Without meaning to offend fellow dachniki, I affirm that the farming life is not conducive to intellectual pursuits. During most of my time in Russia during July, I was busy from morning to night putting order in the chaos we found when we arrived at our country residence 80 km south of Petersburg.  Waist high grasses and aggressive vines covered nearly all of the 1400 square meters of our property.

My electric ‘trimmer,’ supported by 200 meters of linked-up extension cords, was a great help in clearing the land. However, a lot of hand work was inescapable when freeing the vegetable patch, the flower beds and the many berry bushes. Suffice it to say that by evening my optimistic plans for writing about current international events succumbed to generalized exhaustion and I barely managed to set down a few lines about one or another issue of the day that captured my imagination.

In what follows below, I set out these longer and shorter diary entries which are systematic only in chronological order, not themes.  If I have to identify a couple of overarching themes from international developments during this period, they would be the unstoppable advance of Russian forces through the Donbas and southern reaches of Ukraine, accompanied by the changing Russian war aims, which now suggest plans to annex the entire Black Sea littoral. The logic of this change in objectives has been clearly stated by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov a couple of weeks ago:  the ongoing deliveries of long range artillery-missile systems (HIMARS) by the United States and its allies represent a serious escalation in the war that imposes on Russia the need to push back the borders with Ukraine to the point where the new weapons no longer threaten the Donbas, not to mention civilian populations in adjacent territories of the Russian Federation. Continued Western military assistance to Ukraine, which now clearly includes dispatch of military technicians to man and direct the advanced materiel, will result in the full conquest of Ukraine by Russian forces and a dictated peace with whatever regime replaces the Zelensky junta.

Under these changed circumstances, my proposal of six weeks ago for a peace in which Russia would leave in place the independent and sovereign self-declared people’s republics of the Donbas in exchange for Western lifting of sanctions no longer is relevant. 

Day by day, Russian actions on the ground in the ‘occupied territories’ as Kiev calls them, show the clear intent to incorporate all of them into the Russian Federation. I have in mind the issuance of Russian passports to all comers in these territories, the preparations for a new school year based on the standard Russian curriculum, the pay-out of pensions and state salaries from the Russian budget, the ongoing construction of new housing and schools to accommodate those who have lost their lodgings in Mariupol and elsewhere. These actions complement and underscore the words delivered by Sergei Lavrov.  What we are witnessing will add perhaps 10 million citizens to the country’s population as well as vast new economic potential from what was since 1922 the industrial heartland of Ukraine.

At the level of daily life of Russians both in the city and in the countryside, little has changed since my visit ending a month earlier. Not only food stores, but those selling consumer goods of all kinds seem to be well stocked. Prices are higher than before the ‘special military operation,’ but not more so than in Western Europe.  A couple of our city friends left for their annual vacation of several months duration on their tiny property in Crimea near Feodosia. The trains to the South function normally even if air traffic has been shut down for safety reasons. Other friends grouse about the now much more expensive package tours to Turkey due to higher airfares and they look further afield to places like Kazakhstan where beaches on the Caspian are in lesser demand.  Still others who would normally vacation in Europe at one or another spa now instead are driving south to Krasnodar, making many stops in historic towns along the way. One friend just came back from Kostroma, where she was delighted to discover a local cheese producer whose wares rival what we see around us in Belgium; in short, a pre-Revolutionary tradition has been successfully revived.

In the countryside, our neighbors are busy tending their greenhouses and harvesting daily their wonderful Bio quality tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and the like.  The mood is of greater solidarity and sociality than we have seen before in our ten years on the land.  We were given buckets of vegetables by neighbors on both sides, which was a surprise and a pleasure.

Crossing the border into Russia from Finland, 14 July 2022

Departure of our bus from Vantaa airport, Helsinki was on time,  and our arrival in St Petersburg was 45 minutes ahead of schedule, for a total travel time of 7 hours, of which 1.5 hours was spent crossing at customs and passport control on both sides of  the frontier.

Every seat in the bus was taken. Of the 50 passengers, I was the only foreigner. This became clear when the driver asked foreigners to step forward to be presented to a Russian border official – for the purpose of checking on the mandatory PCR test result.  

