Transcript of Conversation with Glenn Diesen, edition of 27 September

Transcript submitted by a reader

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

Diesen: 0:00
Welcome back to the program. We are joined today by Gilbert Doktorow, an historian, international affairs analyst and author of _War Diaries – the Russian-Ukraine War_. So I remember the last time Trump was ramping up the pressure and rhetoric against the Russians. He gave them 12 days to accept an unconditional ceasefire. Otherwise the response would be crushing.

This of course, the prospect of America going, if not to war with Russia, but at least putting its might behind the attempt of crushing Russia created a lot of excitement. And then the 12 days expired, they met in Alaska and Trump took the unconditional ceasefire off the table. I was wondering now we’ve seen this display at United Nations. We see the same rhetoric, the Russians are losing, Ukraine is winning, will get back all its territory. And while you’re at it, why not take some Russian territory and shoot the Russian jets out of the sky.

1:11
And yet again, the Europeans are very excited. Finally, America is joining, becoming more directly involved at least, already quite involved. How are you assessing this development?

Doctorow:
Well, before I begin, I’d like to congratulate you for putting on air very divergent opinions coming from different experts or people who are being watched on alternative media. An hour ago, I caught the first part of your interview this morning with Jeffrey Sachs.

And what I’m about to say sharply diverges with his interpretation of it. The general position within alternative media of Sachs is very well known, and with good reason, and has a very wide following with good reason. I am much less known with good reason, and my views could be described as an outlier on what we’re about to discuss. I think it would be very informative for viewers to juxtapose, to watch these two different interpretations when each of us has been asked this question by yourself.

2:32
Jeffrey Sachs said that the performance of Mr. Trump at the United Nations was a colossal failure of leadership. I disagree entirely. But behind this is not just my opinion on that one issue and his opinion on that one issue, but where we both stand on everything about Mr. Trump, since it is not widely discussed that Mr. Sachs is a globalist by definition, given his position at Columbia University.

He is a Green movement supporter, since his whole career the last 30 years has been support of sustainability. And Mr. Trump in his speeches at the UN trashed both positions, both globalism, particularly the aspect of it relating to open borders, and very specifically trashed the Green movement. So we’re coming from very different positions on Mr. Trump in general.

3:21
But let’s look at what happened this week in his speech and in Trump’s answer to reporters regarding the shoot-down of Russian jets violating airspace; and the likelihood that Mr. Zelensky will succeed in recapturing his territory, thanks to, with the help he’ll be receiving from the European Union.

Now, Jeffrey Sachs was denouncing Trump for his lack of candor and for his not explaining to the American people the basis of his policy and for being duplicitous. My position is that if Mr. Trump did any of those things, he’d be impeached and removed from office within a few weeks.

His policy on Russia, unlike his policy on the Green movement or open borders, has little or no support within MAGA. It has still less support, in fact is vehemently opposed by the majority of congressmen and by the majority of the American political establishment. For that reason, there is no candor in his speech. There is duplicity, double talk, and he’s leading people on. This was my first conclusion regarding his remarks [in] respect of the likelihood of Mr. Zelensky winning the war against Russia. There was an initial reaction among European leaders of glee. It was not just Lindsey Graham in the States who was taken in by this. It was all of the European top leadership, whether it’s Merz or Starmer or Macron. Macron was sitting next to Trump, and looked very pleased to hear Trump say that he really thinks Zelensky can succeed.

5:42
Well, that was the initial reaction. After a bit of time and reflection and after people like the _Financial Times_ came out and said, Hey by the way, it could be that Mr. Trump’s word shouldn’t be taken at face value and that in fact he is setting the stage for an American off-ramp and for Europe to be blamed, because there will be a blame game for the eventual defeat, capitulation of Ukraine.

Well that has now become a consensus view within the spokespeople for the European Union, like Kaja Kallas, who came out and said precisely that. That– well, not precisely. What she said was that Ukraine cannot succeed with the help of the European Union alone.

6:32
That is a hint, hint, that the United States should be part of the party, of the group. But it suggests that they now understand that they have been taken for fools or as one reader of my recent essay said, that Mr. Trump was trolling them, which is indeed my view of the situation. If he said openly that he expects Mr. Zelensky to be defeated and so on, he would find enormous resistance within all of Congress. So that’s the game he’s playing.

