In past months I have tossed bouquets at the feet of Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever for his brave and superbly executed veto on plans to confiscate Russian state assets held in Euroclear to extend a non-reimbursable loan to Ukraine for the sake of continuing the war against Russia. With the unanimous support of Belgium’s legislature in his back pocket, De Wever stood up to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and delivered a decisive Nyet to their ill-considered plans to violate international law and send European finances into ‘uncharted waters’ as De Wever correctly said to their faces during the monthly gathering of the European Council in Brussels.  His courage attracted support from several other European leaders, in particular Giorgia Melloni of Italy, and the Commission backed down.

However, after what I saw and heard at the Russian Embassy to the Kingdom of Belgium last night, I want my flowers back.

I was in an audience of about 200 Belgians who came to see a film screening, namely to see a film that has been banned by the Belgian government from public viewing in movie theaters under pressure from the Ukrainian embassy in Brussels. In their overwhelming majority the audience consisted of ordinary French-speaking Belgians who accept invitations to Russian embassy events or to Russia House concerts and language lessons for the sake of hearing interpretations of current events or historical events that are not to be found in mainstream print and electronic media. In short, they want to think for themselves after weighing various sides to a story. The questions posed by members of the audience made it clear that curiosity was the motive for their attendance, nothing more.

The film in question entitled “Ukraine-Russia: Behind the Smoke Screen” was made by a Belgian journalist Alexandre Penasse on the basis of a tour of the Donbas that he took last September within a press pool organized by RIA Novosti. The journalists were shown the memorials to children and other civilians murdered by artillery barrages and bombing of residential complexes and other civilian infrastructure from the start of the war on its own Eastern provinces that the extreme nationalist government installed in Kiev in February 2014 following a U.S. backed coup d’etat that overthrew the legitimate elected government. They were taken to schools and given free access to students for one-on-one chats. They were taken to military training grounds to speak to recruits and to veteran defenders of the Donbas.

The film “Behind the Smoke Screen” has been banned by the Kingdom of Belgium for no reason whatsoever. The film is hardly propagandistic. It has no particular point to make. Its greatest “sin” is that on the basis of testimony of the people with whom the filmmaker met it says loudly and clearly that the Russia-Ukraine war was not without provocation and did not start on 24 February 2022. It started in 2014 with the vicious attacks of the Ukrainian army on the civilian Russian-speaking population of Donbas to subjugate them and carry out ethnic cleansing. These attacks continued until the very start of President Putin’s Special Military Operation in February 2022 and had led to the deaths of more than 14,000 Russian-speaking civilians living in the still Ukrainian Donbas region.

The somewhat surprising other take-away from the film is that so many of the Donbas interviewees openly express their confused feelings about their Ukrainian past and their Russian present. They have a residual sympathy for Ukraine while they abhor the vicious attack on themselves unleashed by the nationalists who took control of the government in 2014.  The most common wish of all the interviewees was for peace and an end to this never-ending war.

Now, was this truth something that the Belgian Government had any right to suppress by exercising censorship and forbidding public screening of the film with the unstated but real threats to the film maker of professional sanctions against him?   The answer to these questions is a resounding ‘no’ and it is why I say to Belgian Prime Minister:  “shame on you!”

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026

Interview on minutes 20 – 24

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.

Armageddon Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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