I strongly urge the community of subscribers to this web platform to read attentively this transcript because in the ample time that was given to me by host Nima Alkhorshid I had the opportunity to go well beyond anything I have said in my recent essays about the skeletons that the Russians have taken from their closets to show the massive participation of ordinary Europeans from France, from Belgium, from elsewhere in the armies that Hitler directed against the USSR, as well as the key role that Finns played in enforcing the murderous, genocidal Blockade of Leningrad. My remarks here regarding Yalta and its relevance to the forthcoming Summit between Trump and Putin also are more explicit than my last essay and amount to essential reading.
To ease the task, I have cleaned up the transcript in a modest but I think effective way to improve the grammar while removing dilatory or repetitive words.
Transcript submitted by a reader
Nima R. Alkhorshid: 0:05
Hi everybody, it is Thursday, January 30th, 2025, and our friend Gilbert Doctorow is back with us. Welcome back, Gilbert.
Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, thanks. Good to see you.
Alkhorshid:
Let’s get started with your piece on your blog, on your website, in which you’re talking about the collective memory in Russia and the collective amnesia in the West. What are the main points of this new piece on your part?
Doctorow:
Well, let me explain. My role, as many of your viewers will know, is to communicate what Russians are saying. Some of these points I agree with, some of them I don’t, but it is essential that they get adequate and representative coverage for discussion in our own debates, on our side. And what I’m saying here in that essay is what I have heard from very authoritative, serious Russians looking at the proceedings that took place last Friday in Oświęcim or Auschwitz in Poland, to commemorate the liberation of those remaining inmates, prisoners, in the death camp when the Red Army came through and freed them. This is 80 years ago.
1:32
Of course, the exceptional nature of this event, which is in contrast to all preceding round-number remembrances of the anniversary — five years ago, for example, the Russians were invited, which is logical. To be exact, the Red Army, not the Russian Federation, liberated Auschwitz and the other camps, but they liberated all of the death camps of the Nazis, most of which were in Poland, in fact.
2:13
But the day’s commemoration was precisely for Auschwitz, which coincides with Holocaust Day, an internationally recognized day of remembrance for the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi crimes.
And of course, there were many others. Reportedly, 1.5 million were killed in Auschwitz, people that is, of whom 1 million were Jews. That means 500,000 were not Jews. There were others, they were gypsies, they were political opponents of the regime, of the Nazi regime, they were other minorities that were considered to be Untermenschen by the Nazis. Well, one million Jews.
3:02
In the big order of things, this is how we all think, the general public, the mainstream media in the West, and everywhere, who spoke about Holocaust Day and Auschwitz. They remembered in terms of this scientifically engineer-designed rooms for gassing and for very efficient, effective destruction of people and whatever remained of them.
The reality of course is a subject of discussion, I wouldn’t say dispute, but at least of active discussion among academics in what was launched several years ago by a certain Timothy Snyder, who is a Yale history professor, who did a lot of research in Poland and in Ukraine for his masterwork. It’s called “The Bloodlands”, which gives an additional understanding of what happened. Maybe a few million died in these, all of the concentration death camps put together.
4:15
But six million is the overall number, and the vast majority of those people were killed in the killing fields across East Central Europe and Western Soviet Union or Russia today, Belarus today. And that is not a minor detail, which if you allow me to explain how this fits into our understanding of the Holocaust day and of what it was commemorating. The point is that you could have a few criminals, relatively few criminals, who would run these death camps that were engineered, as I say, by good German engineers using state-of-the-art technology to destroy people. And they could be run by relatively few people. And these relatively few people were criminals of one sort or another who were placed into these positions.
5:16
That gives you an interpretation of the Holocaust and of Germany’s role in it, which is wrong. The fact is that a vast number of Germans were involved in the destruction of Jewry in Europe, by the Wehrmacht, in the regular German army, not in SS units as such, yes, they played a big role, but [it] was ordinary Germans who were the murderers in the fields of Eastern Europe and Western Soviet Union. And Timothy Snyder’s research changed completely our understanding of the Holocaust to those of us who care to know facts and not just to repeat glib generalizations.