The time going through Finnish control, meaning presenting our passports inside their administrative building, was less than half an hour. The building itself is state of the art, much superior to the Estonian border facility we passed through on our last trip.  But then at this Finnish border the Russian administration is also a modern and spacious building, However, on the Russian side the checking is redundant and aggressive. Once we are processed, including x-ray inspection of all our luggage, we were then checked again to see that the date stamp was properly entered in our passports, and this was repeated twice more before our bus was allowed to move on.  Meanwhile while we were waiting, we watched the inspection of the bus itself, which included the requirement that the engine compartment be opened for checking. Were they looking for stowaways going into Russia? More likely they are trying to break narcotics smuggling. That would fit the other ‘show’ to which we passengers were treated:  a couple of German shepherds were put through their attack paces just outside our waiting room.  The bureaucracy is working overtime to put in controls. It begins to look like the Soviet Union all over again.

Otherwise, the bus trip here from Helsinki allowed me to see firsthand the enormous engineering and construction project now proceeding at full speed from the Finnish border down to the city of Vyborg, about an hour’s drive to the southeast. The scale of the project is stunning and includes putting in electricity lines and construction of side roads going off into the forest.   Our bus driver told me it is an extension of the “Scandinavia” highway, the first fully modern, international standard throughway in northwest Russia, built 20 years ago from the outskirts of St Petersburg up to Vyborg.   Completion is scheduled for 2024.

Considering the rupture in relations with Finland over the past several months, considering that there are today virtually no semi-trailers at the border on either side, you have to ask why the Russians are continuing the construction at this level of intensity and cost. 

I see two possible answers.  1. They believe the rupture will be short-lived and normal commercial exchange will resume before the completion date of the highway or  2.  They are preparing for war with Finland/NATO and this new highway will greatly simplify logistics for heavy Russian equipment going up to the 1,000 km shared border.

I mention in passing that the original Scandinavia highway has also been modernized in its full original length, meaning state of the art lighting and the addition of sound buffer screens where it passes through settlements. Moreover, it has been extended south into the city proper and connected with the arterial roads and bridges that the city built in preparation for the FIFA games three years ago. Thus you now pass over the southern tip of Vasilievsky Island and the roadway descends to ground level only when it overpasses the Port with its shipbuilding wharves and views of the broader harbor. The roadway is spectacular and fitting for the country’s second most populous municipality.

Friday, 15 July, St Petersburg

Local media report that more than 5,000 people crossed the border into Finland today, the first day that the Russians dropped the travel restrictions they imposed shortly after the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic in March 2020.

The balance of traffic was 60% from Russia to Finland and 40% going the other way.  The border service noted that most Russians were traveling to Finland for tourism or shopping, some to check on their property in Finland. Finns were crossing into Russia to fill up with cheap gasoline.

Separately, the Finnish embassy in Moscow announced that from the moment when the Corona virus restrictions were lifted by the Russians they received around 59,000 visa applications.  In all of 2021 they received a total of 46,000 applications.

A surprise awaited us as we entered our apartment house in the southern St Petersburg borough of Pushkin:  a notice on the door informed us that the annual shutdown of the central hot water boiler serving our neighborhood has come and there will be no hot water from the 14^th through 27^th July.  Here was proof positive that you don’t have to be German in this period to limit your showers to four strategic parts of the body.  This annual timing may also explain why so many of our neighbors in the building have chosen to leave town for their dachas or for other vacation destinations right now.

Sunday, 17 July, Orlino

The online  “Morning Briefing”  of today’s New York Times carries the news of Zelensky’s firing his prosecutor general and intelligence chief, calling it the most important shake-up in the government since the start of the Russian invasion.

The newspaper repeats Zelensky’s allegation that he took the decision due to “a large number of treason investigations that were opened into employees of law enforcement agencies.” The changes are said to have the approval of American officials, who now expect the Ukrainian president to put more experienced personnel in charge of key security positions. As The Times article further explains, “the firing of Ivan Bakanov, the leader of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency and a childhood friend of the president’s, was not because of any mishandling of intelligence or any major penetration of Ukraine’s intelligence services by Russia.”

