Who is Hitler and who is Chamberlain today?

For the last 50 years at least, American hawks have time and again brought up a lesson from the past to justify their foreign and military policy predilections that amounted to war-mongering.

Every attempt to find accommodation, détente with America’s ideological adversaries was systematically denounced as “appeasement” in the tradition of Chamberlain seeking ‘peace in our time’ when dealing with the German Fuehrer, whose ambition was absolute political, economic, military domination in Europe.

Donald Trump’s absolutely shocking act of aggression this past weekend compels us to face a new reality: that the President of the United States is today the incarnation of Hitler with ambition on a world-wide scale.

I am not repeating here the cheap and empty political posturing of the Trump haters in America who have called him a fascist because he opposes their Green agenda, opposes their LGBTQ+ Rainbow parades and support for sex change operations among adolescents, and opposes other extreme Liberal values that amount to the destruction of the foundations of society in pursuit of I, Me, Me, I.

No, those complainers about Trump are abusing the notion of fascism to serve their own selfish hunger for political power at any price.

I am speaking about the notion of fascism writ large, as a program to destroy all those nations which do or could stand in the way of American global hegemony.

Trump has trampled on the sovereignty of Venezuela and makes no secret of plans to ‘run’ the country and extract enormous wealth for American corporations by setting them free to exploit Venezuelan oil. He has just renewed his claims to take possession of Greenland. He has threatened Iran with military intervention over the suppression of political disturbances that are a direct result of the country’s economic hardships under crippling U.S. sanctions that go back twenty years or more. Surely Cuba is also in his sights.

The operation in Caracas this past weekend is the template for what is to come. No big invasions, just a very carefully researched and executed decapitation strike that removes to American prisons the leaders of the countries on the Trump check-list.

And why bother adding to the prison detainees? In the past week the CIA targeted Vladimir Putin’s countryside residence with intent to murder. Minister of War Pete Hegseth in the past few days has threatened Putin with “we’re coming for you”.

*****

Given all of the foregoing, I am shocked that some colleagues continue to praise the moderation shown thus far by Russia and China in response to what Trump has done and said this past weekend. We are told that they appreciate the volatility, the narcissism, the oncoming dementia of the man in the Oval Office and are making their highest priority avoidance of a nuclear war by handling The Donald with kid gloves.

Dear friends, you are arguing the case for Chamberlain! And was not Hitler in 1938-39 understood to be mentally unbalanced, a madman if I may cut to the quick? The only argument that one might have made in defense of Chamberlain’s appeasement was the lack of preparedness for war of his country and its allies on the Continent. But that is manifestly not the case today, when we all understand that Russia’s conventional forces are more than a match for NATO in its shambolic present conditions, and that Russia’s nuclear triad, its strategic arsenal is years ahead of the USA at this moment. That will likely not be true 5 years from now, but it is true today. Accordingly, there is no logic to Russian pusillanimity, to its not threatening the USA with total destruction here and now if Washington does not pull in its horns and behave in accordance with the UN Charter.

Going back 5 years, I argued in an essay that Khrushchev was right to bang his shoe on the desk in the UN General Assembly. He was right to issue his famous threat to the capitalist world: “we will bury you.”

Khrushchev may have been boorish, but he was brave and he was ready to fight to the death if the U.S. side did not come to its senses. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was a test of courage on both sides the like of which I do not see today. The annihilation of tens of millions of people was a possibility, to be sure, but it was offset by readiness to enter into serious and decisive negotiations going to the root causes of the confrontation. After all, in the end, not only did the Russians pull their nuclear tipped missiles out of Cuba but the USA pulled into missiles out of Turkey and Italy.

*****

‘Progressive humanity’ is today reporting on the demonstrations being held in capitals around the world to protest against the imprisonment of Maduro and U.S. aggression.

Regrettably, the net result of these demos will be nil. The only powers on earth that can stop the insane Hitler-like course of the Trump administration today are China and Russia. If they twiddle their thumbs now then you can be sure that the possible war today will be replaced by a certain civilization ending war in five years’ time.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026

Hourly news bulletin on NewsX World: Trump’s denial that an attack on the Putin countryside residence ever happened

I appear in minutes 21 to 24 on this news bulletin. My main point was that the attack was likely programmed by the CIA and Britain’s MI6. I direct viewers to the longer interview that precedes me with an Indian commentator whose remarks on the scandalous kidnapping of Maduro are worth your time.

