NewsX : Russia-Ukraine War Updates -Tensions Escalate on Russia-Ukraine Border

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In the Travel Notes, Installment Three which I published earlier today, I presented a critique of Russian press censorship coming from the liberal wing of the profession. Here I offer readers an excellent example of how bureaucracy can run amok with unforeseeable consequences that do nothing for national defense while irritating a great many people needlessly.

At noon today Moscow time I gave an interview to the Indian global broadcaster News X regarding the skirmishes now ongoing at the Russian-Ukrainian border in the Kursk region, on the exchange of drone attacks. I broadened the discussion to the Russians’ expectation that their unilateral 3 day cease-fire bracketing the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day (9 May) will not be respected by Kiev; and I went on to mention that should Zelensky & Co. do something really stupid on the 9th and attack one or another of the parades in Russian cities, not to mention attack THE PARADE in Moscow, we can expect all hell to break loose in the Russian counter-attack.

All of this you should find here: https://youtu.be/vcbCeXNXWnY?si=Yi5a30jSBlf4aMkL

I am unable to verify the link which NewsX kindly sent me because THE RUSSIAN AUTHORITIES HAVE SHUT DOWN youtube:com

Over the past year there have been localized go-slow days on youtube services in Russia but this looks like a definitive ban. Meanwhile, LinkedIn, which was shut down for well more than a year, has suddenly come back to life on the Russian internet.

As I see it, there is not much sense in terminating youtube if your objective is to enhance Russian state security. Youtube itself is a neutral platform that is used by those promoting every imaginable political and social position. But there is sense in keeping LinkedIn out of the country because it carries the pesonal data of all kinds of Russian state officials which can be very useful to the intelligence agencies of ‘hostile countries.’ Hence my conclusion above that censorship can be very clumsy if the censors are not kept on a very short leash.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

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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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3 thoughts on “NewsX : Russia-Ukraine War Updates -Tensions Escalate on Russia-Ukraine Border”

  1. I think it may be some kind of local quirk or technical glitch. I just checked, Youtube works fine for me, Linkedin is definitively blocked.

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  2. With VPN, YouTube is always available here in Moscow. The link worked fine. Thanks as always for your fine work!

    >

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  3. you tube may not be explicitly partisan, it is a property of Google, and they are very far from anything that can be graced with the term “neutral”. They are banning, demonetizing, censoring, and filtering at unimaginable scale, and not just on violence or illegal content; rather on search results and polite or even somewhat bland expressions of unwanted truth-telling.

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