In the past few weeks, I have commented several times on the way Western media and politicians either overlook or fail to understand the Russian Way of War as implemented presently during the military operation in Ukraine. They judge the success or failure of the Russians by what the U.S. Armed Forces would do if their objective were to subdue Kiev. With no ‘shock and awe’ opening by the Russians and considering the very slow progress of their move to free the entire Donbas region from Ukrainian control, Western commentators consider the Russian effort a failure.

Perhaps the most extreme analysis and most dangerous conclusions were presented on 6 May by a British journalist who has for decades written about Russia and is widely considered to be an expert, Mary Dejevsky.  Her article in The Independent was given a heading that almost says it all: “By hyping up the Russia threat, the west helped ignite this war. It turns out that Russia had a far more realistic idea of its own strength, or lack of it, than the west allowed.” 

In the body of the article, Dejevsky takes us back to the days of the USSR, which despite its faltering economy in the Gorbachev years was considered in the West to be a military powerhouse. The country’s poor performance in the Afghanistan war and then the total collapse of the Soviet Union forced a revision of the mistaken notion of a military threat from Moscow. 

Now again, she believes the West has overrated Russia’s arms.  She supposes that the arms manufacturers in the West have a vested interest in perpetuating the myth. However, Russia’s poor results against the Ukrainian forces, which have been trained and supplied by the West, compels us to think again.

Unfortunately, Dejevsky goes beyond this observation, which is shared by all too many Western commentators. Her concluding paragraph merits full quotation:

“The west fatally misread a weak state as a strong state, meaning that its attempts to second-guess Russia’s behavior largely misfired. If there is to be any new relationship between the west and Russia – which is unlikely to be very soon – the west must start with this basic reassessment. It must accept that Russia is a weak state, and that the west and Nato are strong.”

Quite amazing that she does not see what is right in front of her nose. About Russian military strength, the fact that Russia now occupies a part of the Ukraine bigger than the United Kingdom thanks to its advances in the ‘special military operation’ somehow does not register. As for economic strength, it is also amazing how blind she is: the market economy of Russia today is vastly more resilient than the command economy of the USSR. Indeed, no other country on earth could have withstood the ‘sanctions from hell’ that the USA has imposed on Russia since 24 February.

But my key point is that if Russia is deemed to be weak, then American and EU pressure will have no limits and will precipitate a reaction from the Kremlin that takes us straight to Armageddon. Vladimir Putin has threatened precisely this and he is, above all, a man of his word.

                                                                        *****

Now I would like to direct attention to delusional thinking on the Russian side that may in its own way head them and us to Judgment Day. The material for my commentary is a front page feature article on today’s online edition of Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a high quality pro-Kremlin newspaper.

Pride of place in the right column is an interview with Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation. His position may be likened to that of Jake Sullivan in the USA. He surely has the ear of Vladimir Vladimirovich and what he says in this interview should worry us all.

Patrushev opens by stressing that the root evil in present world crises as in the past is Washington’s striving to consolidate its global hegemony and to prevent the collapse of the unipolar world.

“The USA does everything to ensure that other centers of the multipolar world do not dare raise their heads. However, our country not only dared but declared for everyone to hear that it will not play according to imposed rules. They have tried to force Russia to renounce its sovereignty, its self-awareness, its culture and its independent foreign and domestic policy. We have no right to agree with this approach.”

So far, so good. I broadly agree with Patrushev on the foregoing.  But the problems begin as he proceeds, in particular his expectations of what the future holds for Europe:

“What awaits Europe is a deep economic and political crisis for the various countries. Growth of inflation and lowering standards of living already are making themselves felt on the pocketbook and in the mood of Europeans. Moreover, large-scale immigration adds to the old threats to security. Almost 5 million Ukrainian migrants already arrived in Europe. In the near future, their numbers will grow to 10 million. The majority of the Ukrainians arriving in Europe expect Europeans to maintain and look after them, but when they are forced to work, they begin to rebel.”

Patrushev goes on to forecast food shortages that will push tens of millions of people in Africa and the Near East to the edge of starvation. To live on, they will try to reach Europe.

He concludes: “I am not certain that Europe will survive this crisis. The political institutions, supranational associations, economy, culture, traditions may all recede into the past. Europe will be gnawing at its knuckles, while America will be rid of its main geopolitical fear – a political alliance between Russia and Europe.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Patrushev is confusing what he would like to see happen with what indeed will probably happen. Intellectually mediocre, conformist and slavish in their pandering to the American overlords as the leaders of the EU Member States and EU central institutions may be, they are unlikely to lose political control at home. Their instinct for survival is not that far gone yet. Moreover, passivity and indifference to the political class are the rule in most of Europe. What the highly unpopular Emanuel Macron just achieved in winning reelection is proof positive of that reality.

Patrushev’s belief in Western weakness is as fraught with danger as the notion among the U.S. and European political establishment that Russia is weak.  These misconceptions easily lead to reckless policies of brinkmanship.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

In my Memoirs of a Russianist: Volume II, Russia in the Roaring 1990s* published in February 2021, my diary entries from the period 1998-2000 devote a good deal of attention to the exodus of Western businesses from Russia following the default of August 1998.  In the preceding five years, the number of companies setting up business in Russia and their headcounts in country had grown by leaps and bounds, to the point where there were 50,000 expats and their families in Moscow alone. In the year following the default, the expat population fell by more than 50%.

 Most small and medium sized foreign companies that, in fact, lacked the resources to get their arms around the huge and complex Russian market threw in the towel.  Large multinational corporations nearly all stayed on, but they halted all further investments in the country and replaced their expat managers, including those in the key positions of general director and finance director, with local staff.

In fact, the promotion of the Russian employees was for those employees a Pyrrhic victory: the departure of the expats meant that Russia was downgraded in the corporate priorities generally.  Moreover, the organizational change within Russia was often accompanied by a change in the corporations’ global marketing structure. Companies like the one I worked for at the time as general director, United Distillers & Vintners (UDV), known today as Diageo, gave a strong signal to investors that Developed Markets in Western Europe and North America now trumped the formerly hyped Emerging Markets. The latter would no longer report directly to senior management in headquarters as had been the case hitherto but would instead be subordinated to individual Key Markets. This had the advantage of burying losses in places like Russia within the performance reports of large, established and profitable markets.

I have had reason to think over these issues as we all have read in mainstream media about the closures of the Russian operations of most U.S., European and even Japanese and Korean corporations in the weeks following the start of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine in February. 

Whatever the wishes of senior management, today the practicalities of doing business dictated at least a temporary suspension of operations in Russia for the very same reasons as I saw around me in 1998: a collapsed ruble exchange rate followed by great volatility and a compromised banking system. The challenges facing any company running a business entailing importation of finished goods or components from abroad were as great in February 2022 as in September 1998. Thus, at a minimum one had to expect suspension of business activity. 

