Occasionally the production team at the Indian broadcaster News X puts me together with someone from the other side of the barricades, so to speak, to discuss the latest developments in the Ukraine war, now in the Ukraine peace talks.
Going back nine months or more, News X was just getting started filling its stable of experts for these programs and, frankly speaking, the first panelists they selected were rather primitive Ukrainian propagandists. I backed out of that format and was subsequently only interviewed on my own.
However, now I find that they have brought in some very good spokesmen for the other side of the issues of the day and it was an unexpected pleasure to engage in a debate of sorts with a mainstream kind of expert. Curiously, though we have very different big picture thinking, on the issues put to us by the moderator, especially with respect to the likelihood of von der Leyen’s getting her hands on the frozen Russian assets in Euroclear, we were singing from the same scores.
Pay no attention to the titles on the video. This is a news hour broadcast and the first 5 minutes deal with the breaking news in a great many different places. After that it is strictly Ukraine and the questions to me and my fellow panelist.
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 