When I received an invitation from Elliot Resnick, former editor-in-chief of the Brooklyn, New York-based Jewish Press to record a podcast devoted to the Ukraine-Russia war, I was delighted to have an opportunity to address an audience that, until his untimely death eighteen months ago, my comrade-in-arms and fellow expert on Russia professor Stephen Cohen had been talking to in his weekly radio broadcasts. Of course, Cohen’s radio programs were listened to by a far wider audience than the core Orthodox community reached by The Jewish Press: they numbered in the millions.  But getting a foothold in New York was desirable for me since most alternative media outlets in the U.S. reposting my essays seem to be on the West Coast.

Here is the link to the newly released podcast by Resnick:

Live interviews like this are always a challenge. Inevitably you do not get across every argument you prepared in advance.  In my mental review of our chat, I have one regret. Though I had requested to be asked about how the Kiev regime can be fascist when its president, Zelensky, is a Jew, I did not give the most relevant answer to that question when we spoke: namely the celebration of the SS-collaborator Bandera by the ultra-nationalists running the show through Zelensky as their front man.

Bandera’s name is being given to streets throughout Ukraine and statues are raised to him.  Tattoos bearing Bandera’s image were found to be worn by the Azovstal defenders when they surrendered to Russian forces.

The whole issue of Bandera and the present day heirs to Ukraine’s collaborationists during WWII was highlighted last week by the scandal over remarks to a German journalist made by the Ukrainian ambassador to Berlin, Andriy Melnyk:  he denied that Bandera was anti-Semitic or was in any way responsible for the slaughter of Jews in Ukraine by his followers. Those remarks elicited a storm of criticism from the Israeli government who called it willful disinformation about the Holocaust. Official Poland also entered the fray and with good reason: Poles were slaughtered by Bandera’s warriors as well. From within Scholz’s government, Germans were incensed. Yesterday Melnyk was removed as ambassador and returned to Kiev, where he likely will be promoted to the position of deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. This whole ugly affair is a good demonstration of the fascist nature of a government nominally headed by Zelensky.

©Gilbert Doctorow

To my good fortune, here in Belgium internet reception of www.smotrim.ru  now works perfectly with respect to live broadcasts. I am thus able to share with readers impressions from the programs I follow most closely: Sixty Minutes, Evening with Vladimir Solovyov and News of the Week hosted by Dmitri Kiselyov.

The past week provided Russian state television with a cornucopia of important events foreign and domestic.  These included, in the West, the gathering of the G7 leaders in Schloss Elmau, Bavaria and the NATO Summit in Madrid. At both events, Russia, its president Vladimir Putin, and the ongoing war in Ukraine were central to the talks and therefore of special interest to RF audiences. 

Russian television coverage was partly provided by Vesti correspondents permanently based in the EU,  like Anastasya Popova, partly by reporting from major Western television channels and print media. It bears mention that some of the segments from foreign television were quite extensive, giving a full airing to the anti-Russian rants. The Russian programmers obviously had no doubt that the absurdities and plain ignorance exposed in the speeches and comments to journalists of one after another EU or NATO worthy ensured that no one in their own audience would be misled and that a great many would be amused.

The overriding nature of the Russian television presentations was mockery of the European leaders for their servility to Uncle Sam and persistence in ratcheting up sanctions against Russia that are destructive of their own economies as proven by separate footage on consumer reactions to the rampant inflation and threatening shortages of gas and heating oil in coming weeks.  

On the subject of servility, no video was more damaging to its central personality than that of Emmanuel Macron interrupting  Biden’s conversation with Jake Sullivan during a walk from one venue to another in Madrid to tell the Boss confidentially that France was doing its utmost to cut import of Russian hydrocarbons but could not see any solutions since his own telephone conversation with a counterpart in the Gulf made it clear no significant increase in oil production there could be expected. Macron had not counted on a French journalist intercepting and later publishing this revelation.  The clip was shown repeatedly on Russian television over the weekend.

At both the G7 and at the NATO Summit, Boris Johnson stood out as the most determined advocate for further military and financial assistance to Ukraine and as the most determined opponent of any peace negotiations. This made him especially vulnerable to malicious Russian commentary, which he invited by his comportment in all venues as the lead jokester or clown among the European leaders.

Johnson made the absurd proposal at a NATO Summit lunch that they all throw off their shirts to show Putin that they also had great pectorals.  This indirect tribute to Putin for his widely disseminated macho photos taken on vacation in the past was picked up with alacrity by Russian television, which also quoted Vladimir Vladimirovich asking whether the NATO leaders proposed to strip only above the waist or further down and noting that in any event it would be a hideous sight. 

Dmitry Kiselyov on Sunday night took this attack on the British Prime Minister one step further, putting up photos of Boris in his sweat shirt, with his heavy chest in need of a bra, per Kiselyov.  This aspersion regarding Johnson’s sexual identity was a biting response to Johnson’s offhand remarks to journalists that the war with Ukraine would never have been unleashed had Putin been a woman. Russian audiences were treated as well to other photos of Boris in his jogging shorts, looking very much like the neighborhood fat boy, with his weighty thighs bare for all to see.

As for Joe Biden, Russian state television picked up and re-broadcast all of his flubbed lines and signs of physical deterioration (the fall from his bicycle) that came their way from U.S. television channels. This perfectly served their editorial line about the degradation of Western political elites.