Quite separately, NYT also reports today on a Russian missile attack on Vinnitsa, where it says 23 people died including a 4 year old child with Down’s syndrome. Meanwhile, http://www.yandex.ru tells me that the Russian military command on Sunday reported that their missile strike in Vinnitsa was directed at the Officers’ Club, where it killed senior military officers of the Ukrainian air command together with high level NATO personnel who had come to a meeting to discuss Western shipments of aircraft to Ukraine. I juxtapose these accounts to highlight the propagandistic editorial manipulation of news by The New York Times. Yes, separate facts are reported, but their causal relationship is utterly ignored for running counter to the official Washington narrative. Linking the stories leads without fail to the conclusion that the shake-up of the intelligence services in Kiev was directed from Washington, which was licking its wounds over the death of high ranking personnel due to intelligence leaks which Kiev could not thwart. By the way, here at the dacha our no-fee satellite tv receiver still provides the Bloomberg and BBC News channels in English.  However, contrary to common sense logic, the Russian state television channels which the pan-European satellite operator Eutelsat dropped on 15 June no longer are accessible here on my receiver.  This is very disappointing.  So here in the Russian countryside I do as in Brussels and watch Russian news on www.smotrim.ru.  However, I am assured that Russia’s largest satellite television operator, Trikolor TV, which has more than 12 million subscribers across the country, continues to offer its paying clientele all Russian channels, though foreign broadcasters like National Geographic, Discovery Channel, the Disney Channel as well as the BBC and other international stations are no longer available.   Wednesday, 20 July, Orlino The Financial Times and other Western media discuss Sergei Lavrov’s interview with RT and indications that Russia is preparing the territory it occupies for annexation. Plans to hold referendums make this very clear.  So was I wrong to propose a month ago that Russia would not annex the newly liberated territories if in exchange the West lifted sanctions?    The latter question was answered by Scholz in the past few days when he said that a peace with Ukraine on Russian terms would not lead to lifting of sanctions.    Moreover, Russian objectives have been changing in keeping with the changing level of US and Western equipment being supplied to Ukraine. The delivery of the HIMARS multiple rocket launchers with 80 km range has been a game changer, but not in the sense meant in Washington.

Monday, 25 July, St Petersburg

Last night’s “Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov” was enlightening.  The mood was optimistic that Russian military superiority will prove itself on the Ukrainian battlefield.  Let the Americans send in their F16s (they dare not send in more recent fighter jets) and we will just shoot them down, given the edge of our latest generation fighters.  What we need now is to concentrate on those NATO members which are supplying the preponderant majority of arms to Ukraine:  the USA and the UK.  See the need to destroy satellites in Musk’s system, which are relaying real time positioning of Russian forces to the Ukrainians. The United States will begin to worry only when we threaten their territory, and their weakest link is Alaska. 

The Russian war aims are ratcheted up with each escalation of the heavy equipment the US is dispatching to Ukraine. HIMARS was a turning point.  The Russian logic is:  as the Ukrainians are given increasingly long range missile systems, we have to push the borders back to the West so they cannot threaten our civilians as they are doing now.    

The Russians are now issuing passports in Kharkiv!  The city, the second largest in Ukraine, will surely fall to Russian forces.  They are moving on Odessa.  Transdnistria is appealing to Russia for annexation.    It is a foregone conclusion that in several months the Russians will reach end game and take the entire Black Sea coast, making Ukraine a landlocked and mainly agricultural country.  They will also dictate terms on completion of demilitarization and denazification.  The demilitarization is already proceeding at a fast place.  The missile attacks on local command cetnters across Ukraine is liquidating the officer class and most experienced soldiers. What is left will be rabble.

The Solovyov show made a big issue of the visit to Moscow this past week by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Hungary, who came begging for increased deliveries of Russian gas to Hungary, saying that realism shows there is no alternative today to Russian energy resources. His arrival speech and his speech at the closing press conference were shown on the screen.  Pleading, begging.  Lavrov responded by saying we will consider this request with the utmost speed. 

The panelists asked whether Orban will survive some US led attack on him for this betrayal. Maybe there will be a political attack, maybe physical liquidation.

