The production team at NewsX World has been very speedy uploading an interview from a couple of hours ago that I shared with a Delhi-based international relations expert discussing the forthcoming state visit.
While my Indian fellow panelist was aglow with enthusiasm for the state visit and ever closer Russian-Indian relations in a wide array of domains including now atomic energy electricity generating stations (with Rosatom), space exploration and the Arctic North, and while the presenter boasted that the current 68 billion dollars in two-way trade is projected to rise to 100 billion, I was more guarded for a number of reasons. First, the rapid growth in trade has been thanks to an enormous increase in Indian imports of Russian petroleum these past couple of years. This is now stopped dead in its tracks by the Trump secondary tariffs. For these reasons, the date of this state visit is unfortunate.
US domination of markets continues and puts in jeopardy the economic dimension of BRICS, which is exactly what Trump wants. I acknowledge that directionally, global trade is shifting away from the dollar, but the dramatic effect will be felt only in the long term and in the long term we are all dead.
BRICS and the strategic cooperation between India and Russia are not driving multipolarism; rather it is Russian victory on the battlefields of Ukraine that today is driving multipolarism globally.
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 