Transcript of Pelle Neroth Taylor interview

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgYZxwBLcCU

Exposing the deep state and government overreach. You’re with Pelle Neroth Taylor on Today’s News Talk, The Pulse.

Taylor: 0:10
Welcome to the Pelle Neroth Taylor show. Well, we’re going to talk about Ukraine again today. I make no apologies for that. It’s a question of, an existential question for all of us. Trump famously said he’s not worried about global warming but he’s worried about the global warming that results from a nuclear explosion.

So with us today we’ve got Gilbert Doctorow, who for many of you he doesn’t need an introduction, but I’ll give an introduction anyway. He’s got a PhD in Russian history from Colombia and speaks fluent Russian. He spent most of his life in corporate Russia, with a focus on Russia. He’s written five books of essays and is well known from various podcasts and YouTube videos. And actually I’m a regular viewer of his, and so it’s a great privilege for me to have him. And he’s just published a book of a kind of war diary, which I guess covers his travels to Russia. I think he’s got a flat in St. Petersburg. Welcome to the show, Professor Doctorow.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, thanks for having me.

Taylor:
What, well, tell us a little bit about your book, and then we’ll spend the first part of the show on that. I’m quite curious, just because you’ve got inside experiences, I guess, of actually going to Russia, you speak the language, you watch the media closely, you have a finger-spitzke feel, a feeling of what’s really going on there, and you see how the country’s really doing, you talk to a lot of people there. And then maybe we can focus on some of the other stuff, like the momentous events that are taking place behind the scenes or in front of the scenes. So what would, tell us about your book and what it’s about.

Doctorow:
Well I say first of all what it isn’t. This is not a comprehensive history of the war. It is instead a view of how Russia fared during the war, based on my visits there both before the start of the special military operation and during. This book covers the periods ’22, ’23, when almost all foreign journalists had left Russia. And so my contributions, which you find in this book, to my observations on what is going on in Russia. By that I mean how consumers are doing, what the feeling of prosperity or poverty is, what the chattering classes are saying. And that comes from my following the major talk shows and state newscasts, which are widely watched and talked about in Russia.

So these are observations. Also books that were published which are very relevant to our understanding of this war. For example, a book about the 85 days in which the town of Slavyansk, which is in the center of Donetsk province, which gets a lot of news because it is the front line today. Anyway, this town was a kind of Alamo of Ukraine in 2014. It was the cradle of what the Russians call the Russian Renaissance, the rebirth. And it held out against vastly superior Ukrainian forces.

Well that was written about in a very competent book. It received very little attention in the West. And that’s the sort of thing that I covered and described in some essays. Or I described some documentaries that were produced in Russia relating to the experience of two nations living together for several centuries, that is Russia and Ukraine. These documentaries I found to be highly informative and they received no coverage in the West. Well, I covered them.

So aside from my own personal observations of what I saw in street markets, the supermarkets, in electronic stores and so forth, what I heard from my taxi drivers, and at least in the period of ’22, ’23, taxi drivers were a very good source of information on what’s going on, particularly if you happen to have, as I did once, a retired colonel in the military intelligence driving the car. So this is what you’ll find in this book.

It is, I just will say one more word, that I view my role here not as an historian in the sense of going through what happened after it happened, but as a chronicler of what’s happened around me and I recorded that. That’s why I call these diaries.

Taylor: 4:28
I think it’s an incredibly important perspective because a lot of us, a lot of people in the alternative media, independent media, call it whatever you like, we’re willing to give Russia, you know, the benefit of the doubt simply because of our own-side lies and propaganda, but you’re able to give a xxxx you speak Russian and you not quite as– you don’t watch Russia with quite the same rose-tinted glasses, and you have a more realistic view. Let’s say somebody who watches the independent shows and believes that the CIA does terrible things, and all that, I’m all on board with that. And read, I mean there’s that fantastic book called _Unprovoked_. I think Scott Horton is very good on that historical aspect. Reading your book, what perspective coming away from that, what piece of the puzzle would you be able to contribute that they wouldn’t get from us Anglophones?