The panelists also note Hungary’s contempt for Kiev over its Ukrainization policies with respect to the Hungarian ethnic minority in their western borderlands. There we see exactly the same criminalization of the use of Hungarian language as is applied to Russian speakers.  The Kiev nationalists are suicidal madmen. In this respect, indeed they are true to the Hitler cult.

 Friday, 22 July, Orlino

Sergei Brillyov, host to the “News on Saturday” weekly program and member of the board of Russian state television news reporting, who has been on leave since shortly after the start of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, and is now doing spot reporting from South America, announced he is quitting the Russian news service and will take up special documentary film projects as an independent.  Brillyov has a British passport; his family is long established in Britain.  Here is one more leading case of a prominent personality finding it impossible to sit on two chairs any longer. To put it starkly, as George Bush said during the Iraq war,’you are either with us or you are against us.’

Saturday, 23 July, Orlino

A Russian missile attack on Odessa is denounced by Western media as showing contempt for the just concluded Ukraine-Russia-Turkey agreement on resumption of grain exports brokered by the United Nations.

Sunday, 24 July, Orlino

One news item of the day catches my attention:  Russia and Israel are in open dispute over the Kremlin’s recent announcement of plans to close down the Sokhnut agency which is charged with recruiting Russian Jews for ‘repatriation.’

The issue seems not to have been picked up by Western mainstream media.  It is a landmine, and yet I feel compelled to take a position on it based on what I perceive are the underlying factors that have influenced the Kremlin’s decision.

The question is not Israel per se but Zionism and how it contradicts the Kremlin’s definition of what the Russian Federation is all about.  Vladimir Putin has in recent months repeatedly stressed the multinational, multi-creed, multi-ethnic nature of Russia. This has been particularly underlined in the reports on heroism of RF soldiers in the field in Ukraine, many of them coming from minority peoples and coincidentally from  Russia’s Muslim population. 

The question of closing Sokhnut will be decided by the Basmanny Court in Moscow.  Though the government has not divulged its reasons for seeking the closure, it is rumored that the case against the agency includes its comments on war crimes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine and violation of Russian laws governing personal information about citizens.

Other news today concerns official Russian military denials that the missile strike in Odessa yesterday was directed against civilian infrastructure or against the grain loading facilities. They struck a Ukrainian naval vessel and a storehouse of U.S. Harpoon missiles. Such attacks do not violate the terms of the signed agreement over grain shipping from Ukraine, say the Russians.

Monday, 25 July, Orlino

The warming in relations with neighbors on both sides of our property continues.  Yesterday I had a lengthy chat with one over taming nature on our farms, the lives of trees and so forth. Later they invited Larisa to join them for some watermelon.   Then today as I walked by the fence on the other side, I was summoned by the wife of the second in command to the owner, her mother in law.  “Hey, neighbor. Come here.  Take this bucket of cucumbers!  This morning we went through our vegetable garden and found that we have four buckets of them.  We can’t possibly eat them all.  My mother in law said – take them to the market to sell. But that is not for us.  So please accept this.”  I did and she waited for me to return with the empty bucket.

Thursday, 28 July  St Petersburg

We go into Petersburg for a number of tasks and find ourselves stuck in traffic as the Full Repetition for the Naval Parade on the Neva takes place and shuts access to Nevsky Prospekt for several hours till 2 pm. On the brighter side, this gives us more time to chat with our regular driver, Andrei, who has just returned from his 10 day unpaid summer vacation which he spent at his mother’s country house to the south of Petersburg, past our own village.  In that time, he went fishing daily and caught a total of 150 fish which he immediately cleaned and salted, and is now hanging out to dry in the back yard of his house. The result will be what the Russians call vobly, an essential accompaniment to a stein of beer.

Andrei explains to us that a lot of VIPs from Moscow will come for the naval parade. Of course, Putin will be there,  but it is also very likely Medvedev will make the trip. After all, he very discretely keeps a house in the St Petersburg area. Moreover, there may well be a visit of the Patriarch to our borough of Pushkin, where from time to time he appears at the Federovsky Sobor, a church constructed in 1909-12 at the orders of Emperor Nicholas II in honor of his cavalry regiment. It bears mention that the nearby Federovsky Gorodok is being restored as a patriarchal residence. The Gorodok was initially built to house those serving the Sobor.  What liturgical obligations the Patriarch may perform in Petersburg on Navy Day have not yet been announced.