Closer to home, Russian media could feast on the countdown to the capture of the last major city in Lugansk still held by the Ukrainian forces, Lisichansk. On Sunday, Russian Minister of Defense Shoigu duly reported to President Putin on the fall of Lisichansk and the surrounding territory of more than 150 square kilometers to Russian troops. Even major Western media acknowledged that this was a key event which indicated clearly how Russia was winning the war on the ground thanks to superior firepower.  Everyone understood that the ‘special military operation’ will now direct its full forces against the Ukrainian military in Kramatorsk and other strategic cities in Donetsk oblast with a view to a similar cleansing of that second Donbas region of what the Russians call the neo-Nazi, extreme nationalist fighters . 

However, a more piquant vision of what the future holds was offered on Monday morning’s edition of Sixty Minutes by the commander of the “Akhmat” battalion of special forces Chechen soldiers fighting in the Lugansk region, Apti Alaudinov.  As deputy to the head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, Alaudinov has been interviewed on Sixty Minutes every day in past weeks as the battles headed towards their culmination.  This privileged position on Russian airwaves is justified by the major contribution the Chechen battalion has made to the very challenging fight for control of the regional cities.  The artillery battles in the suburbs and fields of Donbas are the job assigned to Russian soldiers, as we see from the interviews conducted on the front lines. These Russians either man the artillery pieces out in the open or sit in consoles of highly sophisticated rocket launchers.  The Chechens are doing the very risky work of urban warfare, flushing out Ukrainian fighters from the basements of residential buildings and civil infrastructure, fighting street by street.

Alaudinov’s remarks on Monday about the way forward will surely be closely studied by Western intelligence operatives in Washington and Brussels for days to come before they percolate up into speeches of EU and US politicians.  He said that following the liberation of all of Lugansk, Russian forces would continue their move South and West, or perhaps might on the way take Kiev.  Then they could turn on the Baltic States, where, in his words, the armed forces of a country like Estonia were negligible. Until ordered to halt by the Commander-in-Chief, they might next take Poland.

Would a direct fight with NATO be intimidating, the program co-host Olga Skabeyeva asked.

With a broad smile on his face, Alaudinov said ‘no,’ the ‘LGBTQ’ led armies of NATO were no match for the forces of the Russian Federation.  “Power to Russia,” he exclaimed in conclusion.

Yes, Russian television can be very entertaining!

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

I am pleased to share the link to yesterday’s live broadcast of Press TV dedicated to the ongoing NATO meeting in Madrid and to the new NATO doctrine identifying Russia as the main strategic threat to the Alliance.

Regrettably some technical problems with Skype interfered with the recording at times and cut short my concluding answer to the question about the prospects for world peace which I had hoped would end the program on an upbeat note. My point was that that if the United States never came close to attacking North Korea under Trump, fearing its couple of nuclear armed missiles, it is most unlikely that the US and NATO will enter into direct military action against Russia, with its several thousand latest generation missiles and nuclear triad. In the announcement of the 300,000 troops to be kept on high alert, NATO leaders are just engaging in more posturing and self-congratulations that someone, meaning taxpayers, will have to pay for.

I call attention to the calm and highly professional direction of the panel discussion by the Press TV team. In other dimensions, the country’s leadership is presently heavily engaged in diplomacy directed at raising Iran’s international profile.  Iran’s president Raisi is now in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, participating in a Caspian Summit with other regional leaders including Vladimir Putin. And Iran, alongside Argentina, has just publicly announced its application to join the BRICS group.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/112012

Post Script, 30 June 2022:  My misjudgment of the likelihood of Sweden and Finland overcoming Turkish objections to their accession to NATO may be forgiven in light of the apparent concessions made to Erdogan at the Summit that were unthinkable till now. Latest reports suggest that the Swedes have agreed to turn over to Turkey 73 Kurdish ‘terrorists’ now living in Sweden. Previously it was said that such an about face on the longstanding Swedish policy of welcoming Kurdish refugees would bring down the government. Moreover, the United States did its part with respect to carrots:  Biden has promised to remove all obstacles to Ankara’s purchase of F16s.  Meanwhile, Russian talk show experts are saying that the horse trading with Erdogan may not be over, and that he may yet extract further concessions as the ratification process of the new candidate members proceeds to the parliaments of the Member States. In the Turkish parliament new objections to the deal may emerge which must be overcome by further actions of the Scandinavians.

The elites of the European Union who are running the show seem to have a contemptuous view of their fellow citizens.  Russian media must be banned from the air waves lest the poor simpletons who call themselves Europeans be led astray by the Kremlin!

I submit that the people could not care less about the entire fuss over Ukraine at the ideological level of democracy versus autocracy, or civilization over barbarism.  They care about their fuel bills, about rising costs at the supermarket check-out. Full stop.

This indifference to the military and economic warfare being led from Brussels is sad, though it may yet be reversed and shift towards street protests in the coming months. Not because of Russian propaganda, which is surely now nipped in the bud, but because the pain being inflicted on the population by the economic kamikaze political leadership through sanctions on Russia becomes unbearable here.

Meanwhile, I offer some further thoughts bearing on my essay of two days ago about the New Iron Curtain.

First, to anyone with half a brain and a bit of mental concentration, the contradictions in Kiev-Collective West news (read propaganda) are glaring and self-defeating without an adversary in the ring. 

I noted more than a month ago such contradictions in a BBC report from Kharkov on supposedly savage Russian artillery fire against residential buildings  A well-coiffed and dressed female reporter in the foreground pointed to a partially burned out high rise building a hundred meters or so behind her, saying:  ‘just imagine, four people died here under Russian artillery fire!’  Four people died in the destruction of a multistory apartment building?  A better interpretation is that the building was empty except for Ukrainian military supplies or sheltered heavy weapons, as the Russians said at the time.

