Transcript submitted by a reader

Firstpost – Spotlight: 0:00
We begin with the fallout of the war raging in the heart of Europe between Russia and Ukraine, and its impact on the global oil trade. The war, which is just days away from its three-year mark, has brought Cold War rivals, Russia and the United States, to the edge of a direct conflict. In the latest, the United States has imposed its harshest sanctions yet on Russia’s oil industry. Two major Russian oil producers, along with 183 vessels that have shipped Russian oil, have been hit with severe sanctions. The move is aimed at targeting Moscow’s revenues that it uses to fund its war with Ukraine.

Biden: 0:44
They will have profound effect on the growth of the Russian economy and make it more difficult for Putin to conduct his wars. It is probable that gas prices could increase as much as three, four cents a gallon, but what it’s going to have a more profound impact on [is] Russia’s ability to continue to act in the way it’s acting in the conduct of war.

Putin’s in tough shape right now and I think it’s really important that he not have any breathing room to continue to do the god-awful things he’s continuing to do. And as I said, he’s got his own problems economically, significant problems economically, as well as politically at home.

Spotlight:
Not just Russia.These sanctions are also expected to directly impact Moscow’s top oil customers, India and China. Beijing is the world’s largest oil importer and New Delhi ranks third. The newly sanctioned tankers handled over 530 million barrels of Russian crude oil in 2024, about 42% of the country’s total seaborne crude exports. Out of these, around 300 million barrels were shipped to China, adding up to roughly 61% of China’s seaborne imports of Russian oil. And the bulk of the remainder went to India. India relies on Russia for about a third of its oil imports.

2:11
For the first 11 months of last year, India’s Russian crude imports rose 4.5% on year to 1.7 million barrels per day. This makes up 36% of India’s total imports. For China, the volume including pipeline supply was up 2% at 2.1 million barrels per day, which is about 20% of its total imports. Since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia began diverting oil and fuel shipments from Europe to Asia, and both India and China have been the main beneficiaries of discounted Russian crude. But to step up in punitive measures including sanctions targeting Russian producers, insurers and vessels has thrown the trade of discounted crude into disarray.

3:03
Now these tougher sanctions on Russian oil will force Indian and Chinese refiners to diversify and to source more from the Middle East, Africa and the Americas. In December, India’s crude oil imports from West Asia, specifically Iraq and the United Arab Emirates, surged. New Delhi is already looking to replace the shortfall in supplies from its largest source market, Russia. In the same month, India’s imports of Russian crude dropped nearly 17%, sequentially to 1.4 million barrels per day, which is the lowest level in 2024. Now, harsh measures are also pushing both oil prices and freight costs up.

3:47
Earlier today, oil prices jumped after US announced new sanctions to curb Russian oil supply. Reports say that refiners, tankers, operators and traders across Asia were scrambling to manage the fallout from the latest round of sanctions that impact major importers in India and China too. So far hundreds of ships and many Russian oil traders managed to escape US sanctions. This is because the Biden administration sought to strike a balance between the case for tighter sanctions and averting a global oil price rally. But in a week from now, President-elect Donald Trump will take office and the Republican has promised to end the war in Ukraine.

4:32
Moscow depends on oil exports to not just sustain its economy but also to fund the ongoing conflict. So will harsher sanctions find a place in Trump’s strategy to achieve this goal? Now for more on this we have with us international relations and Russian affairs expert Dr. Gilbert Doctorow who is joining us live from Brussels. Welcome to Firstpost.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Yes, good day to you.

Firstpost:
Now Dr., how will the new US sanctions on Russian oil producers and maritime services affect India’s and China’s ability to secure stable oil supplies? And What challenges might they face in diversifying their supply chains to countries like the Middle East, Africa or the Americas?

Doctorow: 5:28
I appreciate the need to investigate alternative supplies. That is prudent and it may prove to be essential. However, there’s another side to the story. The sanctions that Mr. Biden has just imposed are difficult to remove. They are embedded in American legislation, and it would require an act of Congress for Mr. Trump to overturn these sanctions. However, it is also possible, and I’d say likely, that Mr. Trump will simply not enforce these sanctions. There is no ability of Congress or of any American entity to compel him to enforce these. If he were to go the way through Congress and override or reject the sanctions, then he would have a fight with Congress and he would be expending his political capital for an uncertain result.

6:32
If he simply doesn’t enforce them, then he has no problems, and he keeps on moving with the rest of his political agenda. The actions taken by Biden in the closing days of his administration are vicious, but they also are founded on very poor intelligence. It may sound peculiar to your audience, but the United States CIA and other intelligence agencies that are supplying the White House with the basic information that it uses to draw up tactical and strategic plans for its foreign affairs, foreign affairs management, they are faulty. The head of the CIA, Mr. Burns, has been denounced by CIA ex-experts, ex-employees, as lying through his teeth about the nature and status of the Ukraine war.

7:27
The plans that Mr. Biden has set down would make sense if this war will proceed to ’27 or later, which is what American plans are, as we saw at the meeting in Ramstein last week. However, the Russians will very likely complete the war in the coming months.

Spotlight: 7:46
Right. Doctor, with the sanctions targeting over 180 tankers and Russia-based maritime insurance providers, how significant is the anticipated rise in oil prices and freight costs likely to be for major consumers like India and China?

Doctorow: 8:06
I think that we have to wait a week or two. I understand that the market reacts, and must react to this very significant news that you have just described. The “Financial Times”, for example, gave a very lengthy and detailed explanation of the different aspects of these sanctions, both those that are intended to curtail Russian production by sanctioning the companies that are based in Russia, that is foreign companies that are acting in Russia, to facilitate production; and more importantly, to sanction the ships and the insurers, as you mentioned. The net result could be drastic, But I don’t believe that there will be such a net result, for the reasons I just mentioned. Mr. Trump wants to end the war.

Spotlight:
All right. Absolutely. Doctor, thank you very much for being with us on Firstpost and for your valued insights and analysis.

Doctorow: 9:04
Well, thanks for having me.

Transcript submitted by a reader

NewsX – Porteous: 0:00
Hello and welcome. I am Thomas Porteous, and today we will be diving into a discussion on the USA and the United Kingdom tightening sanctions on the Russian oil industry. Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region have captured two North Korean soldiers, marking the first time Kiev has detained North Korean military personnel. Despite being wounded, the soldiers survived and are currently in Kiev, where they are being interrogated by Ukraine’s security service. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has imposed stringent sanctions targeting Russia’s energy sector, aiming to cut off funding for Moscow’s ongoing war against Ukraine.

0:38
These measures come as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Senior US officials hope to strengthen Ukraine’s position before Trump’s inauguration and ensure that the incoming administration continues to enforce these sanctions. Thank you for joining us for this debate. In this discussion we are joined by Professor Arvind Mahajan, Lamar Savings Professor of Finance at Texas A&M; Professor Rohan Gunaratna, international affairs expert from Singapore; Daniel Wagner, CEO of Country Risk Solutions from Portland, Oregon and Professor Madhav Nalapat, Editorial Director of The Sunday Guardian.

1:19
Thank you for joining us for this discussion. My first question to you is for Professor Arvind Mahajan. Do you see the sanctions from the US and the UK affecting Russia’s economy both in the short term and the long term?

Mahajan:
Well the jury is still out, primarily because we have a new administration coming in, in a couple of weeks, and it really will depend upon the attitude which the new administration takes against Russia in particular regarding the enforcement of these actions. If the enforcement is serious, I think it can have a meaningful impact on the cash flows generated by these oil exports to Russia. And in that case, there might be some meaningful marginal effect on the stance which Russia takes vis-a-vis Ukraine. But it’s unclear what the new administration’s attitude will be towards it.

NewsX: 2:20
Professor Gunaratna, I wanted to come to you next. How do these sanctions compare to the previous ones that were imposed on Russia?

Gunaratna:
Russia was able to overcome the impact of those sanctions. During a visit that I made to Russia, I did see the impact, But it did not in any way affect their capacity to sustain their military campaign in Ukraine. What is so important today is that with a new administration coming to office, they must try to resolve this conflict through dialogue and discussion. Even India can play a very important role, because India has very good relations with Russia and also with the United States. So we should look beyond the continuity of this conflict and try to resolve it because through, by sanctions and by war, this conflict is not going to end. It’s going to affect the entire world

NewsX: 3:34
Daniel Wagner, Professor Gunaratna was talking about resolution to this war, but do you think that these sanctions will make the situation harder to negotiate a peace deal?

Wagner:
No, to the contrary, I think these sanctions are going to make it easier to negotiate a peace deal, because the pressure that’s being put on Putin and the Russian government right now as a result of these sanctions is truly significant. And I think what in essence is happening is that the Biden administration is giving a gift to the Trump administration for its future negotiations to try to end this war. And I think it won’t take long for Putin to feel the pressure, because these sanctions are truly significant. You might ask why they weren’t done sooner and the reason is, of course, politics.

4:27
They didn’t, the Biden administration didn’t want to have a spike in oil and gas prices in America as a result of these sanctions during the election cycle, which basically means for the past two years, that was not going to be in the cards. So I think there’s every reason to believe that this will make a difference.

NewsX: 4:48
Professor Nalapat, Trump has spoken about a possible meeting with Putin. What can we expect from this and what actions do we expect President Trump to take within his first few days of office in regard to this conflict?

Nalapat:
Let me tell you quite clearly that in my view these sanctions are not going to make any impact on Russia’s war capacity. Ukraine is supposed to have been winning the war right from February 2022 onwards and it has lost people, it has lost territory continuously since then.

5:24
The small incursions that are made into Russia can be mopped up at any time. The reality of the situation is that if oil prices go up, it’s a gift to Putin. Putin is very dependent on oil and gas for a lot of the money that he is making and he would be delighted by it. And quite frankly, this war is creating a rift between the West and the rest of the world to the benefit of China. Again, this is– this war is because of an obsessive focus on Europe on the part of the Biden administration and I’m sorry to say by too many scholars in the United States and in other parts of North America.

6:05
The reality of the situation is, if Ukraine were that important to European security, during all the decades it was part of the USSR, was there an impact on European security? Nothing at all. The fact is, this is a Eurocentric approach to the world, and that approach could have been wonderful in the 17th and 18th, 19th century, but in the second half of 20th century the winds began shifting, and now it is firmly in the Indo-Pacific and firmly the main adversary is no longer Russia but China. By keeping on sounding the war drums against Russia, you are diverting the attention away from China to the benefit of China. So very frankly– and supposing let’s say that Trump comes in, and supposing some people say all right they’re going to increase. I mean, Britain and the US are gas exporters; other countries in Europe are importers. They will suffer. The German economy is already significantly weakened. Other European economies have been significantly weakened.

And every single political leader in the West, as Keir Starmer is going to find out in the next election, has been weakened if he has supported the Ukraine war, where you talk about Biden, you talk about Sunak, you talk about Johnson, you talk about Macron, you talk about Trudeau, you talk about any of these people. They’ve all been weakened, because the people of these countries have more common sense than some of the leaders have to have.

7:40
My point is, this is a trap laid for Donald Trump. This is a very clever trap laid for Donald Trump, a minefield that if he steps on, it will blow to bits any chance of a detente with Russia. And in the view of some of us, the fact is, Russian neutrality during this new ongoing Cold War 2.0 with China is essential. If you don’t get Russian support, just as the West got Chinese support during Cold War 1.0, if you don’t get Russian support, at least Russian neutrality. And by making it much more difficult to do so because of this obsession with the European country, Ukraine, which frankly makes very little strategic difference to either Europe or Asia or the United States, wherever it goes. I think quite frankly, the Biden, whoever in the Biden administration is behind this. And so far the UK is concerned. Kier Starmer is marching in lockstep with Boris Johnson and Sunak. And if he’s going to continue, he’ll go the same way.

8:45
Already the Reform Party is gathering speed in Britain. What I understand is, it’s got more people than the Conservatives. But the Conservatives also jumped on the Ukrainian bandwagon. And Labour is going to pay a price for it. So I just want to say this war has to be ended now. And if it’s not ended, the West is in danger of losing the rest to China, and that is to the benefit of only one country, the present biggest threat to the West, which is China.

NewsX: 9:17
Thank you. Gilbert Doctorow, Russian affairs expert, also joins us. How would you respond to Madame Nalepat’s statement there calling this a minefield for the upcoming Donald Trump administration?

Doctorow:
I don’t agree. In war, in politics, timing is everything. The timing is based, is useful when you have good intelligence and understand the world around you. The administration of Washington has bad intelligence. It has a defective CIA, defective other intelligence agencies within Washington, and they have been feeding the president and the Congress completely misleading information or disinformation about the conduct of the war. If this measure had been introduced two years ago, it might have had an impact on Russia’s ability to conduct the war. However, it is being introduced at a time when Russia is close to dealing a knockout blow to Ukraine.

10:21
We are at the war’s end, in terms of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. We are close to a capitulation of the Ukrainian forces. The only possible practical effect of these new sanctions, should they be implemented by the Trump administration, which is questionable, the only possible impact would be to hasten the Russian move for the knockout blow and to motivate Mr. Putin to hasten the war and to finish it up. And it means that these measures have an escalatory impact.

Wars are fought not only on the ground, but by economics. And this economic approach is wrongly timed because of the misinformation, as I said, and because of the cowardice of the Biden administration, which is the other side of the viciousness of this administration. These people, Blinken, Sullivan, and Biden are hateful people, and they think that they are giving a poison chalice to Mr. Trump. But it’s only because they’re misled. You can fool the other party, but you should not fool yourself with propaganda. And regrettably for them, the Biden administration is subject to its own propaganda.

NewsX: 11:46
Gilbert, I wanted to track back a little bit on this, and I was wondering how ordinary Russians will respond to these sanctions and the feeling in Russia about the war currently.

Doctorow:
To give a certain response to that question, because Russia has been on vacation for two weeks. The Russian news agencies, the Russian prime talk shows, the indications of what the elites around the Kremlin think, are only coming back on air on Monday and Tuesday, after the Russian New Year.

12:21
But I can tell you from the latest news bulletins, it is evident that the Russians appreciate the seriousness of these sanctions, but they expect to muddle through and to continue to prosecute the war. No one in Russia has been enthusiastic for this war. Let us be clear, it is a major war. Anyone who thinks that the fighting forces of Ukraine have not been valiant and have not given it their best effort is mistaken. This is a serious war, the largest in Europe since World War II.

And yet [Russia], acting on their own with minor logistical support from their allies, has beaten back everything that the United States and NATO have been able to throw at it. Ukraine is simply the space in which this war between NATO and Russia is being fought. So the Russians have, in the last several weeks, have increased confidence that they are winning this war and the end is near.

NewsX: 13:33
Professor Arvind Mahajan, I wanted to ask you, Russia currently faces around 13,000 international sanctions. With all these sanctions, how might Russia redirect its exports?