Friday, 29 July, Pushkin

We made a trip into Petersburg for talks at the Palace of Grand Prince Vladimir Aleksandrovich, which for many years in the Soviet period served as the House of Scholars. We completed our reservation of their ground floor dining rooms facing the Neva at the level of the Peter and Paul Fortress for 19 September. The views are wonderful and the building itself is a remarkable architectural monument to the imperial age, which justifiably takes visitors on paid tours of the premises on several floors.

I had first visited this palace when I was courting my Russian bride and her father’s membership was our entry ticket. It is wonderful to return now as the venue for our banquet celebrating fifty years of matrimony.   This will be the follow-on to a second taking of vows in the very same Wedding Palace on the English Embankment where in September 1972 we were married.  The American consul had then been the witness signatory and we had our little party in his apartment.  The forthcoming event hopefully will be witnessed by assorted friends from all walks of life, meaning a stage director and a soloist from the Mariinsky Theater, some childhood friends of my wife, our trusted guardian and repairman of our Orlino dacha, our publishers in Petersburg and others.  The opportunity to rent these historic premises to host 15 guests at a price that is not ruinous is typical of what has been and remains so endearing to us about this city and country. Indeed, if we were a simple Russian-Russian couple, nearly all the costs of the celebration would be compensated by a grant from the city authorities.

Sunday, 31 July,  Orlino

We watch the television broadcast of the Navy Day parade on the Neva which Putin oversees. It does not rain on Russian parades!  Beautiful clear skies are the order of the day. The display of ships is very interesting – many of the latest surface and submarine craft are on the Neva river and harbor; others are in the Kronstadt harbor.  Nearly all are relatively small but packed with weaponry and electronic gear. Most of them have cruise missiles – vertical launch Kalibri. The corvette Admiral Gorshkov has the new hypersonic missile Zircon, which has 8 Mach speed and a range of 1,000 km. Stationing off the US coast would give it five minute flying time to Washington, D.C.

Putin makes a short speech from the reviewing stand.  It focuses on the history of the fleet and the valor, bravery of the crews and their commanders. It is a dignified speech. There is no reference to international affairs, no threats to anyone.  Simply the fleet is there to safeguard Russia’s sovereignty and interests. He speaks of Petersburg as “the naval capital of Russia.”  

Note that among the places where Russia is staging naval parades today are Vladivostok, Sevastopol, a Caspian Sea port, and there is also Tartus in Syria!

Before the start of the naval parade, in the Peter and Paul fortress Putin signs a new Naval Doctrine which takes into consideration the challenges of the new sanctions against Russia and global geopolitics. It places priority on the Arctic. It emphasizes that Russia operates in all the world’s oceans.  It states that Russia will be increasing its shipbuilding capabilities, in Vladivostok and elsewhere.  And it mentions that Russia will build an aircraft carrier.

Otherwise, I took my final swim in Orlino lake this visit.  Folk wisdom holds that autumn begins on 1 August and from that day you do not go swimming since the water temperature drops steadily. Already today I feel that the lake temperature has dropped a degree or two, down to the barely acceptable level of 19 degrees.

Monday, 1 August,  Orlino – St Petersburg

The news continues to feature calls for an investigation into the bombing of a prisoner of war installation in Donbas where several hundred Ukrainian fighters who surrendered at the end of the Azovstal siege were being held for interrogation.  A missile struck the facility in the middle of the night killing 53 detainees outright and injuring another 90 or so out of the 200 kept in the dormitory that was struck.  Among the victims were Azov Battalion members. 

Zelensky claims the Russians did this and calls for an international investigation into the war crime.  This was picked up and rebroadcast by mainstream Western media. The complete illogic of such claims has gone past nearly all journalists. One need only consider who had an interest in preventing these POWs from talking about their crimes.

