Zelensky calls for European troops to positioned near the front lines, ready for introduction of a cease fire. This is precisely what former British PM Boris Johnson told reporters in an interview yesterday, and it is the worst possible advice.
The leader of the Russian team, Vladimir Medinsky, said in an interview a day ago that whereas the Russian team has one person to report to, Putin, the Ukrainian team has three people to address, one of whom represents the European Union Member State that wants the war to continue indefinitely.
My best advice to Zelensky is to get out while he can. A power struggle is ongoing among his colleagues, Zaluzhny and Budanov. His future does not look good if he clings to power.
Are Ukrainians looking for regime change? Probably not: they have been brainwashed for the past 12 years. What is needed is a time out, likely a period of military rule, when the population can learn the real state of their armed forces and real state of their economy.
My advice to Chancellor Merz at the close of this interview is that he should tune in to Russian television and he would find that the Russians are ready to wipe Germany off the face of the earth if this hostility continues. It might sober him up.
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 