6:06
In any case, the commemoration on the 27th of January of the liberation by the Red Army of these remaining prisoners in Auschwitz was marred by the treatment of Russia, which was excluded from invitations. Because as everyone knows– and I’m being ironic here, because some people have missed my irony in that essay that you’re referring to– we all know that Russia is the aggressor and is violating all laws of human rights and civilized conduct.
6:52
Well, in any case, for reasons that were particular to the EU and to Poland as the most outstanding, egregious promoter of Russia hatred in Europe, Russia was excluded from the invitation list, whereas they had regularly been present. In fact, Putin himself was present at one of the commemorations, early in his presidency after the turn of the millennium. They were excluded. And so the Russians on television had good reason to analyze and discuss what’s going on, why they were excluded, and the leader of a country that is ruled by neo-Nazis from their perspective, I’m speaking about Zelensky and his regime in Kiev, he was invited. He was not just invited, but he was celebrated.
7:50
The article in British newspapers– “The Guardian” is the one who had the longest and most detailed article on the events in Auschwitz– their biggest photo, and a color photo, was of a very contrite and concerned Mr. Zelensky placing one of these candles, a Jahrzeit candle to be precise. This is wax in a glass so that it burns for 24 hours. He was placing one of these memorial candles, among others placed by other dignitaries. And he was captured in a photograph in the British newspaper.
What was he doing there? There’s still more. What was Scholz, the Chancellor of Germany doing there, when the people who liberated Auschwitz are absent and the people who perpetrated Auschwitz are present. This is a very interesting presentation. And the Russians find it interesting in the sense that it colors their appreciation of the world order today, that the world order in the West is standing on its head. That values have been turned upside down. That the ravings of the Russophobes in the Baltic States and Poland in particular have become the narrative of the European Union and also the United States.
9:34
What ravings am I talking about? This goes back to the question of who was really responsible for World War II. And the revisionist position that countries like Poland and the Baltic states have been promoting is that Stalin’s Russia was at least as guilty of the crimes against humanity that were perpetrated before, during, and after World War II, as guilty as Nazi Germany was.
So the guilt that they want to lay at the door of Russia is part of the overall project which America initiated, and Europe has very happily continued, to portray Russia as a pariah state, as a state that cannot be invited to civilized events like the memorial services in Auschwitz.
10:37
That was one event last Friday, which caught the attention of the thinking, the talking classes in Moscow and Russia. The other event was their own event. This is the commemoration of the 81st anniversary of the liberation of, the breaking the blockade on Leningrad, which cost the lives of one million or more, nearly all civilians, and was in terms of the present-day definition of the word “genocide” was a genocide. It was the intentional starving to death of the civilian population of the city and the plans to raze the city to the ground if the German armies were successful in their venture. Again, I use the word German army.
11:39
The murder of a million or more Russian civilians in Leningrad was the work of the German army, which means the nation in arms. This means that there were hundreds of thousands of ordinary German citizens who were participating in these atrocities. And it has to influence our understanding of a question that is very timely today, thanks to our loud mouth, close advisor to Mr. Trump, Elon Musk, who spoke in this very same time period about Germany moving on and moving past its war guilt from the Nazi era.
This is a question which was also raised on television by the same program that I’m referring to, this happened to have been the “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov”, one of the two or three most important talk shows or news and analysis shows on Russian state television. So these issues are topical in East and West.
12:48
On the Russian side, they were highly critical of the forgiving or forgetting. They prefer to call it forgetting, in the sense of amnesia: “we, the generation today, cannot be answerable for the crimes of our ancestors.” This is a certain issue which I have discussed with readers of my essays, who have questioned this and have every right to question it. Who wants to be held responsible for the sins of grandfathers, or still earlier?
13:37
But the issue cannot be resolved with that little magic wand, “we aren’t responsible”. Let me just remind everyone that for Americans in particular, this is highly topical, because it’s all about woke, which has been a kind of ideological mantra of the Democrats in their vote-gathering efforts among the black and other minority populations in the States — woke that we are responsible and answerable for crimes committed by two or three generations before us.