Also the question of the “paper tiger” remark, an insult to the Russians. Indeed, some Russian readers of my interviews as they’re translated into Russian by one or another Russian internet platform have said that this was an insult to Putin.

Well, let me give my brief explanation. Mr. Trump wants to be a peacemaker. He wants the war to end. And he’s been told by all sides that he must pressure Mr. Putin. I believe he is pressuring Mr. Putin. And this taunt of Russia being a paper tiger was part of the pressure techniques of Donald Trump on Mr. Putin, but not in the sense that the European leaders and many in Congress would like it to be. The taunt is, “Vladimir, get it over with now. Crush Ukraine now.”

8:25
Now, I said in a recent interview that it could be done if Mr. Putin took out the Oreshniks and destroyed Bankovskaya Ulitsa, the street in downtown Kiev, where most of the government offices are. A Russian, one Russian reader and commentator said, you’re 100% right. At first, for a Russian to write that is rather brave. That’s to be taken to be a Putin critic or an Eno agent. But that is the message that Mr. Trump is delivering.

Diesen: 9:11
It is interesting though that the peacemaker is not always able to make peace because it’s a fear of being a sign of weakness. So for example, you saw toward the end of the Cold War when Reagan wanted to open up talks with the Soviets and discuss how to improve relations and have more peace. It would have been very difficult for a dove to get away with this, but he was the hardliner and no one could accuse him of being soft on the Russians.

So given that he had that reputation for being a bit of a hawk, he had the political capital to go and actually talk and try to make peace. I mean, you could say the same with the way the Russians gave territorial concessions to the Chinese. For Yeltsin, that would have been impossible because he was seen as weak, he would have been almost treasonous. No one saw Putin as weak. So he was able to make a lot of agreements which laid the foundation for more stable and stronger relations with the Chinese.

10:21
I guess my point is you might be onto something there because you do have to, it’s very difficult to make peace if you’re seen as peacemakers given that they’re seen as weak. It could be good as playing the hawk at times. I must say though, there is some dishonesty. It’s not [exclusive] to Trump either though. The whole idea that when he says yes, Ukraine can win, nobody really believes this.

And given that their reaction was wait, he’s just trying to blame us for the Ukraine failure. So obviously the Europeans don’t think that Ukraine is winning either. It’s just one of these things you have to say to pledge loyalty to the narrative that keeps the war going. So we’re all chanting, yes, the war was unprovoked, the Ukraine is winning, they’re having low casualties, Russia has these human waves, Zelensky is just super democratic. I mean, this is what you have to say to give support for prolonging the war.

11:20
But the thing is that there’s no honesty anywhere though. Everyone is just lying to support the narrative which makes it impossible to come up with a peace agreement and instead to keep the war going. How do you assess though Starmer, Macron, von der Leyen and Merz? What are their positions? Because I saw Mr. Tusk, the Prime Minister of Poland, take to Twitter that he realized, wait, we might be getting played here. That is Trump is trying to hand over responsibility for the Ukraine war to us. I mean, I guess they wouldn’t panic in such a way if they actually thought that the war was going their way. I mean, why would you want to take responsibility if you actually think you’re winning?

12:15
Well, they are so heavily invested in all of this tripe, all of this nonsense, that it’s very difficult for them, particularly since they moved locked arms. And they are very critical of any member of the 27 countries that breaks ranks as Fico in Slovakia and Urbán in Hungary have done. So they will make a move, but they’re putting it off and putting it off, a move towards reality, to get out of the bubble.

Let me be very precise about duplicitousness and lying to the public or false words that Mr. Trump is spreading. That is in one area, maybe in a few other areas, but the area that is of note is his policy on Ukraine, the Ukraine-Russia war, and on what he expects American relations with Russia to be after the war.

13:20
He doesn’t dare set that out in a straightforward, honest, candid way. For the reason I just said, he would lose all of his political support and become a lame-duck president instantly, if not impeached, if that’s what he did. At the same time, his speech to the UN was perfectly candid and honest and showed leadership. Whether you like the direction of his leadership is another question; that’s a personal choice of anyone who’s listening. But he was perfectly candid in expressing his heartfelt thoughts about open borders, about the renewables as a substitute for traditional fossil fuels.