Mahajan:
Well, I think– I’m not a huge fan of sanctions, because as a generality, I have not seen them work very effectively in most of the cases. And it’s unclear to me really how effective these sanctions might be, even though the Department of Treasury has certainly ratcheted up what it has been doing over the last couple of years. So, I mean, frankly, from my viewpoint, our view of this war, to a large extent, is dictated by where we are situated. Clearly, the American view is slightly different than the Russian view, slightly different than the Indian view, slightly different than the Ukrainian view. And we are subject to our own biases and perspectives.

14:38
Unfortunately, we don’t really get a clear, unbiased information. None of us get them clearly because it’s kind of colored by where we are located and the echo chamber in which we exist. So I think our views on the war accordingly are determined by our position. As a generality, like I said earlier, I don’t think sanctions are usually a very effective tool. In this case, a negotiated settlement really is the only solution here. I am not sure, as I said earlier, I’m not sure how vigorously the Trump administration is going to implement and enforce the changes proposed by the Department of Treasury.

15:26
It’s also unclear to me how the OPEC countries are going to respond, in as far as changing the supply of oil in the markets is concerned. As was mentioned by someone else, there is enough oil in the market that this was an opportune time to put the sanctions on without the fear that the prices will spike up in a significant way, although we did see some increase in the price of oil yesterday. But it’s not going to be impactful as it would have been a couple of years ago when the global supplies were somewhat limited. So the long-winded answer to your clear question really is, one, the jury is out, and two, I don’t think these sanctions are going to be the determinant of how the war ends and on what terms it ends. I think these sanctions are a small part of the larger issues which the countries are dealing with to determine how it will be resolved. I just don’t see them as breaking the back of Russia, so that it will come running to the negotiating table.

NewsX: 16:33
Professor Gunaratna, I wanted to ask, as the UK and the US and Europe wean themselves off of Russian gas, how might Ukraine benefit from new energy deals or pipelines?

Gunaratna:
Ukraine certainly is challenged at this point. So my personal view is that it is so important for there to be a resolution to this conflict, because the threats are going to spread. Already Europe is witnessing so much of threats coming from Russia. And of course, Ukraine itself is mounting attacks deep into Russia.

So this escalation is going to cripple the economy of Europe, Ukraine and Russia. It’s going to create a big conflict and eventually the threat is going to spread beyond Ukraine. That is why I said that it is a great opportunity for the new administration to pursue a different path.

NewsX: 17:44
Daniel Wagner, I want to come to you on this next one. Let’s say this war does end after Trump takes office. How can the US and the UK assure that Ukraine won’t be threatened again?

Wagner:
Right, well, of course, we have to get to that point before we can have such a discussion. And a lot of people are very skeptical that this is actually going to be resolved quickly. It may take quite a few months to do so if all the parties are willing to go to the table. But at the end of the day, NATO is in a much better position than it was to protect itself.

It’s much better funded. It’s much better armed. And Ukraine itself, should it ever become a member of NATO, ultimately would be the best-experienced and best-armed country of NATO among them. So I think part of it will be to keep NATO armed, somehow keep it well funded in the recovery process, and for the NATO countries to step up to the plate and devote even a greater percentage of their GDP to NATO going forward. Two percent isn’t going to do it any more.

And as we know, Trump has talked about ramping that up to 5%. I don’t even think the US is gonna reach that point. So it all remains to be seen, but I do think Europe is in a much better position than it was previously.

NewsX: 19:19
Professor Nalapat, did these sanctions strengthen Russia’s push to build closer ties with countries like China and India?

Nalapat:
Well, I’m afraid the Russians have been pushed completely into the Chinese camp, thanks to these sanctions and thanks to this Ukraine war. And may I point out very, very, very respectfully that NATO has lost every single war it has fought. Frankly it has hardly fought a war in the European continent. There was no kinetic war between the USSR and the US and European countries. You take Libya, you take Iraq, you take Syria, you take Afghanistan, the NATO went in there and created a royal mess, a complete royal mess. So very frankly in Asia we are not very, what do I say, admiring of the great capabilities of NATO in conducting operations in actuality rather than computer simulations or battlefield simulations.

20:31
I think we’re very frankly, the record in Libya, the record in Afghanistan, the record in Syria, the record in Iraq, that all these records speak for themselves. I don’t know who is going to argue with these records. I want to say very clearly, we need to shift the focus back to the Indo-Pacific. We need to shift from Europe, we need to shift the focus back from Ukraine, I mean from Russia to China. And that is the reality that we are confronting today. So quite frankly we can do chest thumping about the immense strength of NATO. But try telling that to the people of Libya, to the people of Iraq, the people of Syria, to the people of Afghanistan and you may hear a bit of polite dissonance coming from them. Thank you.

NewsX: 21:23
Gilbert Doctorow, if Russia is shut out of Western markets, how might this reshape the global economic order, especially with Chinese involvement?

Doctorow:
Western markets, since shortly after the start of this special military operation in February 2022, that’s not a new development. They have found various ways of circumventing the sanctions and finding new markets. That took them perhaps four to six months from the start of the war till they found their feet and resolved the challenges that the United States was posing.

22:07
Those solutions are what are now being attacked by the latest sanctions that Yellen and others in the Biden administration have cooked up. I have in mind the question of the black fleet, the 150 ships or whatever that are being used by Russians to evade the sanctions concerning insurance requirements and other requirements on vessels carrying Russian oil around the world. They have succeeded, and I think they will be equally inventive in finding new solutions to counter the sanctions that are being produced. But the more important thing is not Russian evasion of the sanctions. They will be, as your first speaker mentioned, it will be the readiness and the ability of the incoming Trump administration to implement and to execute the intentions of these sanctions. And I don’t believe that the interest in Mr. Trump is to do that.

23:12
On the contrary, as I said a moment ago, full implementation of these sanctions, if they were to have the impact, the negative consequences for Russian exports of petroleum, would be, would push us in an escalatory direction. One has to remember that when countries are pressed in an existential way, as Japan was before World War II, what starts out economic becomes kinetic. And therefore the ultimate result, if Mr. Biden’s measures were to be successful, which they will not be, would be to escalate this war in the direction of a nuclear war. For that reason, I think we all should condemn what Biden has done. It is, as I said, a poison chalice and it comes from people who know no better.

NewsX:24:12
We have run out of time. That is all we have time for, unfortunately. Thank you very much [to] all our guests for joining us today in this discussion. We will continue to bring more news updates from the war and the rest of the world. Thank you for watching NewsX,

As they used to say at the betting parlors, ‘five will get you ten.’    Once you appear on one television station, the others also want some fresh blood.  And so I was not surprised to be invited this morning to appear on a new giant in Indian global broadcasting which calls itself Firstpost. They boast a subscriber base of over 13 million across leading platforms and in the past 90 days they reached over 350 million viewers worldwide.  Looking at the comments on my session with them today, it is clear that they have an open-minded audience: not a single viewer yet has complained that they are disseminating Putin propaganda…

As you expect from a global broadcaster Firstpost have operating centers in various major cities abroad. Indeed, the presenter for my interview was speaking to me from their Durban, South Africa offices. She opened our session with some well-chosen video spots from Joe Biden’s public announcement of the new drastic sanctions he imposed Friday on the Russian energy sector.

Since we all need a bit of comic relief in these difficult times, it was charming to hear Joe say his measures will work against ‘Putin’s wars.’ Note the plural coming from the mouth of a record-beating fomenter of wars and chaos during his own term in office.  Still better was Joe’s remark that ‘Putin is in tough shape.’ Seems that Joe spent too much time looking in the mirror when shaving this morning.

In my limited time on air, I focused attention on the wrong assumptions that underlie Joe Biden’s imposition of sanctions now, when the war is approaching its climax and conclusion, about which he knows nothing thanks to Lying Bill Burns at the CIA.

To calm the nerves of Indian oil traders who are now getting 32% of the country’s imports from Russia, I called out the likely refusal of Trump to enforce the unwanted sanctions which would only complicate his task of finding common language with Putin and bringing the war to closure.

There have been some readers questioning what I wrote earlier today about how Russian elites now believe that Trump will deliver a Yalta-like settlement with Moscow, as Vladimir Putin demands. Given that what I was citing came from the Vladimir Solovyov show and given that Solovyov has been deeply skeptical that anyone can overrule the Deep State and retrieve U.S.-Russian relations from the hell-hole where they now are trapped, I firmly believe that some kind of backchannel has been established between Trump and the Kremlin which accounts for the changed mood in Moscow and jollity that I saw on air.

See   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DPMzZ1tvFU

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Firstpost (Indien) Spotlight-Programm: US-Sanktionen gegen Russlands Öl treffen Indien

Wie man in den Wettbüros zu sagen pflegte: „Fünf werden dir zehn bringen.“ Sobald man in einem Fernsehsender auftritt, wollen auch die anderen frisches Blut. Und so war ich nicht überrascht, heute Morgen eingeladen zu werden, in einem neuen Giganten des indischen globalen Rundfunks aufzutreten, der sich Firstpost nennt. Sie verfügen über einen Abonnentenstamm von über 13 Millionen auf führenden Plattformen und haben in den letzten 90 Tagen weltweit über 350 Millionen Zuschauer erreicht. Wenn man sich die Kommentare zu meiner heutigen Sitzung mit ihnen ansieht, wird deutlich, dass sie ein aufgeschlossenes Publikum haben: Noch hat sich kein einziger Zuschauer darüber beschwert, dass sie Putin-Propaganda verbreiten …

Wie man es von einem globalen Sender erwarten kann, hat Firstpost Betriebszentren in verschiedenen Großstädten im Ausland. Tatsächlich sprach die Moderatorin meines Interviews mit mir aus ihrem Büro in Durban, Südafrika. Sie eröffnete unsere Sitzung mit einigen gut ausgewählten Videoclips von Joe Bidens öffentlicher Ankündigung der neuen drastischen Sanktionen, die er am Freitag gegen den russischen Energiesektor verhängt hatte.

Da wir in diesen schwierigen Zeiten alle ein wenig Aufheiterung brauchen, war es charmant zu hören, wie Joe sagte, dass seine Maßnahmen gegen „Putins Kriege“ wirken werden. Beachten Sie, dass der Plural aus dem Mund eines Rekordbrechers in Sachen Krieg und Chaos während seiner eigenen Amtszeit kommt. Noch besser war Joes Bemerkung, dass „Putin in einer schwierigen Verfassung ist“. Anscheinend hat Joe heute Morgen beim Rasieren zu viel Zeit damit verbracht, in den Spiegel zu schauen.

In meiner begrenzten Sendezeit habe ich mich auf die falschen Annahmen konzentriert, die Joe Bidens Verhängung von Sanktionen jetzt zugrunde liegen, wo der Krieg seinem Höhepunkt und Ende entgegengeht, worüber er dank des lügenden Bill Burns von der CIA nichts weiß.

Um die Nerven der indischen Ölhändler zu beruhigen, die inzwischen 32 % der Importe des Landes aus Russland beziehen, wies ich auf die wahrscheinliche Weigerung Trumps hin, die unerwünschten Sanktionen durchzusetzen, was seine Aufgabe, eine gemeinsame Sprache mit Putin zu finden und den Krieg zu beenden, nur erschweren würde.

Einige Leser haben meine heutige Aussage in Frage gestellt, dass die russischen Eliten nun glauben, Trump werde eine Jalta-ähnliche Einigung mit Moskau erzielen, wie Wladimir Putin es fordert. Da das, was ich zitiert habe, aus der Sendung von Wladimir Solowjow stammt und Solowjow zutiefst skeptisch ist, dass irgendjemand den Schattenstaat ausschalten und die amerikanisch-russischen Beziehungen aus dem Höllenloch befreien kann, in dem sie jetzt gefangen sind, glaube ich fest daran, dass es eine Art Geheimkanal zwischen Trump und dem Kreml gibt, der für die veränderte Stimmung in Moskau und die Heiterkeit, die ich in der Sendung gesehen habe, verantwortlich ist.

During an on-air conversation last Thursday with Judge Andrew Napolitano on ‘Judging Freeedom,’ I was asked how the Kremlin and Russian elites view the announcement by Donald Trump at his Mar a Lago press conference that he plans to take possession of Greenland and is prepared to use military force or economic pressure, as necessary, to wrest the island from its legal owner, Denmark.  I replied that no definitive answer is yet possible, because Russian news and commentary programming was shut down for the country’s two-week winter break that began on 31 December and will mostly return following the celebration of New Year’s according to the Gregorian calendar, 14 January as the world reckons today.

However, several Russian shows have returned to life ahead of their ‘old style’ New Year’s. Sixty Minutes was back on Friday, and the widely watched Evening with Vladimir Solovyov was again on air last night, Sunday. That show was almost entirely devoted to discussion of Trump’s Mar a Lago press conference and to the latest antics of Elon Musk operating as Trump’s attack dog against Left-leaning governments in Europe and Canada. The several panelists and the host were all delighted with Trump and confident that he will quickly drive a stake through the heart of the Biden legislative and policy legacy, leading to a 180 degree turn from hostile confrontation to live and let live in U.S. relations with Russia.

Last night’s Solovyov show took me back down memory lane. In November 2016, both before and after the U.S. presidential election, I was in Moscow. Just ahead of the election I was invited on to the Solovyov show to comment on Trump for the benefit of his Russian audience which was keen to hear from a Russian-speaking American who happened to be a Trump backer. In the break during that show, when Solovyov circulates among panelists while they take coffee, I asked him directly what he thought about Trump and he replied without a moment’s hesitation that he preferred for Hillary to win:  ‘better to get the devil we know than this volatile and unpredictable Trump.’

Of course, following the election, Russian state television suppressed doubts and celebrated Trump’s victory.  I joined RT host Peter Lavelle in his Cross Talk studio for a round table discussion of the good days to come.

For their part, as 2017 arrived Vladimir Solovyov and other representatives of Russia’s chattering classes were willing to give Donald the benefit of the doubt and see if he could implement the Russia-friendly policies he talked about in the electoral campaign.  As we now know, from the get-go Trump did not deliver on those promises. Indeed, bilateral relations deteriorated during the entire period of his presidency.

Heading into this year’s American elections, Solovyov and other Russian commentators took the position that it would make no difference who wins because the Deep State controls American policy so that the venomous hostility to Russia that has flourished during the Biden years will continue. The main thing, they all said, was for Russia to continue down its own path, smash Ukraine and NATO, and look after its own security by armed force.

Following the election, there was no change in the skepticism with which Russian elites met the Trump victory. In the first weeks, the nomination by Trump of numerous hawks and Neocons to man the top security, foreign policy and military posts in his administration did not augur well.  But then two weeks ago one remark by Trump when speaking to reporters caught Moscow’s attention.  He had called the decision by Joe Biden to allow Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia using American made ATACMS missiles ‘foolish and dangerous.’ Moreover, other little signs indicated that perhaps the new administration would make changes in policy from the outset. Moscow perused with interest the invitation list to the inauguration, which did not include either Volodymyr Zelensky or EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen, the Ukrainian’s greatest supporter.

