Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtFWnlOedjA

Kataoka – NewsX World: 0:00
Thank you very much. Now we move on. But as these diplomatic exchanges unfold, Ukraine is hit by fresh violence. Overnight, Russia carried out what officials called a massive strike on Zaporizhzhia, killing at least one person and wounding 24, including two children. Homes, cafes, and industrial sites were destroyed. Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region also came under heavy attack with explosions in Dnipro, and Pavlograd. Authorities have confirmed Russian troops have now entered the region, marking a dangerous escalation in this area previously spared from fighting.

0:41
Speaking at the UN Security Council, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko has condemned the attacks, declaring Russia continues to choose killing over ending the war. Let’s listen in.

Svyrydenko:
These killings are deliberate acts of terror. It’s an informed decision taken by Moscow to continue its systematic campaign to terrorize civilians and extinguish any semblance of normal life. Yesterday, Russia again responded brutally to our attempts to engage them in a civilized dialogue in the language of international law, peace, and respect for human life.

1:30
Russia continues to choose killing over ending the war. [We] still hope that this Council and its member states, who have consistently emphasized the need for cessation of the hostilities, will now show the courage to turn word into action by supporting a relevant solution on the matter.

Kataoka: 1:53
So as leaders converge in Tianjin, the human toll of the war deepens, emphasizing the stark divide between diplomacy and devastation on the ground. Now for this discussion we are joined by Gilbert Doctorow. He is a Russian affairs expert, joins us live from Brussels.

Thank you very much for staying with us and joining us again. Now with leaders meeting under the SCO framework, how realistic is it to expect that diplomatic summits can influence the course of the current Russia-Ukraine war?

Doctorow: 2:30
Well, it has already been made clear that the subject for discussion between Presidents Putin and Xi when they meet ahead of the parade in Beijing will be precisely the war in Ukraine. Of course, there are other issues, important issues, that they will be discussing, such as the decision of the big three in Europe, the UK, France, and Germany to use the provisions for reimposing sanctions on Iran, and the president of Iran will be there. There are many subjects that are topical and important.

3:09
I could say that Mr. Trump has done his best to provide the key members of the … SCO meeting and of the celebrants of the end of the war in the Pacific with talk and the possibility to address and define a common policy on these very issues. I also want to mention something that your viewers may not be expecting. It is possible that the meeting in China will have a very big surprise, a rabbit pulled out of the hat. That is to say, the Russian media are still considering that Mr. Trump may show up in Beijing for the parade. That is not to be excluded. I’d like to emphasize that this disruption, this disorder, which you in India are feeling particularly over the tariff war, is not arbitrary and is not without a foundation. The foundation is Mr. Trump’s hidden agenda to disrupt entirely the existing world order of American hegemony and to prepare the way for a multipolar world, however strange that may appear from his words, My insistence is to ignore his words and follow his actions. That he has applied these tariffs on India, just ahead of this important meeting is not an accident. It is intentional. And it is to get your presidents talking about how to deal with the United States.

Kataoka:
Yes. And that is very interesting that you’ve mentioned that a surprise guest might show up hinting to US President Donald Trump. If– we can only speculate here– but if he were to show up, do you think that this can shift the narrative at the ongoing diplomatic talks in Tianjin and maybe we might see any breakthrough? What do you think?

Doctorow: 5:13
Well, Mr. Trump has said recently in the last two weeks how much he would like to meet with Mr. Kim, how much he would like to meet with President Xi. They’re both in Beijing for this parade, and so it would be very convenient for him to be there. The European leaders, aside from Mr. Vucic in Serbia and Mr. Fico in Slovakia, the EU-25 hardliners have all declined to accept the invitation. And it would be remarkable if, and in keeping with his policies, if Mr. Trump were to show up. I can’t say that will happen, but there is a possibility that the Russians have detected and are publishing in very serious periodicals and online assets.

6:00
So Mr. Trump has destroyed what 25 years of American diplomacy have tried to do by enlisting India in a quadrilateral arrangement of countries encircling and opposing China. He has destroyed that in a few weeks. That is the real outcome of his tariff policy. The tariffs are nonsense compared to that geopolitical act, which I insist was not an accident, was not something that he missed, but it’s something that he intentionally brought about. So I think India also should rethink what Mr. Trump is doing. It is not what it appears to be.

Kataoka:
And now looking– thank you very much for sharing that– and now looking back at Ukraine and its allies, do you think there is any fatigue from the allies in Europe for Ukraine? Do you think that could eventually impact the level of military and financial aid that’s flowing now from the West?

Doctorow:
I would disagree with your generalization. Ukraine has no allies in Europe. It only has destroyers in Europe. What Europe is doing is to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.

That is not a friend or ally of Ukraine. And that has to be made clear, because we are living in a world of Orwellian double talk, where peace is war and war is peace. Think for yourselves and understand that Europe is no friend of Ukraine.

Kataoka:
Right. Thank you very much for bringing us fresh perspective and always sharing good insights from Brussels.

7:41
That was Gilbert Doctorow. This is all we have time for. We will continue to bring you more news updates from around the world and the SCO Summit.

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI2k2jbku8c

Napolitano: 0:32
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for “Judging Freedom”. Today is Wednesday, August 27th, 2025. Professor Gilbert Doctorow will be here in just a moment on Trump’s confusing signals. But first this.

0:49
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1:59
Professor Doctorow, good day to you, my friend, and thank you very much for joining us and for accommodating my schedule.

In the past week, President Trump on his own Truth Social has written that Ukraine is doomed to lose the war unless it can get offensive and attack Russia, in a Truth Social that we have been posting, you can see it right there. He also authorized the delivery of 3,000 E-ROMs, offensive missile weaponry that can travel 280 miles. That’ll take about six weeks for them to get there. And just yesterday, he said he has something very severe in mind for Russia if President Putin doesn’t sit down at the same table in the same room at the same time with President Zelensky. What kind of signals is he sending to the Kremlin?