What has changed is the way the 2022 crisis has been driven by geopolitics at the level of Western governments imposing sanctions on Russia and at the level of society in the West, where the ‘cancel Russia’ movement has been promoted by the media. These are factors that skittish business executives could not ignore. Hence, the widespread decision of very big corporations in 2022 not merely to suspend operations but to close down altogether and exit the country.

Does this make sense in the medium and long term?  When may these companies reconsider their decision and try to reenter the market? What does the temporary or permanent departure of Western companies mean for Russian firms that may be tempted to fill the void?  In what follows, I will try to answer each of these questions.

In conclusion, I will offer a personal observation on the cycles of construction and destruction in business life.

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Does the departure of major corporations from the Russian market now make sense in the medium and long term? 

To be sure, the Russian market lost its appeal for Western business executives long ago following a series of severe shocks. The default of 1998 under President Yeltsin was the first. The second came in 2008 during the global recession triggered by the failure of Lehman brothers in the United States and the toxic assets of mortgage loans that had been securitized and sold worldwide by American banks: the Russian economy, alongside other Emerging Markets experienced a very big setback. Then came 2014 when the first hard sanctions were imposed on Russia by the USA and the European Union following the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s intervention in the Ukrainian civil war. 

For some industries, for example beer brewing, which has been wholly dominated in Russia by AB InBev, Carlson and a very few other global players, the general rush for the exit in February may have given them a pretext to close what had long ceased to be the money spinners they had hoped for. For other multinationals, like Apple, the share of Russia’s contribution to sales and profit may have been no greater than 1%, so the withdrawal from the market falls within the normal accounting margin of error and could be taken without any adverse impact on share values while resulting in good PR. For still other companies like the international banks operating on the Russian market in consumer banking, the pull-out from Russia entails sustaining substantial pain and multibillion dollar losses.

The decisions taken now with so few apparent reservations or second thoughts represent a total write-off of major investments of senior management time and capital over the past 25 years from when all of global business was knocking at Russia’s front door to get in.  As regards consumer goods manufacturers in particular, they also are writing off the possible future rise of the Russian economy and purchasing power in a country of 150 million citizens as it undergoes reindustrialization through government supported import substitution. Vast numbers of good paying high-tech jobs will be created.

When and under what conditions are the companies leaving the market today likely to make a reentry try and what obstacles will they face?  From my experience as someone who reported to top management in London headquarters of multinational corporations, I find it hard to imagine that those leaving today will be ready to reconsider resuming activity in Russia in less than five years.  The decision to leave is taken at the CEO or Chairman level and no Vice President with regional responsibility will dare come back to them with proposals to reverse such decisions any time soon, since it would be the equivalent of denying the correctness of the decision to leave.

Nature abhors a vacuum and in the meantime, one way or another it is highly likely that the place of those departing will be filled by other companies, first and foremost by Russians.  All of which brings us to the question of why the foreign companies have dominated so many sectors of the Russian economy. This is something I witnessed back in the 1990s when the Western businesses were first being set up in Russia. The key lever back then was working capital, which the Western companies had and which existing Russian companies or entrepreneurs did not have. Western industrial and consumer goods may have been better than their Russian equivalents, but that was not the decisive issue.  Western goods were offered to wholesalers and retailers either on consignment or on generous credit terms that the Russian manufacturers could not match.  An additional advantage of the major Western brands was their marketing and advertising skills.

Today, when Western companies leave, there will be many Russian companies of long standing as well as start-ups that will, with government assistance, have the working capital essential to make a go of it. And once they are entrenched in any given industrial sector, it will be hard for any foreign company seeking to reenter the market to gain traction.

Secondarily, the place of many Western manufacturers in the Russian market may be taken by Chinese and other non-Western corporations who have political backing and see business opportunities in Russia that did not exist for them until now, when global competitors have left the field.

                                                                         *****

In a week or two, I will be making an hour-long presentation of my Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s on a St Petersburg radio show called “The History Club.”  Back in November 2021, which is when this should have taken place had there been no new wave of omicron, I had a story to tell about the construction of the Western business presence in Russia which I participated in during the 1990s. This was a story that had its positive and negative sides.  Some of the companies at the time, such as the intermodal shipping and railway logistics company SeaLand, made a very positive contribution to Russia’s infrastructure while also making a handsome profit on their investment. I knew their story from the inside having been the lead candidate to replace their Russian manager.  Other companies were ill-adapted to achieve much in Russia because their internal political wars between the field and the headquarters precluded taking business decisions on the basis of objective profit and loss analysis as opposed to the interests of individual company officers. I knew such companies from having worked in them. Yet, on balance, I think more benefit came from the presence of Western companies in Russia than the damage that the blundering of some caused. A generation of Russian managers was trained in what had been until then alien business concepts and practices.

As I prepare for my radio talk, I find that the subject at hand is truly history, an age gone by. What we built in that decade and in the years since has been largely destroyed in the past few weeks, as Western companies have pulled up stakes. This is sad, but not tragic.  It is a good reminder that nothing is forever, that change is the only constant in our lives.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

P.S., 29 June 2022: I was amused to read yesterday that my employer in Moscow from 1998 – 2000, the world’s largest wine and spirits company, Diageo, headquartered in the U.K. have just announced their plans to shut down their operations in Russia over the coming six months. The 299 company employees of their Representative Office in Russia will be offered redundancy settlements. This is an outcome which we came very close to implementing in 1998 following Russia’s default in the midst of economic collapse.

In the past couple of days, there were two major diplomatic scandals at the international level. One concerns the Ukrainian ambassador to Berlin, who grossly insulted the Chancellor.  The other concerns Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov’s offhand remarks in an interview regarding anti-Semitism, which immediately riled the political establishment in Israel. Though both incidents have been featured in news bulletins, neither has been approached from the angle of investigative journalism.

When Ambassador Andrij Melnyk accused Olaf Scholz of behaving like “an offended liver sausage” for refusing to visit Kyiv, that caught the attention of not only German media, but global media. The term “offended liver sausage” may have seemed peculiar to English speakers, but it clearly was not meant as a compliment.

The Daily Beast went further than most of the press in identifying the term as a German colloquialism “commonly employed to describe someone as a prima donna.” They connected this insult to the head of government with a tit-for-tat by the Chancellor:  in the preceding month, Zelensky had refused to receive German head of state Frank-Walter Steinmeier because of his past close ties to Moscow and this motivated Scholz’s decision not to go.

However, the nominally investigative journalists of The Daily Beast looked no further. Neither this paper nor mainstream has asked and then answered persuasively why Kiev would intentionally offend the most powerful country within the EU, upon whom it greatly depends for military and economic assistance. Some put it down to the ambassador’s personal views. Others are simply confounded.  No one has considered that the spat Kiev’s man on the spot has initiated with Scholz might be a calculated intervention in German domestic politics, with a view to pushing the indecisive Scholz out of power.  The Chancellor is known to be under threat from other members of his own party and from coalition partners who would gladly replace him with someone more committed to helping the Ukrainian cause with action and not just words.

