Where’s the link?

Uncategorized 2 Minutes

Occasionally I receive requests from readers to post the link to sources I am using for my news and analysis essays.

The question would be fair if my product were academic research, for which footnotes are de rigueur. But my product is journalism. Some of my writings are themselves primary sources, meaning impressions and information that I gather firsthand in my travels or by participating in the events I describe. On the other hand, when I am summarizing information I receive from third parties, usually from Russian state television broadcasts, the source is transient and may not be available later as a podcast or in streaming. This is certainly the case of the 24 hour Vesti news channel.

To be sure, News of the Week on Sundays and Sixty Minutes on weekdays as well as the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov talk shows which I frequently cite in my articles are available for viewing the day after the live broadcast. But none of these programs offers English translation subtitles. 

These television programs, I hasten to add, are vastly more informative than print media in Russia. By way of example, the highly regarded Rossiyskaya Gazeta provides only a small fraction of the information available each day on Sixty Minutes.

What all of this means is that to catch news on the war in real time that allows juxtaposition with the daily Washington narrative, you have to be able to catch spoken Russian on the fly.

Now let’s be honest. American propagandists are quick to call most anyone who can muster a sentence in Russian the compliment of being a fluent speaker That was what they said about Susan Rice, for example.  Or about former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul.  But I defy these supposedly brilliant linguists to listen to a Russian news program and take notes, mental or written, to share with anyone.

Of course, talented linguists do exist. I have no doubt there are such folks at work for the CIA in the Moscow embassy of the United States or out at Langley.  But what they take down will not be shared with the American public. Of that you can be sure. 

In that regard, what I am taking down from the live Russian broadcasts today leaves no doubt that the Russians are now very confident of their military superiority, confident that the Ukrainians are needlessly sacrificing their personnel and heavy military equipment to satisfy their masters in Washington. The big story of the day was the one Russian tank commander who destroyed 10 Ukrainian tanks and armored personnel carriers, mostly Western, in one-on-one battle. Otherwise there was repeated broadcast of videos showing the horrific destruction of Leopards and other tanks in the past couple of days by Russian artillery, kamikaze drones, mines and other means. Then came the video of the latest and most desperate Ukrainian tactic, sending infantry out into the field in attack without cover of tanks, so as to avoid further loss of this precious equipment. Needless to say the Ukrainian soldiers were cut to pieces by Russian fire.  The latest projections of the Russian experts on Sixty Minutes is that the Ukrainians have another three weeks of elite reserves and cannon fodder available to maintain the current intensity of battle and then it is all over.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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6 thoughts on “Where’s the link?”

  1. From the film I saw of this incident with the excited commentary of a few soldiers looking on, I believe the ‘Rambo’ tank commander knocked out 8 not 10 military vehicles – still it was some feat and a great advertisement for Russian tanks

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  2. I wonder……..but hope……

    “The latest projections of the Russian experts on Sixty Minutes is that the Ukrainians have another three weeks of elite reserves and cannon fodder available to maintain the current intensity of battle and then it is all over.”

    Thank you for your reporting!

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  3. I know I have mentioned it my blog, but I want to say here I appreciate so much your reporting on what is being said on the Russian news programs. I can chat with taxi drivers, folks in the grocery store and family here, but those newscasters are way beyond my level of Russian comprehension. Thankful to have you “interpret.”

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  4. Pingback: Aug 2, 2023 – Situation Report: The World

  5. Here is the bottom line and you can extrapolate from there.

    With their current equipment package, the Ukrainians will NEVER break thru that Russian 3 tier defensive belt.

    There are four ways to defeat a complex obstacle belt made up of: tank ditches, minefields, multi strand barb wire fences, guarded by pre-planed targets and interlocking fields of fire:

    a. You go around it. You do this in three ways: Airborne/air assault over it, tunnel underneath it, or ground maneuver around it.

    B. You bomb a path thru it. Read about the battle of St Lo and Operation Cobra in WWII

    c. You use a combination of Artillery and Air power and do a convention attack . BUT, you Need LOTs of Air power and LOTs of artillery to be successful.

    d. Lastly and the most sad. You do Chinese type human wave/ Japanese Banzai attacks. You drown the enemy in human bodies until the mines are all detonated and the enemies ammo runs out.

    Unless the Ukrainians get some new “true game changer” munitions like a MOAB and a way to deploy it, they are going to continue to die in a useless manner.

    So the real question becomes: What will the Ukrainians do when their reserves, especially their
    Tier 1 NATO trained/ equipped brigades are all gone?

    The West will have to decide to either double down or be satisfied with a broken Ukraine in whatever form is left.

    If the West doubles down, they could possibly send in Polish and Lithuanian Volunteers, like the Chinese did in Korea , or worst case, send in Nato troops.

    But the smart move would be to tell the Ukrainians to drink pond water and sue for peace.

    But with people like Nuland in there, I don’t think they will choose the smart move.

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  6. Trouble is the Poles are a *lot* more keen to fight Russia using Ukrainians. Lithuania (and more so the other Baltic States) for it’s part, is a tiny country they simply don’t have the men.

    Even if that wasn’t true, they and the other former WTO states. Have given away much of their Soviet built/licensed equipment and decommissioned the factories that built them, in favour of a “modern” western-style service economy.

    And the ” Western” NATO armies march mostly on paper.

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