So this issue on Russian television also should resonate with audiences in places like England, which has its own woke and the United States, where it went very far and found expression in legislative acts and programs that Biden instituted and which Trump is now busy dismantling for inclusiveness, preference to minorities of every imaginable variety, and so forth, at the expense of the majority of the population.
14:52
So the Russian commemoration of the 81st anniversary of the liberation of the city of Leningrad, today’s Petersburg, from a stranglehold siege that was mainly carried out by the Germans, but also carried out by the Finns. And I bring this up to those who have not paid attention to it.
The Russians in the present state of open confrontation with virtually the entire West, have finally put up on the screen and shown to their population facts, documentary films that never ever left the archives in the proceeding 70 years, 80 years, 100 years, because they worked against the overriding principles of brotherliness, of forgive and forget, which was the Soviet position on these matters, and which the Soviet Union could afford because it politically controlled those countries which otherwise would be deeply offended by the truth coming out.
16:15
The truth about the Finns’ participation in the strangling of Petersburg or Leningrad was never ever shown to the Russian people. It was a deep secret, because the Finns were quiet. The Finns were friends. The Finns had learned their lessons and were no longer a threat to the Russians.
Well that’s all been turned on its head. The Finns are now trying as best they can to be the biggest threat and security risk to Russia that they can be. And the Russians have now let loose the facts that were in their archives. I can say at the same time, this goes back six months or a year, that the documentary films in the Soviet archives about the participation of all of Europe on the Hitler side in the armies attacking the Soviet Union, those documentary films have been put on television and we find for example that the Russian figures show that there were more French participating in Hitler’s armies attacking Russia than there were French resistance fighters fighting Hitler. They have put on television, films showing that there were vast numbers of Belgians, and particularly Flemish, who were gladly taking part in Hitler’s armies in his attack on the Soviet Union.
17:53
So these difficult facts from the past, which were kept in the archives, not to upset relations with now-friendly countries, have– in the course of the special military operation and in the course of the evolving open hatred for Russia that the European countries have allowed themselves to engage in– well, the Russians have started opening the door, opening the boxes and showing who was who when, and who has a right to speak, and who should just shut up.
And I close this remark by pointing to the hideous statement by the acting, and I say acting because he lost his ruling position last June when his parties were voted out. The acting Prime Minister of Belgium, Mr. De Croo– at the gathering, this is about 10 days ago, of the Europeans, for European members present in the Davos Economic Forum– De Croo from the dais said, “Mr. Putin is our enemy.” May he hang his head in shame for making that outrageous remark. But unfortunately, he was only joining the general mood of 25 of the 27 European member states.
Alkhorshid: 19:29
And if they believe that Russia is their enemy, then are they going to continue the fight? Are they going to change their strategy? Because this sort of strategy on their part is harming Europe more than Russia.
Doctorow:
Nima, in several months, I will publish volume one of a two-volume collection of my essays since the spring of 2021 under the title “War Diaries”. And the overriding picture, which I will describe on the back cover of volume one is that I am writing history looking forward, when we’re all in a state of confusion, whereas academic [historians] of the war are writing them looking backwards, when everything that happened is known.
20:19
No, we don’t know today how Europe will break up, but break up it will. It’s in the process of breaking up. We have all been caught out in making predictions about how close the end of the Ukraine war was. I am looking at things that I wrote in the spring of 2121, and I say, “My goodness, how wrong you were.” But so was everybody else, on the Russian side, that is.
20:50
On the United States side, everybody predicted a war would come, and they should have known, because they were doing everything possible to precipitate one. On the Russian side, they were doing everything possible to avoid it, And the general talk was about no war. In any case, answering your question, how will Europe proceed? Nobody knows. I’m in an active discussion with my close colleague and the translator of my works, my essays in Germany, about what’s going to happen on February 23rd.