Then in this past week, Trump’s Mar a Lago remarks to the assembled press changed entirely Moscow’s estimation of what the Trump presidency may bring.

Russia’s experts are very happy to see Trump espousing a policy of naked aggression, of pure imperialism to further American interests, which is what his plans for Greenland and for retaking the Panama Canal illustrate. This marks a stark departure from the sweet talk of values based foreign policy that the Democrats have used as their smoke screen to spread chaos globally and enforce American hegemony. It is pure Realpolitik, or interests based foreign policy, and is music to the ears of the Russians.

Accordingly, Biden’s ‘rules-based order’ is kaput, spheres of influence are back in favor. The Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine assumes an entirely legitimate nature if, as Trump was saying at Mar al Lago, it had been provoked by Biden’s crossing red lines that had been set down back in 2008 by pushing for Ukraine’s admission to NATO.

Panelists on the Solovyov show said last night that they expect Trump to diminish or entirely cut off aid to Kiev. Talk about defending Ukraine’s 1992 borders, about it dealing a humiliating blow to Russia on the battlefield has ceased. From Trump’s words, Moscow believes that the USA will be indifferent to that actual borders that Ukraine retains at the conclusion of a peace, nor does it wish to provide security guaranties to Ukraine or to envisage its joining NATO at some date in the future.  All that counts is for there to be some semblance of sovereignty in the remaining territory when the Russians are through with it that will call itself Ukraine.

Obviously, from the words of the panelists, they do not expect Trump to enforce the crushing sanctions that Biden has just imposed on the Russian energy sector.

Most importantly, they expect that the eventual Trump – Putin summit, which may come soon or may come in April or in August, will not be about Ukraine but about a revision of the global security architecture. The word was not used, but they are clearly looking for a kind of Yalta-2 negotiation. The negotiation will be with Russia, and not with China, because it is Russia that has been the first to directly challenge U.S. global hegemony and it is Russia that remains the intellectual leader of the Global South towards BRICS and a multipolar world.

As for Elon Musk, Vladimir Solovyov’s panelists have greatly enjoyed his blunt and insulting words addressed to heads of government in Europe and further afield who have been Biden’s willing agents in the hybrid and kinetic war against their country over Ukraine. Musk’s publicly calling German chancellor Olaf Scholz a ‘stupid fool.’  His addressing Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau as ‘a little girl’, which is a snide reference to his ambiguous sexual orientation. Moscow takes great pleasure in such scandalous treatment of its enemies. Moreover, the Solovyov panelists see in all of Musk’s recent doings, including his X interview with Alternative for Germany co-chair Alice Weidel, an exercise in regime change that has a clear ideological dimension: to replace corrupt and cowardly Left-oriented governments in the European Union with friendly to Russia Rightist and populist led governments.  All of this they see as closely coordinated with Donald Trump, and it reinforces their newfound enthusiasm for Donald.

Let us hope that Russia’s elites are not mistaken this time about Trump. Their confidence appeared to be so solid that it is tempting to believe that some backchannel between the incoming American president and the Kremlin has been established, confirming the radical policy changes ahead. In the meantime, let us breathe easier.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Russische Eliten sind begeistert von Donald Trumps Pressekonferenz in Mar a Lago

Während eines On-Air-Gesprächs mit Judge Andrew Napolitano am vergangenen Donnerstag in der Sendung „Judging Freedom“ wurde ich gefragt, wie der Kreml und die russischen Eliten die Ankündigung von Donald Trump auf seiner Pressekonferenz in Mar a Lago sehen, dass er plant, Grönland in Besitz zu nehmen und bereit ist, militärische Gewalt oder wirtschaftlichen Druck einzusetzen, um die Insel ihrem rechtmäßigen Eigentümer Dänemark zu entreißen. Ich antwortete, dass eine endgültige Antwort noch nicht möglich sei, da die russischen Nachrichten- und Kommentarsendungen wegen der zweiwöchigen Winterpause des Landes, die am 31. Dezember begann, eingestellt wurden und größtenteils nach den Feierlichkeiten zum Neujahrstag nach dem Gregorianischen Kalender, dem 14. Januar, wie die Welt ihn heute festlegt, wieder ausgestrahlt werden.

Einige russische Sendungen sind jedoch vor ihrem Neujahrsfest im „alten Stil“ wieder auf Sendung gegangen. Sechzig Minuten war am Freitag wieder auf Sendung, und die vielgesehene Sendung Abend mit Vladimir Solovyov war gestern Abend, am Sonntag, wieder auf Sendung. Diese Sendung war fast ausschließlich der Diskussion über Trumps Pressekonferenz in Mar a Lago und den jüngsten Eskapaden von Elon Musk gewidmet, der als Trumps Kampfhund gegen linksgerichtete Regierungen in Europa und Kanada agiert. Die verschiedenen Diskussionsteilnehmer und der Moderator waren alle begeistert von Trump und zuversichtlich, dass er Bidens politisches und legislatives Erbe schnell zunichte machen und zu einer 180-Grad-Wende von feindseliger Konfrontation zu einem „leben und leben lassen“ in den Beziehungen der USA zu Russland führen wird.

Die Solowjow-Sendung von gestern Abend hat mich in Erinnerungen schwelgen lassen. Im November 2016, sowohl vor als auch nach der US-Präsidentschaftswahl, war ich in Moskau. Kurz vor der Wahl wurde ich in die Solowjow-Sendung eingeladen, um Trump zu kommentieren, und zwar zum Nutzen seines russischen Publikums, das unbedingt von einem russischsprachigen Amerikaner hören wollte, der zufällig ein Trump-Anhänger war. In der Pause während dieser Sendung, als Solowjow sich unter den Diskussionsteilnehmern bewegt, während sie Kaffee trinken, fragte ich ihn direkt, was er von Trump halte, und er antwortete ohne zu zögern, dass er es vorziehen würde, wenn Hillary gewinnt: „Besser den Teufel, den wir kennen, als diesen launischen und unberechenbaren Trump.“

Natürlich unterdrückte das russische Staatsfernsehen nach der Wahl jegliche Zweifel und feierte Trumps Sieg. Ich schloss mich RT-Moderator Peter Lavelle in seinem Cross Talk-Studio zu einer Diskussionsrunde über die guten Tage, die vor uns liegen würden, an.

Als das Jahr 2017 anbrach, waren Wladimir Solowjow und andere Vertreter der russischen Klatschpresse ihrerseits bereit, Donald im Zweifelsfall zu vertrauen und abzuwarten, ob er die russlandfreundliche Politik, von der er im Wahlkampf gesprochen hatte, umsetzen würde. Wie wir heute wissen, hat Trump diese Versprechen von Anfang an nicht eingehalten. Tatsächlich haben sich die bilateralen Beziehungen während seiner gesamten Präsidentschaft verschlechtert.

Im Vorfeld der diesjährigen amerikanischen Wahlen vertraten Solowjow und andere russische Kommentatoren die Ansicht, dass es keinen Unterschied machen würde, wer gewinnt, da der Schattenstaat die amerikanische Politik kontrolliert und die giftige Feindseligkeit gegenüber Russland, die in den Biden-Jahren aufgeblüht ist, anhalten wird. Das Wichtigste sei, so sagten sie alle, dass Russland seinen eigenen Weg weitergeht, die Ukraine und die NATO zerschlägt und seine eigene Sicherheit mit Waffengewalt gewährleistet.

Nach der Wahl änderte sich nichts an der Skepsis, mit der die russischen Eliten dem Sieg von Trump begegneten. In den ersten Wochen ließ die Ernennung zahlreicher Falken und Neokonservativer durch Trump für die obersten Posten in den Bereichen Sicherheit, Außenpolitik und Militär in seiner Regierung nichts Gutes ahnen. Doch dann erregte vor zwei Wochen eine Bemerkung Trumps in einem Gespräch mit Reportern die Aufmerksamkeit Moskaus. Er hatte die Entscheidung von Joe Biden, ukrainische Angriffe tief in Russland mit in den USA hergestellten ATACMS-Raketen zuzulassen, als „dumm und gefährlich“ bezeichnet. Darüber hinaus deuteten andere kleine Anzeichen darauf hin, dass die neue Regierung möglicherweise von Anfang an Änderungen in der Politik vornehmen würde. Moskau nahm die Einladungsliste zur Amtseinführung mit Interesse zur Kenntnis, auf der weder Wolodymyr Selenskyj noch die Präsidentin der EU-Kommission Ursula von der Leyen, die größte Unterstützerin der Ukraine, standen.

In der vergangenen Woche haben Trumps Äußerungen gegenüber der versammelten Presse in Mar a Lago die Einschätzung Moskaus darüber, was die Präsidentschaft Trumps bringen könnte, völlig verändert.

Russische Experten sind sehr erfreut darüber, dass Trump eine Politik der nackten Aggression und des reinen Imperialismus zur Förderung amerikanischer Interessen befürwortet, wie seine Pläne für Grönland und die Rückeroberung des Panamakanals zeigen. Dies ist eine deutliche Abkehr von dem Gerede über eine wertebasierte Außenpolitik, das die Demokraten als Vorwand benutzt haben, um weltweit Chaos zu verbreiten und die amerikanische Hegemonie durchzusetzen. Es ist reine Realpolitik oder interessenbasierte Außenpolitik und Musik in den Ohren der Russen.

Dementsprechend ist Bidens „regelbasierte Ordnung“ kaputt, und Einflusssphären sind wieder in Mode. Die russische „Invasion“ der Ukraine ist völlig legitim, wenn sie, wie Trump in Mar al Lago sagte, durch Bidens Überschreitung der roten Linien provoziert wurde, die 2008 durch das Drängen auf die Aufnahme der Ukraine in die NATO festgelegt worden waren.

Die Diskussionsteilnehmer in der Solowjow-Sendung sagten gestern Abend, dass sie erwarten, dass Trump die Hilfe für Kiew verringern oder ganz einstellen wird. Die Rede davon, die Grenzen der Ukraine von 1992 zu verteidigen und Russland auf dem Schlachtfeld eine demütigende Niederlage zuzufügen, ist verstummt. Aus Trumps Worten geht hervor, dass Moskau glaubt, dass die USA gleichgültig gegenüber den tatsächlichen Grenzen sein werden, die die Ukraine nach Abschluss eines Friedensabkommens behält, und dass sie auch keine Sicherheitsgarantien für die Ukraine abgeben oder einen NATO-Beitritt zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt in Betracht ziehen wollen. Alles, was zählt, ist, dass sich auf dem verbleibenden Territorium, das sich Ukraine nennen wird nachdem die Russen die militärischen Aktionen abgeschlossen haben, einen Anschein von Souveränität gibt.

Aus den Worten der Podiumsteilnehmer geht eindeutig hervor, dass sie nicht erwarten, dass Trump die vernichtenden Sanktionen durchsetzen wird, die Biden gerade gegen den russischen Energiesektor verhängt hat.

Am wichtigsten ist, dass sie erwarten, dass es bei dem möglichen Trump-Putin-Gipfel, der bald oder im April oder August stattfinden könnte, nicht um die Ukraine, sondern um eine Überarbeitung der globalen Sicherheitsarchitektur gehen wird. Das Wort wurde nicht verwendet, aber sie streben eindeutig eine Art Jalta-2-Verhandlung an. Die Verhandlungen werden mit Russland und nicht mit China geführt, da Russland das erste Land war, das die globale Hegemonie der USA direkt in Frage gestellt hat, und Russland nach wie vor der intellektuelle Anführer des globalen Südens gegenüber den BRICS-Staaten und einer multipolaren Welt ist.

Was Elon Musk betrifft, so haben die Diskussionsteilnehmer von Wladimir Solowjow seine unverblümten und beleidigenden Worte an die Regierungschefs in Europa und darüber hinaus, die Bidens willige Agenten im hybriden und kinetischen Krieg gegen ihr Land wegen der Ukraine waren, sehr genossen. Musk bezeichnete den deutschen Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz öffentlich als „dummen Narren“. Den kanadischen Premierminister Justin Trudeau nannte er „ein kleines Mädchen“, was eine abfällige Anspielung auf seine zweideutige sexuelle Orientierung ist. Moskau hat große Freude an einer solch skandalösen Behandlung seiner Feinde. Darüber hinaus sehen die Solowjow-Panelisten in allen jüngsten Handlungen von Musk, einschließlich seines X-Interviews mit der Co-Vorsitzenden der Alternative für Deutschland, Alice Weidel, eine Übung in Sachen Regimewechsel, die eine klare ideologische Dimension hat: korrupte und feige linksorientierte Regierungen in der Europäischen Union durch Russland-freundliche rechtsgerichtete und populistisch geführte Regierungen zu ersetzen. All dies wird von ihnen als eng mit Donald Trump abgestimmt angesehen und bestärkt sie in ihrer neu entdeckten Begeisterung für Donald.

Hoffen wir, dass sich die russischen Eliten dieses Mal in Bezug auf Trump nicht irren. Ihr Vertrauen schien so gefestigt zu sein, dass man geneigt ist zu glauben, dass es einen geheimen Draht zwischen dem neuen amerikanischen Präsidenten und dem Kreml gibt, was die bevorstehenden radikalen politischen Veränderungen bestätigen würde. In der Zwischenzeit können wir aufatmen.

In a posting yesterday, I said that I would present the link to the debate over Biden’s latest sanctions from hell imposed on the Russian energy sector as soon as that link became available.

Here it is:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mucw9iJmhA

I am hopeful that viewers will find this discussion with 5 participants as refreshing as I did when participating in it.  My own contributions begin at the 9 minute mark and resume at the 21 minute mark. But I do recommend watching my fellow panelists for a reminder that the ‘truth will win out’ as Jan Hus once said in Prague and that ‘you  cannot fool all of the people all of the time,’ as Abraham Lincoln famously quipped.

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

News X World: USA verhängen Sanktionen gegen Russland | Debatte mit Thomas Porteus

In einem gestrigen Posting sagte ich, dass ich den Link zur Debatte über Bidens neueste Sanktionen aus der Hölle, die dem russischen Energiesektor auferlegt wurden, präsentieren würde, sobald dieser Link verfügbar ist.

Hier ist er:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mucw9iJmhA

Ich hoffe, dass die Zuschauer diese Diskussion mit fünf Teilnehmern genauso erfrischend finden werden wie ich, als ich daran teilnahm. Meine eigenen Beiträge beginnen bei Minute 9 und werden bei Minute 21 fortgesetzt. Ich empfehle jedoch, meine Mitdiskutanten zu beobachten, um sich daran zu erinnern, dass „die Wahrheit siegen wird“, wie Jan Hus einst in Prag sagte, und dass „man nicht alle Menschen immer zum Narren halten kann“, wie Abraham Lincoln einst sagte.