The case of Lavrov’s remarks about Jews and anti-Semitism has received even less penetrating analysis.  He is quoted in the press as having said that Hitler also had Jewish blood and that the worst anti-Semites are found among Jews.  These words were instantly denounced by the Israeli government, which called for an apology.

The Western press was equally quick to remark how Lavrov had precipitated what can only be a cooling of relations with Israel. Jerusalem would now surely abandon its claims to be an honest broker and would align itself more closely with Kiev. In Washington and London, editors were gleeful.

However, no one asked the question which begs to be addressed: how, why would Sergei Lavrov, who is surely the most experienced diplomat on the world stage, make remarks that could only do damage to Russian-Israeli relations?

I admit that there is an innocuous explanation. Lavrov intended his words as a counter to Western denial that Kiev is a Nazi-dominated regime on grounds that President Zelensky himself is Jewish. But Lavrov had to be aware how Jerusalem would react to his words, so we should look further.

Let me hazard a guess.  Lavrov knew well what he was doing and probably had discussed this subject with his boss, Vladimir Vladimirovich, before he opened his mouth.

The Russians are very dissatisfied with Israel over its past military cooperation with Ukraine, and Lavrov’s statement was only the opening round. If we go back to the very first days of Russia’s ‘special military operation,’ when they took control of the Zaporozhye nuclear power station and seized there documents relating to Ukraine’s efforts to build a ‘dirty nuclear weapon,’ the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that there were foreign enablers active there.  Then the next day, unexpectedly and in great haste, Israeli Prime Minister Bennett flew to Moscow for unscheduled talks with Putin.  Almost nothing was disclosed about the subject of their talks. But subsequently the foreign enablers were never identified by the Russians.

Though I have been praised by some readers for avoiding ‘speculation,’ I will permit myself just this once to speculate:  it is not inconceivable that the Israelis were among the key advisers to Kiev on its program to build nuclear weapons.  If that is so, we may expect Russian-Israeli relations to get a lot worse in the coming weeks and months.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Ideological blinkers prevent a correct U.S. assessment of the Russian successes in the Ukraine war, of the likely outcomes and of what to do now

Yesterday’s edition of the premier Sunday news wrap-up on Russian state television, Vesti nedeli, hosted by Dmitry Kiselyov,  marked a turning point in what the Russians are saying officially about their achievements on the ground in Ukraine. It set me to thinking over why Washington is getting it all wrong and how America’s ideological blinkers may lead to very unfortunate consequences on a global level.

Up until now, Russian news has been very quiet about the country’s military achievements in Ukraine. The daily briefings of Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov have only given summary figures on the planes, tanks and other armored vehicles, command centers in Ukraine that were destroyed by high precision Russian missiles plus the names of towns that were taken, without elaborating on their strategic or other value.  Otherwise, Russian television programming has been showing only the damage inflicted daily by Ukrainian forces on the city of Donetsk and its suburbs from artillery and Tochka U missile strikes. There is a steady toll of destroyed homes, hospitals, schools and loss of civilian lives. The sense of this programming is clear: explaining again and again to the Russian audience why we are there.

Yesterday’s News of the Week devoted more than 45 minutes to Russian military operations on the ground. The message has changed to what we are doing there. Television viewers were led by the Rossiya team of war zone reporters through the wrecked forests and fields of the Kharkov oblast in northeastern Ukraine as well as in newly liberated parts of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Filming from an armored all-terrain vehicle, they showed us kilometers long stretches of burned out Ukrainian tanks and other heavy military gear as well as dozens and dozens of corpses of Ukrainian soldiers “killed in action” and left behind to rot by their fast retreating comrades and deserters. Then came interviews with Ukrainian prisoners of war, whose faces and words tell a very different story from the heroic encomiums raining down from Zelensky and his entourage. Finally, there were interviews with some of the civilians who were let out of the Azovstal underground complex these past couple of days and made their way to freedom via the humanitarian corridor which the Russians set up each afternoon.

I will deal briefly with each of these segments from last night’s News of the Week. But first, allow me to offer two overall generalizations.

First, the Russian ‘special military operation’ is a millstone that grinds slowly but grinds fine. It is working. The Russians are crushing the Ukrainian forces.  It is improbable that any amount of deliveries of foreign equipment to Kiev can make a difference on the outcome of this conflict. Indeed, while critics of the US-led intervention in the conflict claim, correctly, that the deliveries are drawing out the war by encouraging Kiev to fight on, it is also true that the Russians have no problem with that:  the longer it goes on, the more territory they can seize, with a view to controlling and ultimately annexing the entire Black Sea littoral. They would thereby ensure that what survives of the Ukrainian state can never again pose a military threat to Russia, with or without NATO help.

Second, the Ukrainian army indeed has NATO trained officers and skilled professionals who may be admirable fighters, as the Western media insist. But it also has a lot of cannon fodder. By cannon fodder I mean overaged recruits dragooned into the forces and also volunteers who are useless to any modern military and are no longer trainable. Most of the prisoners of war shown on Russian television were in their late 50s and even late 60s; they had no prior military experience. One of the latter, with haggard face and scraggly beard down to his chest was asked why he enlisted to fight. The answer came back: “There was no work. So I signed up just to make some money.” After seeing their mates shot dead, is it any wonder that such soldiers raise their arms to surrender at the first opportunity? 

The question not being asked is where are all the young and able Ukrainian males? How have they evaded the draft?  Given the widely acknowledged corruption in Ukrainian government and society, would it not be strange if some just buy their way out of the war? Are they among the 5 million Ukrainians who have gone abroad since the start of the hostilities? Are they the ones now driving their high priced Mercedes with Ukrainian license plates around the streets of Hamburg? Who in the West records this or really cares about it?

The testimony of the prisoners of war shows that they were misled by their officers. They were told that the Russians would simply slaughter them if they showed the white flag.  The testimony of the several women who walked to freedom from the Azovstal catacombs supports the official Russian version of the situation there: they were intimidated by the nationalist warriors who used them as human shields. They were barely fed and were warned that the way out was mined so that they would die in any attempt at escape.

The advance of the Russians on the ground as they finish preparations of the cauldron or total encirclement of the major part of Ukrainian forces in the Donbas is slow, only a couple of kilometers per day. The reason was clear from the reporting last night: apart from the open fields and forests mentioned above, the Ukrainians are in well-fortified bunkers that they constructed over the past eight years and they are situated in the midst of small towns where they have to be flushed out street by street, house by house. Carpet bombing or unlimited shelling would result in heavy loss of life among the civilian population, many of whom are Russian speakers, precisely the people whom the Russians are seeking to liberate.