Over this past weekend, a similar bit of nonsense was reported by Euronews and other Western media with respect to a Russian missile strike on an apartment building in downtown Kiev.  Four of the nine stories were destroyed, but only one or two casualties were reported by the Ukrainians.  Was this not a building from which the civilian residents had been chased out and a weapons production line had been installed, as the Russians claimed?

Now today’s featured headline report on the morning edition of Euronews speaks of a Russian air launched rocket attack on a shopping center in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk, Poltava oblast.  The smoldering remains, the twisted iron frame are shown on our screens. Zelensky claims that more than a thousand civilians had been sheltering there.  Yet the reported deaths were a dozen or so.  Does this make any sense if you put your mind to it?  The simple answer is ‘no.’  That is to say, you see through the propaganda without even hearing the Russian explanation of what happened: namely that just 90 meters away was a factory renovating Ukrainian tanks and other military vehicles that was also being used to store newly arrived Western armaments; it was the primary target of the Russian bombs. Secondary explosions there set off fires in what was an abandoned shopping mall.

In closing, I am obliged to correct my remarks about the accessibility of the Russian point of view on www.smotrim.ru:  I have now discovered that the live broadcasts , as opposed to the shows already aired and stored on the site, can be viewed without difficulty. This means there is no need to find exotic hi-tech solutions that some readers have proposed in the Comments section.

 I also note that the Russians are seeking and finding alternative ways of presenting their point of view on youtube, from which the official Russian channels have been banned.  Yesterday I received a link to a Russian language news program in which I appeared in vignette interviews. The production company is called “Mir” and is an offshoot of the Community of Independent States ( CIS), the organization of a dozen or so former Soviet republics.  Formally, legally it is not a Russian entity and so it slips past the youtube censors. I assume that the cat and mouse game of the Information War will continue to evolve.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

In recent weeks, I have received a number of complimentary emails from readers of my essays who took note of what they consider my even-handed approach to the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian military conflict which is at variance with the fired-up Russophile and Russophobe positions that we find daily in alternative and mainstream media respectively. Some have gone on to say that they have profited from my reporting on the content and changing views aired on Russian political talk shows these past few months, all of which is rarely featured in mainstream Western news and analysis. My intent in such reporting was to ensure that at least some people here understand what Ukraine and its Western backers are up against, so as to better understand the course of the fighting on the ground and who may be winning.

In this context, I announce with sadness that the job of even-handed reporting has just become much more difficult as a result of Eutelsat’s implementation yesterday of a policy decision announced just over a month ago, but which went unnoticed by most everyone, myself included.

I quote from Google Search:

“Eutelsat to remove banned Russian channels. Eutelsat ready to immediately stop the rebroadcasting of the Russian channels RTR Planeta and Rossiya 24 on its satellites on June 25.  13 May 2022”

Indeed, the main state news channels of the Russian Federation can now no longer be received via satellite antennas here in Belgium or elsewhere on the Continent. They are partially and sporadically accessible on the internet via www.smotrim.ru but the level of interference from Western censors makes such viewing a dismal exercise. “Freezing” of frames seems to be most common with respect to the talk shows “Sixty Minutes” and “Evening with Solovyov,” two programs which I had been following and reporting on most regularly. However, it also is applied against Russian shows which might be characterized as being simply entertainment, such as the currently running historical serial about the life and times of the 18^th century tsarina Elizabeth. I dare anyone to get more than a minute or two into the broadcast before the curtain comes down, so to speak.

The curtain in question is an updated Iron Curtain, which this time has been dropped on our heads by the powers that be in Washington.  After all, it is Washington that pressured the French controlled Eutelsat rebroadcaster of television channels that dominates the European and other global markets to throw out the Russians.

The argument behind that demand was to exclude “Russian propaganda” from the airwaves. 

In the spirit of fairmindedness with which I opened this essay, I agree that Russian state television is practicing propagandistic methods insofar as it withholds certain information from viewers while promoting other information favorable to its paymasters.  For example, on Russian state television news you will not find a word about the civilian casualties and damage to residential buildings of Russian artillery and rocket attacks on Kharkov. You are shown only the civilian casualties and damage to residential buildings in Donetsk and towns of the Donbas caused by Ukrainian artillery and rocket strikes. 

On the other hand, however, European and U.S. newscasts feature the damage caused by Russian strikes on Ukrainian towns while saying not a word about the sufferings of the Donbas population from military assaults by Ukrainian forces.  Just as they have been entirely silent about such suffering and death among the Donbas population that Kiev has inflicted on them for the past eight years, since the outbreak of the civil war in 2014.

Each side in the Ukrainian conflict accuses the other side of using cluster bombs and other internationally prohibited weapons against civilian populations.  These accusations are put on air by Russian and Western news programs only as they are set out by their favored respective side.

My point is very simple: by silencing the so-called Russian propagandists, Western propagandists have the field to themselves here in Belgium, in the broader European Union and in North America. The possibilities for the public to form an independent view of what is going on are choked off, and with that there is no basis for informed policy discussion in the expert community. As The Washington Post so nicely puts it: democracy dies in darkness.

And what about the Russian side? Are they also cut off and ignorant as my remarks on coverage of casualties above might suggest?  I commented on this question in my travel report on my six week stay in Petersburg that began in May:  Western news channels have been removed from the cable television distributors in the city. For this I blame not Russian government prohibitions but the commercial decisions of Western content providers who terminated their contracts with Russian distributors just as did the Hollywood studios. Meanwhile, Western stations remain accessible on the internet without interference and they remain accessible on satellite television.