Doctorow:
Precisely the Russian perspective. I am well aware of this _Unprovoked_. I bought the book. I glanced through it. It is a different approach, of course. It is documentary. It is, again, history looking backwards. It’s compiling relevant documents after the fact. What you find after the fact is very different from what you find around you in timepresent. My diaries are diaries in the sense that they are time-present.

They’re not making reference to landmarks. And this gives you advantages and certain disadvantages. The advantage is that you can understand what it’s like to live in the period. People living in the period weren’t reading history books. They were always guessing what comes next.

And part of this was the natural circumstances of what’s called the fog of war, where states intentionally conceal what is going on, because they don’t want to affect their electorate in a way that gets people very wound up, very militant, or very exasperated with the government. They want to keep people calm, so they don’t give out the facts. That’s true on both sides, both the Russians and the Ukrainian side. Then you have the distortions that are put in after the fact for political reasons. I think of something very relevant, very recent.

We all know that there was a nearly-signed peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine that was negotiated in Istanbul in the end of March 2022. We learned some details about this. When President Putin held it up in front of reporters, there was a thick document that you see, he initialed everything. It was all set to be signed off by the two presidents, himself and Zelensky. And then came Boris Johnson and persuaded Zelensky not to sign it, and it was finished. And we know that close to a million people have lost their lives ever since then in three years of war.

This is a very nice perspective, but I believe it doesn’t reflect the facts. Certainly, it doesn’t reflect what you’ll find in my book. I took diary notes. I hardly covered, and only one diary mention, did I speak about the negotiations in Istanbul.

At the time, it seemed improbable to succeed, with or without Mr. Johnson coming. In fact, his coming was hardly known. The point is that after the fact, we can say probably the Russians didn’t really want to implement that. And we certainly know the Ukrainians didn’t, because they staged the massacre in Bucha, which was used to justify breaking off all negotiations.

So could there have been a peace really signed in March, April, 2022? It’s not clear. And here we have a distortion that’s introduced into the current events, what you find in newspapers today, introduced actually by Mr. Putin, which gives us a false understanding what the chances were.

Taylor:
Well, I mean, that’s a very interesting perspective, because you’re saying that as somebody who is not you know, a Ukrainian fan boy, part of the mainstream media propaganda machine. I mean you’ve got a lot of integrity and you’re sort of saying something against the Russians here, saying that they, post the event, are reconstructing a story that makes them look more peace-minded. But how can you be sure that your contemporaneous perspective writing diary notes was more accurate than what was going on behind the scenes? I mean, maybe … they were keen on peace; they just didn’t tell the talk shows that you were watching or that the taxi drivers that you interviewing.

Doctorow:
Of course, nobody could be certain, and it probably will be 50 years from now before you can draw final conclusions, if then. History by its very nature is always being rewritten. Not necessarily distorted, but the events are viewed from different perspectives, because we know where they led. 20 years from now, 50 years from now, you know where they led. Today we don’t. And so you draw out different elements that took place in the time- present, today, and you give them a different interpretation.

9:43
I didn’t mean to say that Mr. Putin is distorting things, but he is omitting something very important. There was considerable dissatisfaction within Russian elites over what little they knew about that peace treaty, because it seemed to confer far too many concessions to the Ukrainians. And so I don’t think that– I don’t think, I know– that Russian elites, the people who set the limits on what Mr. Putin can do, because it is a democracy, different from ours, but is a democracy, and Putin is responsible and answerable to a large swathes of the population.

And they were not happy with it. So that is as much as I can say. Was this decisive? Would it have been executed if Boris Johnson had not intervened? Would it have been executed if MI6 did not stage the Bucha massacre, to put at the door of the Russians and find an excuse for breaking up negotiations? Who knows? But the question has to be posed. And looking at media discussions today, it isn’t being posed.