Time to impeach Trump

The attack on Venezuela and snatching of President Maduro puts an end to my flirtation with Trump. He has just trampled on the National Security Strategy that he rolled out 3 weeks ago. He has proven that the Neocons control the government and he is nothing more than a figurehead.

I call for his impeachment so as to install JD Vance and give him two-three years to do what has to be done, namely to purge the Pentagon, the CIA, State of the Neocons who constitute the decision makers and implementers in the ‘power ministries’. This accomplished, Vance could then hope to carry out the NSS and position the USA as a major world power among peers, rather than a hegemon and Cold Warrior.

For those in the Community who may be puzzled by my turning against Trump, I recommend that they read the first chapter in my 2019 collection of essays entitled A Belgian Perspective on International Affairs: “Time to Impeach Trump,” dated 21 September 2017, pp. 1-4. You may have overlooked this book because its title was explained only in the Foreword, p. xiii: the ‘Belgian’ in question was not a collective part of this small nation that one could disregard until its Prime Minister Bart De Wever stood up to Ursula von der Leyen and Chancellor Friedrich Merz a couple of weeks ago and saved the global financial markets from the catastrophe that would have followed confiscation of Russian state assets held in Belgium. The word ‘Belgian’ in the title stood for one person, me, who had become a naturalized Belgian. My call for impeachment was precipitated by Trump’s barbaric declarations before the UN General Assembly threatening to annihilate North Korea, a nation of 22 million people.

My coddling of Trump’s vile activities in some global hotspots since taking office again, in January 2025, in particular his enabling the Israeli genocide in Gaza, was based on the reasonable assumption that that was the price to pay for him to enjoy the political capital in the heavily pro-Zionist Congress and in the foreign policy establishment in Washington necessary to pass his domestic and foreign policy programs. The same logic persuaded me to remain silent about his attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities and his enabling Israeli strikes on Teheran and other purely civilian targets in their 12-day war.

But the recent months of Trump’s superintending so-called peace negotiations to end the war in Ukraine have shown that at best his efforts are incompetent and so are condemned to failure. Holding separate talks with each of the warring parties and agreeing with each side to their entirely contradictory peace plans shows that he is posturing and that nothing of use can come out of these talks. Moreover, no peace agreement that met the Russian demands of resolving the underlying reasons for the war, namely turning back NATO expansion to Russia’s borders and getting Washington to consider revising the security architecture in Europe, will get approval in Congress now that everyone has read about Trump’s hopes to overturn 76 years of American foreign policy priorities by the language of his NSS document.

Accordingly, I view without prejudice and on their merits Trump’s attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Maduro and his wife to face trumped up charges of drug trafficking in the USA. And on their merits Trump has egregiously violated international law. Sad to say, he has not set a precedent, but is following a pattern of ‘rogue state’ behavior established by President George H.W. Bush when he invaded Panama in December 1989 and seized president Manuel Noriega. Noriega then spent years in U.S. detention and died there.

Let us remember that ‘rogue state behavior’ was precisely what one of the chief popularizers of Neocon ideology, Robert Kagan, husband of the notorious Victoria Nuland, urged upon the United States in books and speeches. That is to say, scorn for all legal constraints on how foreign policy is conducted for the sake of maintaining U.S. global domination.

The difference between what H.W. Bush did in 1989 and what Trump has just down now in Venezuela must be called out. Bush was just ‘kicking ass,’ as they say in the States. Trump is implementing a farther- reaching geopolitical objective of driving all foreign powers out of the Western Hemisphere, which he seeks to maintain as Washington’s exclusive hunting preserve. To be more specific, Trump has attacked not just Venezuela. He has attacked China which is a main export market for Venezuela; conversely, China is highly dependent on Venezuelan oil and an American take-over would surely cause economic harm to Beijing. In this regard, the warm-up exercise to yesterday’s snatch operation was the U.S. capture of two Venezuelan oil tankers, one of which was carrying oil destined for and already paid for by China.

Going back still further, this American attack on Venezuela is a continuation of the attack on China’s commercial activities in Latin America that we saw still earlier in 2025 when Trump brought pressure on Panama to remove the Chinese from their control over the Canal.

*****

What lessons can the world’s two other superpowers draw from Trump’s outrageous attack on Venezuela?