Doctorow: 2:54
Well, they’re not good ones, but I don’t see any sense of alarm coming out of Russia. They’re rather calm about this. Mr. Trump changes his– he pivots this way and pivots that way, in accordance with domestic American politics and where he sees the greatest threats to his position.

In this sense, Mr. Trump is not a great departure from other presidents and from the American political establishment for whom the rest of the world are just props. The only thing that counts in foreign policy is domestic policy. And that dictates many things. I was asked earlier today about the American initiative in the United Nations to reinstate the sanctions against Iran.

3:51
And in Tehran, they’re very upset about this. They take this, shall we say, personally? My point is, there’s nothing personal about it. If Mr. Trump sees himself under threat for one or another issue, however unrelated it is, for example, to Iran, then he will take action on Iran.

And if it’s the most convenient and less costly thing that he can do to flex muscles and to prove that he is macho and still in control of everything.

Napolitano: 4:27
I realize that you and I agree that he is often driven by his own personality and his own ego. He doesn’t have the moral or ideological or value-laden sense of some of his predecessors. But what is to be accomplished by these threats? How can he expect the Kremlin to react positively, or do they just dismiss it as, “Oh, there he is changing his mind again, he doesn’t mean it, he’ll back off, what can he possibly do to us?”

Doctorow:
I think it’s the second situation. We don’t know what back channels there are, what messages are being sent by Washington to the Kremlin to reassure them that this is not going to be what it looks like. If it is what it looks like, then we have World War III. So then we all should be quite excited about it. What I mean is that the Russians have made definite threats, what they will do to the suppliers of long range missiles that are being used against them deep inside the Russian Federation.

5:40
And this would be in direct, this shipment of these 3,600, whatever it is, medium-range, oh, 480 miles is pretty good. If that is used as the Ukrainians would normally use it to destroy civilian infrastructure, to kill ordinary Russians and not to attack military posts, then the Russians will have to, if they want to follow through on their red lines, attack Washington.

So I don’t believe this is going to happen. He’s making sounds and he’s silencing critics of one kind or another, maybe in relation to his policy on Gaza. It’s hard to say exactly what is motivating him.

But I would go a little bit in variance with what you said about his ego. I don’t think he’s ego-driven. I think it is policy-driven. But it is political threats that he’s responding to. They are real threats. And he responds in what seems to be illogical and unrelated manners.

Napolitano:
Here’s his threat yesterday, Chris, cut number two.

Trump: 6:50
I want to see that deal end. It’s very, very serious, what I have in mind, if I have to do it. But I want to see it end.

I think that in many ways he’s there. Sometimes he’ll be there and Zelensky won’t be there. You know, it’s like, who do we have today? I got to get them both at the same time. But I want to have it end.

We have economic sanctions. I’m talking about economic, because we’re not going to get into a world war. I’ll tell you what, in my opinion, if I didn’t win this race, Ukraine could have ended up in a world war. We’re not going to end up in a world war.

And it will not be a world war, but it will be an economic war. And an economic war is going to be bad. And it’s going to be bad for Russia. And I don’t want that.

Napolitano:
–done a damn thing to dial back the violence. If anything, it’s accelerated in the past eight months.

Doctorow: 7:49
Well, this brings us to the point. I think the hidden message from Moscow is what he said to Netanyahu months and months ago. But in Netanyahu’s case, it didn’t serve his interests. His interest is to keep the fight going, but to keep in, to stay in power. Mr. Putin doesn’t have a problem staying in power. He doesn’t need a war to stay in power. So the issues are a little bit different, but Trump’s behavior towards them both is the same: get it over with fast. And frankly speaking, the Russians are getting it over with much faster than they were before Mr. Trump made his threats.

Napolitano: 8:29
Yesterday, President Zelensky said he would never voluntarily surrender the oblasts in the Donbas region or Crimea. It sounds ridiculous. But is he free to make those concessions? Or would he do so at the peril of the loss of his life?

Doctorow:
Oh, I think it’s the latter case. I think the Russians are solving that predicament for him. The way they are progressing now, along the whole front, taking every soft spot they can, even if it’s not in Donetsk, even if it’s not moving closer to the Dnieper, they are taking territory and position, making emphasis on position. They moved into and took one or two towns in the new oblast for them, the Dnepropetrovsk oblast. We know about that area because there the only use of Oreshnik was to destroy a factory, military factory, heavily fortified and underground factory in Dnipro. Dnipro is the Ukrainian word for Dnepropetrovsk. And this area is of symbolic importance, the same way that taking Kramatorsk and Slavyansk in Donetsk oblast, is symbolic, because that’s where the– that was the cradle of the Russian Renaissance, the resumption of spirit and self-confidence that came in 2014.

10:07
So this Dnepropetrovsk is more than a physical acquisition, it is a symbolic acquisition, because that is the home base of Kolomoisky, the oligarch who from the start financed the Azov battalion, who financed a lot of the dirty operations against Russia.

Napolitano;
Right.

Doctorow:
And was one of the wealthiest men controlling, owning the most important bank in the country and owning the airline and calling all the shots. Well, that’s where he came from. So this is a territory, if they move on Dniepropetrovsk, they are going at the jugular of the…

Napolitano:
What actually happens or changes on the ground when the Russians take a village Does the government of the village change? Do the police in the village change? Does everybody go back to speaking Russian? Or are these takeovers of villages, which we’ve never heard of here in the US, just symbolic or part of the pathway toward the Dnieper River?

Doctorow: 11:21
It is more than symbolic. It’s clearing the way for reconstruction and for resettlement. There aren’t too many people in those towns that are taken, to greet the incoming Russian soldiers. Very few have remained behind, because they were under threat of being shot by the Ukrainian soldiers for not evacuating with them. So there are very few people in their cellars or whatever who are there to toss flowers to the incoming Russian soldiers.

The main task that the Russians have is demining. And they send in their specialists to remove the mines, because everything is mined after the Ukrainians leave a village. Well, I say village; most of these places they’re conquering really are hamlets. Maybe they have two, three, 500 inhabitants. They’re not a village in the sense that you had in mind.