At my dacha, I had no difficulty receiving the BBC and Bloomberg for free courtesy of my parabolic antenna. How long this will be the case given the tit-for-tat nature of the relationship between the West and Russia generally I cannot say. But if someone does pull the plug on Western ‘propaganda’ in Russia, it will be in response to the West’s dropping the Iron Curtain on Russia, not the other way around.

It is sad that Western leaders are destroying with their own hands the underpinnings of democracy at home through this censorship.  The only likely result will be total shock and surprise throughout the Western world when the Russians complete their liberation of Donbas, take the Ukrainian Black Sea coast including Odessa and declare victory over what will by then be an utterly destroyed Ukrainian army.

In the meantime, under greatly constrained conditions, I will try my best to follow the Russian side of the story on talk shows, on news reports of Russian war correspondents embedded with their forces on the front lines, and to share with readers what appears to be afoot on the other side of the barricades.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

I have taken my time preparing a commentary on Putin’s speech to the Plenary Session of the St Petersburg Economic Forum last Friday, and I am well satisfied that this was the right decision.  Others have written about the content and delivery of the speech. Still others have written about the Forum itself in its twenty-fifth anniversary, with a particular emphasis placed on the absence of foreign government leaders and of high level contingents of Western businessmen.

 What I intend to do here is to go beyond these narrow constraints and to put the event in the broader context of several other important international developments that have occurred in the past few days, many of which are interrelated. They have barely received the attention they deserve in global media and I intend to make amends here.

                                                           *****

The slogan of this year’s Forum was “A New World. New Possibilities.”  Put another way, in terms well familiar to the Western business community, the logic here is not to let a good crisis go to waste but to react in a constructive manner that takes the economy and standard of living to new heights previously unattainable through import substitution, which is just another name for reindustrialization.

 Both in the specialized sessions which were broadcast live and in the plenary session to which Putin spoke, the challenges posed by current, draconian Western sanctions on Russia were spelled out in great detail without any self-deception or gloss. The same was true of businessmen speaking truth to Power when commenting on the Government’s proposed programs to help the economy during the transition period to new logistical solutions, new trade flows and new local manufacturing:  “don’t do the usual thing and build a bridge to the middle of the river; go all the way with radical new solutions and in particular with a very cheap credit policy to provide working capital to where it is needed most.”  This kind of talk which I heard in the session chaired by Sberbank general director Gref, is both responsible and bold.

 Indeed, the most relevant adjective to describe the proceedings would be “frank.”  Political correctness was no longer being practiced.  Interlocutors in the West were no longer called “partners.”  In his speech, Putin led the way, criticizing the American administration and the European bureaucratic elites setting policy in Brussels for economic illiteracy.

For his part, the most honored international guest at the Forum, Kazakhstan’s president Kasym-Zhomart Tokaev, did not mince words either when answering a question put to him by the moderator, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan during Q&A following the keynote speech:  whether he recognizes the Donbas republics of Donetsk and Lugansk as independent states?  “No,” he said, without hesitation though he was seated on stage just a couple of meters from Vladimir Putin.

Tokaev explained that the United Nations Charter contains two contradictory principles:  the territorial integrity of Member States and the right of populations within any State to self-determination, meaning declaration of their independence without asking or receiving the permission of the Government of the Member State. In this context, Tokaev added, if the right of secession were to take the upper hand, the present membership of the UN at 200 or so countries would balloon out to over 500 and this would create chaos. Accordingly, Kazakhstan does not recognize the independence of Kosovo, which Russia has used as a precedent for its own actions with respect to various ‘frozen conflicts’ in Former Soviet Republics, such as South Ossetia and Abkhazia.  This being said, it was also clear by his presence at the Forum that Tokaev supports Russia economically and politically in its ongoing proxy war with the United States on Ukrainian territory.

                                                                          *****

Vladimir Putin’s speech to the Forum lasted an hour. The most interesting remarks were in the first 15 minutes, when he argued the case that the present grave challenges to the global economic, financial and political systems have their source in wrong-headed policies of the Collective West.

The West’s abuse of the printing presses to keep state institutions and business afloat during the Covid pandemic through emissions of currency not covered by ongoing supply of goods and services started an inflationary process that long preceded the conflict in Ukraine. It drove up energy and food costs dramatically, and the inflation was then further aggravated by the “thoughtless” sanctions imposed on Russian hydrocarbons, fertilizer and agricultural products as from 24 February. 

To be specific, Putin remarked that in the past two years, the money supply in the United States had expanded by 38%, an amount that normally would take decades.  In Europe, the money supply was increased over this period by 20%.  Then Putin matched these facts with the trade figures for the United States. Before the excess emissions, import into the United States had been running at 250 billion dollars a month.  By February 2022, monthly imports were at 350 billion. That is to say, they tracked precisely the increases in the amount of money in circulation. 

From this Putin made the concluding argument that the United States and Europe were now practicing an updated version of colonialism. Like a ‘vacuum cleaner’ they are buying up goods and services from the rest of the world in exchange for their own currency which is depreciating in value with uncovered emissions. This, he said, explains the near doubling in the price of food products globally over the past year.

There were other points in Putin’s economics lesson, but these give a good idea of the contempt in which he holds Western politicians and elites, who, in his view, have not absorbed the lessons handed down in elementary school and are now trying, in the global Information War, to put the blame on Russia for “Putin’s inflation.”

