https://gilbertdoctorow.substack.com/p/russia-at-war

See minutes 21.15 to 26.30

Back on Press TV (Iran)

https://t.me/presstv/191573

I have been interviewed on Press TV several times in the past month but their production team was not prepared to upload the videos into online podcasts. Now, it appears, they have resumed this function though they are disseminating it via the messenger service Telegram, which just happens to be very popular in Russia.

The two sentence summary shown on on the page that opens via the above link tells you the punch line of my interview.

I have been unable to access the video for lack of experience with Telegram. If any of the techies in the Community can convert this into a readily accessible video and send this to me will disseminate that.

Retired U.S. military men like Colonel Douglas Macgregor or Colonel Daniel Davis have been among the most listened to experts delivering commentary on the Russia-Ukraine war in podcasts that are watched by tens if not hundreds of thousands of Alternative Media devotees, all of whom expect to get the inside scoop on how Russia is on its way to total victory over Ukraine, striking a death blow at NATO and US global hegemony.

Let me tell you here why these viewers are getting disinformation rather than real insights from the military experts: because from day one to today, Russia’s war is being led by a politician, President Vladimir Putin, who knows no more about military strategy than you or me but who knows a great deal about what is politically acceptable to the broad Russian population at every stage of the war. In effect, in what is widely considered to be an autocratic regime, Putin and Company, have their noses to the wind on what the Little People of Russia will accept without grumbling, let alone demonstrating in the streets.

And that is why the war was unleashed in February 2022 without marshalling the military forces on the ground in the usual 3 or 4 times greater numbers than the 150,000 soldiers in the Ukrainian army against whom you can successfully, swiftly and relatively painlessly stage an offensive operation aimed at regime change. The very idea of a possible general mobilization of Russian reserves not to mention the idea of there being a draft of young soldiers to fill ranks set hundreds of thousands of Russian men fleeing across the border to avoid military service at the outset of the war. But there was no active public resistance to the war and Putin could be pleased, except that quick victory slipped between his fingers and led us into the 4 years plus of fighting and more than a million Russian casualties of whom we may suppose that 350,000 are deaths.

For this reason, I urge the Western public to take with a grain of salt what our military experts are saying about the war. The Russian war was and remains a political operation led by politicians who are more sensitive to public sentiment at home than they are to implementing military doctrine, such as our experts swear by.

Does any of this remind readers of how and why the United States lost the Vietnam war under Presidents Johnson and Nixon?

Copyright Gilbert Doctorow, 2026

Many times in the past I have referred to taxi drivers as a useful source of information. They speak to a lot of people under conditions of anonymity. They gather information from their passengers and share it with the next passengers if they are so disposed in the sure knowledge that they are not identified and can speak freely, which is not the case with your friends and acquaintances. These drivers or hair dressers or others serving the general public and spending enough time together to chat are, as a rule, pretty smart folks and what they say can often prove valuable.

So it was last night when I finally got a car via Yandex Go to take my wife and me plus a couple of friends from our apartment in Pushkin to a restaurant in the neighboring town of Pavlovsk. The driving time was 20 minutes – just enough to share some observations on the state of the internet, the state of the GPS service by which all drivers are guided and related subjects that are close to his… and my heart these days in Russia.

First, the driver instantly agreed with me that the curtailment of internet sites and access has nothing to do with countering Ukrainian drone attacks or assassination plots, as the Putin government is saying publicly. That is a fairy tale for kids, he says. The real reason is to break up communications between the Little People of this country and to ensure that their dissent with the continuation of the damned war on Ukraine is contained and politically neutralized.

That is achieved by shutting down access to foreign news media. It is achieved by shutting down or reducing functionality of the key messenger services that the vast majority of the Russian population was using before the crackdown – like WhatsApp, which was ubiquitous but now is unreliable, no longer supports telephone conversations with any regularity, etc. The same happened to Telegram and other popular Apps. Why? Because these Apps were encrypted and totally secure from the prying eyes of the KGB’s successor organization, the FSB. In their place; the entire population was herded into MAX, a purpose built government controlled App that has zero security of communications from government listeners. Bingo!

