Within this lengthy hourly news report dealing with Pakistan and other subjects, you will find in minutes 25.29 to 31.40 my discussion of how the destruction of critical Russian energy infrastructure is finally changing the balance in the war to Ukraine’s favor.
News X World: this morning’s podcast on Ukraine’s latest successful strike on an oil refinery in the Samara region
Published by gilbertdoctorow
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. View all posts by gilbertdoctorow
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Gilbert Doctorow 
Anyone who dismisses Ukraine’s domestic manufacturing capability and thinks that the “most powerful drones in the world” could only come from Germany or the West is totally ignorant of history. Ukraine was a powerhouse of engineering and technology for many decades. Even during the Soviet Union the most advanced military technology like Antonov planes and Motor Sich helicopter engines and Soviet tanks were (and still are!) mostly built in Ukraine. Ukraine had a ton of latent engineering talent and manufacturing capability which was reactivated during the war and is bearing fruit now (it takes about 5 years to build out factories). So don’t let a PR piece in the New York Times about a German AI startup fool you: most of the long range strike drones being deployed by Ukraine now are in fact domestically designed and manufactured, the West is learning from Ukraine, not the other way around.
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Nice push-back, but entirely based on surmise, not on facts – which none of us have. What skills Ukraine had in 1990 does not tell you what skills they have today after one third or more of the general population fled the country and are now living either in Russia or in Germany, Poland and Western Europe. Moreover, the whole story of long-range strikes is also a matter of conjecture. Are the Ukrainians actually firing drones into Central Russia from Kazakhstan? Are they prepositioning them in trucks that have entered the RF by stealth in the same way as they arranged the Spiderweb attacks on Russian airfields? We don’t know. Surely they are domestically producing the short range kamikaze drones that are used on the battlefield and also to hit into the border oblasts of Kursk, Kherson and Belgorod. But we cammpt say more with any confidence.
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