Taylor:
So I get you, I mean that’s interesting, because the Ukrainians rejected even something that the Russian elites thought was too generous to them, which makes me wonder whether anything will be resolved now when Putin is likely to be even harder. I mean that he might satisfy his public opinion, but he’s certainly even less likely to satisfy the Ukrainians, although of course they’re now losing, they’re be more amenable to a deal.

Doctorow:
You’ve identified precisely the reason why I raised this question. It’s not an abstract, it’s not something picayune, something of minor– no, no, it’s something major in understanding where we are today. Can the sides reach an agreement when they’re so far apart?

Taylor:
I mean, just what do you think the Russians were trying to achieve in 2022? I mean, I was talking to another guest and I’m wondering whether the West was trying to put, it’s called a Zugzwang in chess apparently, trying to make your opponent have just bad choices. Whatever he does, it’s bad. So if Putin didn’t invade, they’d carry on the boiling-the-frog method of putting more CIA bases into Ukraine, giving Zelensky his lines about, you know, rearming and getting nukes, reinforcing the Black Sea bases, which the British navy could then get into. And if they, so they get worse and worse for Putin. But if he did invade, they’d hammer Russia with sanctions and they probably believe that they could destroy the Russian economy that way. So that’s the Zugzwang, apparently. And Putin could see this, and he acted on that. Would you agree with that?

Doctorow:
Let me, something, a point that I make at the very beginning of my book, which is worth repeating here. There were many explanations made by the Russians of why they went into the special military operation. And some of them were the ones that you are thinking now, which are national security issues.

Others you have not mentioned, but were also very prominent. And that was the Russian national defense, defense of Russian national interests of the speakers of Russian in Ukraine who had been subjected to oppression, to military strikes on their residences. And I’m speaking now about those provinces in the east of Ukraine who refused to accept the coup d’etat of February 2014 and who rebelled. These were then supported largely verbally, diplomatically, very little militarily, by Russia from 2014 on. And to protect them from an ethnic cleansing or genocide, which is one of the reasons why Putin went in, in February 2022.

He had– his intelligence told him that the Ukrainians were ready to pounce. They had concentrated 120,000, 150,000, more than half of their total military they had concentrated on the border with the rebelling provinces. And they had been armed to the teeth by their Western friends. And so [it was] supposed by Moscow that there was going to be a genocide. And they moved in on the same principles as the West moved into Libya of the right to defend or the obligation to defend and protect.

So that is a big aside to the … special military operation. It is important, because that is something that Mr. Putin can address to his public. It speaks to the heart. It is our people, our brothers, our sisters are facing a massacre.

14:52
They certainly are facing daily bombardment for the last eight years from the Kievan forces, meaning that 14,000 civilians in these rebelling provinces had been killed by, largely by artillery shells and short-range missiles fired by the Ukrainian government at the rebels in their residences, in their playgrounds, in their hospitals. So that plays to the, that message plays to the heartstrings of any people, and the Russian people included. The other side of it, which you were discussing, I think was what really drove this. It was the national security, if the British succeed in establishing naval bases within easy striking range of Sevastopol [ewhere] the Russian Navy had its Black Sea headquarters. If missiles, long-range missiles are put in by the Americans and others into Ukraine, then Russia faces a severe security risk.

But you can’t talk to your people about that. People do not, people anywhere, they are not moved by these issues of military balance, of raison d’etat, state interests. People do not take that up, send their sons, their fathers, their husbands out to possibly die for these reasons. When you say that it’s to preserve the lives of your distant relatives, and of course there are many intermarriages between Russians and Ukrainians of your distant relatives, your cousins, your father-in-law, whatever, in these areas of Ukraine, then people are willing to sacrifice their lives for that purpose. So there are several reasons, as I say.

Taylor:
Very good. And you’ve actually explained it. I mean, I didn’t know that the Ukrainians had gathered quite so many. But it’s interesting, because Zelensky was telling the world media that he wasn’t expecting the Russians to attack even as he must have known it because he was escalating on the border there although I did know that the OSCE the organization that was patrolling the border and monitoring the border showed a huge uptick in fire, on shellings, just before the February invasion, which no one in the West reported.

