Earlier today I wrote about the questions put to me by News X World for an interview that took place at 12.30 Brussels time. These questions prompted me to organize my thinking about Sergei Lavrov’s latest remarks on how the Iran war may be expanding outside the Middle East and poses a great danger to world peace, and also to think about the Ukraine drone strikes that yesterday seriously damaged Russia’s oil export installations in Ust-Luga, Leningrad oblast. The drones arrived from Estonian territory and the question arises: what if anything Russia will now do to retaliate against Estonia.
I have just received and am pleased to share the link to this podcast:
I use the opportunity also to share one other podcast link which I just received from my good friend Ray McGovern. This podcast contains the presentation he and colleagues made in the National Press Club, Washington, D.C. last Thursday, 26 March about the lies and deception that the Pentagon and intelligence agencies have fed to the American public to justify never ending wars going back to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Ray comes on in minute 15. Special attention is given to what motivated Donald Trump to launch the war against Iran on 28 February 2026. Within his talk, Ray put up on the screen a pre-recorded 10 minute message from fellow member of the activist group VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) Karen Kwiatkowski that is engrossing.
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 