This link to a brief interview from yesterday has just arrived and I am pleased to share it with the Community. Pay no attention to the ‘China Warning’ heading because this is a news digest and the Russia-Ukraine War is the first topic on the interview agenda after the presenter reads off the top news of the hour.
Yes, as you will notice, my expectations from this latest Trump peace initiative are changing by the day. I emphasize that I have no angst changing my position when the object under examination changes, and the evolution of this initiative is anything but consistent.
Some are saying that Team Trump is overseeing a ‘bait and switch’ operation in which the Russians were offered one fairly acceptable 28-point plan and now instead they will be required to agree to a much less desirable Ukrainian-edited plan. That may be. But I think something more characteristic of Trump is underway: he is preparing for the parties NOT to agree to his mediated settlement and then will lower the boom on both – withdrawing US intel and military hardware support for Ukraine and imposing new draconian sanctions on Russia. This will allow him to wiggle out of the entire project of bringing peace to Ukraine and tell the Europeans to deal with it on their own.
I mention this as a possible explanation for the peculiar behavior of Dan Driscoll and Steve Witkoff in Geneva, letting the Ukrainians gut the original proposal and then smiling at the end and saying everything is very constructive.
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 