The reasoning underlying the Russian Way of War in Ukraine has been wholly overlooked or dismissed out of hand by official Washington. American media and senior politicians speak only of Russia’s supposed logistical problems and poor implementation of its war plans.  This is so is not because Biden’s advisers are lame-brained. It is so because of the ideological blinkers that the whole foreign policy establishment in the United States wears. The ideology may be called (Wilsonian) Idealism. It stands in contrast to Realism, which is espoused by a tiny minority of American academics.

The distinction is not mere words. It is how foreign policy issues are analyzed. It is about the creation in the United States of a post-factual world that might just as well be called a virtual world. 

Idealism in foreign policy rests on the assumption that universal principles shape societies everywhere. It systematically ignores national peculiarities, such as history, language, culture and will. By contrast, Realism is based precisely on knowledge of such specifics, which define national interests and priorities.

Under these conditions, the think tank scholars in the United States can sit at their computers and write up their evaluations of the Russian prosecution of the war in Ukraine solely on what they, the Americans and their allies, would do if they were directing the Russian military effort.  They would fight the American way, meaning a start with “shock and awe” followed by vast destruction of everything in the way of their march on the capital of the enemy state to bring about total capitulation in short order.  The reasoning of the men in the Kremlin holds no interest for them. Hence, the dead wrong conclusion that the Russians are losing the war, that Russia is not the strong military force that we feared, and that Russia can be successfully challenged and beaten down until it submits to American directions and American definitions of its national interest.

The same problem of a “virtual world” approach comes up now in the discussion among American experts of the likelihood that Putin will use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine and how the US-led West should respond.  The possibility that the Russians are winning and have no need for extreme solutions is excluded. The possibility that non-nuclear solutions like carpet bombing might be applied if the Russians genuinely were stymied is excluded.

The latest variation on Russia’s possibly escalating towards WWIII by using tactical nuclear weapons is a reaction to President Putin’s vague threat of a ‘lightning quick’ response to any sign of Western powers becoming co-belligerents by their deeds in support of Ukraine.  Curiously, the threat was deemed to mean precisely tactical nuclear attacks, not the launch of the new Sarmat hypersonic and ABM-evading ICBMs, or the dispatch of the deep-sea drone Poseidon to wash away Washington, D.C. in a nuclear explosion caused tidal wave.  In any case, the assortment of devastating new weapons systems at Russia’s disposal seems to be ignored by our policy experts. They have settled on just one, about which they speculate endlessly.

The virtual world bubble in which the U.S. foreign policy community exists and flourishes is a disaster waiting to happen.  Who will heed the wake-up call of John Mearsheimer and the few policy experts who hold up the Realpolitik standard?

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

I write to you today and for the coming month to six weeks from St Petersburg, Russia. During this stay, I will broaden my reporting from the events and media coverage of the war in Ukraine that have been my staple since 24 February to more mundane but highly relevant issues of how everyday life in Russia is going on notwithstanding the distortions caused by the West’s sanctions.

In today’s installment, I direct attention to how I got here and what I learned along the way, to the peculiarities of the present ruble-euro and ruble-dollar exchange rates and to the bread and butter issues of how the Russian food stores and markets are currently operating, meaning price inflation, changed country-suppliers and the like.

                                                                           *****          

The Covid 19 pandemic created serious barriers to travel globally, including travel from most anywhere to Russia, where issuance of visas to tourists and business visitors was suspended for 18 months starting in the late spring of 2020.  And when the Russian borders re-opened tentatively to foreigners in the late summer of 2021, that did not progress very far before the onset of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine beginning in February of this year prompted the mutual closing of airspace and cancellation of air travel between Russia and all of Europe.

For these reasons, my intended periodic visit to St Petersburg where my wife and I maintain a pied à terre, was postponed several times as we investigated exotic travel solutions after our March tickets on Finnair were cancelled by the carrier. On the advice of friends, we decided to access Russia via neighboring Estonia.

The Estonian capital is just 368 km by road from Petersburg, and much of the route in both countries is good to very good four-lane highways. The problematic part was always the border crossing. From the Russian side, the town of Ivan Gorod, you go through their passport and customs control building and then proceed over a bridge in your car, bus or on foot, crossing the Narva river to the Estonian border control in the town which shares its name with the river. There another full document check takes place, though you remain in your vehicle while frontier police take your documents for inspection in their offices.

The situation at the borders today is greatly complicated by the large flows of Ukrainian refugees on the move into Estonia that began about three weeks ago when the Russian forces besieging and attacking Mariupol completed their victory over the Azov battalion and other radical Ukrainian nationalists. The Ukrainian forces had held the city in their grip and used the civilian population numbering nearly half a million at the start of hostilities as “human shields,” or hostages in plain English. When the power of the nationalists was broken by Russian forces, humanitarian corridors heading east into Russia were opened. More than 120,000 refugees from the city and its environs were given free choice of where to head after liberation.  Some, like those we encountered at the Estonian border, decided that their safest option would be to head north through Russia to the EU Member States of Estonia and Finland.  The alternative, heading west across Ukraine, simply was deemed to be risky. This became all the more true once the Russians began bombing railway power stations a week ago, crippling the train service across Ukraine.

Be that as it may, the Ukrainian refugee crisis caught up with us Friday night on our bus trip.  An sms message from the bus operator an hour before scheduled departure time warned us that our bus was delayed and that we would be informed later when it would show up in Tallinn.  A chat with the staff of Ecolines at their offices just near the station clarified that problem:  our bus was still waiting for clearance at the Estonian-Russian border.  Meanwhile, back at the bus station we chatted with several Russian-speaking ladies who were there waiting to meet incoming Ukrainians on that very bus now delayed.  They were there to receive a party of four Ukrainian refugees from the Mariupol area. From their experience, the current delays at the border can add three to eight hours to the normal bus trip of seven hours. At the borders, each of the Ukrainian refugees leaving Russia and entering Estonia has to be interviewed to record their case, their intentions. Many are lacking proper identification papers, so their processing simply takes time.

How long this crisis will last, no one can say. But it makes the land route between Scandinavia and Russia a miserable choice.

We were lucky that our bus to Petersburg was only half filled and that among the twenty or so passengers there were only three Ukrainian refugees. They were traveling back to Russia, to the total confusion of the Estonian border police. Their story was that they had been living in the Mariupol region, where they had a farm and livestock. After eight years under the Kiev regime, they had their fill of insecurity and moved across into Russia to travel north to Scandinavia. For reasons unknown, they were denied refugee status in Estonia and now had to return to Russia, from where they probably would try another refugee route into the EU.  Their return into Russia raised more eyebrows there. The Russian border police took them off our bus for longer debriefing and that was the last we saw of them.

