Gilbert Doctorow

Apr 10, 2026

I take pleasure in announcing that Volume 2, 2024 has just been placed on sale by Amazon throughout its worldwide websites.

Within a week or so an e-book version will be added.

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Volume 2 differs notably from Volume 1 by its inclusion of summaries, extracts from transcripts and several full transcripts of my nearly weekly interviews in 2024 on leading youtube channels, particularly ‘Judging Freedom,’ that regularly attracted the attention of tens of thousands of viewers. Thus, readers can follow closely what U.S. and other Western audiences found newsworthy at the time, and what they sought expert commentary about as the Russia-Ukraine war evolved in 2024.

I remind readers that these War Diaries are primary sources. They are history recorded in time present while looking to the still unknowable future. Errors of judgement at the time of writing are left intact. The purpose is to show what my expectations were based on what was known within a day or two of the events described.

I imagine that each reader will seek in this volume answers to his or her own questions about the war in general and 2024 in particular. Both questions and the evaluation of answers found here will change over the years to come, which is natural to all historical writings. Nonetheless, in the Foreword and Introduction, I share with the reader an overarching view of what I found remarkable in the ‘diaries’ when I prepared this book for publication in January 2026.

Note: Volume 2 is set in larger, 12-point typeface and is thus easier to read in paperback format than Volume1.

The image of the book cover above dramatizes two important elements of the war that emerged in 2024. The front cover shows the destroyed interior of the Crocus entertainment center in a Moscow suburb where on 22 March 2024 a Ukrainian financed and directed attack killed 149 civilians. This terrorist act enraged Russian society and was a key factor raising pressure on President Putin to harden the language and severity of Russia’s pursuit of the war. The back cover shows a double-amputee Ukrainian soldier in hospital being visited by German Chancellor Scholz. It is meant to direct attention to the human as opposed to material losses in this war. It is widely believed that Ukraine has now lost more than two million soldiers to death and permanent incapacitation as a result of Zelensky’s persisting in a war that they have lost as measured in traditional military terms.

I come on at minute 15.20

The personality defects of Donald J. Trump have been the subject of amateur psychology in mass media since his first presidential electoral campaign in 2016. The trait that has been most discussed was and is narcissism.

Google’s AI Search has the following to say about this issue:

Quote

Numerous mental health professionals and critics have publicly suggested that Donald Trump exhibits traits consistent with

narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), and paranoid personality disorder, often grouping them under the term “malignant narcissism“. These claims, primarily argued by psychologists and psychiatrists, cite patterns of grandiosity, lack of empathy, need for admiration, and impulsivity.

Unquote

This portrait of Trump is the product of specialists operating in our secular culture.

However, this is Easter Sunday and I think it entirely appropriate to approach the issue from a Christian binary analytical framework of Good and Evil, God and Satan.  This is all the more relevant because Trump professes to take religion seriously. Key members of his administration, like Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, are zealous Believers and speak publicly of their religion.

In this context and considering the Easter Sunday dateline of this message to the Community, I say that Trump and the senior members of his Administration have stepped right out of Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed.  They are Evil Incarnate, they are possessed by Satan in their support of Israeli genocide in Gaza and now in the vicious, inhuman violence they are directing against the Iranian people. Listening to Trump’s daily diatribes, his bloody threats against Tehran, it  strains belief that these words are coming from our top elected official. 

And so I conclude : shame on the United States if this man is not impeached and removed from office, sent to face the International Court of Justice for war crimes.

Amen

Earlier today I wrote about the questions put to me by News X World for an interview that took place at 12.30 Brussels time. These questions prompted me to organize my thinking about Sergei Lavrov’s latest remarks on how the Iran war may be expanding outside the Middle East and poses a great danger to world peace, and also to think about the Ukraine drone strikes that yesterday seriously damaged Russia’s oil export installations in Ust-Luga, Leningrad oblast. The drones arrived from Estonian territory and the question arises: what if anything Russia will now do to retaliate against Estonia.

I have just received and am pleased to share the link to this podcast: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDuAfVEKS0Y

I use the opportunity also to share one other podcast link which I just received from my good friend Ray McGovern. This podcast contains the presentation he and colleagues made in the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. last Thursday, 26 March about the lies and deception that the Pentagon and intelligence agencies have fed to the American public to justify never ending wars going back to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Ray comes on in minute 15. Special attention is given to what motivated Donald Trump to launch the war against Iran on 28 February 2026. Within his talk, Ray put up on the screen a pre-recorded 10 minute message from fellow member of the activist group VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) Karen Kwiatkowski that is engrossing.

As readers of my website know very well, I very rarely use this platform to promote articles or podcasts of others. Today I make an exception and strongly urge the Community to watch the interview with Professor John Mearsheimer conducted by Judge Andrew Napolitano on Judging Freedom in the past hour. Watch to the very end, please, since the discussion goes beyond analysis of Trump’s desperate self-inflicted situation or of the chances of success of the land invasion of Iran that Trump is now threatening. It goes where others fear to tread: here Mearsheimer speaks of the absolute silence of America’s liberal minded professoriate with respect to the US-enabled genocide that Israel has been conducting in Gaza, to their absolute silence about the gross violation of international law that the United States has committed in its savage war of aggression on Iran that it did not even bother to justify by reference to some real or imagined provocation.

I salute Professor Mearsheimer for courageously pronouncing what I have been thinking for some time but hesitated to say publicly: namely that if a Nuremberg style tribunal were to be conducted to hear the case of the foregoing offenses of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, both would be sentenced to death by hanging.

Bravo!

Discussio