In its closing weeks before the Trump inauguration, the Biden administration is doing its very best to present its successor with a poisoned chalice, meaning to push relations with Russia to the point where it is politically impossible to pursue the path of peace that Trump has made his priority upon taking office.

At the latest meeting at Ramstein, Germany, Secretary of Defense Austin announced a further tranche of $500 million in armaments to Kiev.  In the past few days there were further Ukrainian attacks on the interior regions of the Russian Federation using American precision missiles, repeatedly crossing what the Russians have declared to be a red line that triggers escalation. And now on Friday Washington issued new sanctions on the Russian energy sector which, from all appearances could have a devastating impact on Russia’s export earnings.

The latest sanctions have received extensive coverage in major Western media. A Financial Times article yesterday details the various points of attack in the sanctions. These include measures against the Russian oil producers Gazprom Neft and Surgutneftegas and measures against the 183 oil tankers in what is called the ‘shadow fleet’ Russia created over the past 18 months to evade Washington’s restrictions on its traditional shippers of crude oil and insurers. Other new sanctions will be applied to petroleum traders. And new measures also seek to cut Russia’s production capacity by sanctions on Russia-based oilfield service providers.

The new sanctions package has been jointly developed and will be jointly applied with the U.K., whose foreign secretary David Lammy explained the intent: ‘Taking on Russian oil companies will drain Russia’s war chest – and every rouble we take from Putin’s hands helps save Ukrainian lives.’

As to why the sanctions on Russia’s energy sector are being tightened drastically now, the FT has an answer for us: ‘because oil markets are expected to be oversupplied in 2025.’ That is to say, removal of Russian oil from the global market could not be pursued earlier because it would have driven up prices at the pump in the USA to politically unacceptable levels given the presidential and Congressional elections anticipated in 2024. But now that the elections are past, now that the Democrats have lost both the presidency and Congress, and now that new sources of crude oil have come onto the market, the attitude is ‘bombs away’ and let Mr. Trump deal with the fall-out.

As the FT tells us slyly: ‘…The last-minute move creates a challenge for President-elect Trump, who campaigned on ending the war between Russian and Ukraine quickly and has expressed scepticism of imposing additional sanctions…’  They remind us that Biden’s sanctions are now embodied in law and that it would require an act of Congress to undo them, which is unlikely even under circumstances of Republican control of both houses.

The FT believes that the new measures may cost the Russian government billions of dollars per month, putting in jeopardy its continued financing of the war in Ukraine.

                                                                             ****

So far, so good. The FT has set out as a stenographer would what are the basic elements of the new sanctions package and what are the expectations of the Biden administration and of its friends in London. What is missing is journalistic questioning of how, why the logic of Washington might be faulty and the results might differ considerably from the expectations, as has been the case with all of the myriad sanctions imposed on Russia from the start of the Special Military Operation. Let us give that a try now.

But first, let’s look at how Moscow reacted to the new package of sanctions. Friday evening’s edition of Sixty Minutes, a featured news and analysis program of Rossiya 1 freshly back on air after the nearly two week-long winter break, spent some time discussing the sanctions. The mood was one of consternation but not alarm. The feeling was that Russia had one way or another overcome the thousands of sanctions already imposed and would somehow work around the new ones.

Indeed, that may be the case, but there are other considerations which may be more relevant to the case at hand.

First, although the new sanctions would be difficult, even impossible for Trump to repeal by legislative action, there is nothing to prevent his simply not enforcing them. That would be all the easier given that the United States would have to proactively threaten and punish many actors based in third countries for the sanctions to bite, so that a wink and a nod to them would suffice to negate the effect of sanctions.

Second, this all-out attack on Russia’s oil production and export simply comes too late. In war, as in all other human endeavors, timing is critical.  We are told that such severe sanctions were not applied earlier because until 2025 the global petroleum markets were tight and withdrawing Russian supplies would have led at once to high spikes in energy costs that would be felt in all consumer countries, starting with the United States itself. However, to think such sanctions will be useful in forcing Russia to bend the knee and accept American terms to end the war is to ignore the realities of the present situation on the battlefield.

Washington is gaming on the war in Ukraine extending into 2027 and beyond. This timeline was used in the past week’s gathering of Ukraine supporters in Ramstein, Germany as they discussed continuing military and financial aid to Kiev through that year. However, the game is going to be up in 2025 and perhaps fairly early in this year if the ongoing Russian offensive all across the 1200 km line of confrontation achieves its mission of crushing the Ukrainian forces and achieving capitulation. With or without the new deliveries of arms and munitions from the West, Ukraine lacks the men to continue the war for long at its present level of intensity. Kiev admits to 500,000 men not showing up after receiving their draft notices and to a further 100,000 deserters from the armed forces. The reduction of the draft age to 18 for purposes of general mobilization is unlikely to ameliorate the situation given the universal resistance to what is perceived as ‘robbing the cradle.’

Ignorance of the relative positions of the warring parties on the battlefield is precisely the problem that the American administration has made for itself by relying for its tactical and strategic plans on the corrupted information sources of the CIA. The Agency is simply passing along to the Oval Office the propaganda it wants to hear coming from Kiev.  My good colleague and ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern, and his colleague Larry Johnson who has years of both CIA and State Department service behind him, have both been saying publicly that the CIA under the direction of William Burns is daily lying through its teeth about this war.

On the other hand, let us assume for a moment that the new sanctions should have a sudden and extreme impact on Russia’s petroleum exports, depriving the Kremlin of needed funds to continue the war. What then?

Yes, in such circumstances, Moscow might pull in its horns and enter negotiations for a ceasefire and possibly for a peace while compromising on some of its objectives.  However, it is also possible that the reaction in the Kremlin would be the direct opposite of what the Biden administration expects, namely to escalate the war, sharply and immediately, putting us all at risk of a nuclear exchange.

For strange reasons, the masters of the universe in Washington are ignoring the message of the recently commemorated 7 December Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese demonstrated that at a certain point, when the pain of economic warfare becomes unbearable, the response is to unleash kinetic war, the more devastating, the better.  Have Messrs. Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken and Joe Biden given that any thought? I doubt that in their collective hubris they have given any thought to such a scenario.

But let us not be overly gloomy. Mr. Putin never overreacts. It is more likely that the effect of the newest sanctions will prompt President Putin to merely accelerate his schedule for complete victory on the ground in Ukraine.

There is reason to believe that a big push to smash the Ukrainians is already under way. Today’s Financial Times reports that to everyone’s surprise the Russians have decided against frontal assault on the key logistics hub of Pokrovsk and are avoiding time consuming and hazardous urban fighting there. Instead they are sweeping past Pokrovsk and cutting off the highways and rail links supplying it from the west and north by moving their own forces in the direction of Dnepropetrovsk (Dnipro), Ukraine’s fourth largest city. As they say, where there is a will, there is a way. As they run out of supplies, the Ukrainian troops in Pokrovsk will be compelled to retreat, and the Russian advance to the Dniepr river will go that much faster.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Neue US-Sanktionen gegen russische Ölexporte: ein lähmender Angriff auf die Kriegswirtschaft des Kremls?

In den letzten Wochen vor der Amtseinführung von Trump tut die Biden-Regierung ihr Bestes, um ihrem Nachfolger einen vergifteten Kelch zu überreichen, d.h. die Beziehungen zu Russland so weit zu belasten, dass es politisch unmöglich sein soll, den Weg des Friedens zu beschreiten, den Trump bei seinem Amtsantritt zu seiner Priorität gemacht hat.

Auf dem jüngsten Treffen in Ramstein, Deutschland, kündigte Verteidigungsminister Austin eine weitere Tranche von 500 Millionen Dollar an Rüstungsgütern für Kiew an. In den vergangenen Tagen gab es weitere Angriffe der Ukraine auf die inneren Regionen der Russischen Föderation mit amerikanischen Präzisionsraketen, die wiederholt eine von den Russen als rote Linie bezeichnete Eskalationsschwelle überschritten. Und nun hat Washington am Freitag neue Sanktionen gegen den russischen Energiesektor verhängt, die allem Anschein nach verheerende Auswirkungen auf die Exporteinnahmen Russlands haben könnten.

Über die jüngsten Sanktionen wurde in den großen westlichen Medien ausführlich berichtet. Ein Artikel der Financial Times von gestern beschreibt die verschiedenen Angriffspunkte der Sanktionen. Dazu gehören Maßnahmen gegen die russischen Ölproduzenten Gazprom Neft und Surgutneftegas sowie Maßnahmen gegen die 183 Öltanker der sogenannten „Schattenflotte“, die Russland in den letzten 18 Monaten aufgebaut hat, um die von Washington verhängten Beschränkungen für seine traditionellen Rohöl-Spediteure und Versicherer zu umgehen. Weitere neue Sanktionen werden gegen Erdölhändler verhängt. Und neue Maßnahmen zielen auch darauf ab, die Produktionskapazität Russlands durch Sanktionen gegen in Russland ansässige Ölfelddienstleister zu verringern.

Das neue Sanktionspaket wurde gemeinsam mit dem Vereinigten Königreich entwickelt und wird auch gemeinsam mit diesem angewendet. Der britische Außenminister David Lammy erklärte die Absicht: „Die russischen Ölkonzerne zu treffen, wird Russlands Kriegskasse leeren – und jeder Rubel, den wir Putin aus der Hand nehmen, hilft, ukrainische Leben zu retten.“

Auf die Frage, warum die Sanktionen gegen den russischen Energiesektor jetzt drastisch verschärft werden, hat die FT eine Antwort für uns: „Weil die Ölmärkte im Jahr 2025 voraussichtlich überversorgt sein werden.“ Das heißt, die Entfernung des russischen Öls vom Weltmarkt hätte nicht früher erfolgen können, weil dies die Preise an den Zapfsäulen in den USA angesichts der für 2024 erwarteten Präsidentschafts- und Kongresswahlen auf ein politisch inakzeptables Niveau getrieben hätte. Aber jetzt, da die Wahlen vorbei sind, jetzt, da die Demokraten sowohl die Präsidentschaft als auch den Kongress verloren haben, und jetzt, da neue Rohölquellen auf den Markt gekommen sind, lautet die Devise: „Bomben abwerfen“ und Herrn Trump mit den Folgen fertig werden lassen.

Wie die FT uns verschmitzt mitteilt: „… Der Schachzug in letzter Minute stellt den designierten Präsidenten Trump vor eine Herausforderung, der sich im Wahlkampf für eine schnelle Beendigung des Krieges zwischen Russland und der Ukraine eingesetzt und sich skeptisch gegenüber der Verhängung zusätzlicher Sanktionen geäußert hat…“ Sie erinnern uns daran, dass Bidens Sanktionen nun gesetzlich verankert sind und dass es eines Beschlusses des Kongresses bedürfte, um sie aufzuheben, was selbst unter den Umständen, dass beide Häuser von den Republikanern kontrolliert werden, unwahrscheinlich ist.

Die FT geht davon aus, dass die neuen Maßnahmen die russische Regierung monatlich Milliarden Dollar kosten und damit die weitere Finanzierung des Krieges in der Ukraine gefährden könnten.

                                                                             ****

So weit, so gut. Die FT hat wie ein Stenograf dargelegt, was die Grundelemente des neuen Sanktionspakets sind und welche Erwartungen die Biden-Regierung und ihre Freunde in London haben. Was fehlt, ist eine journalistische Untersuchung, wie und warum die Logik Washingtons fehlerhaft sein könnte und die Ergebnisse erheblich von den Erwartungen abweichen könnten, wie es bei allen unzähligen Sanktionen der Fall war, die seit Beginn der militärischen Spezialoperation gegen Russland verhängt wurden. Versuchen wir es jetzt.

Aber zuerst wollen wir uns ansehen, wie Moskau auf das neue Sanktionspaket reagiert hat. In der Freitagsausgabe von Sixty Minutes, einer Nachrichten- und Analysesendung von Rossiya 1, die nach einer fast zweiwöchigen Winterpause wieder auf Sendung ist, wurde einige Zeit lang über die Sanktionen diskutiert. Die Stimmung war von Bestürzung, aber nicht von Alarm geprägt. Man hatte das Gefühl, dass Russland die Tausenden von bereits verhängten Sanktionen auf die eine oder andere Weise überwinden und die neuen Sanktionen irgendwie umgehen würde.

Das mag in der Tat der Fall sein, aber es gibt andere Überlegungen, die für den vorliegenden Fall möglicherweise relevanter sind.

Erstens: Auch wenn es für Trump schwierig, wenn nicht gar unmöglich wäre, die neuen Sanktionen durch gesetzgeberische Maßnahmen aufzuheben, hindert ihn nichts daran, sie einfach nicht durchzusetzen. Dies wäre umso einfacher, da die Vereinigten Staaten viele Akteure in Drittländern proaktiv bedrohen und bestrafen müssten, damit die Sanktionen greifen, sodass ein Wink und ein Nicken ausreichen würden, um die Wirkung der Sanktionen zu negieren.

Zweitens kommt dieser umfassende Angriff auf die Ölproduktion und den Ölexport Russlands einfach zu spät. Im Krieg, wie bei allen anderen menschlichen Unternehmungen, ist das Timing entscheidend. Uns wird gesagt, dass solche schweren Sanktionen nicht früher verhängt wurden, weil die globalen Erdölmärkte bis 2025 angespannt waren und ein Entzug der russischen Lieferungen sofort zu einem starken Anstieg der Energiekosten geführt hätte, der in allen Verbraucherländern zu spüren gewesen wäre, angefangen bei den Vereinigten Staaten selbst. Wer jedoch glaubt, dass solche Sanktionen nützlich sein werden, um Russland dazu zu zwingen, sich zu beugen und die amerikanischen Bedingungen zu akzeptieren, um den Krieg zu beenden, ignoriert die Realität der gegenwärtigen Situation auf dem Schlachtfeld.

Washington setzt darauf, dass der Krieg in der Ukraine bis 2027 und darüber hinaus andauert. Diese Zeitachse wurde in der vergangenen Woche bei einem Treffen von Unterstützern der Ukraine in Ramstein, Deutschland, verwendet, bei dem über die Fortsetzung der militärischen und finanziellen Hilfe für Kiew in diesem Jahr diskutiert wurde. Das Spiel wird jedoch 2025 oder vielleicht schon ziemlich früh in diesem Jahr vorbei sein, wenn die anhaltende russische Offensive entlang der 1.200 km langen Konfrontationslinie ihr Ziel erreicht, die ukrainischen Streitkräfte zu zerschlagen und eine Kapitulation zu erreichen. Mit oder ohne die neuen Waffen- und Munitionslieferungen aus dem Westen fehlen der Ukraine die Männer, um den Krieg auf dem derzeitigen Intensitätsniveau noch lange fortzusetzen. Kiew gibt zu, dass 500.000 Männer nach Erhalt ihrer Einberufungsbescheide nicht zum Dienst erschienen sind und dass weitere 100.000 Deserteure aus den Streitkräften desertiert sind. Die Herabsetzung des Einberufungsalters für die allgemeine Mobilmachung auf 18 Jahre wird die Situation angesichts des allgemeinen Widerstands gegen das, was als „Raub der Wiege“ empfunden wird, wahrscheinlich nicht verbessern.