                                                                                   *****

Tallinn is a charming small city of 450,000 with a touristy medieval center. It is also a town where everyone in the hospitality industry and a majority of the folks enjoying the sights are Russian speakers. Most of them are in fact citizens of Estonia.

To be sure, Estonian in the only official language, but the authorities have some common sense and don’t overdo their protection of national identity:  signs in the streets urging people to register for Covid vaccinations carry Russian and English texts as well as Estonian.

Everyone identifies Petersburg with its historic imperial period city center, but that is not what you see when you arrive by bus. The city has a population ten times bigger than Tallinn. Its extensive new industrial-logistical parks and high-rise residential districts on the outskirts are strikingly modern, and you sense at once the pulse of a big lively city that operates 24/4. One hundred per cent of the folks strolling the streets are Russian speakers. These days, foreign visitors are a very rare breed.

Yesterday morning I began enjoying the full spectrum of Russian media which I had been denied in Brussels after the West lowered its Iron Curtain of censorship following the onset of the Ukraine war.  Conversely, some Western channels have been cut here in tit-for-tat measures. For example, www.news.google.ru, to which I referred readers in a recent essay, is not accessible on my computer in Petersburg, surely as a result of the ongoing Google-Russia fight. However, my staple news sources Financial Times and The New York Times are fully accessible. I still have to look into which of the global television news providers have been removed from Russian cable and satellite television and will report on that later.

I began my day listening to the radio station Business FM – Moscow over breakfast. The station offers a potpourri of news with an emphasis on economic and business issues. What caught my attention was a brief feature report on movements in the ruble-dollar and ruble-euro exchange rates.

Several weeks ago I remarked on the decision of the Bank of Russia to relax constraints on currency exchange that were imposed after the start of military action and the immediate collapse of the ruble which for several days was trading at 120 rubles to the euro. The new rules would allow Russian citizens to freely transfer hard currency to accounts abroad within certain monthly limits. They also allowed banks to sell cash, euro and dollar banknotes, to their clientele.

I wondered at the time where these banknotes would come from given that there was no longer any flow of tourists and business people carrying cash into the country. I speculated that perhaps some customers of Russian hydrocarbons in the West were quietly shipping banknotes by the plane-load to Moscow to cover current deliveries of gas and oil. A few days later, I saw reports that in fact the banks had no banknotes to sell their clients. However, at the time there was no follow-up in Russian news and I let go of the issue.

Now, the Business FM report was more detailed.  Indeed, their journalist contacted several banks and was told that they had no currency to offer their depositors. The radio station went one step further and checked to see what the actual exchange rate of the dollar and euro to the ruble might be “on the street” and how it might differ from the officially quoted rate of the Central Bank.  What they found is that the exchange rate for purchase of dollar and euro bank notes is just a few rubles more than the official rate. In other words, there is no true “black market” currency exchange. This discovery raises as many questions as it answers.

It may well be that the non-cash exchange rate of the Central Bank is an accurate measure of the strength or weakness of the ruble since it reflects mainly commercial demand of big business. In the past couple of weeks, the ruble has strengthened significantly against foreign currencies. Its present value as quoted by the Central Bank is 5-10 percent higher than before the Ukrainian crisis. The ten percent change with respect to the euro is partly explained by the collapse this past week of the euro rate to the dollar in the West. But the broader explanation is that Russian exports continue at high levels while imports from the euro and dollar zones have plummeted.

With foreign travel  for Russians to Europe now so very restricted for reasons of problematic visa issuance by the foreign consulates in Russia presently operating with greatly reduced staff, and for reasons of the very limited travel options to get to Europe, it may well be that private demand for physical cash has dried up.

I round out this discussion of the exchange rate with my personal experience yesterday at the Sberbank branch in the Petersburg district of Pushkin.  I exchanged 400 euros and received rubles at the rate of 71.49 to the euro, which is considerably worse than the Central Bank’s cross rate on the 30th of 74.56 rubles to the euro. No sooner was the transaction complete than the cashier called over to colleagues:  “I’ve got some currency!”  Obviously, I made their day.

                                                                              *****

Finally, I direct your attention to an area of reporting that I pioneered back in 2014 following the first wave of European and American sanctions: my walking tour of food product retailing in St Petersburg. Yesterday I pursued my customary visits to retailing at three levels:  what they call here “economy class” supermarket chains (in my neighborhood, a chain called “Verny”), an upmarket supermarket chain (Perekryostok), and the city market where vendors specialized in one or another food product occupy stalls or small stores (Pushkin market).

My sweeping generalization about all three categories of retailing is that they are all well stocked. The Russian consumer is spoiled for choice, as I intend to demonstrate. Price is a different matter, and I will make a first attempt at gauging inflation, nothing more than a finger to the wind, but hopefully informative, especially to those readers who only know about the Russian consumer and his/her options from highly prejudicial Western media.

I   begin with the “economy class” Verny supermarket that is just across the street from our apartment complex. This is where I buy most basic foodstuffs, and even wines, given that they have exceptionally smart buyers and sell at very fair prices.  This is the store where the value oriented and restricted budget military families who are a sub-group of our residential district do most of their shopping.

My inspection began with wines and I can report that the Spanish and Italian wines remain strongly represented and at prices unchanged from where they were on my last visit in late October.  I imagine that the warehouses of this chain and their importers have goods on hand to last several months more. These products will eventually be replaced by an enlarged assortment of Chilean, Argentinian, South African and other wines from friendly countries. Moreover, ever more shelf space will be allocated to the growing numbers of quality wines from the South of Russia and Crimea. These Russian products are today very well packaged in high quality bottles and sometimes also have good quality liquid inside.

The same stock conditions are true of detergents and other dry goods supplied by major Western consumer goods manufacturers that recently declared they are leaving Russia.  A better test of how Russia is faring under conditions of severe sanctions and embargos is fresh produce, meats and poultry, fish and the like.

The economy class supermarket still offers the meats and poultry it had before the crisis. These were then as now almost 100% Russia-sourced.  In the past year or two before the crisis, Russian producers of marbleized beefsteaks and high quality cuts of pork in special atmosphere plastic packaging had done a very good job bringing these products to all levels of retailing. Locally grown poultry was long before at a fully Western level in terms of packaging, long storage and other parameters.  The prices yesterday were not noticeably different from what I paid in the past.

As regard fresh produce, nothing much has changed.  Lettuce, small cucumbers, green onions, tomatoes have for several years now been grown in hothouses located regionally and the supply, as well as the prices remain excellent.  Russia’s advantages in gas supply, which is essential to hothouse farming, translate into stable prices even now for these vegetables, whereas in Belgium for example, cherry tomatoes recently doubled in price thanks to the rise in energy costs.

