I am pleased to inform the Community that Volume 3, 2025 has just been placed on the Amazon global websites for sale as an e-book, complementing its availability as a paperback. Go to the nearest Amazon country website and type either War Diaries Volume 3 or my name into the Search Box to arrive at the e-book offer.

The price for the e-book in the American market is $9.99 The price in other markets corresponds in local currency.

Although my personal preference is for paperbacks, I frankly acknowledge that the e-book has an advantage for those who wish to follow the embedded links to the many podcasts cited in the text.

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