Die Unkenntnis der relativen Positionen der Kriegsparteien auf dem Schlachtfeld ist genau das Problem, das sich die amerikanische Regierung selbst geschaffen hat, indem sie sich bei ihren taktischen und strategischen Plänen auf die korrupten Informationsquellen der CIA verlässt. Die Agentur gibt lediglich die Propaganda an das Oval Office weiter, die sie aus Kiew hören möchte. Mein geschätzter Kollege und ehemaliger CIA-Analyst Ray McGovern und sein Kollege Larry Johnson, der jahrelang sowohl für die CIA als auch für das Außenministerium tätig war, haben beide öffentlich erklärt, dass die CIA unter der Leitung von William Burns täglich Lügen über diesen Krieg verbreitet.

Nehmen wir andererseits für einen Moment an, dass die neuen Sanktionen einen plötzlichen und extremen Einfluss auf die Erdölexporte Russlands haben sollten, wodurch dem Kreml die benötigten Mittel für die Fortsetzung des Krieges entzogen würden. Was dann?

Ja, unter solchen Umständen könnte Moskau einlenken und in Verhandlungen über einen Waffenstillstand und möglicherweise über einen Frieden eintreten, wobei es bei einigen seiner Ziele Kompromisse eingehen würde. Es ist jedoch auch möglich, dass die Reaktion im Kreml genau das Gegenteil von dem ist, was die Biden-Regierung erwartet, nämlich eine scharfe und sofortige Eskalation des Krieges, die uns alle der Gefahr eines nuklearen Schlagabtauschs aussetzt.

Aus seltsamen Gründen ignorieren die Herren des Universums in Washington die Botschaft des kürzlich mit einer Feier bedachten japanischen Angriffs auf Pearl Harbor am 7. Dezember. Die Japaner haben gezeigt, dass ab einem bestimmten Punkt, wenn der Schmerz des Wirtschaftskrieges unerträglich wird, die Reaktion darin besteht, einen kinetischen Krieg vom Zaun zu brechen, je verheerender, desto besser. Haben die Herren Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken und Joe Biden darüber nachgedacht? Ich bezweifle, dass ihnen in ihrer kollektiven Selbstüberschätzung überhaupt ein solches Szenario in den Sinn kommt.

Aber wir sollten nicht zu pessimistisch sein. Herr Putin neigt nicht zu Überreaktionen. Es ist wahrscheinlicher, dass die Wirkung der neuesten Sanktionen Präsident Putin dazu veranlassen wird, seinen Zeitplan für den vollständigen Sieg in der Ukraine vor Ort zu beschleunigen.

Es gibt Grund zu der Annahme, dass bereits ein großer Vorstoß zur Zerschlagung der Ukrainer im Gange ist. Die heutige Ausgabe der Financial Times berichtet, dass die Russen zur Überraschung aller beschlossen haben, auf einen Frontalangriff auf den wichtigen Logistikknotenpunkt Pokrowsk zu verzichten und zeitaufwändige und gefährliche Kämpfe in der Stadt zu vermeiden. Stattdessen umgehen sie Pokrowsk und schneiden die Autobahnen und Bahnverbindungen ab, die die Stadt aus dem Westen und Norden versorgen, indem sie ihre eigenen Truppen in Richtung Dnepropetrowsk (Dnipro), der viertgrößten Stadt der Ukraine, verlegen. Wie man so schön sagt: Wo ein Wille ist, ist auch ein Weg. Wenn die Vorräte der ukrainischen Truppen in Pokrowsk zur Neige gehen, werden sie sich zurückziehen müssen, und der Vormarsch der Russen bis zum Dnepr wird umso schneller voranschreiten.

Transcript submitted by a reader

NewsX: 0:00
Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro has sworn in for a controversial third term, sparking global backlash. The US has announced an increased 25-million-dollar reward for his arrest on narcotics and corruption charges. Similar bounties target close allies, including interior minister Diostado Cabello and defense minister Vladimir Ppadrino. The UK, EU and Canada have also imposed fresh sanctions, accusing Maduro’s regime of human rights abuses and undermining democracy. Venezuela has dismissed these claims, blaming its economic woes on what it called US-led imperial sanctions. Maduro, meanwhile, insists his new term will bring peace and prosperity, but critics say the July election was rigged, with international observers rejecting the results. The US calls Maduro’s leadership fraudulent, offering a 65- million-dollar bounty for him and his key allies. Aditya, with this recent news from Venezuela, why is there so much international attention on this case?

Aditya Wadhawan: 1:06
Well, you know, as you rightly pointed out, the US has also placed a $25-million bounty upon this Nicolás Maduro. You know, in the past, he has been sworn in as a Venezuelan president for the third time and you know many reports suggest that you know this voting hasn’t been fair because the opposition leaders have been arrested and there is a whole sort of autocracy that exists in Venezuela. That is why you know this protest with this particularly this particular Nicolás Maduro is getting international attention you know that is why you know America has also put this bounty of 25 million dollars it needs to be seen you know. Earlier also America you know have threatened this Maduro because you know his governance hasn’t been well, you know. During his last term, the inflation in Venezuela has reached to about 400% inflation. So that needs to be seen as to what steps are taken in this regard and what the build-up, how will the international community respond to this further. Yes, Tom, back to you in the studio.

NewsX: 2:11
Thank you, Aditya. For further discussion on this we are joined by Professor AK Pasha, international affairs expert, live from New Delhi; Gilbert Doctorow, russian affairs expert, live from Brussels. Thank you for joining us. My first question is for you, Professor AK Pasha. The US has a long history of getting involved in socialist Latin America. What is their– what did they want the outcome to be in this case, now they’re offering this bounty?

AK Pasha, PhD: 2:42
The recent announcement, increase in bounty for capture of the Venezuelan president and the interior minister and others, you know, it is a continuation of the regime-change agenda by the United States and its allies, you know, who have become used to changing regimes who don’t toe the US line. It is not the first time or the last time. They have done it plenty of times, not only in Latin America but elsewhere. But what makes this case unique is the continuation of the socialist regime there and how they have survived years of sanctions and deprivation and the confiscation of their gold reserves, so on and so forth. Although there is high inflation, but from what I hear from one of my students who is an ambassador there, that life goes on normally there for most Venezuelans, even though it is tough. But the kind of propaganda which America and its allies have been unleashing has not undermined Maduro and Socialist Party to a very large extent, like the Iranian regime also which has been under sanctions, or Russia.

4:18
You know, it is a systematic policy pursued by the United States and its allies to undermine and overthrow the regimes which it doesn’t like. On the one hand, you have $10 million on the head of the new Syrian administration, HTS, which has been ignored. It is a terrorist organization, declared by the State Department. But since he collaborated with the United States and its allies, you know, that will not see the light of the day. So this double standard is part of the US policy to undermine its own propagation of rules-based order, whether it is Venezuela or Russia or Iran or even Nicaragua or Cuba or for that matter many other countries which have become victims.


And increasingly countries in the global south are looking for break away from this so-called rules-based order and steering towards the BRICS which is emerging as an alternative power block to challenge the US attempts to strangulate countries which don’t toe the American line.

NewsX: 5:37
Gilbert, I wanted to come on to you in this next one. Is offering a bounty for a head of state an appropriate use of foreign policy?

[speaking simultaneously]
… Sorry.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 5:50
I agree with the speaker who has just completed his remarks, in every respect. I’d like to put a new title on. We’re talking about naked imperialism. This term has come up in discussion in international news in the last several days, thanks to Donald Trump’s stating what he would like to do to Greenland and what he’d like to do to Panama Canal. Some of that, that bravado, that macho foreign policy has been applauded by people like the “Financial Times”, who said, on his remarks, “Oh, we thought that Trump is an isolationist. No, he’s actually an expansionist. And bravo.”

So there are people in the G7 and UK as foremost in this who applaud imperialism. That is not true of the global South, and I think it’s probably not true of many of your listeners. After all, the kind of sanctions and penalties that Joe Biden is now imposing on the Venezuelan leader, well, you have a recollection of that in India. After all, the United States had imposed sanctions on Modi, before he took power, for their disagreement with his treatment of minorities within India.

7:18
So the United States is an imperialist state, whether it’s run by Mr. Joe Biden in the name of a rules-based order and values-driven foreign policy, or whether it’s driven by a man who is unafraid of positioning himself as promoting naked aggression, like Mr. Trump.

NewsX: 7:40
Professor AK Pascha, they have accused– this bounty is for a 2020 arrest warrant for him being accused of narco terrorism and flooding the United States with cocaine. Is this the right time to use this arrest warrant, and what do you think of America and the UK being involved in this?

Pasha:
You see, this is the typical State Department, I mean the rule passed by the US Congress to use State Department to accuse leaders who don’t toe the US line of corruption and narcotic involvement. You know, this has been done for a number of leaders, including former Panamanian head of state, who was abducted, to many other leaders in Latin America. So this is well known.

8:42
You know, this is just a cover, a pretext for the US administration to accuse the popular leaders of involvement in drug charges and corruption charges, whereas they overlook their own support to whether it is the Pakistani leaders or the innumerable dictators America supports in Africa or even in Latin America and elsewhere. So this charge of undermining the democratic process itself is questionable, because America has never respected the democratic elections. For example, the Hamas elections, Palestinian elections in 2006 which brought Hamas to power in Gaza was never respected, and they declared it as a terrorist organization. Or even the involvement of the full line Lebanese politics, you know, they look at it as a terrorist organization.

9:43
So anybody who genuinely participates in the political process and wins due to popular electoral support, you know, this legitimacy is questioned selectively, and this is what is a big question mark for American foreign policy. And the British also toe the American line. And this is undermining the credibility of the United States as a leader of democracy. And the rules-based order is being pulled down brick by brick by themselves, and pushing the global South countries to look with suspicion [on] what they do, whether it is against Venezuela or Iran or Russia or Nicaragua or South Africa also. And even including India, you know, they try to question a number of issues, domestic issues, with which America has nothing to do. So in that way, the color revolutions in Central Asia or in the Caucasus, all these including in Ukraine, where many were through the CIA and its regime-change agenda.

10:55
And this is isolating the Americans, if you see the voting pattern in the United Nations General Assembly. On many of these issues, America is isolated. More than two-thirds of the members of the United Nations disapprove of what America has been pursuing for its narrow national interest, ignoring the aspirations, expectations of the global South who want a better life, who want development, who want less exploitation, and the kind of strangulating sanctions imposed on any issue if you don’t buy the American language. So in that way, you know, the American leaders themselves have been isolating and affecting its own credibility in the short term and in the long run.

NewsX: 11:50
Gilbert Doctorow, election observers in Venezuela claim they have credible evidence that Gonzalez, his opponent, won the election. Western countries and countries all around the world have all called Maduro’s win illegitimate. What does, do you think once President Trump comes to power, can you see him getting involved in this like the Biden administration has?

Doctorow: 12:17
Oh very likely he will be, though he has other issues that are foremost in his policy plans. But this would fall in line completely with Trump’s view of America’s policeman role within the Western hemisphere. I applaud the mention by my colleague, fellow panelist, of the Noriega case, that is the abduction of the president of Panama, and his being taken to the United States where he died in prison after many years.

This is also, you need a sense of irony to appreciate what these charges of narco traffic mean when they’re addressed to the Venezuelan president. I think the biggest trader in narcotics in the last two decades was the United States, the United States government, which encouraged the cultivation of poppy in Afghanistan and facilitated the heroin trade. It was only when the Taliban took over that they snuffed out within two years what the United States seemed to be unable to touch for the whole time that it was resident in Afghanistan. So there’s a lot of hypocrisy here.

And when you say that the members of the G7 and other allies of the United States condemn the elections, there’s a British expression which summarizes very efficiently the response to that: “You would say that, wouldn’t you.”

NewsX: 13:49
Thank you very much for joining us on this discussion.

News X (India):  a genuine voice of the Global South?

To my surprise and pleasure, each new invitation to participate in panel discussions of breaking news on this Indian English-language global broadcaster shows the increasingly confident commitment of their producers to present a broad variety of expert views to their audience. While the News X presenter introduces the given subject for discussion reading from Western mainstream accounts, and while their own in-house analyst, when present, does not stray far from that mark, their guests are impressive for their well-informed critical view of the Global Hegemon and its lackeys in the EU and G7.

The video imbedded below dealing with Western repudiation of the electoral results in the latest Venezuelan presidential election and announcement by the United States of a $25 million bounty on the head of Nicolas Maduro was taped at noon today Brussels time. My fellow panelist, an Indian professor, is quite extraordinary and I commend his remarks to my community.

I add as a side comment that this evening’s television news on Rossiya 1 showed images of the Duma president Volodin attending President Maduro’s inauguration in Caracas and extending warm congratulations from Vladimir Putin.

Late in the afternoon, I was invited back by News X for a discussion of the latest package of harsh sanctions directed against Russian oil exports that the Biden Administration has just imposed. Here I was joined by 4 other panelists, including one American based in the States who delivered the Washington narrative on the state of the Ukraine war and prospects for the sanctions crippling the Russian economy, while the three Indian experts who spoke were much better connected to the political and economic realities of Russia as it approaches the culmination point in its destruction of the Ukrainian armed forces.  I will post the link to that discussion as soon as it becomes available.

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

News X (Indien): eine echte Stimme des globalen Südens?

Zu meiner Überraschung und Freude zeigt jede neue Einladung zur Teilnahme an Podiumsdiskussionen über aktuelle Nachrichten dieses indischen englischsprachigen globalen Senders das zunehmend selbstbewusste Engagement seiner Produzenten, ihrem Publikum eine breite Vielfalt an Expertenmeinungen zu präsentieren. Während der Moderator von News X das jeweilige Diskussionsthema anhand von westlichen Mainstream-Berichten einführt und der hauseigene Analyst, sofern anwesend, nicht weit von diesem Thema abweicht, beeindrucken die Gäste durch ihre gut informierte kritische Sicht auf den globalen Hegemon und seine Lakaien in der EU und den G7.

Das unten eingebettete Video, das sich mit der Ablehnung der Wahlergebnisse der letzten Präsidentschaftswahlen in Venezuela durch den Westen und der Ankündigung der Vereinigten Staaten, ein Kopfgeld in Höhe von 25 Millionen US-Dollar auf Nicolas Maduro auszusetzen, befasst, wurde heute Mittag Brüsseler Zeit aufgenommen. Mein Mitdiskutant, ein indischer Professor, ist wirklich außergewöhnlich und ich empfehle seine Ausführungen meiner Gemeinschaft.