And they don’t have mayors and high officials. But this is very important. Mr. Putin yesterday had his meeting one-on-one with the governor of Kherson oblast. And this is an area that is highly contested.

The Kherson city, the capital, is on the right bank, that is say the west bank of the Dnieper. It is under Ukrainian control. It was evacuated by the Russians as untenable. They had to cross the river to supply it.

But most of that, Kherson oblast is in Russian control on the east side of the Dnieper. And they were discussing the vast reconstruction program that’s now ongoing, building 600 kilometers of new asphalt roads and all kinds of infrastructure. And taking each of these little hamlets and villages is extending the territory in which Russia will restore normal living conditions, rebuild housing, and so forth. So it’s more than symbolic that when they take these, they’re preparing to move in immediately to restore normal living in these places.

Napolitano:
And who pays for this reconstruction? The Russian Federation, or is it private investments, or is it BlackRock in the U.S.? Who’s paying for it?

Doctorow: 13:41
It is multiple layers of the Russian government. You have cities in Russia like Moscow, which have city-to-city brotherly relations with this or that town, the same thing as St. Petersburg, and they put up their own laborers, their own equipment and so forth, to do construction work and then to build new housing for the returnees.

You ask which language they speak. Almost everyone in these territories speaks Russian. The idea they’re– or they’re bilingual, Ukrainian, Russian. Let’s not confuse the language with the ethnicity. There are ethnic Ukrainians, if you can define that, who are Russian speakers. That was the predominant language in the region where they were living. So that is not really an issue.

Napolitano: 14:38
Right.

Doctorow:
Even on Ukrainian television, you have a lot of officials who are interviewed and are speaking Russian. That was the language.

Napolitano:
Isn’t it illegal, even criminal, under Ukrainian law to speak Russian?

Doctorow:
It is. But practicality says if you want them to say something, they’ll say it in a language they can speak.

Napolitano:
Right. Foreign Minister Lavrov says no Putin-Zolensky meeting without an agenda. What does that mean?

Doctorow:
Well, they have an agenda. It’s a negation of the agenda by Zelensky. As soon as he got back home following his trip to Washington, he was saying that in no way will we accept surrender of territory. And that put a big “nyet” on the whole logic of the meeting, because Trump himself had said the prime purpose of the meeting would be to discuss exchange of territories, meaning Ukraine ceding its loss.

The question, of course, is that if you go into this, the Ukrainians, if they were to cede anything, would be de facto rather than de jure, they would maintain their claims. But the United States, at least with regard to Crimea, already stated openly that it is willing to acknowledge Russian governance of Crimea, de jure. What happens to the rest of the other oblasts will be a subject for negotiation at present or perhaps at a given time in the future.

Napolitano: 16:09
India is thumbing its nose at Trump’s tariffs, which are now up to, I think, 60 percent. Are you surprised?

Doctorow:
There has been some very reasonable analysis of what actually is happening on these tariffs. The most important component of Indian exports to the United States are not commodities, they’re not products. It is IT, it is technology, it is software programming. So I think $38 billion in that. That’s not touched.

Pharmaceuticals are not touched. And we all know that India is a big producer of generic pharmaceuticals, which are in big demand because they cost a fraction of the price of the original owners of the medicines that we’re talking about. These are not touched. What is touched are this: many factory operations were started up in the last two or three years to replace production that otherwise had been going on for American companies in China.

And so this is affected. The products that were being made in India to replace their production in China are under direct threat and become unviable as exports to the United States. That is surprising, but I’m just saying that the Indian commentators do note that it is more complicated than it looks. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump has undone in a matter of a couple of months, what the United States took perhaps 10 years to achieve as a foreign policy objective: to use India as a counterbalance to China and to invite India into its partnerships relating to the Indo-Pacific area.

18:05
That’s all undone. And it’s remarkable. That is the most astonishing reversal, and I say loss of American influence, that Mr. Trump has done since taking office. Mr. Biden pushed Russia into China’s arms, and Mr. Trump is pushing India into Russia’s arms. And also into China’s arms. Mr. Modi is going to China, I think, in the next week or two.

Napolitano;
Right.

Doctorow:
This will be the first visit in seven years.

Napolitano:
Is it fair to say that for all of his bombast and threats and animosity toward BRICS, he’s actually strengthening it, Trump?

Doctorow:
Absolutely. That’s a perfect summary of his achievements from seven months in office.

Napolitano: 18:52
Wow. Last week, the Russians destroyed not- yet-assembled Taurus missiles that had been delivered by Germany to Ukraine. Did Chancellor Merz think that the Russians would allow the Ukrainians to assemble these things and start firing them?

Doctorow:
Well, the Russians did very important damage to the whole missile program in Ukraine, both the deployment of weapons that are received from outside and the construction of weapons using British and other Western technologies. One of the big issues that drove Mr. Trump– if you want to speak, want to find rational decision-making in what he’s been doing for the last 10 days– one of the most important factors was the destruction of the Flex Factory. This was nominally making coffee machines for consumers in Ukraine, 30 kilometres away from the Hungarian border. A company called Flex, I believe, which was the local branch of an American electronics manufacturer. Now, Mr. Trump had to react to that.

20:18
This was, I don’t know, this was a billion dollar or so, so it was a large investment had been made by Americans in this military production, intending to create strike missiles in Ukraine. This was utterly destroyed by a combination of drones and hypersonic missiles. Flattened, destroyed. It took Mr. Trump a day to react.

Of course, he must have been under enormous pressure. “How do they dare?” Just as Mr. Merz must be concerned, “How do the Russians dare?” Well, they dare.

In this sense, there’s acceleration, escalation I should say as well, in what the Russians are doing. Before, they didn’t touch manufacturing facilities owned by foreigners. Now they are. And it was a big signal to the Brits, to the French, to the Germans, don’t even think of setting up military facilities, production facilities in Ukraine, because they will suffer the same fate.