21:25
The overall consensus in mainstream is that Mr. Merz, the leader of the Christian Democrats who had at last polling 32% popular vote, that he will be victorious, he will put together a governing coalition from the center, of the centrist parties, and that things will get even worse, because Merz’s position on Russia is even less realistic and, shall we say, insane, very much in line with the absurd statements that come out of people like Lindsey Graham, whereas Scholz will look like a peacenik if Mr. Merz takes over.
22:09
But we don’t know. Thanks to the help from Elon Musk, the leader of the Alternative for Germany, Frau Weidel, her ratings rose from 19 to 31%. At the same time– that’s on the right. On the right, which is for peace and for normal relations with Russia, among many other things, but our interest on this show is what do they think and what are they saying on international affairs. The other side on the left, formerly from Die Linke and having formed her own party, is Sahra Wagenknecht. And she had at last polling 11%. If you add 31% and 11%, my goodness, that’s a bigger block than Mr. Merz can easily put together. So how Germany will move is an open question.
23:14
Which part of Germany, which part of Europe is going to collapse first is unpredictable. We all can make a guess, but let’s acknowledge that we’re all making educated guesses, not based on concrete facts that we can rely on.
Alkhorshid: 23:37
And, Gilbert, do you see that the way that Donald Trump is dealing with Russia is helping to build trust between the two nations, between the two governments in order to go after some sort of solution in Ukraine?
Doctorow:
Well, it’s good you raise that question, Nima, because it is very topical, and it is widely discussed, and I’d say disputed, among well-informed experts, both in mainstream and in alternative media. There are those who say that “watch what Mr. Trump does, not what he says”. There are those who say that Trump is just creating this fog, repeating the absurdities that Blinken and Sullivan were disseminating for three years, because he wants to keep his enemies off guard, not to allow, give them material that they could use to attack him and to throw off course his domestic program in Congress, which is his first and most important consideration.
24:47
This is all possible. I don’t deny that this is an explanation, although I would say it’s a terrible way to run a railway. My point is that I don’t see a need for that. He is also conducting another very important policy initiative. And of this, there can be no doubt that this is going on, that he has a secret diplomacy with Iran, with Tehran going on, to resolve the fundamental issues of the Iranian nuclear program and other issues between the States and Iran that have been the justification for very cruel sanctions on the Iranian economy that had cost them very dear and which they would like to overturn.
And there is every reason to expect that a deal will be done with Iran, despite the fact that a war with Iran has been the greatest ambition of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is now on his way to Washington to confer with his great friend Donald Trump. So do we hear anything about the secret diplomacy? Is Mr. Trump walking around and talking about how many nuclear bombs Iran is about to deploy. No, he has had the good sense to keep his mouth shut about Iran.
26:27
And I ask, why doesn’t he keep his mouth shut about Russia and Ukraine? I don’t see the purpose of his making inane statements which only undermine his credibility among Russians and undermine the chances for a successful meeting and negotiations to end the war and to resolve other issues of a much greater scope for the security of the world that are within reach of the United States, Russia and China, if they can be persuaded to do something constructive as opposed to destructive.
Alkhorshid: 27:07
It seems that the way that Netanyahu and the administration in Israel are seeing the situation between Iran and Russia and the way that Russia is helping in negotiations and they have been helping the negotiations, JCPOA, they were part of that, of those negotiations. It seems that doesn’t feel good for Israelis. That’s why they’re not happy with Russians. They don’t want Russians to be part of that. They don’t want Russians to facilitate the process of negotiations. Do you see that’s the main reason, the way that they’re behaving toward Russia?
Doctorow:
Well, the Russian relations with Israel are very complicated. They’re also very secretive, and none of us knows the full picture, to give an evaluation of them. There are many factors, including the ones that you just mentioned. But there was the unanswered question, why the Russians did not provide air cover to Syria. Why they didn’t provide advanced air defense systems to Syria. Why they allowed Israel over years to freely bomb various towns and arms caches in Syria.
28:29
So that just as an example of the peculiarities, why was Russia going easy on Israel when it could have, and perhaps many will say should have, been on the other side, on the side of Iran and Syria and Iraq in combating forces that were supported by the United States to the detriment of Russia in the Middle East?