As for Russia, the message should be crystal clear to President Vladimir Putin that he does not and cannot have a partner in Donald Trump. Russia must proceed on its own path to resolve the Ukraine war, and as I have been saying in recent months, the sooner the war is ended, whether by a decapitation strike on Kiev and other decision-making centers, or by storming Kiev with ground forces, the better. Russia now has a window of opportunity that it should exploit without hesitation. If President Putin is unable to act decisively in this sense, then he should resign and pass the torch to someone in a younger generation who is level-headed, has proven experience at high levels of the government and is decisive, not wishy-washy.

As for China, this attack on Venezuela is de facto an attack on China. Generally, Chairman Xi is more decisive and has more resources to threaten the USA than does Putin and Russia. If ever there were a moment for China to resolve the Taiwan issue it is here and now. The Americans have just stolen Chinese oil and are attacking a major supplier to China. Xi will not straighten out relations with Washington now by remaining silent and failing to respond appropriately. Such reticence will only encourage further provocations and give Washington time to better prepare for armed conflict.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026

A gift to Russian speakers

Книга «История Надин» была написана и только что опубликована на английском языке через дочернюю компанию Amazon. Она доступна в двух форматах в глобальной сети страновых веб-сайтов Amazon. Цена электронной версии книги составляет 8 евро. Бумажная версия стоит в четыре раза дороже. См. веб-страницу книги на amazon.fr.:

Ряд друзей и потенциальных читателей «Истории Надин» спрашивали меня: «О чем эта книга?» Я не даю краткого изложения событий романа, но отмечаю, что в нем излагаются мысли и чувства героини в романтической истории, имеющей международный размах. Подзаголовок «Сцены из жизни» говорит о том, что повествование не сдерживается и включает в себя эротические сцены. Именно поэтому роман относится к категории «литература для взрослых».

Ниже я привожу текст предисловия, в котором «История Надин» рассматривается в особом контексте книг, изданных спустя много лет после их написания, а также в контексте многолетней эмиграции русских на Запад.

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Роман «История Надин» был написан более тридцати лет назад и действие в нем происходит пятьдесят лет назад. За это время почти все наши представления о жизни, о «свободном мире» и о СССР кардинально изменились. Это неизбежно вызывает ряд вопросов, на которые необходимо ответить, прежде чем читатель откроет страницы этого романа и отправится в путешествие по тому миру.

В советскую эпоху авторы часто хранили свои рукописи в ящиках стола в течение многих лет, прежде чем они в конечном итоге были опубликованы. Причину этого можно описать одним словом: цензура. Многие широко известные романы и произведения документальной литературы из всего творческого наследия XX века постигла такая судьба. Отдельные произведения были напечатаны в периоды «оттепели», например, при Никите Хрущеве.

Еще большее количество произведений увидели свет, когда советская система контроля над мышлением начала рушиться под влиянием Михаила Горбачева и его политики «гласности» в 1980-х годах. С новыми свободами, которыми россияне наслаждались, когда страна закрыла дверь перед коммунизмом в 1990-х годах, еще больше рукописей было извлечено из ящиков и нашло издателей. Одна из таких работ, «Чужие письма» автора Александра Морозова, даже выиграла российскую Букеровскую премию в 1998 году, хотя и вызвала много споров о практике публикации работ спустя десятилетия после их написания.

В случае с «Историей Надин» ее длительный период затишья до настоящего времени был вызван другим видом «цензуры», практикуемым на Западе: до недавнего времени издательский рынок находился в тисках устоявшейся сети издательств, имеющих свои собственные планы или «программы», как они это называют, и связанных с устоявшейся сетью литературных агентов. Совместимость искусства и коммерции всегда была хрупкой. Система имела и имеет ограниченные возможности продвигать более чем небольшую часть достойных произведений за пределами своего собственного круга авторов.

Когда Надин стала жертвой политики исключения со стороны издателей в 1990-х годах, автор перешла к другим литературным вызовам и в конце концов в 2010 году нашла издателя для своего второго романа «Живи как прежде» в санкт-петербургском литературном журнале «Звезда», который долгое время публиковал ее статьи о культурных событиях в Западной Европе. В 2019 году другое известное издательство в том же городе, «Лики России», выпустило русскоязычное издание следующего романа автора «Мозаика моей жизни». Между тем, для англоязычного издания «The Mosaic of My Life» автор обратилась к американской компании Author House, специализирующейся на самоиздании и печати по требованию..