21:17
So in a number of ways, the various threats that Trump and others have made, the various attempts to have a real military presence in Ukraine– such as assisting the construction of latest generation strike missiles there– that has touched a nerve, and the Russians have responded, I’d say, violently.

Napolitano:
I’ll tell you what I’m concerned about, Professor Doctorow, and I wonder if you share that concern. And that is the resurgence of the neocon whispering into Donald Trump’s ear. General Kellogg, Senator Graham, Secretary Rubio. The type of threat that Trump made yesterday. Maybe it’s just an idle threat. He often talks off the top of his head. I can’t imagine he’s run this past his advisors first. But I’m worried that that neocon attitude may be resurgent in the behavior of the American president. Do you share that fear?

Doctorow: 22:28
No, I don’t. There are limits on what he’s going to do. And the limits are: if he were to do what he said about giving the Ukrainians these 5,000 missiles and letting them have a go at it, then we’ll have a war. And the last thing he wants is a war. He had just said in the segment that you quoted that he wants an economic war, not a kinetic war. And I believe that is a deep-set feeling.

As to the whisperers, again, this is part of his drama, of his theatre. Not everybody is deceived. There are a few people around who have their wits about them and understand what’s going on, even in Europe. Even in Europe. There were two days ago in a broadsheet publication as a large-format daily newspaper, the “Écho de la bourse”, there was an article interviewing a leading French European security specialist talking about how the European response to Trump and his seeming pivot towards Putin and against themselves explaining that it’s a little bit more nuanced than one would think, that Europeans aren’t complete dolts.

They understand that he could be playing with them, that he could be stringing them along, but they have a choice of two ways to react. One is to turn their back on him and to go against him, to dig in their heels. And the other is to humor him, to play to his vanity and to think that they can bring him around. And the second policy has a little bit more depth to it than it appears. It is that they don’t want to be seen as being that monkey-wrench in the works that Mr. Putin was talking about. They don’t want the failure of Trump’s peace efforts to be their doing. They believe that Mr. Putin will do it and let him take the flak, let him take the opprobrium from Trump for destroying his chances of getting the Nobel Peace Prize and ruining the peace negotiations. And that could be, there’s a logic to that. It makes them look a little bit less stupid than they otherwise seem to be.

Napolitano: 25:01
Right. Before we go, what is the significance, if any, of the arrest in Italy of this Ukrainian intelligence officer? I think I have this right.

Doctorow:
No, you do. I was very glad you brought it up because while very little is said about it in Western news, a lot is said about it in Russian news. And they’re covering it closely. Today’s had a release on the ticker tape news in Russia that you find on their Yandex, that he was the head. The man who was arrested was a Ukrainian officer who was supervising a team of seven saboteurs, of various specialties, who carried out the preparation of destruction of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. But that doesn’t take away from Sy Hersh’s story that the whole thing, the whole concept was American and that Biden approved the timing and that this was a setup for whenever the American president decided the explosive would be detonated.

26:17
That doesn’t change. But it does tell you that, and as Russians are saying, in fact, the only aspect of this that interests them is this team was Ukrainian and that it could never have been authorized without the personal approval of Zelensky. And they’re saying, and what is Mr. Merz going to do about it?

Napolitano:
And what was this team of Ukrainians doing in Italy? Where in Italy? In Rome?

Doctorow;
No, no, It’s one man who’s captured, as far as I know. And there is an arrest warrant out for six others who were his subordinates in this team that carried out the preparation of the destruction of the pipeline. And I suppose he’s simply enjoying the money that he received for his work.

I think he’s just gotten away from the hardships of Ukraine. I don’t believe that he’s out there in Italy on assignment. Certainly that his team isn’t there, because the job was done.

Napolitano:
Professor Doctorow, thank you very much. Thanks for the broad array of topics. Thanks for the tip on the arrest in Italy. Great chatting with you, my dear friend. We have a holiday coming up here in the US, Labor Day weekend, but it should not interfere with our work next week, and I look forward to it already.

Doctorow:
And I do as well. Thank you.

Napolitano:
Thank you. All the best. And coming up later today, actually beginning shortly at 11 this morning, Professor Jeffrey Sacks; at noon, Aaron Mate; at three this afternoon, Phil Giraldi. Tomorrow, Colonel McGregor and Professor Mearsheimer and Colonel Wilkerson.

28:03
Judge Napolitano for “Judging Freedom”.

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://youtu.be/_rW7a-qqdSE

Diesen:
Hi everyone and welcome back. We are joined again by Gilbert Doctorow, historian, international affairs analyst and author of “The War Diaries – The Russia-Ukraine War”. So yeah, welcome back. It’s always great to see you.

Doctorow:
Good, a pleasure.

Diesen:
So as the Ukraine war appears to be entering its, if not final stage, at least the final stages, at least some things appears to be moving in that direction, It’s worth exploring what the relationship between the Europeans and Russia would look like after the war. And I guess a good case study would be to look at some of the comments coming from Finland. That is, the meeting between Trump and Europeans in the White House was interesting for a variety of reasons. But the interactions with President Stubbe of Finland was interesting, I guess, because he made several comments. He referred to Finland’s own historical experience with peace with Russia, but also the possibility of renewing relations with Russia after the end of this war. I was wondering what you read into this comment.

Doctorow: 1:19
I think Stubb’s remarks got far more attention at high levels in Russia than it did in the West. In the West, well, I for one was confused by what he meant. Is this supposed to be a recommendation to Ukraine to see how well Finland had done after a nasty war with Russia? … Finland’s participation on the side of Hitler against Russia was ended by a 1944 peace between the Soviet Union and Finland in which Finland ceded a lot of territory to Russia.

So that could sound like it was a recommendation to Kiev as to what to do. On the other hand, as after some thought and with reflecting on what Sergei Lavrov had to say about it the day after Stubb made his remarks, I come to a different conclusion that bears on your question, how Europe will deal with Russia as the war closes. It is important to note the remarks, the comments on Stubb that were made by Lavrov in an interview that was on Russian state television the next day. In this he reminded everyone what was that 1944 agreement all about? What did it contain? Why was it concluded?

