In the past several days various position statements from the European Union and most particularly from its top Foreign Affairs commissioner Kaja Kallas demonstrate that EU leaders are ideologists not practicing politicians where the art of compromise is crucial and pragmatism is the best policy. The latest call by Kallas for Southeast Asian countries not to buy Russian oil at this very moment of the Mideast War, closing of Hormuz has cut off these nations in southeast Asia from their principal supplier and only Russian oil can save their economies.
Kallas, von der Leyen are Russia haters who can find no other unifying cause fot the EU than waging war on Russian.
Statements such as Kalla’s advice on buying oil only serve to make the EU a geopolitical irrelevancy.
Meanwhile, as I say here in the interview, Europe tramples daily on its own supposed values. The EU is said to be considering applying sanctions on Israel. Not for the genocide in Gaza about which the EU is silent to its shame. Not for the act of aggression in attacking Iran, for which the EU is split, with some applauding the attack and others criticizing it. But for Israel’s plans to buy Russian wheat.
And there you have it: the EU Commission has gone mad.
My apologies for the poor audio at the start of this interview, but that is what you get when the broadcaster finds you in a Belgian railway csar.
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 