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.

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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.

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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.

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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

Questions not being asked about the Mariupol die-hards, about the availability from today of Euro and dollar cash withdrawals at Russian banks, and much more

As I have remarked in earlier diary entries, the Russians are very sparing in the information they release daily on the status of the war effort.  A couple of days ago, we were shown the 1300 or so Ukrainian marines who surrendered in Mariupol. Yesterday, Russian television devoted a lot of time to brief interviews with some of these prisoners of war, all of whom were Russian speakers, by the way.  No surprises there, of course, since the whole region is basically Russian speaking, which is why there is a civil war going on against the extreme nationalist government in Kiev which has sought from the beginning to wipe out the language, the culture and all Russian ethnic identity.

There was another curious news item yesterday on Russian television: a video report on the capture of the latest mobile air defense system produced in Ukraine, which was abandoned by its technical crew in mint condition, with all of the manufacturer’s technical brochures still intact.  Here again, most peculiarly, all of the technical documentation is in Russian!  This would be amusing if the broad context were not tragic, set alongside the number of Ukrainian servicemen whom the Russians have listed as killed in action:  over 23,700.  That is approximately eight times the number Zelensky gave to the press the day before.

Finally, Russian news in the past day recounted how a Ukrainian freight plane loaded with Western military supplies was shot down by Russian forces as it approached Odessa from the sea.

Aside from these feature items in the news, Russian authorities continue to give no overall picture of how the campaign is proceeding.  Strangely, Ukrainian news sources from the field can be more informative.  Among the items today posted on www.news.google.ru  are reports from the Ukrainian controlled administration of what remains of Lugansk under their control.  They speak of Russian artillery attacks, on the damage being done to houses in hamlets, on the evacuation of civilians to the West ahead of Russian advances on the ground. All of this is in anticipation of the full-scale Russian onslaught on Donbas expected imminently.

Western media have been featuring today the “brave” decision of the remaining Ukrainian forces in Mariupol, holed up in the underground fortress of the Azovstal works, to refuse the Russian offer of their lives in exchange for unconditional surrender.  But Western coverage asks no questions whatsoever about the decision and what it tells us about the regime in Kiev that these thousand or so die-hards are serving, seemingly heroically.  Russian talk shows today shine a spotlight on that very question and produce some interesting interpretations.  We are told that Kiev instructed the Azov battalion leaders and those aligned with them in Mariupol to fight to the end and not to negotiate with the Russians over surrender. From within the ranks of the desperate troops underground, whose ammunition, food and water are all depleted, we are told that anyone daring to speak in favor of surrender is being shot on the spot. We are also told that among the 1,000 or so hold-outs are 400 foreign mercenaries including a goodly number of high ranking NATO instructors.  Since from the standpoint of Kiev those instructors are better dead than taken alive, we may assume they are from Member States lower in the pecking order than the British pair of cut-throats taken several days ago who may yet be saved by intervention of Boris Johnson in a prisoner exchange.  Shall we assume that the NATO instructors in the lower tunnels of Azovstal are Polish or Lithuanian?  I think that would be a fair guess. 

So much for easy questions that go unasked, let alone unanswered by Western media, by Russian media or by both.  Now I will raise a different question just to demonstrate how the news and analysis flow on  this ‘special military operation’  or war, if you will, runs in a narrow rut.  The net result is that we have very limited ability to understand what is going on and where we are all headed.

I will just turn attention to the announcement in Russia that as of today the public can make cash withdrawals of dollars and euros in substantial amounts, and also can order foreign currency transfers abroad, up to $5,000 if I understood properly.  This means that poor Mr. Piotr Aven, the billionaire banker and Russian wheeler dealer sitting in London at present with his vast assets frozen under sanction rules, may yet be able to pay his chauffeur by ordering a transfer from his Sberbank account in Moscow. 
Curiously no one is asking how and why Russia has reopened nearly free currency exchange and cash withdrawals after a month of strict clampdown.  Where are the dollar bills and euro notes coming from?  Surely the question is begging to be asked. It is not coming in from tourists to Russia since there are virtually no foreign tourists in Russia at present.  It is not being carried by foreign business visitors for the same reason.  So let us guess.  Could it be that Germany and other select EU Member States are delivering plane loads of cash to Moscow to pay for their gas, oil and coal deliveries? Yes, this would allow them to claim they are defying Putin over payment in rubles while respecting the terms of their long term contracts with Gazprom. But it is a pretty picture that they would not want made public, since the European Parliament would make the life of them all quite unbearable if the word got out.  Perhaps readers can offer better explanations.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Sometime in the distant future, when the Russian internal documents relating to the conduct of this war in Ukraine are made public, one of the great conundrums of our time may finally receive a definitive answer:  why Russia has been prosecuting its ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine with one hand tied behind its back, always holding back the vast destructive forces at its command, and so drawing out the operation and suffering losses of its soldiers in a way which a more cruel, ‘American style’ campaign would largely have avoided. 