Этот последний благоприятный опыт, который вскоре подтвердился публикацией первой попытки Залесовой в области путевой литературы, «Дачные рассказы: жизнь в российской глубинке», убедил ее отряхнуть пыль с «Надин» и опубликовать ее.

Как говорится, что посеешь, то и пожнешь. Эта тридцатилетняя рукопись приобрела новую актуальность, поскольку в последние несколько лет иммиграция стала главной темой новостей в Западной Европе и США. Действительно, в последнем опубликованном романе автора «Мозаика моей жизни» (2020), хотя он и охватывает широкий период российской истории от дореволюционных времен до 1970-х годов, вскользь затрагивается вопрос, который мучил так много россиян на протяжении трех поколений: остаться на родине или уехать в поисках лучшей жизни при первой же возможности, что бы ни случилось. В романе «Надин» этот вопрос занимает первостепенное место в сознании героини от начала до конца.

В течение XX века Россия потеряла миллионы своих граждан не только из-за политических репрессий и жестокости военного времени. Она также стала свидетелем неоднократных массовых исходов, как санкционированных официально, так и тайных. В относительно стабильные времена при Леониде Брежневе и его непосредственных преемниках произошло несколько громких дезертирств, которые привлекли внимание западного мира, тем более что среди бежавших были одни из самых одаренных артистов мира, которые на несколько десятилетий изменили восприятие балета во всем мире: Рудольф Нуреев, Александр Барышников, Наталья Макарова.

Их смелые побеги объяснялись только одним мотивом: «Я выбрал свободу». При этом в основном упускался из виду тот факт, что эти звезды также выбрали полноценную карьеру и художественное развитие, которые были им недоступны не только из-за ограничений командной экономики и авторитарного режима, но и из-за избытка талантов вокруг них. В России просто было слишком много лучших в мире талантов, чтобы их звезды могли проявить себя, и время, которое они проводили на сцене, было гораздо меньше, чем того требовали их амбиции. С их отъездом российское исполнительское искусство, очевидно, потеряло некоторые из своих лучших визитных карточек за рубежом, но не рухнуло.

В более широком смысле, эмиграция бесчисленного количества талантливых людей из России в Кремниевую долину и другие ниши занятости на Западе не лишила страну ее интеллектуального потенциала. Возрождение российской промышленности, сельского хозяйства и культуры в новом тысячелетии, подобное возрождению феникса, свидетельствует о достаточном количестве в России мастеров мирового уровня в самых разных областях.

Роман «Надин» исследует вопрос о том, оставаться или уезжать, с различных точек зрения, в основном личных и связанных с семейной жизнью героини. Я уверена, что эта история найдет свое место в продолжающемся исследовании эмиграции во всем мире.

Today’s Press TV (Iran) interview

Are the Russian allegations about a Ukrainian drone attack on Putin’s residence credible? How will this attack affect the peace negotiations?

This six-minute interview taken this morning is focused on the issue of the drone attack on Putin’s countryside residence.

Some of you may not be able to access the Iranian website for reasons of local censorship by your mind police. Curiously, here in Brussels I can watch this video easily on my i-phone but not on my computer.

https://urmedium.net/c/presstv/135594

NewsX World morning news wrap-up, 1 January 2026

My segment in this news wrap-up begins at minute 3.30 Another day has passed and there were more Ukrainian drone attacks which the Russians claim to have shot down. More questions from the broadcaster on where the war is heading. Is this going to be a long-term situation of no conclusive victory by either side? What prevents Europe from recognizing Ukraine’s defeat?

All in the family. A new book for your consideration: ‘Nadine’s Story’

Years ago, Luigi, one of my colleagues at work in the European headquarters of ITT, the world’s biggest ‘conglomerate’ at the time, shared some family wisdom over lunch in his home as we enjoyed the spaghetti that he jokingly claimed was the end result of a thousand years of Italian culinary development. Based on his own marital experience of a failed first marriage, he warned that two artists in a family are one too many. To that I would add today, that one artist in the family is just right for purposes of putting bread on the table and having thought provoking conversation between the partners in a marriage.

