A busy day of interviews with Indian television

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Global broadcasters are straining their in-house resources to make sense of what Trump, Putin, Zelensky and the European Coalition of the Willing are doing and saying to promote a diplomatic solution to the Russia-Ukraine war. In these circumstances, they are turning to outside geopolitical analysts like myself to add value to their coverage.

I discovered the old rule of this game in 2016 in Russia, when the U.S. presidential election and the Trump victory made me the darling of Russian talk shows on multiple channels. Once you are presented by one broadcaster, the others are quick to seek time with you as well. And then you are in their collective press pool – until world news moves on to other topics and you are dropped as quickly as you were acquired.

At WION, India’s largest news broadcaster in English with 10 million subscribers, where I first appeared more than a year ago and had established a very good rapport with one of their program hosts, the invitations to appear there thinned out about six months ago. At the same time, I noticed that they were putting up more videos on youtube featuring their own staff. That seems to have ended two weeks ago when preparations began for the Alaska summit. Now for the second time in 10 days I was phoned by their producers to join them for an on-air chat about the evolving situation around Ukraine. The program host who asked to be linked with me on LinkedIn six months ago was back and ready to party. I am waiting for them to send me the link to what we recorded this morning and will then post it here.

Virtually at the same time today, I got a request from another well-known Indian broadcaster, Firstpost. Wikipedia tells us that “Firstpost is an Indian news website owned by the Network18 Group, which also runs CNN-News18 and CNBC TV18.”

What I will say is the Firstpost interviewer is a top professional and that it was a pleasure for me to chat with him as I hope it will be a pleasure for the Community to watch this. The subject, of course, is where the negotiations for peace in Ukraine are headed, whether Putin and Zelensky will actually meet face to face and much more

©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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