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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2 thoughts on “Conversation with Professor Glenn Diesen, 9 January 2026: Russia’s Oreshnik Strike in Warning to NATO”
“Not only did Russia destroy a facility representing half of Ukraine’s natural gas storage but this was done in the neighborhood of Lvov”. Destroy? How do you know? You do not. Pure supposition. Like most of your nonsense.
Two days after the strike, the local gas supply is still off for 380K customers, but it seems that physical destruction above ground is very low. Obviously the underground gas reserves did not ignite — there’s no oxygen in a natural gas underground reservoir, so it cannot burn. But something funny has indeed happened to the infrastructure or the service would have been resumed by now. Your challenge is to find out what, professor. I’m an engineer myself, and can sense something’s up, but a ten to twenty ton TNT equivalent explosion spread over square kilonetres isn’t going to destroy much to the naked eye. The sharp initial shockwave of the hits may have broken piping like a seismic event, however, causing the system to leak. Pure speculation on my part. But I bet you dollars to donuts there’s no vast field of destruction. Oreshnik damage is an interesting phenomenon apparently — we don’t know what it does, but it does something. It’s impulse damage, presumably. Interesting.
Sir, this is one of the very, very few comments you have posted which is almost respectful and not using gutter language. So I will respond to your challenge by quoting here a direct answer to your question that was posted as a comment by a viewer of the Glenn Diesen interview in Russian voice over on hyourtube:
При всем уважении,к Гилберт Д., уточняем(��): 6 (ШЕСТЬ) пустых боеголовок от “Орешника” уничтожили блок управления и систему выхода газа из хранилища ! А газ остался (��) в хранилище !!! Для Вашего понятия, это как удалить аппендикс, через задницу… И если “Орешник”,с начинкой, прилетит по “биг-бену”, то стрелки от часов, будут лететь до Брайтон-Бич…( �� ) С “Рождеством Христовым”, американцы…������
Put in simple English he says that the 6 warheads on the Oreshnik that struck Lvov were dummy warheads, but they got the job done: they destroyed the management center of the gas storage together with all the control equipment for releasing gas from the reservoir but without touching the gas reservoir itself. An achievement of great precision to make a point on capability. Needless to say the Oreshnik is invulnerable to all known air defenses and normally could deliver tactical nuclear weapons.
Gilbert Doctorow 
“Not only did Russia destroy a facility representing half of Ukraine’s natural gas storage but this was done in the neighborhood of Lvov”. Destroy? How do you know? You do not. Pure supposition. Like most of your nonsense.
Two days after the strike, the local gas supply is still off for 380K customers, but it seems that physical destruction above ground is very low. Obviously the underground gas reserves did not ignite — there’s no oxygen in a natural gas underground reservoir, so it cannot burn. But something funny has indeed happened to the infrastructure or the service would have been resumed by now. Your challenge is to find out what, professor. I’m an engineer myself, and can sense something’s up, but a ten to twenty ton TNT equivalent explosion spread over square kilonetres isn’t going to destroy much to the naked eye. The sharp initial shockwave of the hits may have broken piping like a seismic event, however, causing the system to leak. Pure speculation on my part. But I bet you dollars to donuts there’s no vast field of destruction. Oreshnik damage is an interesting phenomenon apparently — we don’t know what it does, but it does something. It’s impulse damage, presumably. Interesting.
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Sir, this is one of the very, very few comments you have posted which is almost respectful and not using gutter language. So I will respond to your challenge by quoting here a direct answer to your question that was posted as a comment by a viewer of the Glenn Diesen interview in Russian voice over on hyourtube:
При всем уважении,к Гилберт Д., уточняем(��): 6 (ШЕСТЬ) пустых боеголовок от “Орешника” уничтожили блок управления и систему выхода газа из хранилища ! А газ остался (��) в хранилище !!! Для Вашего понятия, это как удалить аппендикс, через задницу… И если “Орешник”,с начинкой, прилетит по “биг-бену”, то стрелки от часов, будут лететь до Брайтон-Бич…( �� ) С “Рождеством Христовым”, американцы…������
Put in simple English he says that the 6 warheads on the Oreshnik that struck Lvov were dummy warheads, but they got the job done: they destroyed the management center of the gas storage together with all the control equipment for releasing gas from the reservoir but without touching the gas reservoir itself. An achievement of great precision to make a point on capability. Needless to say the Oreshnik is invulnerable to all known air defenses and normally could deliver tactical nuclear weapons.
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