We’re just going to go into a break and back after the break.
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Taylor: 18:42
Welcome back to the Pelle Neroth Taylor Show. We’ve got Gilbert Doctorow with us, who’s just written a book of war diaries, which covers him as one of the few sort of geopolitical analysts out there who’s actually speaks Russian and has been to Russia and regularly during this special military operation. I think he’s got a flat in St. Petersburg and he wrote a contemporary, contemporaneous diary, which I think fills in some of the gaps because I said history, we’re always looking back, and we kind of, even the best historians create a post hoc reconstruction of events and yours has got the freshness of being written at the time, and you explained very … clearly what Putin’s motivations would have been there. I just, this Bucha massacre, what’s been worrying about me, I mean, since that happened, is whether the Brits or someone else will stage another false flag to create something else, right?

You know, I mean, that was to stop– that was to create opinion in the West against peace. Would they do something like that again, because if the stakes are so high, and that might bring us into what Merz is doing, you know, the German Chancellor, he’s provoking, or, you know, the Russians must be absolutely neuralgic about this, a German Chancellor, Lavrov has been calling, comparing him almost to Hitler, perhaps either firing, knocking down the Kerch bridge which is of huge symbolic value, or maybe even striking Moscow which would force Putin to listen to the public opinion and maybe strike Germany and then we’re into World War Three territory. What is Merz trying to do, and what are the Russians doing to combat that?

Doctorow: 20:11
Well, the Russians have very effective air defence. We have heard in the last week, just before Mr. Trump said that he didn’t know what got into Putin, that Putin is absolutely crazy. Before he said that, and the reason he said it, how justified in saying that, is that all Western media were reporting on the devastating strikes. These are combination strikes of drones and precision missiles, either ground-launched or air-launched from significant distances, either from the Black Sea or interior of Russia, against major cities, foremost of them Kiev, but also other cities around Ukraine in the last week, or particularly concentrated over last weekend.

What our Western media has not reported was what touched that off. Again, throughout the war, it’s been a, the coverage has been like in a kindergarten playground where the camera shows the fellow who punches the other kid back, but doesn’t show how he was punched first.

And that’s exactly what we have here. In the lead-up to these Russian revenge attacks– that’s what they call them openly, revenge attacks– the Ukrainians had fired more missiles, so it was like 2,000 to 2,500 missiles were fired, say 50-50 between the Russian-occupied eastern provinces of Ukraine and Russian Federation proper. In the latter category, many of them were concentrated on the city of Moscow. The Russians claimed that they knocked down, which means either they shot them down or they used electronic warfare to down them, to disarm the software guiding the drones.

These were drones. And everyone talks about how Ukraine needs missiles in order to do damage to Russia. Well, this is absolutely empty talk. The Ukrainians are doing very well, thank you, with long-range airplane-like, airplane-shaped drones. And they cover 1,000 kilometers or more.

So the idea of striking Moscow or striking industrial or residential cities in the middle of Russia doesn’t require a missile. They’re doing very well with drones, and drones are actually harder to locate, to identify and to destroy than missiles are. So in that sense the Russians were very, very upset about 2,400 drones swarming. And although they nearly were all downed, that doesn’t tell you this whole story. We all know that drone attacks lead to deaths and damage, not from the drone hitting the target, but from the pieces of a destroyed drone coming down to earth.

And so there were deaths among civilians in Russia, even as the Russian military could claim that their air defenses stopped all the drones. And the response was what I’ve said. Russians say that they concentrated their efforts on identifiable military targets as confirmed by reconnaissance drones. And they’ve shown on television just what damage they did to this airport which was used to launch F-16s that themselves launched Storm Shadow missiles against Russia or against a container ship in the port of Odessa which had 100 containers of various assemblies for making highly high-powered drones, kamikaze drones. This type of site was destroyed.

And you’ve seen pictures of it. And then the Ukrainians are rushing to our press to say that the Russians have struck civilian targets. The numbers speak for themselves. If the Russians indeed launched in three days from this last weekend 1,000 or more drones and missiles. The Ukrainians speak of 13 or 30 civilian deaths.