In our family, we are both historians. As you probably know, I received a doctorate in history for which I produced a book that was published as separate articles in scholarly journals at the time. That is to say, I have an academic approach to history and employ the related investigative techniques in my essays, including parsing texts, on global politics today.

My wife, Larisa Vladimirovna Zalesova, is also interested in and writes about the historical past, both recent history and history going back to the start of the 20^th century. But she practices a different craft as a novelist. Therein she is the ‘artist’ in our family.

Historical novels are especially attractive to the broad public because they are entertaining. The author enters the minds of the protagonists in a way that academic historians most often cannot do for lack of substantiating documentation, written and otherwise. The limitations of an academic historian in this regard became clear to me in my doctoral research when I entered the archival funds of the Russian legislators and statesmen responsible for the creation of Russia’s first parliament in 1905– and came up with dry dust, not living and breathing persons.

Historical novels like the one I am recommending here, the just published Nadine’s Story. Scenes from Life, draw on the author’s life experience with living and breathing people of today. There is no need to document every sentence with references, which can weigh down the writing of academic historians. And, as a bonus, the novelist can depict ‘scenes from life’ that your academic writer dares not touch such as the erotic and sexually explicit.

Nadine’s Story is a sophisticated piece of adult literature and I will say no more here on that issue.

Two weeks ago, Nadine’s Story was released as a paperback by Amazon into its worldwide distribution network of country websites, amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr, amazon.com.au, amazon.co.jp etc. It is now available through this same global network in ebook format at just under 10 dollars U.S. and the equivalent in local currencies outside the U.S.

Some of these websites already have a ‘look inside’ feature on the book’s web page that allows you to read the first 5 pages online to get a ‘feel’ for the writing style. Regrettably this ‘look inside’ omits the Foreword which I think is especially useful for potential readers to appreciate the work they are about to acquire. Accordingly, I reproduce that Foreword here below.

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Foreword

The novel Nadine’s Story was written over thirty years ago and is set in the time period of fifty years ago. In the meantime, almost all of our assumptions about life, about the “free world” and about the USSR have changed dramatically. This necessarily poses several questions which require an answer before the reader undertakes a journey into that world by opening the pages of this novel.

In the Soviet era, it was commonplace for authors to hold their manuscripts in a desk drawer for years before their eventual publication. The reason can be summed up in one word: censorship. Many widely recognized novels and works of documentary literature from the whole opus of 20^th century publications had that fate. Individual works saw print during periods of “thaw,” as for example under the stewardship of Nikita Khrushchev. Many more saw the light of day when the Soviet system of thought control began to crumble under Mikhail Gorbachev and his policy of “Glasnost” in the 1980s. With the new freedoms which Russians enjoyed when the country closed the door on Communism in the 1990s, still more manuscripts were withdrawn from drawers and found publishers. One such work, Other People’s Letters by the author Alexander Morozov even won the Russian Booker Prize in 1998, though it stirred up much debate over the practice of publishing works decades after they were written.

In the case of Nadine’s Story, its long resting period till now was due to another kind of ‘censorship’ as practiced in the West: the stranglehold on publishing enjoyed till recently by the established network of publishing houses with their own agendas or ‘programs’ as they call it, interlinked with an established network of literary agents. The match between art and commerce was always fragile. The system had and has limited ability to promote more than a tiny fraction of works of merit outside their own stable of authors.

When Nadine fell victim to the exclusionary policies of publishers in the 1990s, the author moved on to other literary challenges, eventually finding a publisher in 2010 for her second novel, Live as Before (in Russian Живи как прежде) within the St Petersburg literary journal Zvezda, which had long published her articles on cultural affairs in Western Europe. In 2019, another well-established publisher in the same city, Liki Rossii, produced the Russian-language edition of the author’s next novel, Мозаика моей жизни. Meanwhile, for the English language edition, The Mosaic of My Life, the author turned to the American specialist company in self-publishing and print-on-demand, Author House.

This last favorable experience, which was reconfirmed with the publication soon afterwards of Zalesova’s first venture into travel literature, Dacha Tales: Life in the Russian Hinterland, persuaded her to dust off and publish Nadine.

As they say, what goes around, comes around. There is a new timeliness to this thirty-year-old manuscript which comes from immigration having become headline news in Western Europe and the USA these past few years. Indeed, the author’s last published novel, The Mosaic of My Life (2020), though covering the broad sweep of Russian history from before the Revolution to the 1970s, in passing had as an issue the question that tormented so many Russians over three generations: whether to remain in their homeland or to leave for better shores at the earliest opportunity come what may. In Nadine, this question is foremost in the mind of the heroine from start to finish.