Also today Algeria announced its interest in joining BRICS.  This joins numerous other announcements of candidacy for both BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.  Taken all together, it spells the end of US-European global domination.  And to whom do we owe this very promising reordering of the global landscape?  To Putin and the ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

My three weeks of vacation in the Russian countryside south of St Petersburg come to an end tomorrow and by Thursday I expect to publish my day by day notes for this period.  In the meantime, I offer the link to a panel discussion on Iran’s Press TV in which I participated a couple of days ago. The subject was the ECB’s latest decision to raise interest rates to combat rampant inflation throughout the Eurozone. The inflation is in large part due to the anti-Russian sanctions which Europe imposed on energy exports from Russia, and so that policy also featured in the program.

 You will note that my hosts assumed I was speaking to them from Brussels when in fact I was in my Petersburg apartment at the time. Thanks to 5G capable fiber optic cable now installed in our apartment complex the broadcast quality is indistinguishable from what it would have been speaking from Brussels.

http://www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/114094

On 3 July, we lost one of our closest friends in Brussels, Sergei Leshchenko, who died at age 73, ‘following a long illness,’ as they say. We were present at the onset of that illness, about seven years ago, when we drove him to an out of town hospital for prostate cancer surgery. We heard about the delivery of his death sentence 18 months ago, when he was diagnosed with stage four cancer. The cancer had come back unexpectedly and metastasized. And this past Monday we took part in his funeral at the main Russian Orthodox church in Brussels, St. Job, situated a few hundred meters from the Russian embassy, where his passport had been renewed periodically over the years.

Yes, Sergei was Russian. Very Russian in his zest for life, extravagant risk taking and monomania for his chosen profession, music, the piano to be specific.  Indeed, music was his true nationality whatever other passports he held.  Music had taken him to Cuba in the Soviet days, when for several years he held an appointment as music teacher at the Soviet embassy. He fell in love with the tropics and late colonial life, had the Latin mistresses that so many Russian males dreamed of in the distressed 1990s.  It led him to his third and final wife, a Brazilian, and to travels in the Amazon, where he swam in rivers infested with poisonous fish and life-threatening reptiles without a care in the world.

In terms of professional achievement, Sergei retired several years ago from a career of teaching at the Conservatory of Brussels. He prepared more than one generation of students of the piano, both at the Conservatory and in private lessons. Some became candidates in international competitions. He gave annual master classes in northern Italy and Germany.  He helped his own daughter, Polina, to develop an international career as soloist. She performs across the globe under her maiden name and she has numerous recordings.

In his own family, Sergei embodied the multinational, multiethnic Russia that Vladimir Putin speaks so often about. His family name was, of course, Ukrainian, though I know nothing about that distant past. Sergei’s immediate family came from Moscow, where his father was a leading ophthalmologist, practicing his specialty there into his early 90s in the new millennium.

During the Second World War, like many Muscovites, the Leshchenko family was evacuated to Central Asia for safety reasons and in 1948 Sergei was born in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where he grew up.

Sergei’s first two wives were Jewish. The first remained in Petersburg after their divorce. The second lived with him abroad, settling ultimately in Belgium after a stay of several years in Israel.

After music, Sergei’s greatest passion and indulgence was forest mushrooms. Year after year, we joined him on mushroom hunting expeditions, mostly in the Flemish lands around the industrial town of Genk, best known to the general public for its Ford factory. We knew it better for its fields of cêpes and other prized funghi.   Sergei went through the forest like a vacuum cleaner, picking up varieties we would never touch.  He alone knew how to disarm their toxins and enjoy the flesh, whether sautéed or, more commonly, in rich soups to which he treated his dinner guests.

A Dieu, Sergei.  Till we meet again, as I know we shall.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Thanks to the efforts of sympathetic account holders with youtube.com, some RT shows are accessible on the platform, notwithtanding the closure of RT’s own account in the days following the start of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.

Accordingly, I invite you to view yesterday’s Cross Talk show entitled “The Russia-West Split” in which I had the pleasure of participating with a couple of outstanding panelists under the guidance of the show’s moderator and host, Peter Lavelle.0:5 / 24:57

I also note that the following previously aired RT program fits nicely back to back with the show of yesterday.  “Russia and Europe: The Closing Window”.  That was taped just as Russia was celebrating the 350^th anniversary of the birth of Peter the Great.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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