In yesterday’s short interview with Press TV, I was given the opportunity to comment on the brouhaha in the United States and Europe over the leak of sensitive information about impending bombing of the Houthis in Yemen due to the inadvertent inclusion of a journalist, Atlantic magazine editor Jeffrey Goldberg among the chat recipients.
The release of what should have been highly secure military plans awaiting execution was perhaps the least controversial aspect about this event. More damaging was the openly hostile language that Vice President J.D. Vance and other participants used with respect to the European allies in their chat.
Live broadcasts like this one on Press TV go out unredacted. I use this opportunity to correct my identification of the deputy Secretary of State who made a vulgar and telling comment about the European allies in 2014 to the American ambassador in Kiev when they discussed whom to install there as head of government following the coup d’etat then awaiting implementation a few days later. It was, of course, not Hillary Clinton but Victoria Nuland who said in a telephone conversation that went viral when posted on the internet: “Fuck the EU!” Anything critical about Europe said by J.D. Vance this week in the leaked chat notes seems very tame by comparison.
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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Gilbert Doctorow 