And he was perfectly honest and candid, if anyone bothered to listen to the end of his speech about a multipolar world. Why do I say that? He established that it is the obligation of heads of state and heads of government to look after the prosperity of their peoples and to give support to the traditions, the national traditions of each country, which established the uniqueness and the sovereignty of those countries. My goodness, that is a complete break with the underlying principles of the neocons and of globalism. And that was speaking from the heart. Oh, he does have a heart, and he just speak from it, but not on Ukraine and Russia.

Diesen: 15:11
But I hear what you’re saying. John Mersheimer, he’s also, he interpreted it in the same way that this was this statement, which was very belligerent on paper and rhetoric. What it effectively did was to wash Trump’s hands of the Ukraine war. And I thought this was convincing because when he said, well go shoot down Russian jets, but you know, America won’t participate and you can put crushing sanctions on Russia and secondary sanctions, which will also crush Europe. But you know, you go first and then we’ll join later.

Yeah, we’ll send all the weapons, they can retake all the territory, but you know, You have to buy them from us. And they don’t really have the money. America don’t have the weapons and the Ukrainians don’t have the soldiers. So one, one, I guess I found your argument in your article quite convincing in this sense. But I do have to say though that words, they do matter though, and the rhetoric can be quite dangerous.

16:22
This whole argument of striking deeper inside Russia, they’re going to send more weapons. That’s one of the things that made Lindsey Graham just giddy like a little schoolgirl that now America wouldn’t put any limits on weapons. So you’re going to have this long- range missile striking deep inside Russia, which is effectively then an American attack on Russia, and with the Russian jets as well. I mean, once those words have been uttered, they have to be taken into account by Russia. And again, they made it very clear if anyone in Europe thinks about firing upon a Russian jet, then it’s war. There’s no other path. So it seems that the rhetoric nonetheless is intensifying, though.

Doctorow: 17:08
It would be troublesome if there were anything true, the claims and the demands and the … fists in the air from European leaders. What Trump was doing was calling their bluff, and it is a bluff because he knows and they know that they don’t have the wherewithal to do anything without the United States. And it also is calling the bluff of the Americans, the people under him who are saying to him and he then repeats, oh we will ship 3,000 missiles to Ukraine, so that they can strike deep.

Well, that issue has been taken up by Russian analysts on air, on state television, and they insist: these weapons haven’t been produced yet. We’re speaking about something two years, three years from now. When Trump said he’s going to ship them, he didn’t say when. Oh, he said when, but it wasn’t serious. It is not going to be in three weeks.

18:11
Therefore, this belligerency that seemed apparent and that could have made people like Lindsey Graham delighted is also a bluff, and empty talk. In the meantime, Mr. Putin, the lawyer– He is a trained lawyer after all, who doesn’t want to take an action that is no longer a military, special military operation, but in fact an act of war. He doesn’t want to do that without the authorization, specific authorization of his parliament.

That man, the lawyer, is working at odds with the man who is the supreme commander-in-chief of the Russian armed forces, which also was named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. So we have this contradiction at the top of Russia, and it should be resolved. It has been lingering and lingering.

Diesen: 19:15
Yeah, well, Zelensky was making some comments that he might hit, I’m not sure if he was going to hit Moscow with Tomahawks, something along those lines. But I saw a report, I haven’t had it verified, but I read that the Tomahawks are not forthcoming.

So again, this would also be something that would cause a direct war between NATO and Russia. So I guess there is some, behind the wild rhetoric, there seems still to be some common sense.

But on the issue of common sense, what do you see actually happening now at the moment? I mean, you followed the war very carefully with your war diaries And there’s been, you know, gradual unraveling over time.

We tried to patch up the holes with new weapons, more aggressive recruitment strategies in Ukraine. But at the moment, there’s some, a lot of regions now which are being encircled, not just Pokrovsk or Konstantinivka, but Kupiansk, that might be the most critical one. There’s a lot of problems building up, Also the Zaporizhzhya front, which is now being closed off both from the West and the East. But once countries get desperate, and you did say the Europeans, they committed themselves fully to this. And if there is no diplomatic path, I’m always worried that desperation translates into stupidity, and there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of that at this moment in Europe.