These are questions that we cannot answer. There are many other questions about Mr. Putin’s time in office. He has many detractors, particularly, I won’t name them, you know them, you’ve interviewed one of them recently, who are saying that he’s weak and pusillanimous and he’s not really defending Russia’s interests. I can’t answer that question. Nobody can. But I do admit freely that there are questions why he tolerated, for example, the reign of corruption and bleeding of Russian interests, and I would say sabotage that people like Chubais did for 20 years. And this was open knowledge in Russia that the man was a threat to Mr. Putin and to his government.
29:57
And nothing happened to him. He was allowed to sneak away and to rejoin some of the billions of dollars and euros that he had stolen from the Russian treasury in various scams relating to the very high offices that he occupied over the course of decades as the head of Rosnano, which was a completely fake organization, which was as you remember, the nano business was in its own time, which is going back a little more than a decade, as widely promoted as the artificial intelligence nonsense, sorry, is today. That was where you placed all your bets. Well, Mr. Chubais was sitting on all those bets and taking out his commission.
30:49
Everyone knew that and nothing happened to him. So there are a lot of questions about Mr. Putin’s time in power, which will only be answered in due time, certainly after I’m gone and possibly after a lot of other people who are watching it are gone.
Alkhorshid: 31:07
You mentioned the way that Donald Trump is treating Russia today and the perception on the part of Russians. But do they really feel that even Keith Kellogg and the way that he’s talking is just not the main objective of Donald Trump? Because that could be so much unconnected to the reality.
Doctorow:
Well, Russians are not paying so much attention to each of these personalities. They’re not even paying that much attention to the personality of Donald Trump. The underlying principle, point of analysis, is that the United States foreign policy and much else is directed by the deep state and it’s almost a matter of indifference who sits in the Oval Office. Or least of all, is it a matter of indifference who is advising or pretending to advise the man who sits in the Oval office.
32:01
I’m not sure I agree with that. I do think that the American president has a good deal of latitude to influence and shape events. And whether he succeeds depends on his ability to manage in general, whether or not he can get people who are nominally subordinate to him to actually do what he tells them to do. So that remains to be seen. There are people who say that during his first administration, Trump performed very badly in that respect, and that his efforts, his instructions, his direct executive orders were being subverted by his deputies. We’ll see how he does this time.
The Russians, as I say, they’re looking at the big picture in which they see the deep state and much less interested in the personality quirks. In America in particular, a great deal is made about the personality of people in power and people who are not in power. Personalities tend to take precedence over issues, over political issues and political causes and interest groups. The Russians are more likely to focus on the interest groups behind events than they are on the personality flukes of one person or another.
Alkhorshid: 33:19
The other move on the part of Donald Trump, which was so interesting to watch, is that he said that he’s going to put pressure on Saudi Arabia to reduce the price of oil, which was, it seemed, that rejected by Saudis so far.
But on the other hand, it seems that he’s trying to get closer to Chinese, to Xi, and in order to, the same sort of policy that the Biden administration tried to manage, but they were not successful in those attempts. Do you think that Donald Trump would do better than Joe Biden? He thinks that he can put pressure on Russia this way?
Doctorow:
Well, I think it’s too early to reach conclusions as to whether what Donald Trump is saying and even some of the things he’s doing are indicative of his overarching plans for the future. He has his own notion of how deal-making goes on.
Part of it is bluff and bullying and saying things and doing things which are not his intentions and which are to keep his talking partners and the rest of us off guard and clueless. What he really has in mind, we don’t know. We’ll find out in the fairly near term. But I would like to touch upon one other aspect of this. To what extent the utterly ignorant and incorrect statements that Trump has been making about Russia and about the state of its economy, about the state of its military, about the number of casualties it has suffered.
35:13
I have heard some of my peers attribute this to disinformation coming from the highly corrupt CIA and other intelligence agencies. That is possible, but I would like to ask a simple question that nobody seems to be asking or even considering. Doesn’t this guy ever open a newspaper? If you just, all right, I admit, I don’t expect that Donald Trump is reading “Financial Times”. Okay.
