Transcript of News X interview: Russia’s attacks on Odessa

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSrGMADG9D4
NewsX: 0:00
Russia has attacked Ukraine’s city of Odessa with one of its biggest drone attacks, injuring three teenagers, damaging residential and commercial buildings and sparking fires across the city. The attack comes as the United States is pushing for a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia and hoping to agree on a partial ceasefire that would halt strikes on energy infrastructure by both sides. Hours after Trump spoke, Russia launched a massive drone attack on Odessa. The long-range drones buzzed into the city in several waves, damaging infrastructure, residential houses and commercial buildings and causing multiple fires, officials said. Around 25 cars had been set ablaze at a car repair shop.

0:38
Zapore Zia regional governor Ivan Fedorov, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said nine were also injured in addition to the casualties. Russian strikes on Ukraine do not stop, despite their propaganda claims. [“Every day and every night, nearly 100 or more drones are launched, along with ongoing missile attacks. With each such launch, the Russians expose to the world their true attitude towards peace.”] Zelensky said on Thursday on X. Delegations from Russia and the US are expected to resume talks on ending the war on Monday in [Saudi] Arabia, both countries officials said, following an earlier round of talks in February. However, the recent escalation has raised concerns once again in the Russian-Ukraine conflict.

1:18
Well, joining us now live is Gilbert Doctorow, Russian affairs expert. He’s joining us live from Brussels in Belgium. Thank you very much for speaking with us today. Let me begin by asking you about what you make of this latest Russian offensive.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, [there’s] nothing unusual about it. Even Donald Trump remarked the very same thing when the question was put to him yesterday. There’s a war going on, and whatever understandings have been reached between Trump and Putin and Zelensky were a very partial limitation on the military operations. Specifically, both sides have pledged not to attack the energy infrastructure of the other side. In point of fact, just a day after Russia’s military was ordered not to attack Ukraine, Ukraine attacked the metering station on the pipeline connecting Russian gas into Ukraine in Sudzha.

2:21
Sudzha is the main town in the territory of the Russian Federation province, region, of Kursk that the Ukrainians have been holding since last August. They did great damage to that pipeline, and the Russians estimate it will take two and a half years to replace it. So this was a major attack on Russian infrastructure relating to energy exports. The Russians have been restrained. They have decided not to take this provocation any further and not respond in kind, because they do not want Mr. Zelensky to sabotage the peace talks, which is clearly the objective of the strike on Sudzha. As to the Russian strikes on Odessa, they were all on fair game. The same way that the Ukrainian attack on the airbase at Engels in the Saratov region of central Russia was fair game. Nasty, damaging, but it’s a military objective. As you reported about the Odessa, you were getting the Zelensky version of it.

3:36
Let me give you the Russian version of it. They successfully destroyed ships in the port of Odessa, carrying munitions. They successfully destroyed caches of arms and weapons in Odessa. When the Ukrainians speak about civilian buildings being destroyed by Russian drones, they are keeping from you the fact that these residential buildings were barracks, they were housing armed men. So these questions are very disputed.

NewsX: 4:13
Yes, let me also ask you then, Gilbert Doctorow, looking ahead now, there is another round of talks expected on Monday. What do we expect then? How hopeful are you [for] some sort of progress? Do you believe a partial ceasefire, at least on restraining attacks on energy infrastructure on both sides, is likely?

Doctorow: 4:34
I think it’s a big mistake to focus our attention on the ceasefire. From the Russian perspective, and I would say now from the American perspective, the objective is two parallel discussions. The technicalities of the ceasefire and the end results of a peace negotiation, where will it end up? These are going on in parallel. As regards the Riyadh talks on Monday, they are primarily between an American working group and a Russian working group.

These are technical talks. They are going to be discussing, for example, free navigation in the Black Sea. There has already been a case of free navigation of the Black Sea; that was about a year and a half ago. It went on until finally the Russians said “Stop” because the Ukrainians were not delivering on their side of the bargain. And what will happen now is negotiations between technical people, security people, in Riyadh. In the same city, there will be a Ukrainian delegation, and it is reasonable to expect that Americans will be going back and forth between the Russian delegation and the Ukrainian delegation in Riyadh at the time.

5:54
Is there progress being made? Very definitely. What is the end result? The end result will be a peace in Ukraine, probably arrived at in several months from now, but in a context of a reset of American-Russian relations of dramatic scope. The last time we heard the word “reset” was in 2010, when Barack Obama said that he wanted to do a reset with the Russians in order to get through the New START Arms Limitations Treaty prolongation.

6:30
At that time, American policy was led by ideologists. Russia was a pariah state, and you could do business with it only on the few subjects that were of material interest to the United States. The reset that we’re about to witness is of a comprehensive nature that we have not seen since the time of Richard Nixon. That takes us back a long way into the 1970s. And the whole time since the 1970s, American foreign policy has been led by ideologists, not by realists. Nixon was a realist and Trump is a realist. These are new days.

NewsX: 7:07
Would you then see these latest attacks, though, as being a setback for peace efforts, or not quite?

Doctorow:
Absolutely not. War is war, and these attacks are fair under the rules of war. They are unpleasant, they are damaging, people lose their lives, but that’s what happens in wars. Mr. Trump’s insistence that this should come to an end sooner rather than later is a valuable contribution. His great engagement with this process is a very important and decisive factor, spelling its likely success. There are no certainties in this world. It may fail, but it has a high chance of success, and I would not be distracted by the ongoing daily fighting.

NewsX: 7:56
All right, Gilbert Doctorow, thank you very much for joining us with your perspective on that big story.

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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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