2:37
It wasn’t just that Finland was changing alliances in an abstract or formal way. It is the fact that Finland was an active participant in the atrocities that the Germans oversaw and encouraged in the siege of Leningrad, that they did various acts of barbarism, which the Russians have slowly taken out of their archives. The Russians have a lot of goods on many countries in Europe, including the level of participation of the Belgians or the French in the military forces of Germany on Russian territory, which outweigh in their figures anything resembling the forces of the opposition resistance movements in these countries which everybody has celebrated, including the Russians, formally till now. Well, so they’re taking things out of the archives, which are not very pretty, but would have gotten in the way of reestablishing normal relations with the various countries that participated with Germany in the assault on Russia.

3:50
In the case of Finland, he was mentioning, yes, they committed these atrocities and some images of this were put up on the television screen, on Russian state television. And they concluded in 1944, seeing which way the war was going, which was coming to a conclusion against Germany, they decided to change sides, which they did at a considerable price. But that agreement, that peace treaty had conditions which Mr. Stubb didn’t mention, but Mr. Lavrov did.

Precisely, Finland was obliged to maintain in perpetuity neutrality. It was obliged not to enter into any military bloc directed against Russia. And there you have it, they joined NATO. So, Mr. Stubb did not go into that aspect of what his country had agreed to.

4:42
But let me move on from that to further consideration of what he may have meant. It came out a day later when he said, without any particular reference why he was saying it, that Finland sought to reestablish relations with Russia. One could read between the lines “normal relations with Russia after the war ended because after all we are neighbors, direct neighbors”. Well, that was quite a signal of a change in position.

The Russians immediately pounced on it and asked, well, why do you wait? You can reestablish relations with us right now. We’re not the ones who broke them off, you are.

He didn’t respond to that challenge. But it does indicate something that I think we will see a lot of in the coming weeks as the war comes to its conclusion, which will be a military defeat that is universally recognized and even in Ukraine. So some sort of treaty will be negotiated.

5:50
And that is that the smaller countries will probably be the first ones to leave this 27 nation wide consolidated opinion on Russia that the EU has maintained for most of the last three years. They are the ones who are most to suffer by the weakened economies resulting from the sanctions and their impact on inflation and on jobs in Western Europe. I live in Belgium. And I can tell you that right now, the country is experiencing severe economic pain. We’re not far from one of the premier commercial avenues, boulevards in Brussels, the Avenue Louise, and there are a lot of empty restaurants and storefronts.

I am sitting now in Knokke. Knokke is the most elegant, most prestigious resort on the North Sea, on sea coast of Belgium. And there are vacancies on the digue, on the seafront, and on a few of the major retail districts. This is unthinkable. This is the most prosperous part of Belgium, and there are vacancies.

There are restaurants that have gone out of business. Some of them are rather large. So I have a relative whose employment has been related to as a son-in-law, whose employment is related to marketing. And he was meeting with his confreres, with his fellow practitioners in marketing, preparing films for advertising and marketing. And they’re all suffering. Marketing is the first thing to go in the budget lines of corporations when they see the economy is sinking.

7:53
So here in little Belgium and in a place like Finland and in many of the smaller countries which have been dependent on Germany as a locomotive to keep them all doing well, now that Germany is officially in recession, continuing in recession, they are all suffering and they cannot afford to continue the sanctions on Russia, particularly after the war ends and there’s no logical reason for them to continue it.

Even in France, I wonder how long Mr. Macron can sing his aggressive songs about Russia and the coalition of the willing and so forth. He’s about to face the fall of his government as Prime Minister Beyrou has announced that it’s impossible for him to accept changes to the budget, which he has prepared, a very strict budget because the country now is experiencing a severe decline in its creditworthiness and is paying a premium price, even above Italy and Greece and other rather weak economies that we traditionally speak of as having high bond rates, because the markets do not give them good grades for managing the economy, France is now above, paying higher rates of interest on its bonds than those countries.

9:31
This cannot continue because France will be penalized. It may find itself in the arms of the IMF if this goes on much longer. Therefore, considering these weaknesses, France among the big countries is the worst case, although Britain isn’t doing very well. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is facing severe criticism because their budget is going into serious deficit and they have been unable to cut costs. And so they face the very unpleasant task of raising taxes. So these are two out of three countries that are facing up to credit problems, all resulting from a weak economy and from the enhanced military expenses if they are assuming to wage war against Russia in 2029.

10:34
These are, I say the big countries are just beginning to see it. The smaller countries are feeling it. But now Mr. Stubb, I think, is the first swallow here to fly by, a new changing direction of politics within the EC, the European Union over relations with Russia.

Diesen:
It’s certainly interesting that after the war is done and everyone, the overly hardened position has to be loosened up. This could be something that fractures the Europeans as well. It’s often pointed out that once the war is over, the Americans might leave, but it’s also interesting that the Europeans might end up taking very different approaches. But who do you think would be the most hardliners within Europe and who would run fastest to try to mend some ties?

Doctorow: 11:30
Well, the … mending of ties, as I say, will be the small countries who are badly hurt by the weakened economy of Germany in particular because they were so dependent on its maintaining the GDP growth in Europe as a whole. The hardliners, well, two days ago, there was a two-page broadsheet interview with a professor of European, a specialist in European security at the University of Lille in France, that was featured on the most important economic or finance daily in Belgium, the “Écho de la bourse”.

12:18
And there you had the logic for the hardliners. Note that Belgium always French- speaking Belgium, always looks to what the French are doing and saying. They take them as the etalon, as the high standard for what should center in public discussion in Belgium itself. This Leo professor was saying, he was very quite intelligent and quite open with his observations on Mr. Trump and Europeans’ handling of Trump, which was interesting because it contradicts what many of my peers and myself included have thought about the European understanding of Trump. That they were taken in, that they don’t see that he is using them.