What they don’t speak about of course is military deaths, which were, one can assume substantial because among the targets were barracks of mercenaries, French mercenaries, by the way, and Ukrainian armed forces. But civilian deaths, 30. This is negligible.

Taylor:
It’s incredible. I mean, it’s the … war with the least number of civilian deaths in history probably isn’t it? And the aim of this, of course, was to break up the peace talks between Russia and the rapprochement between Russia and the United States with the assistance of the Western media which just reports on what the Russians did and then allows Merz to say, sort of evoke pictures of terror bombings of World War Two somehow, and then maybe get those bone-crunching sanctions and then break off relations between Trump and Putin because the media– because Trump seemed quite surprised by what– when some reporter pointed out that the Ukrainians had struck first.

25:58
We’ve just got time for one last question, although I’d love to continue for longer. A lot of the independent media are kind of gone sour on Trump, you know. They say they feel he’s a traitor and that he’s listening to his neocons. But you made an interesting point.

Check out Gilbert Doctorow dot com for your essays and your transcripts of your interviews. You make the point that he’s actually a brave man and he knows what he’s doing. He probably knows much more than what people attribute to him. So you said this is the man who approved closing down USAID, the main instrument for regime change paid for by the CIA. The man who’s decapitated the US intelligence agencies now purging the State Department, who’s scaling back the National Security Council from a bloated 200 staff under Biden to a headcount of 60.

The man who’s doing all this cannot be a buffoon. He is a brave man, knowing what he’s doing and probably throwing out a lot of chaff to confuse people and his enemies while being kind of laser focused, you know, playing the buffoon but like he knows what he’s doing. Can you just expand on that for about a minute or two?

Doctorow:
Trump talks a lot. Trump talks too much. But his talk is intended to confuse people. He’s not confused, I assure you. And I’ve said the thing about Trump is follow what he does, not don’t follow what he says. What he says is intended to disarm his opponents, to let them believe that he’s a buffoon and that they can influence him and bring him around to their positions. If they believe that, then they don’t stick a dagger in his back. And that is what it’s all about.

But when you look at what he’s done, you just enumerated the things he’s done. He didn’t even talk about them. They, in fact, are destroying the power base of neocons in the federal government. And people heard about them because, oh, yes, because Elon Musk is saving money.

That was also a cover. Why exactly is the first place he looked to save money to close down USAID, which was the main instrument for CIA money to stage color revolutions around the world? So trust Trump that he’s no fool. He is not a likeable personality. I’m not praising him for his egotism and his in-your-face behavior, but he’s saving our lives.

And he’s certainly saving free speech, despite contradictions about about free speech over … Gaza and so forth. That’s all he’s [crazy for].

Taylor:
But I mean– sometimes I disagree with him over Gaza– but I mean if he stops the war in Ukraine, at least thank him for that. And there’s some people in independent media so blinded by his apparent kowtowing to Zionism that they can’t credit him for for Ukraine. Anyway, maybe that’s for another time or do you want to say some last thing?

Doctorow:
Well, it’s the last point. It’s all politics. I, He is, his feet are pointing now towards disengagement with Israel, not just with Netanyahu. But the question is, how can he put through his peace plan on Russia and Ukraine, or how can he withdraw the United States from that conflict, as he says he would like to do, without having political capital?

You don’t do anything without political capital in the federal government. And if he were to do the decent thing, the honest thing, and to denounce what Israel is doing in Gaza for what it is, genocide, he would lose in one day all of his political capital and would be able to do nothing to save you, me and the rest of the world from a third world war over Ukraine.

Taylor: 29:35
Absolutely. I agree with all that. Amen to that. Thank you so much, sir. It’s incredibly interesting discussion there. Gilbert Doctorow, you can see the name at the bottom with a dot com. You’ll find your website and you Google that, go to Amazon. I guess you can find that and in many good bookstores Thank you so much, sir.

This is the Pelle Neroth Taylor Show, and we’ll be back after the break.