                                                                  *****

Traditionally there has been a Master of Ceremonies or moderator to oversee the Q&A that follows the presidential address to the Plenary Session of the Forum. Traditionally this role was given to celebrities from Western mainstream media – presenters from CNN, MSNBC and the like. Generally they were given their lines by their employers and would ask once, twice and repeatedly the same offensive questions while ignoring completely the detailed answers given by Vladimir Vladimirovich.  This show of collegiality and jollity by the Russians is something I never quite understood, but then I never understood why so many of the American academics that the Kremlin invited year after year to the annual Valdai gatherings were incorrigible Putin and Russia haters.

Under present circumstances, the Forum organizers had to fall back on domestic candidates for the role of MC and the assignment was given to RT’s Margarita Simonyan. 

In the past I have been critical of Simonyan’s stewardship at RT, which presented all too many shows run by failed or overaged journalists from Western mainstream, by people with no knowledge of or feel for Russia.  In what I saw of Simonyan’s performance last Friday, I will freely admit that whatever her competence as a news station manager, she is an outstanding journalist.

This very point was highlighted at the outset of Sunday evening’s premier talk show with Vladimir Solovyov.  His opening remarks were to the effect that Simonyan had been given the rare assignment to moderate for the country’s President and had performed this journalistic task at the level of Olympian gold. Having tossed to her this bouquet of roses, he asked her to comment on her experience of working hand in glove with Putin for nearly two hours of Q&A.

Simonyan’s remarks are worth repeating here. She expressed her surprise that Putin showed up in such a good mood, fully confident that he had been making the right decisions with respect to the start and the prosecution of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.  And she shared her impression of his being in excellent physical and mental form. Not only did he perform on stage with her for three hours, but later in the evening she saw him at one gathering, in which he maintained the same high energy level. And still later, after leaving her group, she knew that he went on to yet other meetings. Her conclusion was that all talk of his suffering from some illness is belied by this evident vigor.

Simonyan noted that she saw it as her obligation not only to ask the questions that are the talk of Russia’s expert community but also the number one question being asked by ‘simple people,’ as those experts would condescendingly call the mass of the population. That question was: why has Russia not responded to the daily rocket and artillery attacks on the civilian population in Donetsk, to the attacks across the border on towns within the Russian Federation, by doing what Putin had threatened weeks ago, namely to bomb the ‘decision making centers’ of Ukraine, starting with the Ministry of Defense. 

She said that Putin offered a comprehensive answer to the question. First, an all-out assault on the Ukrainian positions from which the artillery and rocket firings were hitting the DNR would lead to a great number of civilian casualties since the Ukrainian forces intentionally positioned themselves in residential areas so as to invite ‘indiscriminate’ shelling by Russian return fire. Moreover, the Russian objective was to keep civilian casualties to a minimum since these were their future citizens. Secondly, a blitzkrieg assault would be very costly in casualties among Russian military and had to be avoided whenever possible. Therefore the preferred method was encirclement of the Ukrainian positions and a calm wait for them to run out of provisions and surrender. When asked what were Russia’s red lines that would trigger a more forceful response, Putin refused to be drawn.

                                                                       *****

There are indications that not only friends of Russia but also its most fierce enemies were paying close attention to the proceedings of the Petersburg Economic Forum.

Today the Ukrainian armed forces struck and did great damage to an offshore Crimean oil drilling platform in the Black Sea on which more than a hundred workers were stationed. More than 90 were evacuated but at least seven are unaccounted for.  This dramatic and  highly provocative attack by Ukrainian fighter planes and vessels is said to be Zelensky’s response to a Russian missile strike a day earlier that destroyed the main refinery supplying fuel to the Ukrainian military. It is also a clear attempt to test Putin’s red lines and continued restraint in pursuing the military operation.

But this is not all. Among the various governors of Russia’s constituent federal units attending the Forum, state television journalists broadcast an interview on Friday morning with the governor of Kaliningrad, Anton Alikhanov, a vigorous 37 year old who spoke fluently and confidently about the situation of his oblast.  When asked about relations with the neighboring Baltic States, he commented that all mutual obligations were being respected and that transportation of freight to and from the rest of the RF via the corridor passing through Lithuania was operating normally.

However, on Friday evening Lithuania announced a partial blockade on rail traffic to Kaliningrad. Specifically, all goods subject to EU sanctions would no longer be allowed to transit their country. This would amount to about half of all railway freight, and would present Kaliningrad with a host of problems to resolve if alternate, sea transportation has to be put in place.

By Saturday morning, Russian news channels were discussing the counter-leverage Russia may exert in response to the Lithuanian move. They claim that the free transit of goods between the Russian Federation and its outpost, Kaliningrad, was a precondition agreed by all parties at the start of the 1990s when Russia accepted the line of its international border with Lithuania. If free transit was now being withheld, Russia might cancel its acceptance of the borders. As regards leverage of a non-legal variety, threats were being made to cut the supply of Russian electricity to Lithuania, which is a major element in the country’s energy balance.

This spat over borders comes in the context of tensions between Russia and Finland. As Minister of Foreign Affairs Lavrov mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Finland’s possibly joining NATO would compel Russia to reopen an old issue of property rights over an important canal in Finnish Karelia. This could pose a serious security risk for Finland.