No, no. This professor was acknowledging that Trump may very well be trying to deceive them and trying to string them along, but their response to that falls within certain limits what they can do. One is they can turn that back on him or they can directly oppose him or two, they can humor him and throw carrots to him as the professor said and show him every politesse, every sign of respect, which they did.

13:57
But without themselves believing that this would change his course, that there would be a pivot back to the pro-European, anti-Russian positions. The logic is different. The logic is: don’t do anything to upset his plans. Let Mr. Putin do that for us. Because they don’t believe that Putin will follow the recommendations or diktat of Trump regarding a meeting with Zelensky and an early conclusion of what will now be a peace treaty rather than a ceasefire.

So they expect that to fall through and they want Putin to take the brunt of Mr. Trump’s dissatisfaction rather than to point to them as having spoiled it, something that would have happened if they hadn’t stood in the way. So that is a more nuanced approach to what Europe is doing than I have seen anyone else say, and I take my hat off to them. At the same time, his overall logic I think explains very well what’s going on in the mind of Mr. Macron and people around him or Mr. Stammer, namely that in no way should this war end in a treaty that compromises Ukraine’s sovereignty, its ability to conclude alliances with anyone it wants, its ability to maintain an army of the kind that it wants for its security and so forth.

With the idea that Ukraine will always be a reserve force of 800,000 man army ready to help Europe at any moment. That is to say, very close to what Mr. Zelensky has been saying, that he is a defender of Europe. If, for example, says this professor, the Russians should move on Estonia, but we could open a second front with the help of Ukraine.

So that is the logic that I have. And it’s exactly what Mr. Putin had in mind when he opened the special military operation: to make that kind of relationship impossible by imposing neutrality limitations on the Ukrainian size of its army and de-Nazification, that’s to say regime change.

There you have it. As I said, I take this professor from l’Ille as being a very good exponent and explainer of what is probably going through the minds of many of his peers in the academic advisors to Mr. Macron and possibly, probably their equivalents in Germany and in England.

Diesen: 17:01
Yes, Stoltenberg, when he was a NATO secretary general, said something similar to that. If the Ukrainians are victorious, then the benefit would be to have as a partner state an army with hundreds of thousands of men who would be battle hardened on the Russian border who would then function as a shield more or less. So I think this is what Europeans want at the end of this war. They can’t accept a neutral Ukraine which can’t be used as an instrument possibly to deter.

But this is why I found the comments by Alexander Stubb interesting as well, because his argument was more or less that Russia cannot be appeased, it must be contained. And this was kind of the lessons that they had with, historical lessons they had with Russia. But it seems that it would be the opposite because from my perspective, the main lesson that should be learned is the security competition you should avoid on the borders of other great powers because a lot of Finland’s experience with the Soviet Union was exactly back in ’39 when the Soviets feared that Finland was too close to, well, Leningrad which is now St. Petersburg, and the Germans could use this in the future as a northern flank against them.

18:20
So they had fought in the winter war. But after this, the Finns indeed, they did join the invasion of the Soviet Union on the side of Hitler, partly to regain their territory, of course. But when they were defeated, they accepted a peace that entailed territorial concessions, but also permanent neutrality. And the whole idea then would be not to be an instrument of security competition between the great powers. So take yourself out of this and by doing this, the Soviets wouldn’t have anything to fear from Finland and they wouldn’t have to go against the Finns.

And to a large extent, the story of Finland is a great success story of neutrality. This massive border, yet no more problems through permanent neutrality. I mean, it’s pragmatic, it shows neutrality works, they ensure their independence, sovereignty, peace. So often people would then look to Finland, why wouldn’t this be a good model for Ukraine?

19:22
But instead of making Ukraine into Finland, we’re doing the opposite. Finland is becoming a frontline like Ukraine. And this is the whole point. When Finland joined NATO in 2023, they changed this power balance. I guess when President Staib says that they want to revive relations after this war, to what extent is it possible to go back to the same? Because now Finland is the largest NATO frontline against the Russians and the Russians are rebuilding the Leningrad military district. It’s a response to this reality, which means that the border with Finland as it’s ended its neutrality will become more militarized.

We have countries like the Baltic states, Poland talking about Finland in NATO allows the Baltic Sea to become a NATO lake. We’re seeing more preparation for a fight or confrontation in the Arctic. It does seem that Finland is becoming a frontline state though. So how possible is it to actually go back, try to restore relations as they were?

Doctorow: 20:32
Well, Russia has had relations with NATO countries. It has very good relations, or reasonably good relations with Turkey, which has the largest military force within NATO. So I don’t think that being in NATO by itself excludes having a normalization and even very good commercial relations with Russia. That’s to hold up Turkey as Exhibit A. As for what has happened to Finland by, I think they were probably the biggest losers economically in this conflict with Russia. We speak about Germany, that is always brought up because of the cheap energy resources that it received via the gas pipelines and also petroleum pipelines.

How will Finland as a case of many times over dependence and profitability from its commercial relations with Russia. This goes back to the Soviet period when they were selling, to be honest about it, quite shoddy consumer items to the Russians in exchange for very fine energy resources and not only. Look, Finland has a very big lumber processing industry, a paper industry. And these were heavily dependent on cheap Russian raw logs. There was a big discussion of course in Russia about the practical benefits or losses in this type of exchange, and there’s no question it was losses.

22:17
The Finns got the logs and then they turned it into a typing paper or anything else you want to think of and cellulose and for rayon and the rest of it. And the Russians got small change and then they received in return leather shoes, which nobody could wear without getting blisters. So I know this a practical matter. That’s what it looked like when you looked at the consumer goods from Finland. They were on sale in Russia in the Soviet Union. They were quite shoddy first by the level of what Bulgaria would ship. The Finns’ economy in every respect was profiting from Russia and that is inside Finland; and their operations in Russia were profitable.

And the Russians wanted it that way. They weren’t stupid about this. They were buying the, this they did with their own Warsaw Pact countries, their control over Eastern Europe, all of these commercial relations were disadvantageous for Russia. And they, again, not because they were stupid, but because they were buying the passivity, the peace with these countries. And it worked, to a certain extent. But to a certain extent, these countries were unwilling to sacrifice their identities for the sake of cheap Russian resources.