When I was in Belgium and read about MAX and its nil security a year ago, frankly I did not pay much attention. But now, combined with the effect of the sharp curtailment of the internet generally here, I see the climb back into the drivers’ seat by the Security Forces and the attack on the sense of personal freedom of everyday Russians.

You will notice that the driver was talking about control of the Little People. As for the Big Boys, corporate and oligarchical Russia, you can be sure they enjoy separate, corporate communicatoins systems that function even today.

Finally, this driver tipped me off about what the Little People are doing to preserve their access to world media and to watertight Apps: per his information, 100 million Russians have installed VPN software on their handheld devices and computers to get around the blockages set up by their internet service providers under instructions from the Security Services.

Well, dear friends, I intend to give this a try, to download one or another VPN and to see if indeed I can restore access to the internet: I will report here on the results of this experiment as they become available.

Copyright Gilbert Doctorow, 2026

There are surely those among you who are scratching their heads and wondering why Doctorow makes such a big deal about the disruption of the internet communications. You may say to yourselves: my kids could profit if our internet went down.

Well friends, let me explain what you likely do not know about today’s Russia after 25 years of Putin’s overseeing its reindustrialization. The industrial and general economic landscape is in many areas far ahead of Europe and of the USA. There has been a concentration of business, or shall we call it a monopoly established in many sectors which makes this country particularly vulnerable to changes in the rules of the game, as for example the current downgrading if not outright blockage of internet services at the order of the government authorities under advice from the Security Services (aka the FSB), supposedly to prevent terror attacks and drone strikes, which are occurring with ever greater intensity and frequency nonetheless.

We all know how several of the giants of Silicon Valley and of the IT sector in America were created by Russian immigrants or sons and daughters of such immigrants. There is nothing in their DNA but a lot in the culture, in the stress on math and engineering in the society to explain this. Just think over who founded Google.

Well Russia’s population of math and programming geniuses was not cleaned out in the 1990s. Plenty of talent was deeply patriotic and was ready to swing into action when the opportunity came under the new administration of Putin at the turn of the new millennium. These are the engineers who created the world beating new strategic arms that Putin first presented to the domestic and foreign audience in 2018. But beyond military industry, there were plenty of Russian geniuses to found and develop corporations in the high tech sector. Russia’s very own Google – called Yandex – also grew from the leading Search Engine into the general engine of growth across many sectors of the consumer economy. Yandex Travel is Russia’s equivalent to booking.com. Yandex Go, its division providing taxis, scooters and other forms of mobility to the public has no peer in the USA – it holds a monopoly position in the taxi sector that it built to completion only in the past two or three years when it bankrupted or bought out nearly all local providers of taxi services across this vast land by drastic pricing wars initially, by luring away the drivers of competing companies and by introducing world leading technologies such as geolocation functions in its App so that you need not identify where you are and with the help of the system’s memory of your past trips, need only start to type where you want to go and the system fills in the rest.

The problem with this technical and business building success is that when the internet and GPS systems are restricted or altered by the authorities, Yandex Go services are voided. They send cars to the wrong address or, as is the case today in Petersburg, the system completely loses control of communications with its drivers and orders via the App and even by phone cannot be put through. Since Yandex eliminated all those little companies and freelancers at the local level who did not need the GPS to find addresses, there is no taxi service whatsoever available to the public for extended periods of time. That is not merely an inconvenience, it is a ruin-your-day experience for the public and a nightmare for businesses that depend on taxis to move their personnel around in cities.

Now if Russia’s fate as a nation depended on the severe restrictions being imposed on the communications network, then I would listen to the argument. However, it is patently clear that 1) these measures are ineffective against the Ukrainian forces and 2) Russia has the armaments to end the Ukrainian government and its attacks in a couple of days if leadership can summon the decisiveness to do what is needed.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026

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