As for fruits, a very large portion of non-seasonal items was always imported.  The sanctions have had not had much of an impact on assortment. Bananas were imported from Ecuador and the fruit on display in Verny still come from there. But some other fruits are obviously coming from new supplier countries.  The kiwis are now smaller, but better than ever. Apples, conference pears (a typical export item of Belgium before 2014) and similar non-exotic fruits are all present in abundance and at seemingly unchanged prices.

The assortment of dairy products at Verny also is virtually unchanged from before the crisis. These had long been completely Russia-sourced from producers of local brands.  How long the Danone yoghurts will bear that logo remains to be seen, but the product will not disappear.

Turning to the upper middle class Perekryostok supermarket in my neighborhood, I will speak about two product categories which drew me there in the past as well:  fresh fish and the manned deli department.

The fish counter remains very attractive.  The perfectly fresh sea bass and dorade royale were and remain supplied by Turkey. They are not cheap at about 8 euros per kilogram, but that is nonetheless half the price you pay in Belgium and freshness like what I paid for yesterday is not assured even in upmarket Belgian supermarkets or at specialty fish mongers.  The usual Murmansk supplied lake trout and flounder are still fully available.  What is missing at Perekryostok now is fresh salmon.  From after 2014, when Norwegian imports were banned, the Faroe Islands (Denmark) became Russia’s main source of this farmed fish. Now they too apparently are no longer invited onto the Russian market.

The deli department at Perekryostok is totally unchanged from before the crisis. All the delicacies so beloved of Russians, in particular, Salade Olivier and other prepared appetizers are available at seemingly unchanged prices.

My remarks on “unchanged prices” will clearly need greater attention as I spend more time in stores. I am obliged to admit that my total purchases in the two aforementioned supermarkets yesterday totaled perhaps 15% more than I spent in the past, but it is difficult to compare based on just two shopping carts full.  Some food products are priced comparably to Western European prices, as was true in the past.  Some others remain well below Western prices. That is true of wines and spirits.  Premium quality Russian vodka costs less than half what the product costs in Belgium, where excise taxes are very high.

It remains for me to say a few words about the Pushkin city market, which occupies a special place in retailing. As was always the case in the distant Soviet past, such markets offer luxury products that are well beyond the pocketbook of most citizens. However, in fairness, ordinary Russians always were and are ready to spend a higher percentage of their disposable income on food and especially on exotic and pricy items for family celebrations. So it is not only plutocrats who frequent the market stalls.

What I found at the market yesterday reconfirms the high level of the products on offer. What has changed is the countries of origin. That said, Turkey remains a big player. There were wonderful fresh strawberries from there yesterday, though competing strawberries also came from Russia’s Krasnodar and from, most remarkably, from Greece, which officially should not be represented here. I might add that strawberries of this quality simply are unavailable in most of Western Europe, which is held in the clutches of a Spanish mafia, who peddle their chemicals laden berries that bring only woe to anyone with an allergic susceptibility. Happily Belgium is an exception to this rule during the early spring when Flemish farms put superior local strawberries on sale in the supermarkets.

One fruit counter in the Pushkin market offered wonderfully scented honeydew melons from South America and perfectly ripe watermelons from Iran.  Other counters featured large and very attractive cultivated blueberries from Morocco.  I can only imagine that these products are arriving air freight, as surely did the fish from Turkey, to assure the evident level of freshness.

A visit to one of the fish stores within the market grounds turned up an unexpected discovery: farmed salmon supplied from Murmansk.  I imagine that the supply from there is still too small to enable them to meet the requirements of the supermarket chains.  This shop also offered the Petersburg seasonal specialty of koryushka, a sardine sized lake fish which traditionally is caught in the Neva River that passes through the city as the fish leave their home in Lake Ladoga after the ice breaks and head for the Gulf of Finland to spawn. 

Koryushka has a distinctive aroma of fresh cucumber. Every self-respecting Petersburg family will buy it from stores, from vendors who for a week or two sell it on the city streets. Rolled in flour, fried in sunflower oil, it graces the table and brings joy even in these trying times.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

In fulfillment of my mission to bring to Western readers news items of particular importance in Russian media about which they otherwise would likely be clueless, I direct attention to information released on the Interfax website and carried by Lenta.ru and other major Russian news portals:   the head of Russian External Intelligence (SVR), Sergei Naryshkin, has spoken out about Poland’s plans to take control of part of the territory of Ukraine.

According to SVR, Poland is coordinating this issue with the United States. The idea is to establish military and political control by Warsaw over the “its historic territories” which today fall within the boundaries of Ukraine. Poland would introduce its troops into the Western regions of the country under cover of a mission to “protect the territory from Russian aggression.”  Eventually this would be expected to lead to a partition of Ukraine. The Poles would install a friendly government in the territory they control, ousting the Ukrainian nationalists.

Of course, the Polish ambitions in Western Ukraine are as well founded historically as are Russia’s with respect to Eastern Ukraine, which was once known as New Russia.  Western followers of the war will now know for certain where the city of Lviv is located – 50 km or less from the Polish border.  It is the city to which American and other foreign diplomats withdrew after Kiev seemed unsafe in the early days of the war. It has been the marshalling point for incoming foreign mercenaries and deliveries of military supplies to Ukraine from the West.

Following the three partitions of Poland in the 18^th century and for the entire period of the 19^th century, Lviv alias Lvov alias Lemberg, was a Polish city within the Austro-Hungarian Empire known for its splendid Central European architecture and philosophical bent: the city was home to mystical religious sects, both Jewish and Christian.

Indeed, if we want to trace back in history the sources of the present conflict in and over Ukraine, we necessarily find ourselves going back even earlier into the 16^th and 17^th centuries, when the Great Powers of the day, Ottoman Turkey, Poland, Sweden and Russia were all engaged in warfare over lands that figure in modern day Ukraine.  For a good initiation into the culture, or perhaps better to say the barbarism of those days, which prefigure what is now going on in places like Bucha, a good place to start is with the novella Taras Bulba by the Ukrainian-Russian author Nikolai Gogol. I just re-read it in Russian and I assure you the novel is a splendid initial guide to understanding the passions of the present day.

However, none of the foregoing takes into account the military powerhouse that Russia is today.  We may take the possibility of a Polish move of its forces into the Western Ukraine as the kind of intervention that Vladimir Putin had in mind when he said yesterday to legislators gathered in St Petersburg that it would provoke a lightning fast counter blow by Russia.  Meanwhile, a similar possible intervention by Romania in swallowing up Moldova and threatening to overrun the Russian separatist territory of Transnistria which is sandwiched between Moldova and Ukraine, could also spark a powerful military response from Moscow. 

The mainspring of history is unwinding spasmodically and destructively.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Compliance with Russian payment demands in rubles for gas deliveries: Western reporting falls on its own sword

It is widely assumed in the general public that all Russian news sources are propaganda, which justifies the banning of these sources from the airwaves, or to put it into simpler English, justifies the unprecedented Western censorship about which none of our human rights activists seems to care a fig. So much for European values!