Ich möchte noch anmerken, dass in den Fernsehnachrichten auf Rossiya 1 heute Abend Bilder des Duma-Präsidenten Wolodin gezeigt wurden, der an der Amtseinführung von Präsident Maduro in Caracas teilnahm und herzliche Glückwünsche von Wladimir Putin überbrachte.

Am späten Nachmittag wurde ich von News X zu einer Diskussion über das jüngste Paket harter Sanktionen gegen russische Ölexporte eingeladen, das die Biden-Regierung gerade verhängt hat. Hier wurde ich von vier weiteren Diskussionsteilnehmern begleitet, darunter ein Amerikaner, der in den USA lebt und die Sichtweise Washingtons zum Stand des Ukraine-Krieges und zu den Aussichten für die Sanktionen, die die russische Wirtschaft lahmlegten, darlegte, während die drei indischen Experten, die sprachen, viel besser mit den politischen und wirtschaftlichen Realitäten Russlands vertraut waren, das sich dem Höhepunkt der Zerstörung der ukrainischen Streitkräfte nähert. Ich werde den Link zu dieser Diskussion posten, sobald er verfügbar ist.

Transcript submitted by a reader

Nima R. Alkhorshid: 0:05
Hi everybody, today is Friday January 10th, and our friend Gilbert Doctorow is back with us. Welcome back, Gilbert.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Good to be with you.

Alkhorshid:
Let’s get started with the interview Elon Musk had with the AfD and in which he said– he was talking about the situation in Ukraine and he found it as Donald Trump was pointing out various times– he said that it was a stalemate in Ukraine for more than two years. How did you find this interview?

Doctorow: 0:46
The interview was interesting in a number of ways, particularly to judge Elon Musk’s possible contribution to the new incoming administration and what his superior intelligence-– and that is unquestioned, the man is one of the most brilliant men on earth, and he didn’t make us fortune by chance– what one of these most intelligent people on earth says and does when he moves outside his area of competence. And that is exactly what he did. I understand why he’s promoting Weidel, is completely in line with his taking over X, turning it X as a vehicle for promoting free speech. That is laudable and understandable.

However, when you have your free speech, you have to have something to say. And in this interview, it’s clear that he has nothing to say. Very sad because you think with all the time that I imagine he’s a quick reader and I imagine he has a very good memory. But it don’t seem to have been applied to the question that is uppermost in the minds of many people who have watched that. What is the future of Germany in NATO?

What is the view of this opposition, hard right opposition to Russia? Is it, does it hold the promise of a further split in European opinion regarding the current policies towards Russia, the sanctioning of Russia? This is the assistance in arms and money to Ukraine. Is there a change that we can expect, should Weidel and her party, the Alternative for Germany come to power? And listening to this and hearing, as you just said, his punchline, most important remark that Musk made in this whole interview that he sees this as a senseless war, which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and produced nothing. And there’s a stalemate.

2:53
This shows that he is either just repeating for the sake of sounding aligned with Trump the empty propagandistic statements about the war that Trump has made following the intelligence briefings that he’s gotten from our deeply faulty American intelligence community in Washington, D.C. Or is this what Elon Musk believes on his own? I don’t dismiss entirely the possibility that he just did not want to contradict Trump. That exists.

3:31
But there’s also, just if you take his words at face value, he would appear to be completely under-informed and uncritical of intelligence that we know is deeply faulty and is basically propagandistic, repeating the empty claims and empty numbers that Kiev has produced over the last two years over the casualty rates and so forth. So this is a very big disappointment. At the same time, it is a refresher course in how everyone, including all the viewers to this program, should approach anything that anybody on this program says just as they approach critically what they hear on mainstream. You cannot expect to find in any of the experts a universal genius. That doesn’t exist in nature.

4:25
People who speak about Renaissance men, which is a word that was evoked yesterday with respect to Jimmy Carter at the, one of the eulogies from the speakers in the cathedral. There are no Renaissance men, or if they were, they were as faulty in their own ways as people who are said to be Renaissance men today are in fact. I hope that we’ll have a couple of minutes to speak about Carter. I understand I cannot violate the rule of not speaking ill of the dead, but nonetheless, that doesn’t mean that we have to be certified fools. And I do not share all of the praise and all of the bouquets put at his casket yesterday.

5:07
But that’s a separate issue, which maybe we have time for, maybe we don’t. And then the main point is that a person of the intelligence, of the wealth, of the success of Elon Musk, has a duty to the public in general to either shut up if he doesn’t know something or to learn something. So he has something genuine to say. That was not the case yesterday.

As regards the interview, it is very clear that Frau Weidel was playing up to him. She was saying anything possible to ingratiate herself with him for the obvious financial incentives that come from having him at her side. But I don’t think that that has so distorted her views that we cannot take and analyze what she said, because of the way it bears on the prospects for a change in NATO or an abolition of NATO that might come about in Europe quite separately from any reduced presence in NATO that Mr. Trump may intend to bring in with his administration.

6:18
So one of my most widely listened to and most authoritative fellow experts who is peers on many programs, including your own, that is Colonel Macgregor, said in the past week that he expects the Alternative for Deutschland to triumph at the polls in Germany on the 23rd of February and to take Germany out of NATO. Well, I ask and invite your audience to listen closely to the statements of Frau Weidel, the head of the Alternative for Deutschland, and see if you can find any reason to believe there would be the slightest change in Germany’s foreign policy if she comes to power, or she will not, when she takes office. Nothing.

7:17
They spoke about many things and many of the causes that she has espoused– and that Musk wanted the worldwide audience to see and hear about to give her respectability and her party respectability– these are many of our worldly causes, halt on illegal immigration, a reduction in taxes on the general German population, I assume on business as well, or business stripping away over-regulation that makes it very difficult to have initiative and to have innovative manufacturing in Germany. These are– free speech to ensure that there is no state censorship as now exists in Germany– these are all very worthwhile things and will improve the social climate in Germany if she and others were to bring that into play. Of course also to address what she denounces as the green policies that Chancellor Merkel introduced abolishing the nuclear power plants and so forth that have made German industry in such a disadvantaged position.

8:34
These are nice changes, but the things that interest your audience, the things that interest me, are changes in foreign policy. There was nothing in her statements to indicate a change of policy. In fact, she doubled down on Germany’s wrongheaded and unforgivable, unqualified backing for the state of Israel. She insisted that her party, the conservatives, are more solicitous, more promoting security for Jews in Germany than the other parties who are tinged with a leftist sympathy for Palestinians.

9:20
None of this is going to reflect well on a change in Germany’s policies to address the genocide in Palestine, in Gaza, and the rest of the atrocities that Israel is now perpetrating. There was, as I said, she agreed very calmly to Musk’s comments on the senselessness of the war, and she subscribed to his notion that Donald Trump can fix it quickly, can find a resolution to the war quickly. She asked him for details, and he very wisely said no, that’s not his role to play, that this is the prerogative of the incoming commander-in-chief, and he will not set out what specific measures Trump could or should take with respect to the war. But the idea, the basic idea, this basic fallacy in European policy is there, right in the middle of what she is saying, that the United States can end the war.

10:29
I’m sorry, officially the United States is not an uninterested, fair broker in this. It is effectively a co-belligerent. And it’s a co-belligerent on the losing side. How the losing side is going to settle a war, short of capitulation, is unfathomable. It may be that Mr. Musk has in mind capitulation as the outcome of this war, but he didn’t dare say it. And so we’re left to see that the Alternative for Dutchland is just going to follow in the wake of whatever America does. That is not very promising for our future.

Alkhorshid: 11:13
Do you understand the role of Elon Musk and how influential he is on Donald Trump in the coming administration. Can we get it, in your opinion?

Doctorow:
No, I don’t think we can. It is being intentionally left very vague. We know that he has moved into Mar-a-Lago, that he has a villa on the estate, on the Trump estate there, which he’s renting for $2,000 a night, which is of course small change for him. That gives him instant access to any important meetings that Trump may have with American politicos who come to visit him and bend the knee. But what exactly he’s contributing to this is not the least bit clear. I don’t know which way the information flow is going: from Trump and Trump’s advisors to Musk on how to characterize the present state of the war, or from Musk to Trump. It isn’t obvious. And it’s intentionally left unclear.

Alkhorshid: 12:23
You mentioned AfD and their policy. As I understand it and you’ve mentioned it, there is no drastic change in their foreign policy. It’s all about the domestic policy and how capable are they in implementing those domestic policies that they’re talking about?

Doctorow:
When you’re listening closely to her remarks, to her talking about how it was so essential to her since she doesn’t know all that much about everything, that she has competent aides, assistants, whom she allows to criticize herself daily and tell her what’s wrong. I’m sorry, that’s a very peculiar method of management. Musk didn’t come back to her on that. And he’s, “Oh, yes, we also, in our companies, we have feedback.” But generally speaking, in corporations, feedback means this 360-degree review, in which all people at various levels can tell the chief executive what they think about this or that.

13:27
You don’t do that every day. You cannot undermine the authority or suggest that the leader is rudderless on a daily basis. That’s not the way to manage anything. So that was not too good. She was kind of folksy. They were sharing laughs and jokes. It was all very conversational. The whole point was to put a human face on what otherwise looks like the Hitlerjugend, it looks like it’s a continuation of fascist Germany.

Instead, Musk wanted to show that these are just folks like we are, and they are interested in the same greater liberty, freedom of expression, chance to get rich by pulling back the very high German personal income taxes. That these were the causes that the American conservatives respect highly, are the basic agenda of the Alternative for Deutschland, as compared to what she’s calling the Uniparty, which means everybody else who are, if you listen to her, all a pack of socialists.

14:35
They’re socialists with the same agenda that the most progressive and I should say perverted forces in American political life are expressing, whether it’s the emphasis on gender issues or a leftist educational program, which is destroying the quality of German education in her view. These are the issues that Mr. Musk wanted the world to hear. And they did have a pushback to the criticism of this interview that Germany’s two main party leaders, that is the CDU and Merz and the socialists with Scholz, they were complaining loudly about Musk’s foreign interference in the election.

15:37
And she pushed back by saying, “Oh, okay, what about Mr. Merz’s disparaging remarks about Trump before the American elections? That wasn’t interference?” For that part, the Russians have also commented, what about Mr. Soros’ constant intervention in all European politics? It’s never denounced for what it is. It’s also foreign intervention. But that is celebrated by the EU institutions because it’s on the side of values driven policies. So these are the basic features of that discussion, on-air discussion, which I think really merits close examination.

Alkhorshid: 16:23
It’s so amazing to see that Elon Musk, who is so, he’s criticizing Soros and his attitude, but at the same time you see the same sort of behavior when you look at Venezuela right now in Europe. He tries to interfere in the domestic policies of these countries. Don’t you think that would be a game of two, like these two parties in the United States fighting each other, but at the end, we’re going to get the same result?

Doctorow:
Well, I think so. I was very positively oriented towards Musk, thinking that, all right, where is the adult in the room, which is what the kind of expression that was used about Trump in his first administration. I don’t think that Musk is the adult in the room. He’s a technical genius, but all of us have had plenty of experience with techies who try to set domestic and foreign policy, and usually those people are disasters. I’m afraid that Musk falls into that same category. I had hoped that he would help pull Trump out of extreme positions, but I think that was a false hope.

Alkhorshid: 17:44
Donald Trump was talking about Greenland and how important Greenland is for the security of the United States. Here is what he said. Let me play it.

Trump:
Well, we need Greenland for national security purposes. I’ve been told that for a long time, long before I even ran. I mean, people have been talking about it for a long time. You have approximately 45,000 people there. People really don’t even know if Denmark has any legal right to it. But if they do, they should give it up, because we need it for national security. That’s for the free world. I’m talking about protecting the free world. You look at you don’t even need binoculars. You look outside, you have China ships all over the place.

You have Russian ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen. We’re not letting it happen. And if Denmark wants to get to a conclusion, but nobody knows if they even have any right title or interest. The people are going to probably vote for independence or to come into the United States. But if they did do that, then I would tariff Denmark at a very high level.

Reporter:
The US just have to draw a plan.

Alkhorshid: 18:54
Yeah. Because he says that, “I’ve been told that Greenland is so important for our security.” Who are these people, and what is happening in their mind?

Doctorow:
Well, this whole Greenland story has been handled extensively by mainstream media, and to a certain extent, in alternative media. But I think that most everyone I’ve read or heard has taken the wrong end of it. They’re all looking at the question, well, when the ice cap melts in 30 years time or whatever, these sea lanes will be very important. The control over the Arctic will be important. And so far it is really Russia because Russia’s geography is there and China in cooperation with Russia is trying to lay claims to Arctic wealth.

19:46
And so this is a bit of prudence. Other people are saying, “Ah, you can put missiles there in Greenland. That’ll be that much closer to Russia for deterrence purposes.” There are many of these arguments, many of them absolutely meretricious, which are dealing with the Greenland issue as an abstraction. I say it’s anything but an abstraction.

A man like Trump does not give a damn of what’s going to happen 30 years from now. This is part of his indifference to global warming. He won’t be around 30 years from now and he just doesn’t give a damn. The issue, I mean, there’s just no need to say that I support all the green measures, nothing of this. That’s not at all true.

20:33
But the arguments that Trump would care about Greenland because of what comes, is totally false. It is, I don’t know that’s intentionally misleading, it probably is, but it is taking us away from what’s really happening. What’s really happening is that Trump is considering throwing Ukraine under the bus. He can do it very simply. He doesn’t provide any further aid.

The Ukraine army, armed forces, will not survive more than a few weeks without American assistance. Europe cannot fill the gap. Therefore, if Trump does nothing to assist Ukraine, there’ll be a capitulation. The problem is the Ukraine regime will take the first plane out if they’re lucky, or they’ll be lined up and shot if they’re unlucky. And everyone will speak about who lost Ukraine.

21:25
First of all, Democrats preparing their argument for the next congressional elections. And there will be a very sore point for Mr. Trump. Well, how do you distract attention from that? Not only distract attention, how do you demonstrate that you really are macho and much tougher? And if you’re letting Ukraine go, it’s because you have much bigger fish to fry, much more important things on your agenda that are of higher value to American prosperity and security, and which frankly speaking cost the United States nothing.

It’s all low-hanging fruit. The Greenland issue is low-hanging fruit. Mr. Trump showed his teeth. He said he’s ready to use military force or economic pressure to get the agreement of Denmark to ceding ownership, possession of Greenland to the United States.

22:25
That was the first step. Second step, almost followed immediately, is a statement by the Prime Minister of Denmark that there’s no reason for us to have a conflict over this. There’s no reason for us to create a scandal within NATO by the United States itself, breeching all, she didn’t say this, but the essence is the United States breeching international law on sanctity of boundaries, borders by forcing the takeover of Greenland. No, none of it. She said the Greenlanders should decide themselves.