Maybe that’s too high-brow for him. But I was considering how this “New York Times” has descended over 20 or 30 years into a newspaper featuring more cuisine and gastronomy articles than news, than world news. He might just dip into the “New York Times”. And every day now, the truth about the state of combat on the ground between Russia and Ukraine is being fairly, accurately reported. It is clear that there’s been a decision in the editorial offices, “Enough is enough. We know we’re going to lose the war, so let’s prepare the public for it.”
36:35
And they are reporting fairly accurately what’s going on. So Donald, open “The New York Times” and throw away the scrap of paper you’re getting from the CIA.
Alkhorshid: 36:48
Maybe that’s why Vladimir Putin recently sent a video message to the people in the West — the main reason was on Trump. The other thing, Gilbert, with the 80th anniversary of the Yalta conference, that you believe that it’s more relevant to today’s geopolitics than ever before. What’s the main point of that?
Doctorow:
Yes, on the 4th of February, that’s to say next Tuesday, the Russians will be celebrating, they’re not commemorating but celebrating, the Yalta Conference, which opened in the Crimea, by the way. And the Crimea, when it opened, was part of the Russian Federation, by the way. The Yalta Conference was a meeting of the big three, there was Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, in February of 1945, when the end of the war, the victory in Europe was already very clear to everyone, everyone except Adolf Hitler. The outcome on the battlefields was clear. The Russians were 65 kilometers from Berlin. And they met, three met to discuss and to reach agreement on the post-war map of Europe. Territorial map, political map.
38:24
These were all realist thinkers. There was also this humanitarian overlay, the values-based overlay of a United Nations, which already had been agreed and certain points in how it would operate were hammered out in the Yalta conference. So that aspect of the post-World War I order was also furthered and defined at Yalta. But the main thing was in the realm of realpolitik, of national interests and recognition of the principle of spheres of influence.
How Russian or Soviet, properly speaking Soviet, control over Eastern Europe would evolve was not entirely clear. It may not have been entirely clear even to Stalin. The principle though was that Russia needed a buffer. It would not allow the neighboring states to be such easy ramps for a West European invasion of its country. And the principle was defensive, for Russia’s interests not to undergo this terrible catastrophe that they were just barely surviving in February of 1945.
39:52
And so the principle was spheres of influence. The principle was that the major military forces in the world would gather and resolve issues about how the post-war world would be operated. That was three countries, actually it was two countries, the United States and Russia, and Britain was there for the ride, because Britain’s glory days were already long past. But nonetheless, France was, could just as easily have been inserted, but it wasn’t. France was barely mentioned when it came to the partition of Germany and what little slice it would get as one of the victors.
40:48
Now why is it interesting to bring up Yalta now? Other than the fact that the 80th anniversary is rolling around, and people should say something about it. I believe that the Yalta Conference was closely re-examined by Vladimir Putin in the days before he issued the ultimatum to the United States and a separate ultimatum to NATO to revise the security architecture in Europe, essentially to roll back the NATO military installations and deployment, temporary or otherwise, of NATO personnel in the area that was formerly the Warsaw Pact countries, and also that was included, countries that had been part of the Soviet Union, that is the Baltic States, to roll this back.
42:03
So he was looking in December of 2021 for an overall agreement with Washington about the rollback of the NATO expansion that had been a violation of agreements that were reached, oral agreements to be sure, that were reached between Russia, well, the Soviet Union, under Gorbachev, and United States, and Germany and other interested parties in Europe before Russia agreed to withdraw its forces from the Warsaw Pact countries. And this whole experience of Yalta was seen by Putin as highly relevant, what he wanted next.
43:05
The means of reaching agreement diplomatically failed. They failed as we saw by the middle of January [2022], after there were several meetings, separate meetings by the way, between Russian representatives and representatives of the NATO powers, the OSCE. These were involved in meetings in Europe, and they all led to nothing. Jens Stoltenberg had been the first and the quickest to say that these were non-starters, that they would not negotiate. Washington was slower and never said no, but it never said yes either.
