Transcript of Press TV ‘Spotlight,’ 3 October

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.urmedium.net/c/presstv/134767

PressTV: 0:14
Hello and welcome to “Spotlight”. Tensions between Russia and NATO are escalating once again with Moscow warning the US about the potential deployment of long-range missiles to Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed that such a move would mark a new stage of escalation in the conflict, significantly raising the stakes between Washington and Moscow. Putin also expressed concern over Europe’s increasing militarization, particularly Germany’s plans to strengthen its military and warrant a retaliatory measures. As NATO member states pledge to boost military spending, Russia insists that these actions, coupled with the flow of weapons to Ukraine, are fueling the war. Moscow maintains that NATO, not Russia, is responsible for the ongoing conflict and the rising tensions in Ukraine.

Story by Hamid Shahbazi: 1:06
Tensions between Moscow and NATO countries are once again on the rise over the war in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his latest speech, warned the US about the potential supply of long-range missiles to Ukraine, saying that it will mark a completely new stage of escalation between Washington and Moscow.

Putin:
Using Tomahawks without the direct participation of American military personnel is impossible. This would mark a completely new, qualitatively new stage of escalation, including in relations between Russia and the United States.

Shahbazi:
The comments come shortly after it was reported that the White House has approved intelligence sharing with Ukraine, while weighing up whether to send Tomahawk cruise missiles to Kiev.

The supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles, which are known to have a range of at least 2,500 kilometers, would significantly boost Ukraine’s ability to strike Russian targets. Russian President Vladimir Putin also expressed frustration over Europe’s military buildup, noting that he is monitoring the trend and warned of retaliatory measures.

Putin: 2:14
We are closely monitoring the rising militarization of Europe. In Germany, for example, they’re talking about how the German army should once again be the most powerful in Europe. Well, we’re listening carefully, watching what exactly they mean. Retaliatory measures by Russia will not take long. The response to such threats will be very significant.

Shahbazi:
He accused Europe of stoking hysteria to justify rising military spending and said Russia is not a threat. In June, NATO member countries have pledged to nearly triple their military spending under pressure from US President Donald Trump, deepening militarization across Europe despite ongoing social and economic strains.

NATO claims its military buildup is for self-defense. But Russia argues that it is this very buildup, along with the constant supply of weapons to Ukraine, that is fueling the war. Moscow insists that NATO’s actions, rather than any Russian attack, are the real cause of the conflict, and warns that continued militarization will provoke significant retaliation, with Russia holding the West responsible for escalating tensions in Ukraine.

PressTV: 3:23
Joining us on tonight’s “Spotlight”, we have radio host and journalist at CPR News, Mr. Don Debar joining us from New York.

And we also have independent international affairs analyst, Mr. Gilbert Doctorow, who’s joining us from Brussels.

Gentlemen, welcome to the program. So the Russian president, we’re going to start off with Mr. Debar, New York. The Russian president has warned against Europe’s escalating militarization amid this conflict with Ukraine. Vladimir Putin said effectively all NATO states are at war with Moscow right now, and his country is going to respond to any threat against its security. Break down the recent warning from Putin.

Debar:
Well, here in the US, to me, the most significant part of it was that he reminded the world that the United States came through World War II unscathed because of the two oceans that separated it from the European and Asian wars, and that these would not be a barrier to the US’s full participation in a response from Russia to the threat. In other words, we’re getting to the point where they’re talking about trading missiles back and forth across the oceans.

And we know what those missiles carry. And in fact, because we can’t know what they carry while they’re in transit, everyone that goes off the ground, the other party has to assume it’s carrying a nuclear warhead and respond in kind while they’re able to. This is the policy and the doctrine they followed for many years. Now, we’re looking back to 1962, October, what’s it, 63 years now, and because the Soviet Union had installed some mid-ranged nuclear weapons missiles in Cuba which was 90 miles off, I’d say analogous to the location of Ukraine, the United States directed, but it said basically, number one, any missile launched from Cuba against anyone else in the world considered launched by the USSR against the United States and will see a full retaliatory response. And secondly, that the missiles had to be removed or there would be an invasion, you know, a full-scale invasion by the US of Cuba.