In short, the whole question of Russia’s relations with its Baltic neighbors is heating up.  In this context, it is necessary to recall Vladimir Putin’s public remarks in the past week or so that Russia has no ambition of territorial expansion but will only reabsorb and consolidate what has been Russia’s in the past. This statement immediately set off alarm bells in Helsinki. After all, Finland had for a hundred years until WWI been a constituent if separately administered and privileged part of the Russian Empire.

What we are witnessing is a potential vector of escalation in America’s proxy war with Russia on Ukrainian territory.  While many commentators in Washington speculate on the possibility of Russia resorting to nuclear weapons if it should fear that it is losing the fight in Ukraine, I believe that is a phony issue, given that Russia is very unlikely to fail in its Ukrainian campaign and given that it has barely begun to implement the conventional weapons systems at its disposal and to destroy the infrastructure and major cities of Ukraine as it can and may yet do. However, Russia’s success in withstanding the full weight of NATO in Ukraine is probably changing its calculus on how to deal with the Baltics now that they are using their exaggerated sense of security from NATO’s Article 5 provisions to bait and provoke Russia. A more muscular if still reactive Russian posture is clearly emerging.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

It was a delight to participate yesterday evening in a featured news program on Press TV just as the results of the voting were coming in.  It is quite remarkable that the news room and their correspondent in Paris took a line of commentary that would fit perfectly within the reportage of the French mainstream news Establishment, Figaro or Le Monde. Their top question was whether Macron’s movement, which now had lost its absolute majority, could regain control of Parliament by forming a coalition with the traditional centrist party, the Republicans. Their top concern was whether this would enable Macron to proceed with his neo-Liberal domestic reform policies, such as raising the legal retirement age from 62 to 65.

It was my pleasure to throw a spanner in the works and redirect attention to Macron’s foreign policy, namely his support for Ukraine in the ongoing military conflict with Russia, a policy which the nominally Leftist Opposition coalition of Mélenchon shares fully. Indeed, judging by foreign policy issues, there was only one true Opposition in this election, Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement national, which seeks good relations with Russia and distances itself from NATO. Note that Le Pen’s party did better in yesterday’s elections than ever before and will capture as many as 10 times the number of seats it held before the elections.

As I argued in yesterday’s mini-debate, continuation of the war thanks to French and other European and American military and financial assistance to Kiev, and the continued imposition of draconian sanctions on Russia particularly in the energy sphere, are feeding an inflationary cycle that will overwhelm political and economic life in France in the coming months, especially when the home heating season begins.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/06/19/684204/France-Parliamentary-Vote

I am pleased to share the link to my half hour interview yesterday with Belarus Radio Television.  I have appeared on their broadcasts several times before.  The video was a good opportunity to discuss the effect of sanctions on Russian society and economy, and also to consider what the end game in Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine is likely to be.

To this I can add one other interview, two days later, with a separate Belarus broadcaster, the television channel ONT, this time conducted in Russian.

As noted in my essay a couple of days ago,  I returned home to Brussels from St Petersburg, in two steps:  by bus to Tallinn, followed by a forty-eight hour stay there before resuming my trip by plane.  For reasons unknown, the only bus service to Tallinn departs Petersburg at an ungodly 6.30 am and the only direct flight from Tallinn to Brussels departs at the same ungodly hour.  Hence, we decided to break the trip and allow for some recovery in between. This also provided an excellent opportunity to explore further the questions that arose on our brief stop in Tallinn on our way East:  namely how to reconcile the country’s Russophobic notoriety at the national government level with the omnipresent Russian speakers on the streets of the Old Town and among all the personnel of the hospitality industry whom we encountered.

The New York Times regularly features Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas’ anti-Putin pronouncements as she vies with her colleagues in Latvia and Lithuania for leadership in the sanctions crusade.  For its part, Russian state television airs footage of Estonians removing Soviet war memorials as proof of the hostile intentions of their neighbors.

The reality of relations between Estonia and the Russian World is more complex, as my little two days of exploration showed.  But then again, as I knew well before this, though all three Baltic States are lumped together by Western media as a bloc in the EU that is and has long been pressing for anti-Russian policies, their domestic treatment of their Russian speakers differs greatly. 

In what follows, note that I use the term “Russian speakers” rather than “ethnic Russians” because the population in question largely settled in the Baltics during the post-WWII Soviet period and included many from Ukraine and Belarus who shared the language with their ethnic Russian fellow settlers.

The most egregious violator of the human rights of their Russian speaking residents is Latvia, where the percentage of Russians holding Latvian passports at the time of national independence in 1991 was 40% or more. Latvia then stripped of citizenship all those who had settled in their country after 1939, effectively making 300,000 Russian speakers stateless. They also subjected these Russian speakers to restrictions on their property rights and on employment possibilities, including the levels to which they could rise. Effectively Latvia installed an Apartheid regime which they maintain to this day, whatever mouth honor is given to “European values.” Moreover, Latvia also tolerates fascist parades honoring Nazi collaborators from WWII, similar to the Bandera movement in Ukraine. And it has closed down public and church schools that conduct classes in Russian. Given the country’s shortage of teachers generally, this means that many students learn their lessons in the broken Latvian of their native Russian speaker educators.

The least friction with its Russian-speaking minority is in Lithuania, where Russians never counted more than 15% of the population and where another significant minority, Polish speakers, also had to be tolerated.

Finally, there is Estonia, which has 320,000 Russian speakers among a total population of 1.3 million. And those Russian speakers are concentrated in the national capital, Tallinn, where they constitute a substantial majority of the 426,000 population there. Inescapably, the city government in Tallinn is not aligned with the anti-Russian policies of the national government.