And it went beyond the time limit that the Russians set for getting a definitive answer to their request for review of the security architecture. And the next step was that Russia moved on to “military technical means”. That was how they called it. We all were confused and I have to admit with or without my knowledge of Russian, I was also confused. I’d say it was more appropriately what they meant is what the Americans call kinetic warfare.
44:23
It was very simple, in which you use a lot of military hardware. Yes, that’s the technical part. So the start of the special military operation was the consequence of the failure of the American interlocutors and of the EU member states to deal seriously with Mr. Putin’s demand for revision of the architecture, which would ensure that Russia has some genuine security and is not facing American missiles at its borders and facing a five- or seven-minute time before it is annihilated at any time of choosing of Washington.
45:06
So these were the issues. And I believe that they are still uppermost in the mind of Mr. Putin as he is considering what he’ll be talking to Donald Trump about. The Russians have already made it perfectly clear that they consider the war is over, just as all the parties to Yalta considered the war was over. It wasn’t over. We all know it wasn’t over until May 9th, but in February they considered the war was over, and they were deciding what comes next.
So it is today with the situation on the ground in Ukraine. From the Russian standpoint, the war is over. Yes, of course, there are still fighting soldiers on the front lines. There are still what is estimated now to be 30,000 of Ukraine’s best elite forces still deployed in the Kursk province of Russian Federation. But the denouement, the end game is perfectly visible.
46:12
All of these Ukrainian forces will be destroyed, destroyed or surrender. And if it happens in two weeks, if it happens in two months or longer, is a matter of indifference to Moscow. It will happen. And increasingly, our major media are saying the same thing. And so it is timely to reflect on what happened in Yalta and what does it mean for the prospects of Mr. Trump when he finally meets with Mr. Putin.
Just remember, as I said, Yalta was a very complex agreement. Yes, it was about the settlement in Central Europe, the areas that were under Russian occupation because they had beaten back the Wehrmacht in all of Eastern Europe. But it was also about Eurasia. This is, we’re forgetting, this is a term that came up months and months ago, that what is needed is a settlement not just for the peninsula at the western end of Eurasia that’s called Europe, but also for the eastern parts of Eurasia, for the Pacific basin countries of Eurasia.
47:37
And let’s remember that that was also dealt with at Yalta. Nobody talks about it very much. Certainly, we tend to forget that at Yalta, the United States and Russia agreed on Russia’s entering the war against Japan, which was scheduled to take place several months after the end of the war in Europe. And the Russians were going to deploy very important forces, and they were going to make available to the United States air bases. First, it was talked about Vladovostok and then I think you went further up to the interior of Russia along the Amur River, they would allow Americans, Air Force bombers to be based there for their bombing raids over Japan.
48:28
The cost of that, which was also set down in writing, and not just in oral agreements, was that the Russians would receive certain territorial compensation. They would receive once again territory that had been taken from them after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, which they lost. And that meant Kamchatka, that meant southern Sakhalin, that meant the Kurile Islands, which are a very topical subject today, since the Japanese refuse to acknowledge the settlement terms of Yalta as it pertains in their territories. In any case, there was this aspect of Yalta which concerned the eastern part of Eurasia. And so it also is topical.
49:15
The logic of this, of course, is that any meeting that Trump has with Putin has the opportunity to go beyond the wreckage of Ukraine, which can only look like a debacle for the United States if it is the whole and total sum of their points for discussion, to an area of win-win, which is defining in terms that a person like Trump understands perfectly, territorial division of the world, since he’s working hard on that in the Western hemisphere with his pretensions vis-a-vis Greenland, Panama, and so forth. So this is the kind of talk that could really appeal to a man like Donald Trump.
50:04
And there are many, of course, listeners who will find this terribly offensive. But for the peace of the world, that is a much better approach to dealing with the other global players than anything that the Democrats under Biden were trying to do.
Alkhorshid::
Thank you so much, Gilbert, for being with us today. Great pleasure as always.
Doctorow:
Well, thanks for the opportunity to discuss these things.
Alkhorshid: 50:38
Take care.
Gilbert Doctorow 