6:00
Now the analogy here is strong enough, but we were talking then about missiles that could only reach, say, from Washington, D.C., to Dallas, Chicago, maybe, or somewhere inside that kind of range, not the entire U.S., not New York, etc. And you had launch time, you know, there was a lot of time, relatively speaking, between launch and when these things would land. Now we’re talking, okay, when I was in Moscow in 1990, they installed cruise missiles in Germany, much further than Ukraine, and the time was 18 minutes from launch to its arrival in the Kremlin. So there’s a hair trigger here that didn’t exist 63 years ago, many more weapons, and the United States is behaving in a belligerent fashion across the board talking about that open war, and that was not the condition in 1962. This is the scariest moment in human history.

PressTV: 7:01
Gilbert Doctorow, Putin accused European nations of fueling instability by increasing military spending and deepening integration under NATO. What is the end game for Europe here, in your opinion? Russia has in the past said that Washington has subjugated Europe in order to wage war against Moscow. What does a winning scenario look like for Europe?

Doctorow: 7:27
Regrettably, remarks that you’ve been quoting come from yesterday’s speech by Vladimir Putin at the Valdai Discussion Club gathering in Sochi. What was regrettable about it is that he has backed away from his own red lines of a year ago. He, in the speech, he was essentially saying, good Americans, bad Europeans. The part that you just asked me to comment on is the bad Europeans. I would like to put attention also to the good Americans.

Mr. Putin was very solicitous and very careful to please Mr. Trump. And this was an alarming aspect of his appearance in the speech and more importantly in the question and answers. You in Iran must be particularly interested in what he had to say about Trump’s 20-point peace plan, which he approved. You in Iran must be particularly interested in his calling the unindicted war criminal Tony Blair an “experienced statesman”, whom he had spent a day or more together with in his residence back at the beginning of the millennium. Well, I’m sorry, this was too big an effort to please Trump, which cannot end well.

PressTV: 9:02
Right. Don Debar, Putin warned that supplying US Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine would lead to a whole new level of escalation, including in the Moscow-Washington relations. Where does that scenario lead to? Ukraine sought these missiles since the Biden administration, but the US rejected that over fears of escalation. Is it likely to happen now?

Debar:
I mean, it’s difficult to tell what’s going to happen. It’s so volatile. And it’s also difficult to know in many, like in some fundamental ways, what’s really going on. There is an apparent– “rift” is a kind way of putting it– in the ruling circles here in the United States, with Trump sitting in the White House and almost everybody else treating him as the enemy, And the population divided somewhere around 50-50 on this. And when Trump ran for president, he ran, he promised that this war would come to an end in 24 hours. But certainly he conveyed the idea strongly and intentionally and rather blatantly that it wasn’t going to be escalated but rather shouldn’t be going on and was going to come to a halt as soon as he could get his hands on it.

Either that’s true or it’s not, in terms of his intent. And then it’s either possible or not for him, but then the question becomes if he’s removed, because this is one of the strongest bases of the support that keeps him in office in the face of the apparent onslaught from all the other political quarters, then if he loses that support, who comes into office?

It’s not going to be anyone who’s ever mentioned that they shouldn’t have a war with Russia. And everyone else in this country, in terms of the ruling circles, they’re belligerent as hell towards Russia and support everything that is offered in terms of dealing with it. You look to Lindsey Graham, for example, as sort of the center of opinion outside of Trump’s White House.

PressTV: 11:19
Gilbert Doctorow, let’s discuss these two serious potential escalations. One we mentioned earlier, the supplying of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine. And the other is the talk of seizing Russian cargo ships on the high seas. How do you see Russia responding to these situations?

Doctorow:
Like a wimp. This is exactly what I’m talking about. By ingratiating himself with Donald Trump or attempting to, Mr. Putin is playing a very dangerous game. He said one year ago, this question of Tomahawk– well, they weren’t named– but of long- range American missiles being supplied to Ukraine was discussed directly by Vladimir Putin. And he said– he didn’t say what he said yesterday, that this would be an escalation. He said that this would make the United States a co-belligerent and we would have the right to strike them, strike them militarily.