So what do you see happening? I ask because I see the Russians now shipping Oreshniks to Belarus. So I’m not sure if they will know something we don’t know yet.

Doctorow: 21:15
Well, to a couple of things. First, to ease the difficulty of listeners to this. Kopyansk is what has been described as a major fortified outpost of Ukraine. It is a logistical hub, yes, but it is also a city protecting Kharkov. It’s part of the Russian strategy of taking Kharkov without a ground assault on Kharkov that could be very costly in civilian deaths. And after all, Kharkov is not just the second-largest city in Ukraine, but it is essentially a Russian-speaking city. So they would be killing their own people if they came in and stormed the city.

So they are going to encircle Kharkov and taking Kupyansk is a big part of it. They do this very dramatically by using underground pipelines from the Soviet era, gas pipelines, to again bring in secretly their own troops. Some of them, these pipes are pretty big because I was told that some of the Russian forces were riding motorcycles or scooters through these pipes. Anyway, It was a very dramatic event. They already have their troops in the center of Kupyansk and they’re cleaning it out.

22:40
This is an important development for the Northeast because this area, Kharkov, was a staging ground for the attacks on the Russian frontier or border provinces, oblasts, Belgorad and Kursk. Moreover, very specifically, the 700 soldiers whom the Russians are said to have encircled inside Kopyansk, Ukrainian soldiers, a large number of them were what was called, or is called, the Russian Volunteer Army, or Corps, which were precisely the people, defectors from Russia, who were armed and sent in by the Ukrainians to commit acts of terror and murder civilians in the first Ukrainian incursion on border areas, which was approximately one year ago, and before the Kursk action, Belgorod. So the Russians are very keen to murder all of them. I think they’ve taken out 250 out of division, 750.


23:51
But that is not the main front. The main front, as you said, is in the Donetsk oblast, and that is where the Russians are advancing and are likely to do in the city of Pakrovsk, which is known in Russian as Krasnoyarmesk, are something similar to what they’re doing now in Kupyansk. And yet there are other things afoot. You’ve mentioned Zaporozhzhye, yes, but there’s something more, I think, more important for us to understand how this war will end, that’s now being discussed on Russian television. And that is the need to take Odessa, because Odessa is rather close. If you look at the map, in maritime terms, it is that close to Crimea.

24:40
And the British and French have looked at Odessa as a key base for precisely that. So the Russians now are also turning their attention to Odessa to be captured. And if they capture it, then this tells you a lot about how the war will end, because once the rump Ukraine does not have Odessa, it loses much of its interest for Britain and France. So this is the way the war is going.

But all of this is going terribly slowly and the world doesn’t stand still. This is why I believe Mr. Trump is pushing Putin to get it over with by some stunning act, like an Oreshnik attack on Kiev that that decapitates the Kiev regime.

Diesen: 25:42
So you think the decapitation strike could be forthcoming; that is, as the frontlines are falling apart to add to the confusion, just go directly after Kiev. Because, well, so far the Russians, well, I wouldn’t say they haven’t touched Kiev because they have increased a lot, especially lately. But it wouldn’t be so popular even within Russia given the historical role of Kiev in Russian history as the origin from Kievan Rus. But do you think such a decapitation strike could come in the foreseeable future?

Doctorow: 26:26
Well, first of all, for one thing, having the Oreshnik takes away a big objection to attacking Kiev. They’re not going to wipe out the Lavada, the very famous and important Russian Orthodox Church-history monastery and repository of the holy relics and remains of Russian saints. They don’t have to do much damage to Kiev as a whole. They just have to wipe out and go deep to get to the safekeeping places of underground of Mr. Zelensky and his close circle on Bankovskaya Urizen and one or two other locations. So the material damage to Kiev would be minimal.

Is it capitation? I think that much depends on Mr. Trump. If he were, for example, to really step up sanctions, do something that severely interrupts the Russian economy, which is within his power, so he can do some nasty things. That might just push Putin to do what he otherwise should be doing, which is to go from this war of attrition, which can go on much too long, to finishing up the Zelensky regime. We’ll see.

Diesen: 27:55
I thought there was a big chance of something like this happening after the attack on Russia’s nuclear forces, that this was something that they couldn’t, yeah, something that would put an end to the attrition warfare. But yet, they seem to continue the same approach.

