys is equivalent to eliminating 500 trucks in one fell swoop. If trucks are like Mario Kart, trains are like Thomas the Tank Engine, but loaded with explosives. And then there is the fourth ring that extends up to 13 km into Russia. The record is held by a drone that reached 1800 km. It hit the target, specifically a radar station in Orsk.
As you can see on the map, this city is 1800 km from the border with Ukraine. That means that the threatened Russian territory is already 10.1 million square kilometers , that is, 60% of Russia where 70% of the population lives. That’s also where 24 of the country’s 33 most important refineries are concentrated, and the Russians have responded exactly as Ukraine expected, namely, badly.
Well, Putin has been moving from one bunker to another for some time now. Vladimir Putin has reportedly set up three identical offices across Russia so he can hide undetected . The first thing the Kremlin decided was to restrict civilian traffic on the attacked routes, which exposed military trucks painted green or any other color.
Then they sent the convoys by secondary trucks, which were slower and in poor condition. And what happened? Well, obviously this made them more vulnerable. So Ukraine responded by seeding these roads with mine-laying drones. Each Russian response creates a bigger problem, and like that friend who tries to fix a pipe with electrical tape and ends up flooding the bathroom, the following happened.
Russia’s operational freedom zone in the Black Sea has shrunk to approximately 25% of the maritime battlespace, confined to Chuba, a strip about 25 km wide along its Caucasus coast. And you might ask, what role does the Crimean Peninsula play in all this? Well, it’s the point where everything converges.
Since the attack on the Kerch bridge in 2022, road and rail traffic to the peninsula has been limited. Ukraine destroyed the Azov Sea ferries. He destroyed the bridges of Chonhar and Genichesk, which connected Crimea with Gershon. It forced the Black Sea fruit to flee from Sevastopol to Novor Rosik. And when Russia destroyed the Novakahovka dam in 2023, it cut off 85% of the water supply to Crimea.
Yes, that’s what I call shooting yourself in the foot. Agricultural production collapsed and the occupation government had to import 40% of its food from Russian territory. The result of this Russian liberation is that there is a gasoline shortage in Crimea and a quota of 20 liters per person per day. Those on the peninsula are virtually trapped.
It’s like the Eagles’ song Hotel California , mixed with The Walking Dead. I was telling you earlier that Crimea is not easy to maintain economically either. The occupation costs Russia $10 billion annually in direct subsidies alone, plus $3.5 billion in infrastructure, $ 5.
8 billion in salaries and pensions, and $ 10 billion in food shipments. And that doesn’t even include the $18 billion they need just to rebuild cities like Mariol, which they bombed to rubble. To give you an idea, 18 billion dollars is more than a country like Spain spends annually on defense and is the cost of rebuilding a single city that they themselves destroyed.
With that money you could have bought three aircraft carriers or the entire Spanish football league, but no, you prefer to turn a city to dust and then pay to sweep it up. Come on, Putin is paying a mortgage on a burning house. And there are two more factors that are tipping the scales in favor of Ukraine. The first one is Starlink. Remember that in February Russia lost access to Elon Musk’s satellite network .
That means Ukrainian drones operate on a network that the Russians cannot access. The advantage is huge. Ukrainian drones are more effective at evading electronic interference, while Russian drones operate with more precarious means and are often vulnerable to detection. the Russian equivalent Starlink. The Rasbet system has not yet been deployed.
After the Starling blockade for the Russians, their level of effectiveness against us was drastically reduced. The second factor is fuel, as diesel production in Russia fell by 20% in April and an additional 10% in May. We’re talking about about 600,000 fewer tons of fuel, and keep in mind that the army consumes 6% of the total fuel consumption of the entire country.
And why is this so important? Because it doesn’t matter how many paths you have, if you can’t get them started. And to top it all off, the Russians themselves are sabotaging themselves. Come on, they’re up to their old tricks. They arrested, for example, Yuri Kozarenko, who is the owner of the company Transport of the Future.
Because? Well, for stealing state money and falsifying drone production figures. The official Russian figures were not accurate. While Ukraine manufactures 95% of its drones with total independence, the Russians cannot even trust their numbers and, on top of that, they are not alone. For example, Ukraine has now partnered with the UK and Latvia in the drone coalition.
The result to date is 5,000 FPV drones, 150,000 interceptors to shoot down Russian drones, and 20,000 reconnaissance drones with a range of 200 km. And with the United States they have developed the Hornet, equipped with artificial intelligence and capable of attacking at 65 km. Come on, Ukraine has more drone suppliers than Amazon has delivery drivers, so Donald Trump has made fun of Ukraine many times.
He said they are on the verge of collapse and that if he had been president the war would not have even started. Sure, if my grandmother had wheels she ‘d be a bicycle. In fact, the United States is pressuring Ukraine to cede territories, but reality tells a different story than what the orange president says .
That’s why Volodymyr Zelensky is still trying to get him to switch to the winning side. We believe a lot, yes, because American technology companies have many interesting artificial intelligence technologies that we don’t have, and we have many things that they don’t have because of our experience on the battlefield. To give you an idea, Ukraine now manufactures 7,000,000 FPV drones per year.
Month after month there are 583,000 drones, almost one for every Russian soldier on the front lines. And their survival rate for the wounded is 70 to 75% compared to Russia’s 38%. And while Trump withdraws weapons and lifts sanctions on Putin, Ukraine has freed a net 400 km² since January. It controls 60% of the Black Sea battlespace and has reduced Russian refining capacity to its lowest level since 2009.
These are indisputable facts. Russia has reached 500,000 verified deaths. And here I’m not talking about total casualties, I’m only talking about dead. But for every death there are two or three wounded who cannot return to combat. Their ratio of deaths to injuries has worsened from two to one.
For every Russian soldier wounded, almost two die. And FPV drones are to blame. Consider that evacuating an injured person under the constant surveillance of drones is more difficult than finding someone clean in Pedro Sánchez’s family group . I have a feeling that in the end we’ll have to ask Zelensky not to end up invading Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s security has been tightened to the maximum amid fears of an attack, especially with drones.
If someone had asked four years ago whether Ukraine could win this war, the answer would probably have been no. Impossible. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have the ability to make Russia lose it. The key lies in strategic patience and cutting Vladimir Putin’s logistical jugular. And in Crimea, that jugular vein begins to lose too much blood.
Therefore, the questions I leave you with now are: Do you think Ukraine can recover Crimea? How long can Russia sustain an occupation that costs it $10 billion a year? And what will Donald Trump do when he realizes that the side he considers the loser has been gaining ground for several months? You can leave your answer in the comments and as always, don’t forget that here at Solo Fonseca we release new videos every week.
So, you know what to do: subscribe to this channel and hit the bell icon so you don’t miss any of our updates. If you liked this video, give it a like and we’ll see you in the next one. Thank you for being there and see you soon.
QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.
Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.
Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.
The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.
Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.
Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.
Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.
that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music
industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.
The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.
Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.
Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.
The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.
Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.
Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.
Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.
Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.
The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.
Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.
The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.
Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.
Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.
The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.
Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.
The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.
Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.
They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.
She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.
She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.
She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.
She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it
well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.
Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.
What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.
The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.
They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.
Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.
Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and
Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.
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