So much for statistics.  How did my experience of two days in Tallinn reflect or contradict these generalities?

Without further ado, I say that I found two parallel worlds – ethnic Estonians and Russian speakers. They each seem comfortable with themselves, with no obvious complexes and rather little intercourse.

Our hotel the first night was the famous and unique Hotel Viru, just a couple of minutes walk from the Old Town. This 23 story building towers over the city. In Soviet times it was the best hotel in the city and I stayed there when passing through on business in 1990. Today it is owned by the leading Finnish hospitality company Sokos. It has been renovated to high international standards, though one typically Socialist feature of architecture has remained, namely the main dining room where breakfasts are served in the morning and where a cabaret show is offered on some evenings. The seating capacity must be several hundred, so that it is not the place for a romantic dinner. But it serves tourist groups very efficiently, which is fine for those stopping in Tallinn on their way to the cruise ships putting in at the nearby port.

The Viru was doing good business during our stay. At breakfast nearly all places were taken.  Not a Russian to be seen or heard.  The hotel receptionist confirmed my hunch: 90% or more of the guests are Finns, who take the two hour ferries from Helsinki to enjoy a low-cost vacation trip; the remainder are ethnic Estonians. My point is that Tallinn is receiving a good share of its tourist visitors from outside Russia, but they travel their own separate route from the Russian groups and individual tourists.

The Viru is also just a five minutes’ walk from Estonia’s cultural holy sites, the Concert Hall and the Opera-Ballet House.  I call them holy sites, because they were built the year following the end of WWI in what was unmistakably a political statement of the newly independent Estonia, that it owned its high culture.

By good luck, the opera house was performing Tosca on our first night in the city. The hall was only two-thirds sold and we easily got fifth row orchestra (stalls) seats at the very democratic price of 32 euros each. The production was good, both vocalists and the orchestra. Happily the stage décor and costumes were simple and non-intrusive. But our attention was on the audience:  100% ethnic Estonians judging by the chatter we heard in the café – buffet, which was heavily frequented.

 The food and drink on offer in the opera café was very traditional: high quality smoked salmon sandwiches and little cakes, while sparkling wine was the best selling beverage.  Most of the audience was provincial in dress. They could just as easily have been opera-goers in stodgy Ghent or Antwerp. The opera house, which seats perhaps 600, is in impeccable condition, perfectly maintained and with all essential conveniences such as elevators for the mobility impaired and 21^st century toilets.

In the adjacent building, a very Estonian event was planned for the evening of the 9^th, which we sadly would have to miss: a special concert celebrating the upcoming 85^th birthday of the Estonian-American conductor Neeme Järvi, who has had an outstanding career at home and abroad in both Europe and the USA, where he presently resides. His family constitutes a musical dynasty in the country, which punches above its weight in musical culture.

My argument for parallel worlds of ethnic Russians and Estonians is borne out by our visits to two of the most important tourist sites in and around Tallinn, both former palaces dating back to the 18^th and 19^th centuries, when what we now call Estonia was part of the Russian Empire: the Kaila Joa Schloss Fall museum-hotel and the Kadriorg Palace Art Museum.

The Russian essence of these attractions is not something overlooked or distorted by official Estonia. Even today Russian “occupation” of Estonia describes only the post-WWII period.  Even today, these magnificent cultural monuments from tsarist Russia are substantially supported by the Estonian national government in the frank recognition that Estlandiya (as the territory was known following its conquest from Sweden in the Northern War) was a jewel of the Empire. In the mid-18^th century, Revel (present day Tallinn) was the largest seaport in the Empire. The mineral water spas of the city and its environs attracted emperors and empresses including Elizabeth and Catherine II, extending into the first half of the 19^th century during the reign of Nicholas I. In this regard, today’s “cancel Russia” movement has had zero impact on Estonian domestic policies pertaining to culture and the arts.

This reasonableness or common sense behavior of Estonians matches what I discovered on an earlier day visit to Tallinn five years ago during a port stop on a Baltic Sea cruise. We visited the city history museum and found in the entrance hall the disarming statement that in the past 2,000  years prior to the post-Soviet independence in 1991, the lands comprising modern Estonia had known political sovereignty only for the twenty year interwar period ending in 1939. The summary history for visitors went on to say that the native peoples of this land, the ethnic Estonians, had been farmers primarily, and they had lived under a succession of foreign overlords: German, Swedish and for the last two hundred years, Russian.  This sobering truth necessarily is an antidote to any nationalist fever which might otherwise spoil the interethnic relations today.

The Schloss Fall museum-hotel situated at Keila Joa, about 32 km along the coast southwest of Tallinn is unique in more than the dimension of Russian-Estonian consciousness. I was persuaded to go there by my wife, who is a full-blooded representative of the Russian intelligentsia as well as a card carrying member of Petersburg’s Union of Journalists. Keila Joa resonates among her peers because the “castle”  there symbolizes the intertwined relations between Fighters for Liberty and Defenders of Autocracy, between the Decembrists and their persecutors in the first half of the 19^th century and beyond. The story of the castle is the story of two fabled families, the Benckendorffs and the Volkonsky’s.

The builder of the castle, Count Alexander Benckendorff, was a bemedaled officer in the Napoleonic wars. Benckendorff was born in Revel (Tallinn) as a member of the Baltic Germans who were long in the service of the Russian throne.  His place of birth explains his decision to build a family residence at a very picturesque point one kilometer from the Estonian coast, overlooking the fast moving Keila river and a dramatic six meter high waterfall. The 20 hectare property is today open to visitors, who can enjoy trails in the forest.