My last question, though, I just wanted to ask about this recent tensions between the Europeans and Russia. Because I had on also two days ago, I did an interview with Colonel Douglas Macgregor, who was previously an advisor to the US Secretary of Defense.

And he argued that in conversation with different people from US intelligence that they kind of dismissed this as being a European hoax. They were exaggerating. The Estonians especially were not credible. They argued that Poland, you know, they more or less, not more or less, they did very openly admit that there was no warheads on this.

Of course, the Russians, they go further. They say, of course, there’s no warheads, but also these weren’t ours. They were sent by Ukraine. Again, I don’t sit on any evidence here, so it’s not for me to say. But what do you make of these tensions though? Because even if it is Russia doing it to perhaps send a signal that we can also bring the war to you.

Even if this is the case, I’m a bit not perplexed, but I take note of the European excitement in this that they can almost show the smoking gun coming from Russia that now we have some legitimacy to step this up or pull the Americans in. I’m not really sure. Yeah, even in this country there, because I’m in Norway, and Oslo, they thought they saw drones. It’s like, oh, Russia, Russia.

29:52
And at the end of the day, they’re not sure if it was a drone. And the next day they arrested someone on a different drone, but you know, he’s a Norwegian. So it doesn’t make any sense. But this impulse always to run into this almost excitement that now finally the Russians have attacked us, now we can do something. It is very strange to me.

Doctorow:
Well, none of us knows for sure, and I doubt that the truth behind this will be known for decades, but we come at it from our own conceptualizations. And my conceptualization is that this fits in line with a typical false-flag operation designed and partly executed by the British, by MI6. I look at timing. Timing is important. In the case of Estonia, Kaja Kallas herself said a week ago, you know the Russians have made these incursions four times this year.

Okay. Why didn’t you say anything before? Why is it coming up now? Why suddenly out of nowhere is Norway coming? Why suddenly is Denmark and the Prime Minister, by the way, not the military, the military are much more cautious in Denmark. They say they have no idea where this is coming from, and it could come from a ship in the Baltic Sea. It could be anybody’s ship.

But it’s the real Russophobe prime minister of Denmark who said, oh, we can’t rule out Russia. OK. I believe MI6 is behind this, because it fits the pattern. If you go back over the last decade, every time there is some kind of big false-flag operation, whether it was in Syria or in Russia, relating to Russia, it coincides with something.

Well, the murder, death, of Alexei Navalny. It came what, a week before the Munich Security Conference, when his widow had already been prepared to come to speak. Well, that’s interesting. But it was a setup. Who had access to him in the far north?

Well, the Brits have a very extensive system of espionage and activities across Russia, particularly with the assistance of people who can pass for Russians, Russians speaking Ukrainians who worked with them, as well as Ukrainian intelligence. And I said at the time that Navani was killed by the Brits. I say at this time that what we’ve seen is a British plot; aided and supported by the Ukrainians, who are fully in on this, because it brought to the attention of Europeans how useful Ukraine can be in supplying them with its unique technology and hardware to intercept, to destroy cheaply, not at $50,000 a missile, a $20,000 drone coming from Russia. That was very convenient for Mr. Zelensky.

33:01
But more broadly, and then the whole idea of a drone wall, which was one of the results of this whole operation. A drone wall for all of Europe with the Ukrainians as part of this. That’s one result. But the timing, again, for me is a big indicator. This came, this whole story about the supposedly Russian drones attacking Poland and Romania, then the Russian military jets in incursion in over Estonian airspace, all of that comes at the tail end and just after Zapad 25.

This joint exercises of Belarus and Russia held every four years. That just was ending with 100,000 Russian soldiers with 25 foreign delegations, many of them quite important and obviously prospective customers for Russian military gear and for security arrangements with Russia, for money of course. And it is very convenient to start this new “Russia Russia Russia” chant to direct attention away from that big Russian success in Zapad 25.

Diesen: 34:18
It’s, yeah, behind the empty rhetoric slogans in the media, there is a more complex reality, I guess. So thank you so much for taking time out of your Saturday to speak. I always very much appreciate your perspectives.

Doctorow:
Well, I very much appreciate your exposing the audience to divergent views, which they have a right and a need to get.