Retired U.S. military men like Colonel Douglas Macgregor or Colonel Daniel Davis have been among the most listened to experts delivering commentary on the Russia-Ukraine war in podcasts that are watched by tens if not hundreds of thousands of Alternative Media devotees, all of whom expect to get the inside scoop on how Russia is on its way to total victory over Ukraine, striking a death blow at NATO and US global hegemony.
Let me tell you here why these viewers are getting disinformation rather than real insights from the military experts: because from day one to today, Russia’s war is being led by a politician, President Vladimir Putin, who knows no more about military strategy than you or me but who knows a great deal about what is politically acceptable to the broad Russian population at every stage of the war. In effect, in what is widely considered to be an autocratic regime, Putin and Company, have their noses to the wind on what the Little People of Russia will accept without grumbling, let alone demonstrating in the streets.
And that is why the war was unleashed in February 2022 without marshalling the military forces on the ground in the usual 3 or 4 times greater numbers than the 150,000 soldiers in the Ukrainian army against whom you can successfully, swiftly and relatively painlessly stage an offensive operation aimed at regime change. The very idea of a possible general mobilization of Russian reserves not to mention the idea of there being a draft of young soldiers to fill ranks set hundreds of thousands of Russian men fleeing across the border to avoid military service at the outset of the war. But there was no active public resistance to the war and Putin could be pleased, except that quick victory slipped between his fingers and led us into the 4 years plus of fighting and more than a million Russian casualties of whom we may suppose that 350,000 are deaths.
For this reason, I urge the Western public to take with a grain of salt what our military experts are saying about the war. The Russian war was and remains a political operation led by politicians who are more sensitive to public sentiment at home than they are to implementing military doctrine, such as our experts swear by.
Does any of this remind readers of how and why the United States lost the Vietnam war under Presidents Johnson and Nixon?
Copyright Gilbert Doctorow, 2026
Gilbert Doctorow 
There is very little visibility inside Ukraine. Yet a recent interview by Tucker Carlson revealed an insider who gives a dire picture of what is going there. Where, one can ask, are all the old opposition figures in Ukraine? Where are the western Ukraine hot heads? And how about all those oligarchs rushing to take their money out of Ukraine to a safe place in Switzerland? What is going on inside the country that has lost half its population? What seems to be happening is that Ukraine is rotting on the inside. Feckless Europeans, with their Russiaphobia are now stuck with having to ingest that rotten fruit or eat humble pie. Time is on Putin’s side, it seems to me.
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