He has backed down yesterday from that important red line, which suggests to Europeans and also to people like Lindsey Graham in the States and all of the hostile people to Donald Trump in the States, that Mr. Putin is indeed a paper tiger. That is a terrible thing for him to have done yesterday. As regards the second threat, I don’t agree that it’s the seizure of tankers. That is an ongoing threat. Generally speaking, the NATO countries are trying to establish a blockade, a sea blockade and an air blockade on the Baltic for Russia.

13:01
That is, under ordinary understanding, an act of war. And it is high time for Russia to say openly, gentlemen, this is an act of war, and we will go to war with you if you persist. So it is also with the seizure of Russian state assets that are frozen. What is now being discussed by the EU is very clever, but it’s too clever by a half. They’re not seizing the assets outright, but they’re calling them collateral for a loan to Ukraine, which will never be paid back.

In effect, it is seizing those assets. It is high time, if Russia has any self-respect, to say to Europe, “Seizure of state assets like these is, by international law, an act of war. And we declare war on you.”

The point is that Russia now has a military advantage over NATO and over Western Europe. That advantage is being diminished day by day as Europe spends this $150 billion in arms improvements, as Mr. Merz in Germany spends his one trillion euros to make Germany the biggest military force in Western Europe. And that will reach a culmination three or four years from now when Europe says it will be ready to fight a war with Russia. It is not ready now, which is to say that if Mr. Putin wants to defend Russia, he should do it now, not three years from now.

PressTV: 14:35
Okay, Mr. Debar, would you like to add anything to what Mr. Doctorow said, whether you agree with him or not? And of course, regarding the “paper tiger” comment, which just came up as well, Vladimir Putin hit back at that at the US President. He said, “If we’re fighting all of NATO and we’re a paper tiger, then what does that make NATO?”

Debar:
Well, I agree with Mr. Doctorow on facts and on his analysis, and I respectfully disagree about the conclusions, because [of] just the stakes. You know, there’s a very strong resemblance to me historically, and to others, it’s not original with me for sure, to the period before the beginning of World War I. And this is something that’s interesting, There’s the dramatic reenactment of the diaries of Robert Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis called “13 Days Here”, where they have some of the, you know, the script basically contains the actual transcripts of the discussions that were going on in the White House during that event. And one of them was a reference to a book that had come out back in August of 1962, I believe, called _The Guns of August_.

15:39
And it was an analysis of the, basically, miscalculations that the various states had made about what each other would do under the stressful conditions that existed at that time. That they thought they knew this [glitch] going down the line, and that the miscalculations were all based on outdated data and consequently didn’t apply, and that people found themselves in a war that none of them wanted, apparently. This is the opinion of JFK through the transcripts. And yet, you know, it was this bloody, horrible, you know, Holocaust that swept over Europe. You know, that pales to the level of destruction that stands before us in the event of even a single nuclear exchange between Russia and/or Europe and/or the United States.

And I assume either China would play the role of the US if it could get, if it could do that, and watch and pick up the pieces later as the US did after World War II or participate. And I’m assuming it would participate on the same side as Russia. They’ve been manufacturing weapons for a very long time. They seem to have the skill and the set of factories that can crank out an awful lot of stuff pretty quick. So I’m guessing a war that included China as an adversary to the West and the US would be a very very significant one to be…

PressTV: 17:41
Mr. Debar, I want to stay with you for the next question. Russia says the Western military aid to Ukraine including the additional missiles would inflict damage but it won’t change the balance on the battlefield. Do you agree with those comments?

Debar:
Yeah, I mean, what will happen is– look, the way the West should conduct a war if Russia didn’t have nuclear weapons the way they would conduct it, if they’re going to attack Russia, the first thing you do is take out its ability to respond on the ground. You take out their airplanes and their missile silos, you know, and all of these different things.