However, in the The Financial Times reporting today on the unraveling of Europe’s supposed unified stand against payment for Russian gas in rubles we see that censorship is destroying not the Russia media but the Western media which, in the absence of competition and challenge, is printing and disseminating every ignorant and self-contradictory utterance that comes out of the mouths of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Charles Michel and Co. without exercising the slightest logic check.

Let me be specific. The article in question is entitled “EU energy groups prepare to meet Vladimir Putin’s terms for Russian gas. Germany’s Uniper and Austria’s OMV plan rouble accounts while Eni of Italy weighs options”. This piece has been slapped together by Sam Jones in Vienna, Andy Bounds in Brussels, Guy Chazan in Berlin and Marton Dunai in Budapest.  Going through the text and encountering the whoppers I will discuss below, you have to wonder where is the editorial staff of the FT to keep their feature articles at a level worthy of the world’s business elites who are their subscribers.

In line with the overall propaganda line set by the United States in the ongoing vicious Information War, cause and effect are systematically reversed.  Every dastardly intention and act laid at the door of Russia is, upon a moment’s reflection, actually being initiated by the West.  This game starts early on, in paragraph five:  “The preparations [for payment in rubles as demanded by Russia] show the impact of Russian efforts to weaponise gas supplies and challenge the EU’s ability to maintain a united front against Moscow.”

The authors have not gone one step further in their reasoning: they do not suggest that the evil intention of the Kremlin is to sow discord among European states. That is the subject of another feature article in today’s online edition of The Financial Times entitled “‘Divide and rule’: Russia’s rationale for halting gas flows to Poland and Bulgaria.” Apparently the authors Harry Dempsey and Neil Hume have forgotten or never heard the remark attributed to Sigmund Freud that sometimes ‘a cigar is just a cigar,’ meaning that there is no need for exotic explanations of a simple fact.

Wouldn’t it be more logical to say that the unprecedented freezing of Russian Bank dollar and euro assets in the West had the effect of “weaponizing” gas supplies?  If the existing contracts calling for payment in euros were to continue, the effect, as intended by the European policy makers, was to deprive Russia of the proceeds of its sales, all of which would be frozen in turn.

In the next paragraph the FT authors quietly acknowledge that “the EU sanctions against Russia’s central bank” prompted Vladimir Putin to impose the new rules for payment in rubles purchased on the Russian currency market. Of course, no conclusions are drawn from this fact regarding who is acting and who is reacting.

Then the FT cites Ursula von der Leyen’s description of the Russian cutoff of gas to Poland and Bulgaria over their refusal to sign up to the new payment scheme as “being tantamount to blackmail.”   Blackmail?   No deliveries if we get no money is blackmail?  Or is it rather just the application of normal rules of international business?

The FT writer group then opines that compliance with Russia’s new payment procedures “would result in Russia being able to access billions in gas revenues to support its currency and its economy…” But why else does one country sell its wares to another country?  Out of charity? With no cash receipts expected or demanded?

I will not belabor the points made above.  The FT can make its pitch to schoolchildren who have never studied business or economics.  But how they dare to feed this nonsense to the company directors and bank presidents who comprise their readership defies comprehension.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

The number one news item on Russian state television on 26 April was the meeting in Rammstein, Germany of defense officials from the United States and 40 allied countries to set policy on providing military assistance to Ukraine, including the provision for monthly such meetings going forward.

 The U.S. delegation was headed by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and his remarks were parsed by Russia’s ‘talking heads. They also delivered their considerations on the practical value of the deliveries of heavy weaponry that Germany and other European countries pledged during the gathering.

As is now the rule, the very best discussion of these issues was on the political talk show “The Great Game,” which features the most calm and collected analysis of the day’s hot news items. None of the panelists tries to shout down others, which has been the long tradition of such shows. All are warned by the moderator against presuming to give military advice to the nation’s Commander-in-Chief. And yet even here it was clear that the mood of panelists is for more decisive action against Ukraine right now, meaning the bombing of the ‘decision making institutions’ in Kiev, as the Russian Ministry of Defense proposed to do a week ago in response to Ukrainian missile and artillery attacks across the border with Russia. This was made all the more topical by the statements of the British delegation in Rammstein encouraging the Ukrainians to do precisely that, and by the corresponding offer to ship appropriate missiles to Kiev now. The panelists also want the transportation infrastructure of Ukraine to be destroyed without delay in order to prevent the new heavy weaponry being shipped to Kiev from ever reaching the Ukrainian forces at the front.

Surely the bombing of central Kiev will come, effectively removing the Ukrainian regime. But it will come at the moment of choosing of Vladimir Vladimirovich and will signal the Russian decision to break up Ukraine into several states, as the Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation Nikolai Patrushev yesterday said might be in the cards if the war drags on due to Western intervention and cheerleading.

With respect to Lloyd Austin’s statement yesterday that the United States’ objective is to greatly weaken Russian armed forces over an extended period of time, the panelists on The Great Game offered an interpretation that is well worth repeating here.  The Russians view this as an admission by Washington that the Ukrainians’ position on the battlefield is hopeless. The Americans now seek to redefine their objectives so as to turn a defeat into an apparent victory.  Whatever happens on the front lines in the coming days and weeks, Washington will be able to say that it forced Russia to dip deeply into its store of missiles and other high tech gear, that it forced Russia to lose a substantial part of its professional soldiers.  The objective is now intentionally vague and stands independently of the possible loss of Ukrainian’s main army forces adjacent to the Donbas in a ‘cauldron’ of confinement where they will be killed like herrings in a barrel.

As regards the newly announced shipment of super tanks from Germany and other high tech gear from other NATO Member States, the Russian panel appeared confident this will be too little, too late and would be mostly destroyed on the ground by Russian missiles and aerial bombing.

The foregoing is all more reassuring about our future survival here in Brussels and in New York than any U.S. declarations yesterday that nuclear war is off the table.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

As I have noted previously, there is a firewall between what Western major media are reporting daily about the situation in the Russia-Ukraine War and more generally about Russia versus what one sees on Russian state television and reads in the Russian news agencies.  On the advice of a colleague in Washington, I will now as occasion requires post news developments from Russia that Western audiences otherwise are not receiving despite their importance as indicators of where East-West relations are headed and whether we are all likely to survive the coming weeks.

The top such news item in Russia today is the successful capture by the Russian state intelligence agency FSB of a gang of would-be assassins based in Moscow and acting under orders from Kiev to kill the leading Russian talk show host Vladimir Solovyov, about whom I have written these past few weeks.  And their ‘kill list’ went on to take in other leading personalities on Russian state television:  Dmitry Kiselyov (director of all Russian television news programming), Yevgeny Popov, Olga Skabeyeva and  Margarita Simonian (editor-in-chief of RT).

