This interview focused on the issues I laid out in an essay this morning, namely whether the intense discussions on Russian state television news and commentary shows these past few days of the way Russia is now perceived in the West as weak, indecisive and incapable of prosecuting its war in Ukraine to victory suggest that a coup is being plotted to remove Putin from office and replace him with a more decisive and assertive leader or whether Putin himself is preparing the Russian public for a sharp change from his policy of war of attrition to a decapitation strike against Kiev that ends the war instantly.
The present remilitarization in the EU threatens Russia with a major war in three years time if it does not finish off Ukraine now and then come to terms with the USA on normalized relations. Meanwhile, the war of attrition may face extension for a year or more given Europe’s plans to provide massive aid to Kiev using money from frozen Russian assets.
The current discussion among Russian elites about whether a change in course is needed has been provoked directly by Donald Trump and his Vice President J.D. Vance, by their open denigration of Russia as a ‘paper tiger.’ In this sense, I say that Trump is acting as a peacemaker but not in the sense most of mainstream has in mind
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 