Well, that sounds in abstract political terms, it’s all very politically correct. She’s emphasizing that it’s a free world and these are free people. However, in reality, what she’s saying is, Mr. Trump, go ahead and take it. Because there are only 56, 57,000 Greenlanders on the world’s biggest non-continental Island, which is Greenland.

23:34
And you can imagine how little it would take in millions to each of those 57,000 inhabitants to buy them up. America’s expansion in the 19th century was very largely, or in many cases, where there wasn’t a war as such, in many cases, it was done without military force by buying up the given property. Well, you go back to Manhattan and the first Indian settlements and trading trinkets for land. That policy, in much bigger money terms, was used elsewhere, whether Hawaii or elsewhere, to take possession of islands or territories that became quote independent and then voted independently to join the United States. That’s what he has in mind.

24:26
It’s entirely feasible. I think he’ll get away with it. What this changes, as many people have written and commenting in my writings on this, is almost nothing, because the United States is virtually the only country that has serious military outposts in Greenland today. The advantages, supposed security advantages relative to Russia are nil. The Alaska is much closer to Russia. It’s, I don’t know, 50, 100 miles away, I forget, on the Pacific, than Greenland is, to anything Russian, going over the pole. So that is an absolutely empty argument.

25:07
Therefore, I say it comes down to Trump’s taking a page out of the playbook of Ronald Reagan, who I’m sure his assistants, some of them, have pointed out what Reagan did in a situation of embarrassment when in October 23rd of 1983, the American marines, more than 140 of them, were in barracks together with French soldiers in a peacekeeping mission so-called in Lebanon, and they were attacked by a bomb attack from Hezbollah, which killed them all. This was a terrible embarrassment. The United States, after that, pulled out of Lebanon completely. And how do you cover that up? Well, Reagan did it very effectively.

25:57
Two days later, on 25th October, 1933, he invaded Granada, and that took over all the front pages of all the newspapers, in which he looked macho, he was saving some American students, I forget what the pretext was for the invasion, but it was completely trumped up, phony, and and it served the purpose. Everyone quickly forgot about the disaster in Lebanon, and they moved on to our brilliant leader. The “Financial Times”, by the way, in its first coverage of these remarks by Trump, said, “My goodness, and we all thought that he was an isolationist. It looks like he’s an expansionist.” Hint, hint, bravo, bravo.

26:32
So they were very happy with that. And they were uncomfortable with what he said later in the same press conference that he quote, “understands” Putin relative to the expansion of NATO into Ukraine. Of course, our newspapers changed the word “understand” to “sympathize with, which is not the same thing as “understand”, except if you’re in Germany where the Putin stooges are all Putin versteher. They’re people who understand. But aside from that linguistic quirk of the Germans, an English “understand” does not mean “sympathize”.

Alkhorshid: 27:15
How about the funeral of Jimmy Carter? It was so amazing to see Donald Trump talking to Obama and while Kamala Harris was just not comfortable with the situation.

Doctorow:
I think we all enjoyed that. That wonderful coverage which was on many different news channels. Surprisingly, the biggest number on YouTube are Indian outlets that are rebroadcasted.

I followed that also. I enjoyed seeing, it’s peculiar in this funeral service to see Obama sitting next to Trump and sharing a joke. The two of them are on camera laughing at something. Next to them, completely rigid, looking only at the ceiling, was George W. Bush.

In front of them was Harris, who was so happy to have her husband there, so she didn’t have to look at anybody else. But aside from this body language, the thing that interested me, and there was a wonderful eulogy, the best eulogy was the first one, I think. This was by Gerald Ford’s son. It was the eulogy that Ford had promised to deliver when the two, when he and Carter, who had become fast friends, had made a vow that they would each read an eulogy at the other’s funeral so that the eulogy then written by Ford was read by his son. That was very good, very effective, very human.

28:53
The least human was of course the last one by Joe Biden, which was a very stilted and empty politics. But in between there were, everyone had bouquets to lay at the beer of Carter. And I understand that the man was revered by many people and had, particularly in his post-presidential years, of which there were many, had done a great many humanitarian things through his foundation that are well worth the praise.

However, looking at Carter and without being, violating too severely the old recommendation that you say nothing ill about the dead, departed, I have no particular affection for Mr. Carter. He ruined my business. It was the, I had a consulting business for American corporations that were doing, that were setting up large activities in Russia, particularly food processing from 1975 on. And after the Russians, the Soviets moved into Afghanistan, thanks to Mr. Brzezinski, Carter imposed very deep sanctions and my business activities suffered. I had to close down my company as a result.

So I have a personal, to be totally transparent about this, I have a personal axe to grind against Mr. Carter. But more importantly, having Brzezinski as his security advisor was disastrous. It came from the wrong sources. Carter took the wrong advice in appointing him. People who have some brain said, “Why would you ever appoint a Pole to direct policies which are mostly dealing with Russia?” So the United States got what it deserved, unfortunately. And the world got what it deserved very unfortunately, the promotion of the Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan to attack Russians, which lived on after the Russian evacuation of Afghanistan and gave us 9-11. All of these things are interlinked and they come back to one man and his personal decisions.

31:10
And that one man is Jimmy Carter. I have the highest respect, there’s something still bigger, which I want to mention. And of course, nobody in mainstream would ever touch this issue. They touch it, when they touch it, they touch it in a most flattering way. But he put, this came out in some eulogies, that he made human rights the most important aspect of his activity.

Yes, he did. And I do not praise the man for that. A lot of the problems that we’ve had ever since come out of that very emphasis on a values-driven foreign policy. It’s disastrous. And the opposite of values-driven foreign policy is an interest-based national policy, which isn’t cuddly. The general public doesn’t like the idea, but it avoids wars.

32:03
And the interventionism, all of the right to, or the obligation to save vulnerable people in various countries, which was the gateway to American military intervention and to disastrous loss of life and creation of failed states that go on for decades — all that goes back to Mr. Carter’s policies. So no, I do not revere the man. I respect him for his good intentions. But as we all know, the path to hell is paved with good intentions.

Alkhorshid: 32:40
As Joe Biden is on his way to leave Washington, we know that the last aid from the United States goes to Ukraine. It’s $500 million. And on the other hand, we have Fico and Orban talking about the way that Ukraine is behaving and their not letting the Russian gas going to these countries. They’re not happy with the situation. They’re going to be tough with Zelensky in Ukraine. How do you see these European countries, the response coming from these European countries to Ukraine, as we know Washington is supporting Ukraine as we talk right now?

Doctorow: 33:29
There are two factors going forward. Neither of them is in Europe. There is the Washington factor and the Moscow factor. And everything else will follow in the wake, depending on which of these two factors are decisive in the weeks and months ahead.

I would put my money on the Russian factor. I think that Mr. Trump is not looking to enter a new war, is certainly not looking to escalate to a nuclear war. And therefore, when he sees the Russian advance to the Dnieper– which is going to come in the next weeks, certainly no more than several months from now, when he sees the game is up– then he will meet with Putin yet again. I assume they’ll have a meeting before then, to put an end to this and possibly to talk about the security architecture in Europe, which is where the war started.

34:29
The Europeans have sacrificed any say in the way this goes. So frankly, I don’t care whether AFD gets 34% of the electorate or gets 51%, it’s not going to change anything. Europe is, as Madam Weidel says, in the center, they have lost their way. And all the elites that have managed to run the European institutions here in Brussels are disposable. They cannot carry forward and do the changes needed. So where do you look? You look at those two capitals, Moscow and Washington, to see how this war ends and how peace may or may not come to Europe.

Alkhorshid: 35:20
Yeah. Here is Donald Trump talking about Putin wants to meet with him. Here is what they said about them.
—————-

Questioner:
Putin — is that a day-one or week-one–

Trump:
He wants to he wants to meet, and we’re setting it up. President Xi, we’ve had a lot of communication and we have a lot of meetings set up with a lot of people. Some have come, but I’d rather wait till after the 20th.

Questioner:
And when you say meet with Putin or meet with Xi, do you guys want to have some kind of a summit, or are they going to come here?

Trump:
To be determined. But President Putin wants to meet. He’s said that even publicly. And we have to get that war over with. That’s a bloody mess.
—————-

Alkhorshid: 36:04
The positive point in this talk in this response is he’s talking about we have to put an end to the conflict. I think this is very positive. At the same time, he’s talking about Putin wants to meet him. Your take, Gilbert.

Doctorow;
Well, I believe that Putin does want to meet him, but he hasn’t said it. Certainly hasn’t said it publicly. And the reason why he wants to meet him is because of several things, specific things that Trump said, which resonated in Moscow.

Going back, it’s almost two weeks, when Trump first said that he thinks that the decision by Biden to allow, just allow the use of American, high-precision, long-distance missiles to attack Russian Federation territory, that this was foolish and highly dangerous. That caught the Russians’ attention. And of course, in the last couple of days, Mr. Trump has come and said specifically that he does not see Ukraine ever joining NATO. That, of course, is music to Russian ears.

37:17
And so that sets the stage for serious talks between Moscow and Washington. And in that sense, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and say there probably are feelers at a lower level going on between Washington and Moscow as to how to arrange, where to arrange, who the parties will be in the first meetings. I don’t believe that they’re going to take–

The Russians would not want to meet at the summit without the assistants doing all of the legwork, doing all of the Sherpa work, as they call it, preparing the way to climb the mount. So I don’t expect a meeting to take place anytime soon at the highest level, but would Kellogg and somebody else tagging along for a little delegation go to Moscow and be received? Well, of course they will be.

38:12
And will they be talking about possibilities for meeting at the top? Of course they will be. So … look, I don’t want to join, used to be in the first term of Trump, these Pinocchio counters, how many lies he’s told today. But of course this is a lie, what he was saying.

Alkhorshid: 38:33
Just the wrap of this session, on January 1st, Indonesia was one of those countries that Russia announced they’re going to be BRICS partners. And on January 8th, we’ve learned that Indonesia is full member of BRICS. And BRICS is just expanding and getting growing stronger.

On the other hand, Donald Trump is coming to power. Do you see the United States under Donald Trump would make this world, this type of conflicts that we are witnessing right now in the Middle East, in Far East, in Ukraine, are we going to be more divided under Donald Trump or Donald Trump is going to manage as he talks in his response to this reporter, he wants to put an end to the conflict in Ukraine, that could bring some sort of changes, I would say some sort of drastic changes in terms of Europe, the United States and Russia.

Doctorow: 39:48
If there’s a drastic change in Europe, it will not be from this alone. It will be by Trump’s also cutting back on American financing and equipping NATO forces. I think this will force a lot of rethinking. But the only rethinking that will count is for the European leaderships to come to the recognition that they live on the same continent as Russia. And they have to have some kind of a modus vivendi with their Eastern neighbor, and not only look at the transatlantic connection as their salvation.

So I’m hoping that the brutality that Trump and his assistants, including Elon Musk, may show with reference to the leading authorities in Europe, will parallel the brutality that he has shown to Justin Trudeau in Canada, with similar results. That is, I hope it will not be an empty hope, but I think it has some justification. And that is one of the points that I rely on for a change in Europe, brutality coming from Washington.

Alkhorshid: 41:10
Yeah. Thank you so much, Gilbert, for being with us today. Great pleasure as always.

Doctorow:
Well thanks for having me.

Alkhorshid:
Goodbye.

In the days immediately ahead of the chat on his social medium X that Elon Musk had scheduled with Alice Weidel, co-chairwoman of the Alternative for Germany party (AfD), Germany’s leading politicians, Olaf Scholz for the Social Democrats and Friedrich Merz for the Christian Democrats, both condemned what they called Musk’s ‘interference’ in the forthcoming German elections.

To be sure, in recent years when their own standing with voters has been sinking due to widespread dissatisfaction with zero economic growth, deindustrialization and weariness with the large flows of illegal immigrants that have entered the country since 2015, placing a heavy burden on social services and leading to heightened crime rates, the centrist parties in Germany have been especially keen to protect themselves against what they call the ‘far right’ populists, who make electoral hay out of the policy failures of those who have been in charge for decades.

Accordingly, the CDU and SPD seek to marginalize the AfD and to keep it out of any future coalition governments, via the so-called cordon sanitaire.  In this context, Elon Musk’s recent public expressions of support for the AfD as the only party capable of saving Germany from its downward economic and social spiral are viewed with fear and anger by the country’s rulers. In particular, Musk’s plan to feature on X the AfD nominee for chancellor, Alice Weidel, touched a sensitive nerve.

In the past couple of weeks, we also heard from spokesmen for the European Institutions that Brussels would be watching the interview program very closely to ascertain whether X was in breach of regulations prohibiting ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’ on the internet.

Now that the much hyped live one hour and fifteen-minute conversation between Musk and Weidel has taken place, what did we learn from it about the two discussants and about the changes that an AfD led government in Germany might bring, assuming that voters will come out for Weidel in much greater numbers in February than present polls suggest (19% of the popular vote versus 32% for the Christian Democrats)? In particular of interest to readers of these pages:  would an AfD in power do what the widely watched American political commentator Colonel Douglas Macgregor has been saying, namely take Germany out of NATO?

                                                                        *****

Let me be perfectly frank: neither Musk nor Weidel emerged from their online discussion looking strong and persuasive.

Musk was keen to present Weidel as a friendly, folksy reformer who stands for common sense solutions to Germany’s domestic malaise. She obliged by setting out the party’s policy of restoring a good balance in the energy mix on which Germany’s industrial economy depends, namely nuclear and gas generated electricity, with no disproportionate reliance on renewables such as the ‘green’ chancellor Angela Merkel introduced. Weidel rightly condemned Merkel’s shutdown of nuclear power, in particular just when Russian gas supplies were being reduced to nil.  But at this moment when it would have paid to raise the question of the loss of Nord Stream 1 and to ask who was behind that sabotage to the German economy, she had not a word to say.

 The party also would overturn the current Leftist agenda in the educational system which has sharply brought down the quality of schooling and ill-prepared students for the labor market. They would reduce income taxes to better allow Germans to get rich and prosper. They would lift censorship and encourage freedom of expression.

Eager to dispel any confusion in the German public over the democratic credentials of the AfD, Musk asked her directly what is their view of Hitler and the country’s Nazi past.  She rose to the occasion and assured the audience that Hitler was in reality not a genuine conservative, as her party is.  Hitler nationalized German businesses and was a closet Communist, per Frau Weidel. 

Moreover, the AfD strongly supports the right of the state of Israel to exist and to defend itself, whereas the Leftist leaning ‘uniparty,’ meaning all of the nominally centrist parties of Germany, has too much tolerance for Muslims.

But let us go a bit deeper and quote their exchange on the question of Israel directly:

Musk: What are your views on Israel?  