23:54
So Finland has suffered enormously and as I said, taking the example of Turkey, I don’t see any reason why their being a member of NATO means necessarily that they have to be on a war footing with Russia.

Diesen:
Well, you mentioned Lavrov’s comment that “Why wait until after the war, we can have diplomatic relations now. It’s the Europeans who broke off diplomacy, not the Russians.”

This is a good point though, because again, as President Stubb suggested, we can have renewed dialogue with Moscow, but only after there’s been established a just and lasting peace in Ukraine. I guess my first question would be why? Why would the diplomacy enter after a conflict? Also, to what extent would it be possible if we recognize that this war is, as many have suggested from Leon Panetta, Boris Johnson, that this is a proxy war indeed?

Wouldn’t the dialogue be required in order to reach this lasting peace? Because again, from the Russian perspective, the main problem is that we cancel these agreements for pan-European security, indivisible security. So again, constructing this Europe without Russia meant re-dividing the continent, reviving the Cold War, zero-sum logic, and even refusing to then take into account Russian concerns, given that this was a hegemonic peace.

25:31
But if the Russian thesis is correct, that the consequence of this is that the deeply divided states, be it Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, would then be pulled in both directions in order to wrestle control over them, to see what side of the new dividing lines in Europe. All of this seems to be requiring some agreements between the Europeans and the Russians as well. So to what extent can you actually have a lasting peace unless you have the diplomacy before the peace. I mean, I understood the initial logic that will isolate Russia, this will put pressure, but who’s thinking these days that Russia’s isolated with the Americans now talking to Russia? It’s just the Europeans.

The rest of the world is doing business. They’re talking with them. The Americans are trying to improve the bilateral relations. Where does this logic come in then? Because I always make the point, I can understand the Russian position well, I understand the Ukrainians very well, I can understand the Americans, but the Europeans, it doesn’t make much sense why they would still boycott diplomacy.

26:37
Well, I think Mr. Lavrov was making debating points rather than saying what is constructive, what happens next. I don’t think that repairing relations with any of the European countries is really on the top of the agenda for Moscow. I think that its first concern is repairing relations with the United States. And the single most important thing to be fixed with the United States and say urgently is an agreement not to– that the United States not bring over its intermediate range missiles into Germany in 2026, which is five months from now. That is of vital importance. And there you need an agreement with Mr. Trump. After that, they can turn around and look at the European states.

27:35
But on this whole question of who’s who and Russia’s relations with Europe and with the United States, I just go back in time. The whole psychology of Russia, or the Soviet Union, was that there were two superpowers, the United States and Russia and Europe didn’t really count. Despite the fact that Russians on the street may consider themselves to be Europeans, that did not carry over into the thinking in the Kremlin. They measured themselves against the states. All of their descriptions of themselves were in units of the United States. So just as in Australia, I think every distance between cities is measured between, is taken by contrast or comparison with the distance between Melbourne and Sydney.

28:34
It is the basis for making judgments about anything. And our newspapers, so populated by journalists who don’t have a memory that goes back more than a few weeks, don’t understand that this is a persistent element of Russian mentality, particularly official Russian mentality, that the United States is what you measure yourself by, not by these little countries in Europe, even if they’re rather big, even if they’re Germany. They are secondary considerations. So first is repair relations with the United States, get this terrible security issue of intermediate-range missiles in Europe off the table, and then go after these countries in Europe.

29:19
I think they will follow what I just observed. They will work first with the smaller countries that are more amenable to reason. And once they’ve facilitated the breakdown, the breakup of the bloc and facilitated the pursuit of national interests particularly among the smaller countries, then they can deal with the larger countries. The real tough nut to crack here, of course, will be Germany because Mr. Metz continues to invest political capital in the confrontation with Russia. And his words are more important than those of Macron because he has the credit worthiness and the ability to build military assets that Mr Macron does not have.

Diesen: 30:13
I guess my last question was on the European strategy, as you suggested that the goal would be for the Europeans to seemingly just nod along and say, of course, Trump, you’re great, we’ll follow your excellent peace initiatives. We’ve never been more optimistic than now. All you have to do is pressure the Russians, you know, to make sure that this is where his negotiation– or threats as this is how he negotiates– goes. You know, I can see a lot of evidence behind this when they began initially to suggest a 30-day ceasefire. I remember all the European leaders, they sent out a tweet which was almost identical.

30:58
They all had the same phrase, ah the ceasefire, “the ball is now in Russia’s court”. In other words, Trump could go over there, you know. Now you have to pressure them, knowing that Russia would never accept a ceasefire because it doesn’t make any sense without political settlement and hoping therefore that, you know, the diplomacy with the Russians would end up in renewing Trump’s commitment to the war and pulling him into the Biden 2.0 or the European camp of a long war with Russia.

But now that the ceasefire is out of the question, this becomes a bit more difficult, or does it? Because the whole thing appears to be premised on the notion that Russia doesn’t really want peace. It’s just prolonging the time so it can gobble up more territory.

But if the conditions of Russia were actually met, that is the territorial concessions and the neutrality, what are the Europeans going to do if the Americans and Russians come to a peace and the Europeans then have to try to fight this tooth and nail. I mean, how can they actually stop this from happening?

Doctorow: 32:09
Well, they can’t, and I think they will simply split, along the lines I mentioned. Mr. Stubb was being very, very careful, very cautious. He’s making baby steps. And if what he said wasn’t entirely consistent, this has to be considered that he can’t go too far out of line with his peers. But we will see more of this as the war grinds on and as the Russians come closer to taking the whole of Donetsk for example, which they’re doing very nicely right now. I think the opinions will change within Europe.

There’ll be some surprises which countries come out first in an olive branch, but there will have to be a split in Europe. To my understanding, the logic suggests that. And it’s not because the Russians are forcing it, it’s because these countries are chafing under the direction given by Germany and by France and by the UK. And finally will revolt against that because it’s so much against their interests and the interests of their peoples and their prosperity.