The gang, which appears to consist of White Power and other neo-Nazi elements, was interrogated before video cameras and the videos have been posted on the Russian internet by TASS and other state news agencies.

As might be expected, Russian media have been properly roiled by this news. I caught the discussion on Vyacheslav Nikonov’s afternoon edition of “The Great Game.”  His panelists saw this ‘terrorism’ as a new phase in Ukraine’s hybrid war that is being stage managed from Washington.  Panelists made the point that the West has been very lucky till now that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has shown great forbearance by not responding in kind to the vicious war being waged by Washington, which always remains one step short of kinetic war in the mistaken belief that these kinds of aggression are water-tight and mutually exclusive. The panelists stressed that at a certain point Putin will indeed respond and the response will be kinetic.  The message was addressed to Messrs. Blinken and Austin, who, following their meeting with Zelensky, said at a press conference at the Polish-Ukrainian border, that the goal of the U.S. in the  whole matter of the Ukraine-Russian war is to so weaken Russia that it will be incapable of similar actions in the future.  In simple English, what they are saying is that the U.S. ambition is to destroy Russia.  The masks have been dropped.

Another item in Russian news yesterday and today has been the screening several times a day of videos taken in the United States during Joe Biden’s latest trips across the country to sell his narrative on the economic travails America is now experiencing.  Two separate speeches end in Biden’s turning from the lectern and seeking to the shake someone’s hand when there is in fact no one around him. Biden then looks lost and makes a sad retreat from the stage. 

Nikonov remarked that these videos have not been aired on major U.S. television, have not been reported on in mainstream print media.  My friend in Washington confirms that this is so.  Meanwhile, the fact of Biden’s blatant disorientation was denounced by Donald Trump a day ago – so at least he has seen the videos which the Russians take as indicative of the mental degeneration of the U.S. President and a token of the degeneration of the entire U.S. political class. Trump commented that Biden’s disorientation is something the country has never seen before and that the Biden administration has put the U.S. on a path to hell.

Where will all this end?   It is not headed in a good direction

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

I have in past weeks focused attention on the political talk show “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov,” calling it the best of its kind on Russian state television and a good indicator of the thinking of  Russia’s political elites.  However, it is time to admit that in terms of overall quality of presentation, level of invited panelists and screening of videos of topical developments in the West to inform the panelist discussion, Solovyov is now being outdone by Vyacheslav Nikonov’s “Great Game” talk show. 

“The Great Game” in the past featured live discussion with its anchor in Washington, director of the National Interest think tank , Dmitry Simes.  Now Simes is a rare guest, and the panel format more closely resembles that of other political talk shows, with the following notable qualification:  the host, Nikonov, is an unusually gifted moderator, who does not impose his views on the panel and brings out the best from his panelists. Nikonov is a leading member of the Russian parliament from the ruling United Russia party, and has broad experience running parliamentary committees.  As the grandson of Bolshevik revolutionary Molotov, he happens also to be a member of the hereditary ruling clans and practices ‘noblesse oblige’ in his public service work.

It bears mention that alongside the Solovyov show and the widely viewed Sixty Minutes talk show of Yevgeny Popov and Olga Skabeyeva, ‘The Great Game’ has evolved from a once or twice weekly event to a virtually daily affair, indeed with a couple of afternoon and evening time slots as justified by fast moving current events.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, Vladimir Solovyov has at least one advantage making it worthwhile to tune in. To my knowledge, he is the only host to go outside the usual circuit of ‘talking heads’ from universities, think tanks and the Duma. Solovyov regularly feature a bona fide top manager in the arts who rubs shoulders daily with the ‘creative classes’ and shares with the audience what he hears from them.  I have in mind Mosfilm general director Karen Shakhnazarov. 

Over the course of the past six weeks, I have several times pointed to the changing mood of Shakhnazarov with respect to the ‘special military operation in Ukraine.’  At first he was buoyant, then he was fearful that the operation was going badly and running out of control, and finally he appeared to be ‘all in,’ looking for ways for Russia to win decisively and quickly.

Last night, we heard from yet another mood swing.  I bring it to the attention of readers, because it has great relevance to the current complete passivity of our general public in the face of some very peculiar policy decisions with respect to Russia being made at the highest levels in the USA and in Europe, with zero public consultation so far.

To be specific, Shakhnazarov expressed amazement and deep worry that Western leaders have literally ‘lost their minds’ by pursuing measures to destabilize Russia in the hope of precipitating the overthrow of Vladimir Putin and maybe even the disintegration of Russia in a way similar to the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991.  Shakhnazarov remarked that total absence of common or any other sense in Joe Biden is to be expected because of his health (read: senility). But his jaw dropped when he heard that the Chancellor of Germany, Olaf Scholz, declared a couple of days ago that “Russia must not be allowed to win this war!”    Where are his brains? Shakhnazarov asked rhetorically.

The point of Shakhnazarov’s reasoning is as follows:   Russia is the world’s leading power in terms of nuclear arms. An overthrow of Putin would lead to chaos, and very likely to genuine radicals assuming power.  Their aggressive inclinations for policy to the West would be underpinned by the vast majority of the Russian population, which, in Shakhnazarov’s view, is now overcome with pure hatred for the West brought on by the sanctions, by the rampant Russophobia that is now public policy in Europe and the USA. If the conflict should escalate to use of tactical nuclear missiles and beyond, then Russia would no longer limit its strikes to military installations but will happily target all capitals and population centers in Europe and, we may assume, in North America.   In a word, Shakhnazarov equates destabilization of Russia with nuclear Armageddon.

I repeat, these are the fears of a highly responsible and publicly visible Russian general manager in the arts.  Is anybody in the West with comparable standing even beginning to imagine the coming catastrophe let alone speak out about it?

Before closing, I redirect attention to a major newsworthy development in Russia yesterday afternoon which even our Western media have reported on this morning:  the test launch of Russia’s new Sarmat ICBM, which sets new records for speed, distance, destructive force of its MIRV warheads and, surely most important, imperviousness to all known and projected anti-missile systems in the West.  Part of the invulnerability of the Sarmat is a function of its range, which extends to every point on planet Earth.  Sarmat’s trajectory can be set as best suits its undetectability. For example, it can hit the USA by approach via the South Pole, thereby evading American tracking systems, which look to attack from the Northwest. The Sarmat’s 7 or 15 nuclear warheads can each also evade ABM systems and head for target at hypersonic speeds.

Starting in September, the Sarmat will be installed in silos till now housing the world’s most powerful ICBM, the Voevoda, which will be gradually retired and redeployed as launchers for commercial satellites.

In his words of congratulations to the designers, project developers, and manufacturers of the Sarmat, President Putin stressed the importance of the new armaments as Russia’s dissuasion directed against those in the West who would threaten the country militarily.   Is anybody listening?

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022