In the course of the 20^th century, Russia lost millions of its citizens not only to political repression and the cruelty of wartime. It also saw repeated exoduses, both officially sanctioned and by stealth. In the relative stable times under Leonid Brezhnev and his immediate successors, there were several high-profile defections that caught the imagination of the Western world, all the more so as those who fled were among the world’s most gifted artists who changed the perception of ballet the world over for several decades: Rudolf Nureyev, Alexander Baryshnikov, Natalya Makarova.

Their daring escapes were explained by one motive only: “I chose freedom.” What was largely overlooked was that these stars also chose full-blooded careers and artistic development that was denied to them not just because of the constraints of a command economy and authoritarian regime but by the excess of talent around them. Russia simply had too many of the world’s best talent on hand for the good of its star performers and their time on stage was much less ample than their ambition rightly demanded. With their departure, Russian performing arts obviously lost some of its best calling cards abroad, but did not implode.

In a broader sense, the emigration of countless talented people from Russia to Silicon Valley and to other employment niches in the West did not strip the country of its brains. The phoenix-like recovery of Russian industry, agriculture and culture in the new millennium attests to the sufficient supply in Russia of world quality masters in a great variety of domains.

The novel Nadine explores the question of staying or leaving from a variety of angles, mostly personal and imbedded in the family life of the heroine. I am confident this story will find its place in the ongoing exploration of emigration worldwide.

Russia-Ukraine War Update: Russia dismisses evidence calls over alleged drone attack| NewsX World

The Ukrainian drone attack on President Putin’s countryside residence near the town of Valdai, midway between Moscow and Petersburg, has been sharply criticized by India, Pakistan and several other Global South countries notwithstanding Zelensky’s claim that no attack took place.

In the USA, there is active discussion of the incident, with many media outlets casting doubt on the Moscow allegations, in line with Zelensky.

Given the long trail of false flag incidents staged by Kiev with the help of the British going back to the first months of the war (the slaughter of civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha by retreating Russian soldiers) and the repeated absurd suggestion by Kiev that Russians were attacking nuclear power plants that they themselves were operating or that they smashed dams to drown their own population and deprive them of hydropower electricity, it would be very strange to take seriously the vile propaganda now coming out of Kiev that is being disseminated in the West by the usual suspects.

This was the central issue of this morning’s interview on NewsX World beginning in minute 4.

The relevance of the ‘Two Minutes to Midnight’ Doomsday Clock to the “Ninety five percent agreed” settlement of the Russia-Ukraine War

The media are seeking expert commentary on the statements by Trump and Zelensky in Mar-a-Lago that the terms for a peace treaty are 95% complete.

They are overlooking the folk wisdom of ‘missed by an inch, missed by a mile’, meaning that being close to agreement is never good enough. Either you have a deal or you don’t. I believe that there is no deal and cannot be a deal when neither Putin nor Zelensky has reason to give ground and seek compromises on the fundamental issues of territory, neutrality status and similar.

The Doomsday Clock of nuclear physicists has been stuck at ‘two minutes to midnight’ since 1953. The deal on Ukraine may well be stuck at 95% for just as long.

Trump Calls Putin Ahead of Key Meeting: Realistic or Pro-Russia? | WION

In this “Counterpoint” program from India’s largest global English language broadcaster in which I participated this morning, I was pleased to find precisely the debating partner who is so elusive in the podcast world: worldly wise, civilized and holding views on the subject at hand that may be 180 degrees at variance with my own.

The fellow panelist was Joachim Bitterlich. He is described by the WION presenter as a former German ambassador to NATO, but I think it is more relevant to the discussion that he served as European, Diplomatic and Security Advisor to Helmut Kohl in the critically important period of 1988 and later. See his more detailed profile at https://www.bruegel.org/people/joachim-bitterlich

Too bad that the conversation was just getting underway when it ended. It cried for a continuation in some quiet club room, ensconced in leather armchairs and with a whiskey in hand. There would be no name-calling, no questions like the infamous one I took from Former Chair of the EU Parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee Elmar Brok (German – CDU): “How much did Putin pay you to say that?”