Diesen: 33:29
But that also makes me think about the expectations for Ukraine, what comes after this war, because what the Europeans appear to want is to have this hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians prepared to die for Europe essentially to be as their active frontline if they have to have a conflict with Russia.

But the Ukrainians, obviously they hope that it would be the Europeans who would come to the aid of Ukraine not the other way around. Of course if there would be a military block, [those] wouldn’t be mutually exclusive, but then the West of course would be pulled into a war, which the Europeans wouldn’t do without America. So I guess my point is there’s been more voices coming out of Ukraine that what happens after this war, because the Europeans seem to be signaling a lot that we need to keep the war going a bit so to protect Europe from the Russian aggression. So people like Yulia Tomashenko has made a point that we just pretty much meet for the Europeans. They just want to throw Ukrainians at Russia to buy time for Europe.

34:36
So in other words, they’re kind of understanding that Europe is there not to protect Ukraine, but to use Ukrainians to protect Europe essentially. So how would that work after a peace? Because based on the assumption, it seems that Ukraine will continue to do this forever, that there will be a political consensus to throw Ukrainians at Russia to help the Europeans. It doesn’t seem like this will be… Well, I can see some flaws in the plan, I guess.

Doctorow: 35:06
Well, in the musical world, going back 20 years, there was a trend particularly strong in the United States called minimalism. I don’t want to propose a one-note symphony here, but I have said several weeks ago that it really is in the Russians’ hands to make a proposal that could solve all of these issues. It would take the Europeans out. It would give an off-ramp to the Europeans because if the Ukrainians agree to a settlement, what can they say? And to make the Ukrainians agree to the settlement, Russia just has to say, liberate the 350 or 250 billion dollars in our assets that are frozen, make them available for the reconstruction of all of Ukraine, including what we occupy. And that would end the war. And that would end Mr. Zubensky and his gang.

35:57
I’m happy to say that I’m not the only one who has been playing this note. It was picked up by a rather reputable and widely read journal in Germany, the Berliner Zeitung.

And they repeated this proposal, happily with attribution to myself. But the point is it is possible to find solutions if you really want to, and to be a little bit creative here. So I don’t think that we are totally blocked. But of course, even if situation looks rather difficult and even if Mr. Merz and Mr. Macron, Mr. Starmer are awfully stubborn and are supported by academics like the one who appeared in “Echo de la bourse” the other day, there are solutions. And there will be an end to this war. The Russians are really approaching Kramatorsk and Slavyansk. They more or less have Pakrovsk surrounded. They have made some sallies into Pakrovsk.

37:00
And so I really think the war on the ground in Donbas is measured in weeks, perhaps in months, but not in years any more. And once the Russians have seized the whole of Donbas, the excuse that Mr. Zelensky gives that he cannot give up territory that hasn’t been conquered will be removed. He can give it all up or he can take the first plane out and let his successor give it all up. So there will be an end to this war. It’s not going to go on forever. I’m looking to publish volume two.

Diesen: 37:42
Well, that’s the frustrating part that everyone recognizes more or less that the Russians won’t give up on Donbass. So they can either appease now or wait until, you know, pull it a few more months until Donbass has been lost and then make the peace. But of course, at that point, Ukraine will be in a much more difficult position because by that time, much more of Zaporizhzhya would have been lost and of course, much more Ukraine will have been destroyed.

Many more men will have died. The ability to reconstruct everything will have been diminished. So if all was completely rational and you would have leaders with some political weight, they would be able to make an unavoidable deal today as opposed to having to choose the worst deal tomorrow just because it’s politically easier to do. But again, everything about this has frustrated me for the past decade. So I think, yeah, they will not go for the best solutions just yet.

Doctorow: 38:41
There are symbolic things that are going on. Kramatorsk and Slaviansk are symbolic because they were the cradle of the Russian Renaissance, what they call it, going back to 2014. Their last stand against the onslaught from vastly superior numbers, the Ukrainian and military forces who were sent in to crush precisely this resistance to the new regime in Kiev. There are also, you mentioned Zaporozhzhye, but I would add to this Dnepropetrovsk, because the Russians had captured their first towns in that oblast. And as they approach Dnepropetrovsk or as the Ukrainians call it, Dnipro, let’s remember what that is.

39:28
That is the home ground of Pellamoysky, the oligarch who owned the largest bank in Ukraine, who owned the Ukrainian airlines and who virtually controlled the government and who financed the Azov batallions and the other violent nationalists. And so it has great symbolic value also that the Russians are marching on Dniepro. The Ukrainians are being battered, which is not to say that there isn’t a real war. There is. And when you watch Russian television and you watch, listen to the reporters, their war correspondents who are traveling along, close to the front, and they have to leave their vehicles and they have to proceed on foot because the vehicles are just a trap for attack drones.

40:20
So it’s not as though this is “Ah, the Ukrainians are all running from the front.” The Russians are not approaching in large contingents. They’re approaching small groups on foot or on motor scooters or motorcycles precisely because of the drone threat. This nature of warfare is still under-reported and it has changed the character of this war dramatically.

That said, they are proceeding in small groups. They are penetrating Ukrainian settlements, taking them by surprise. And while the Ukrainian defenders flee to the next town where they can make a stand. It is a tough war. And all notion that the Russians are doing this according to a fixed schedule, of course that is not happening. They’re moving to where the weak points are, where the Ukrainians cannot cover the whole line and therefore on their way to the weak points to suffer the least losses on their side because attackers always face the threat of greater losses than defenders. It’s a slow moving scene, but where it’s headed is very clear.

Diesen: 41:53
Well, thank you again for your input. I thought this is quite interesting to look at. It’s worth starting to think about what Europe will look like after this war. And I think this question is also one of the reasons why the Europeans are so stubborn in terms of hoping not to end the war given a lot of the uncertainties of what will actually follow. But yes, always thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Doctorow: 42:21
Thanks for inviting me.