That’s what they hope to do. Maybe they think they have a secret weapon that will enable them to do that, or a series of systems to minimize the response or whatever. But that is insane thinking. Whatever the United States does in terms of military action against Russia, a military action by proxy or otherwise is going to meet a response when it starts to affect on the ground at any scale. I mean, We’ve been looking at attacks inside Russia at the periphery in the mean, with the exception of a couple of terrorist attacks in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

18:55
But an actual overt military attack on the target inside of Russia– particularly Moscow or St. Petersburg or any of the other major cities, Vladivostok, etc. even– there’ll be a response. There will have to be. And I agree with Gilbert there that at that point in time, Putin or whoever’s making policy in terms of this military aspect, that their hands will be tied, they will be forced to–

Look, part of the effort to– these people want Russia’s resources. And part of the effort to do that is to remove the government that is using those resources for the Russian people and for their own use, whatever it is, that it’s not filling the coffers of ExxonMobil, Chase Manhattan Bank, whoever it is that’s got the ear of a power hero or the hand of a power hero. But the people there, if they’re afraid and see that the government can’t protect them, will not be married to the government that they right now strongly support. And so that government’s existence basically is going to rest on it standing up at some point. Maybe that point is now, and maybe not.

PressTV: 20:06
Mr. Doctorow, your thoughts on the same issue as well. There was also the question, it has been looming since this war escalated: will this support result ultimately in this conflict spilling over into other regions and possibly turning into something bigger? There have been threats of nuclear retaliation on several occasions. There are also the scares with Poland and Bulgaria, if I’m correct.

Doctorow:
I’ll have a direct answer to your question. What is galling to Russian patriots? And by that I mean in the intellectual class, in the governing class, the political establishment in Russia. What is galling is that Russia has developed many conventional war arms that are very sophisticated, that are years ahead of anything in the West. It used to be said at the turn of the new millennium that Russia was a nuclear power but had no conventional forces that were worth talking about. And nuclear weapons by definition can’t be used because they will bring a direct response at the end of the civilization, certainly the end of the party that uses it first.

21:21
However, now with the new weapons systems, and in particular the hypersonic missiles that no one has deployed as Russia has, the Oreshnik, the Russian patriots are asking, why not finish this war tomorrow? Several Oreshniks directed at what’s called Bankovskaya Urytsa, that is the street in downtown Kiev where the main government offices, the decision-making centers are, would decapitate the Zelensky regime, would end the war tomorrow. And Europe would stand by powerless and speechless, and Mr. Trump would give a congratulatory handshake to Mr. Putin, because that is what Trump has been saying for the last several weeks, which Putin has not listened to. He’s been saying, “Vladimir, get it over with.”

PressTV: 22:21
Don Debar, let’s rewind to a past statement by then US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who said one of Washington’s goals in Ukraine is to see a weakened Russia. Why does Washington want to weaken Russia and have the sanctions weakened Russia’s economy or have they somewhat backfired in your opinion, especially with European countries?

Debar: 22:47
Well, Biden spilled the beans– he’s not quite as sentient, I don’t know, as Austin– that the real goal was not just to weaken it. The reason you would weaken it is to set up for the next step. They want regime change there. And regime change not in the form of a different president, although it would likely include that, but rather they thought they took the resources in Russia in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and in the period of the 90s, and particularly the oil and gas and some of the other more important aspects of Russian holdings. And instead they were taken back, and again they’re being applied to Russian aims, whatever that might be. I can see from being there that people are doing pretty well since this thing changed in about 20 years ago, 25 years ago now.

23:54
The goal is to get hold of Russia’s oil, gas, and other material wealth to remove it as a potential rival. I mean, Russia also stands as a strategic umbrella over China. And these people would of course like to move from being a 49% holder to a 51 or 100% holder, of ownership, of China’s industrial base. And so, you know, it’s a strategic purpose across the board, both to grab the resources and also to take away the possibility of a rival on the global stage.

PressTV:
All right, gentlemen, we’re going to have to leave it there. That’s all the time we have for tonight’s show. Thanks to radio host and journalist at CPR News Don Debar, joining us from New York. And thanks to independent international affairs analyst Gilbert Doctorow, speaking to us from Brussels. And a special thanks to you, our viewers, for staying with us on tonight’s edition of “Spotlight”.

24:46
It’s good night for now, and see you next time.