Answer:  very complicated. The more I read on the Middle East and the situation in Israel, the more I see it is complicated. I don’t see a solution. Maybe Israel has to find some alliance with the Sunni states.  To be honest, from my perspective, it is a very complicated situation.   I don’t know how to solve the conflict at this point in time.   

Question: Do you unequivocally support the existence of the state of Israel? 

Answer: Yes, of course. We need to protect the existence of Israel.  I think Benjamin Netanyahu has made many mistakes in the past.  But in Germany we have to take action to protect Jewish persons in our country. They are exposed to Muslim crime. They are not safe here anymore.  See all the demonstrations of the Palestinians here in Berlin.   There is huge potential of anti-Semitic crimes here.  To be very frank, the AfD is the only protector of the Jewish people in Germany, because all other parties did all the opposite. They let millions of people in into our country and do crimes on our streets.

Musk: The AfD is being massively misrepresented in Western media.

Answer: I very much support the state of Israel but we have to be mindful of deaths of civilians.  There is no choice but to eliminate those who want to eliminate the State of Israel, Hamas, and then to fix the education system so that children are not taught to hate Israel. The third step is to make the Palestinian land prosperous. You have to help rebuild and to bring prosperity.

The mention of unqualified support for Israel was one of only two international affairs issues that came up in the interview.  The other was the Russia-Ukraine war, over which both Musk and Weidel were in agreement that it has been in stalemate mode for two years, with a great many deaths on both sides serving no purpose whatsoever.

If indeed Musk meant what he said about the Russia-Ukraine war, then he is as badly informed as Donald Trump. Of course, it is possible that his remarks were intended to be aligned with Trump and with Trump’s designated envoy General Kellogg, i.e., not to rock the boat at home, but I fear that his ignorant position on the matter genuinely reflects his thinking.

On the same subject, Musk said that he expects Trump to end the war in Ukraine very quickly, though he declined to give to Weidel any indication of what measures might be taken to achieve peace, saying that is the sole prerogative of the commander in chief, Trump.

As for Weidel, she recognized that the Ukraine-Russia war has the potential to escalate to nuclear exchange. She sees that in Europe there is no strategy to end this.  However, if she has any thoughts on what Germany may do to provide for its own defense and to get out from under full dependence on the US, we did not hear about it. Does any of this point in the direction of some future withdrawal from NATO? Not really.

In the remainder of the interview, Weidel and Musk traded places and she asked him about his plans for Space X missions to Mars to colonize the planet and to guaranty the future of humanity against any possible self-destruction on planet Earth through nuclear war or destruction from natural causes like a collision with some celestial object. Musk was delighted with the attention and basked in her admiration.

                                                                        *****

The sad truth is that Musk demonstrated in this interview that there are no universal geniuses, and that brilliance in the several business and technical domains which he rightly claims does not extend to international affairs. He obviously will not be the ‘adult in the room’ that so many people have hoped would be there to exert a restraining force on the compulsive Mr. Trump.

As for Frau Weidel, it is a safe bet that she concurred with Musk on so many issues to curry favor and shake out some hefty campaign contributions from the world’s richest man. She came across as being a notch or two above the dismal level in the Scholz cabinet, but she is not really prepared for high office. At a minimum we may say that she lacks experience to lead.  She freely admits to not knowing much and to relying on the team of assistants she has assembled whom she invites to tell her daily what they think she has done wrong.

In conclusion, the fears of Messrs. Scholz and Merz about this interview were greatly exaggerated. And our hopes for Germany leading Europe out from under U.S. domination and participation in the ‘forever wars’ were dashed.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

11. Januar 2025

Elon Musk im Interview mit AfD-Chefin Alice Weidel: eine Übung in gegenseitiger Bewunderung

In den Tagen unmittelbar vor dem Chat auf seinem sozialen Medium X, den Elon Musk mit Alice Weidel, der Co-Vorsitzenden der Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), geplant hatte, verurteilten die führenden Politiker Deutschlands, Olaf Scholz für die Sozialdemokraten und Friedrich Merz für die Christdemokraten, beide das, was sie als Musks „Einmischung“ in die bevorstehenden deutschen Wahlen bezeichneten.

In den letzten Jahren, in denen ihr Ansehen bei den Wählern aufgrund der weit verbreiteten Unzufriedenheit mit dem Nullwachstum, der Deindustrialisierung und der Ermüdung durch die großen Ströme illegaler Einwanderer, die seit 2015 ins Land gekommen sind, gesunken ist, was eine schwere Belastung für die Sozialdienste und zu einer erhöhten Kriminalitätsrate führen, waren die Parteien der Mitte in Deutschland besonders darauf bedacht, sich vor den sogenannten „rechtsextremen“ Populisten zu schützen, die aus den politischen Fehlern der seit Jahrzehnten Verantwortlichen Kapital für ihre Wahlkampagne schlagen.

Dementsprechend versuchen CDU und SPD, die AfD zu marginalisieren und sie durch den sogenannten Cordon sanitaire aus künftigen Koalitionsregierungen herauszuhalten. In diesem Zusammenhang betrachten die Machthaber des Landes Elon Musks jüngste öffentliche Bekundungen der Unterstützung für die AfD als einzige Partei, die Deutschland vor seiner wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Abwärtsspirale retten kann, mit Angst und Wut. Insbesondere Musks Plan, die AfD-Kanzlerkandidatin Alice Weidel in X zu präsentieren, traf einen empfindlichen Nerv.

In den letzten Wochen haben wir auch von Sprechern der europäischen Institutionen gehört, dass Brüssel das Interviewprogramm sehr genau beobachten werde, um festzustellen, ob X gegen die Vorschriften verstößt, die „Fake News“ und „Desinformation“ im Internet verbieten.

Was haben wir nun aus dem vielbeschworenen Live-Gespräch von einer Stunde und fünfzehn Minuten zwischen Musk und Weidel über die beiden Diskutanten und über die Veränderungen gelernt, die eine von der AfD geführte Regierung in Deutschland mit sich bringen könnte, vorausgesetzt, dass die Wähler im Februar in viel größerer Zahl für Weidel stimmen werden, als die aktuellen Umfragen vermuten lassen (19 % der Stimmen gegenüber 32 % für die Christdemokraten)? Für die Leser dieser Seiten besonders interessant: Würde eine an der Macht befindliche AfD das tun, was der viel beachtete amerikanische Politikkommentator Colonel Douglas Macgregor sagt, nämlich Deutschland aus der NATO herausnehmen?

                                                                        *****

Ich will ganz ehrlich sein: Weder Musk noch Weidel gingen aus ihrer Online-Diskussion als starke und überzeugende Persönlichkeiten hervor.

Musk wollte Weidel unbedingt als freundliche, volksnahe Reformerin präsentieren, die für vernünftige Lösungen für die innenpolitische Malaise in Deutschland steht. Sie kam ihm entgegen, indem sie die Politik der Partei darlegte, ein ausgewogenes Verhältnis im Energiemix wiederherzustellen, von dem die deutsche Industrie abhängig ist, nämlich Strom aus Kernkraft und Gas, ohne übermäßige Abhängigkeit von erneuerbaren Energien, wie sie die „grüne“ Kanzlerin Angela Merkel eingeführt hat. Weidel verurteilte zu Recht Merkels Abschaltung der Kernkraft, insbesondere zu einem Zeitpunkt, als die russischen Gaslieferungen auf Null reduziert wurden. Aber in diesem Moment, in dem es sich gelohnt hätte, die Frage nach dem Verlust von Nord Stream 1 aufzuwerfen und zu fragen, wer hinter dieser Sabotage der deutschen Wirtschaft steckt, hatte sie kein Wort zu sagen.

Die Partei würde auch die derzeitige linke Agenda im Bildungssystem umstürzen, die die Qualität der Schulbildung stark beeinträchtigt und die Schüler schlecht auf den Arbeitsmarkt vorbereitet hat. Sie würden die Einkommenssteuern senken, damit die Deutschen besser reich werden und gedeihen können. Sie würden die Zensur aufheben und die Meinungsfreiheit fördern.

Um jegliche Verwirrung in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit über die demokratische Glaubwürdigkeit der AfD auszuräumen, fragte Musk sie direkt, wie sie zu Hitler und der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit des Landes stehe. Sie meisterte die Situation und versicherte dem Publikum, dass Hitler in Wirklichkeit kein echter Konservativer war, wie ihre Partei. Hitler verstaatlichte deutsche Unternehmen und war laut Frau Weidel ein verkappter Kommunist.

Darüber hinaus unterstützt die AfD nachdrücklich das Existenzrecht und das Recht des Staates Israel, sich selbst zu verteidigen, während die linksgerichtete „Einheitspartei“, d.h. alle nominell zentristischen Parteien Deutschlands, zu viel Toleranz gegenüber Muslimen zeige.

Aber lassen Sie uns etwas tiefer gehen und ihren Austausch zur Frage Israel direkt zitieren:

Musk: Was halten Sie von Israel?

Antwort: Sehr kompliziert. Je mehr ich über den Nahen Osten und die Situation in Israel lese, desto komplizierter wird es für mich. Ich sehe keine Lösung. Vielleicht muss Israel eine Allianz mit den sunnitischen Staaten eingehen. Um ehrlich zu sein, ist es aus meiner Sicht eine sehr komplizierte Situation. Ich weiß derzeit nicht, wie man den Konflikt lösen kann.

Frage: Unterstützen Sie die Existenz des Staates Israel uneingeschränkt?

Antwort: Ja, natürlich. Wir müssen die Existenz Israels schützen. Ich denke, Benjamin Netanjahu hat in der Vergangenheit viele Fehler gemacht. Aber in Deutschland müssen wir Maßnahmen ergreifen, um jüdische Menschen in unserem Land zu schützen. Sie sind muslimischer Kriminalität ausgesetzt. Sie sind hier nicht mehr sicher. Sehen Sie sich all die Demonstrationen der Palästinenser hier in Berlin an. Hier besteht ein enormes Potenzial für antisemitische Verbrechen. Um ganz ehrlich zu sein, ist die AfD der einzige Beschützer der jüdischen Bevölkerung in Deutschland, weil alle anderen Parteien das Gegenteil getan haben. Sie haben Millionen von Menschen in unser Land gelassen und lassen zu, dass auf unseren Straßen Verbrechen begangen werden.

Musk: Die AfD wird in den westlichen Medien massiv falsch dargestellt.

Antwort: Ich unterstütze den Staat Israel sehr, aber wir müssen uns des Todes von Zivilisten bewusst sein. Es bleibt keine andere Wahl, als diejenigen zu eliminieren, die den Staat Israel eliminieren wollen, die Hamas, und dann das Bildungssystem so zu reformieren, dass Kindern nicht beigebracht wird, Israel zu hassen. Der dritte Schritt besteht darin, das palästinensische Land wohlhabend zu machen. Man muss beim Wiederaufbau helfen und Wohlstand schaffen.

Die Erwähnung uneingeschränkter Unterstützung für Israel war eines von nur zwei Themen zu internationalen Angelegenheiten, die im Interview zur Sprache kamen. Das andere war der Krieg zwischen Russland und der Ukraine, bei dem sich Musk und Weidel einig waren, dass er seit zwei Jahren in einer Sackgasse stecke und auf beiden Seiten zahlreiche Tote zu beklagen seien, die keinerlei Zweck dienen.

Wenn Musk tatsächlich meinte, was er über den Russland-Ukraine-Krieg sagte, dann ist er genauso schlecht informiert wie Donald Trump. Natürlich ist es möglich, dass seine Äußerungen darauf abzielten, sich Trump und Trumps designiertem Gesandten General Kellogg anzuschließen, d.h. zu Hause keinen Ärger zu machen, aber ich fürchte, dass seine ignorante Position in dieser Angelegenheit wirklich seine Denkweise widerspiegelt.

Zum gleichen Thema sagte Musk, dass er erwarte, dass Trump den Krieg in der Ukraine sehr schnell beenden werde, lehnte es jedoch ab, Weidel Hinweise darauf zu geben, welche Maßnahmen ergriffen werden könnten, um Frieden zu erreichen, und sagte, dies sei das alleinige Vorrecht des Oberbefehlshabers Trump.

Weidel räumte ein, dass der Krieg zwischen der Ukraine und Russland das Potenzial hat, zu einem nuklearen Schlagabtausch zu eskalieren. Sie sieht, dass es in Europa keine Strategie gibt, um dem ein Ende zu setzen. Wenn sie jedoch eine Idee hat, was Deutschland tun könnte, um für seine eigene Verteidigung zu sorgen und aus der vollständigen Abhängigkeit von den USA herauszukommen, haben wir nichts davon gehört. Weist irgendetwas davon auf einen zukünftigen Austritt aus der NATO hin? Nicht wirklich.

Im weiteren Verlauf des Interviews tauschten Weidel und Musk die Plätze und sie fragte ihn nach seinen Plänen für Space-X-Missionen zum Mars, um den Planeten zu kolonisieren und die Zukunft der Menschheit gegen jede mögliche Selbstzerstörung auf dem Planeten Erde durch einen Atomkrieg oder eine Zerstörung durch natürliche Ursachen wie eine Kollision mit einem Himmelsobjekt zu sichern. Musk war begeistert von der Aufmerksamkeit und sonnte sich in ihrer Bewunderung.

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Die traurige Wahrheit ist, dass Musk in diesem Interview gezeigt hat, dass es keine Universalgenies gibt und dass sich die Brillanz in den verschiedenen geschäftlichen und technischen Bereichen, die er zu Recht für sich beansprucht, nicht auf internationale Angelegenheiten erstreckt. Er wird offensichtlich nicht der „Erwachsene im Raum“ sein, von dem so viele Menschen gehofft haben, dass er da ist, um den zwanghaften Herrn Trump zu zügeln.

Was Frau Weidel betrifft, so ist es sicher, dass sie in so vielen Fragen mit Musk übereinstimmte, um sich einzuschmeicheln und einige saftige Wahlkampfspenden vom reichsten Mann der Welt zu erhalten. Sie wirkte zwar um einiges besser als das trostlose Niveau im Scholz-Kabinett, aber sie ist nicht wirklich auf ein hohes Amt vorbereitet. Zumindest kann man sagen, dass ihr die Erfahrung fehlt, um zu führen. Sie gibt offen zu, dass sie nicht viel weiß und sich auf das Team von Assistenten verlässt, das sie zusammengestellt hat und das sie einlädt, ihr täglich zu sagen, was sie ihrer Meinung nach falsch gemacht hat.

Zusammenfassend lässt sich sagen, dass die Befürchtungen der Herren Scholz und Merz bezüglich dieses Interviews stark übertrieben waren. Und unsere Hoffnungen, dass Deutschland Europa aus der US-Vorherrschaft herausführen und sich nicht an den „Kriegen für immer“ beteiligen würde, wurden enttäuscht.