Count Benckendorff was a close associate of Alexander I whom he served as aide-de-camp. When, following the death of Alexander in December 1825,  a contingent of officers revolted, seeking to replace autocracy with constitutional rule, Benckendorff was the officer in charge of putting down the insurrection. . He subsequently had responsibility for trying and sentencing the “Decembrists.” Several were executed while most were sent into domestic exile in Siberia, where they remained for decades and were known for spreading education and Enlightenment to their remote part of the Empire. Among them was Major General Sergei Volkonsky.

In the new reign of Nicholas I, Benckendorff became his close advisor and was appointed head of the political police, or Third Department of His Majesty’s Chancellery, a post he retained for life.  However, in the years following his death, under guidance of his widow, the family intermarried with the Volkonsky’s and ultimately the property passed into their hands, where it remained until the Revolution. A scion of the family is well known in Estonia today as a singer and stage performer.

Be that as it may, the buildings on the site were gutted after the Revolution and remained in a dilapidated state until 2010 when the Estonian government approved a formula by which the complex would be totally restored by private investors for dual use as a commercial hotel and also a state museum. The result is extraordinary:  visitors to the castle are treated to the home-like comfort of being able to touch everything. You can seat yourself in the well upholstered divans and armchairs of the ground floor rooms to quietly contemplate the interior design and reproduction paintings of Russian officers who fought in the Napoleonic Wars and other imperial statesmen. These are reproductions of originals in the State Hermitage Museum of St Petersburg, as is plainly noted.  Some of the furniture is antique.

The castle building was designed in the Gothic Revival style by the young architect Andrei Stackenschneider, who was then serving as an assistant to the chief architect of the St Isaac’s Cathedral in Petersburg, the Frenchman Auguste de Montferrand. Later in his career, he became in his own right a well known architect of important palaces and townhouses in central Petersburg. 

The completion of the castle in 1833 was marked by a visit from the emperor Nicholas I himself. During his stay, the guests were treated to the performance of what was immediately approved as Russia’s national anthem, God Save the Tsar, written by another multi-functional young courtier, Alexei Lvov.

As a further commentary on Estonia’s relations with its Russian World past and present, I note that the private investors in the reconstruction of the castle complex were three:  two Russians and one Estonian. The Russians sold out their shares three years ago, and the complex now is owned fully by the Estonian partner, who is an interior decorator by profession and the owner of the Luxor furniture stores that you see in Tallinn and elsewhere in the country.

For all of the above reasons, given the rich history of the site, it is well worth considering not only a day visit but placing a reservation to spend the night. Accommodations in the 21-room Keila Joa hotel can be reserved on booking.com, on tripadvisor.com and from the Schloss Fall website.

The Kadriorg Palace has occupied an outstanding place in Estonian history both under the tsars and during the country’s period of independence, when it served alternately as the residence of the President and as an art museum. Construction was begun in 1718, a decade after the military victory over Sweden that transferred these lands to Russia.  The palace, which was intended as a gift to the Empress Catherine (hence the name in Estonian) was completed in 1725, the year of Peter the Great’s death.  As Wikipedia informs us, between 1741 and 1917, the palace housed the civilian governor of the Governorate of Estonia.  After WWII, the palace definitively became an art museum, though the buildings were neglected and were in bad need of renovation at the time of Estonia’s independence in 1991. 

The renovation work was supported by the government of Sweden, which was at the time heavily involved in the Estonian economy and particularly in the banking system. The palace reopened to the public in 2000 as the home of a specific part of the Estonian national art collection. The ground floor displays the extensive and high quality paintings of European art, in particular Dutch canvases of the 17^th century which were widely acquired by royalty and connoisseurs throughout Europe in the 18^th century and beyond. The second floor displays the much smaller collection of Russian art, though I emphasize that the works are of high quality and very representative of important art movements in Russia during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. There are serious paintings here by Korovin, Aivazovsky, Kustodiev, Petrov-Vodkin, among others.  None has been taken down or turned to the wall.

I close out this sharing of impressions from our stay in Tallinn with a couple of remarks on my visit to one of the largest shopping centers in the city, thye Ulemiste Centre, near the airport. It is just across the road from the hotel where we spent the second and last night of our stay in view of our early flight departure the next morning.

Well designed, handsomely executed, this shopping center seems to be doing well. The large parking area was nearly full and there was a good crowd of shoppers circulating inside. Every one of them speaking Russian. Well dressed, relaxed. If you want a picture of successful integration of a minority population into national llife, this was it.

Oh, yes, one more thing: television. We found in our hotel room that Estonian state television also broadcasts in Russian. That channel provided us with good, entertaining films in the original sound tracks, whether English or Russian. It was a pleasure to watch a Russian channel that is not weighed down with war reporting.

If Kiev treated its Russian speaking minority in any way like what the Estonians have done, there would be no war today and the world would be pulled back from the abyss of Armageddon that presently drains the joy from our lives.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

I take pleasure in announcing the publication earlier today in The National Interest, Washington, D.C. of a Peace Plan prepared jointly with my friend Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/building-lasting-settlement-ukraine-202920

Postscript:

Not surprising, but disappointing nonetheless: I have received some poisonous comments on the PeacePlan following my posting of the National Interest link.  It just goes to prove that too many readers of non-mainstream analysis are not looking for new insights, just looking for pro-Russian, anti-Western soulmates and penpals.

When you seek Veritas, be prepared to wear a barrel and carry a candle.