This afternoon’s chat with Professor Diesen presented our best efforts to make sense of the torrent of breaking news this past seven days. Much of this news was generated by Donald Trump and related to his attack on Venezuela, his threats to take Greenland by force and American piracy on the high seas involving the capture of a Russian-flagged oil tanker traveling just south of Iceland. But in the last 24 hours, Vladimir Putin stole Trump’s thunder by a dramatic strike on critical energy infrastructure of Ukraine, reportedly the country’s largest gas storage facility, using its Oreshnik hypersonic missile. Not only did Russia destroy a facility representing half of Ukraine’s natural gas storage but this was done in the neighborhood of Lvov, in the very West of the country, just 70 km from the Polish border, thereby sending an unmistakable message to NATO countries about their vulnerability to this unstoppable Russian armament.
The conversation moved from this essentially new development to the long-standing issues o where the war is headed, what kind of outcome may we expect and in what time period, whether there will be any further Trump brokered peace talks and much more.
Throughout I insisted on Trump’s inscrutability and use of prevarication to keep us all confounded. And I took note of Putin’s long-awaited decisive action to put the fear of God into Europeans by demonstrating that Russia has not only the wherewithal but also the will to defend its interests.
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 