At the very start of the armed conflict, I remarked on the specifics of what I called ‘the Russian Way of War’ now being applied in Ukraine. This approach does not inflict death on huge numbers of civilians, does not count on a ‘shock and awe’ initial attack to demoralize and overrun the enemy.  I said at the time that the overriding considerations on the Russian side were the traditional ‘brotherly’ relations between Ukrainians and Russians, who were extensively intermarried and had relations on both sides of the national frontiers. The intent of Vladimir Putin and his war collegiums was to do minimal damage to the Ukrainian people, to try to separate the ‘healthy’ elements in the Ukrainian military command from the rabid nationalist Azov and similar irregular forces that had become embedded in the army over the past eight years. If the two could be separated, the war could be won with absolute minimum expenditure of materiel and loss of life.

However, in the early weeks of the operation, after it had become manifestly clear that these were illusions, that Russia was facing a unified military force supported by widespread popular civilian backing, still there was no change visible in how Russia was operating on the ground.  The only hint of change to come was the refocusing of available forces on the capture of Mariupol, to secure the whole Azov Sea littoral and the progressive redirection of the ground forces to the encirclement of the major part of the Ukrainian army that was entrenched just to the west of the line of demarcation with Donbas. In compensation, there was the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kiev and Chernigov, in the north.

There has been a lot of supposedly expert analysis of the war from British, American and other retired generals.  Add to that the ignorant but voluble speculations of simple Western journalists, especially ladies, who have never held firearms of any kind let alone drawn up battle plans.  All of these Western commentators begin with assumptions on how an invasion of Ukraine should be fought, assuming the war was unleashed by the USA or Britain.  Any deviation by the Russian forces from the timetable or scope of such a Western style assault aimed, of course, at overthrowing the regime in Kiev and subjugating the entire country, is deemed to be a failure of morale or ability to coordinate air cover, artillery and other elements of the battle. Full stop. The conclusion they reach is that the Russian armed forces are far less ominous than we had feared, and we should not hesitate to expand NATO and push them back.

At the same time, no one, NO ONE, in the West has commented on a few obvious facts that place the Russian ‘military operation’ totally outside the traditions of invasions or other acts of aggression.  The Russians’ choice of words to describe what they were about to do was anything but arbitrary. They had specific objectives of ‘demilitarization’ and ‘denazification,’ to which was added in the past couple of weeks, almost as an afterthought, to secure the Donbas from any further attacks by Ukrainian forces positioned on the other side of the line of demarcation.  The importance of the last-named would not be obvious to Western readers, because the only war pictures put up on Western media are those showing suffering of residents of Mariupol or Khamatorsk.  However, Russian television viewers are shown daily the consequences of Ukrainian missile and artillery barrages on the civilian population of Donetsk and surrounding villages, with a daily death toll and casualties requiring hospitalization. This is only the tail of a story of vicious attacks in violation of the Minsk Accords that goes back eight years and produced more than 14,000 civilian deaths, of which the West has chosen to be oblivious to this very day.

The appointment several days ago of General Dvornikov to head the next phase of the war, the full liberation of the Donbas and liquidation of the main concentration of the Ukrainian ground forces, received immediate comment in the Western media.  Russian media are just beginning to catch up and publish their evaluation of what changes in the conduct of the war may result. 

Dvornikov distinguished himself as commander of Russia’s very successful military operation in Syria. He was known for effective coordination of air and ground forces, something for which the first phase of the war did not seem impressive, whether because of incompetence, as Western analysts insisted, or because of avoidance of collateral damage and loss of civilian life within the constraints of a geography where the enemy troops were intermixed with residential housing, as the Russian narrative insisted.  The new battlefield in Donbas would be far better suited to “technical” solutions of artillery and missile strikes.

However, the appointment of Dvornikov is only one sign that the Russian Way of War is being reconsidered at present in the highest levels of the Russian command.  In part, this is so because of the ever more daring, or shall we say reckless American and NATO promises to supply heavy armaments to Kiev. The alarm bells rang in Moscow yesterday over statements by a Deputy Secretary of Defense in Washington that the next level of support to Kiev would include intermediate range missiles capable of striking at airfields within Russia.

The Russian response to that threat was immediate.  General Konashenkov, the spokesman of the Russian military throughout the campaign, issued a special announcement that any attacks on Russian territory coming from Ukraine would result in Russia’s directing strikes at the decision-making instances in Kiev, which the Russian command had so far chosen not to do.  This obviously means the Ministry of Defense, Zelensky’s presidential administration, perhaps the Rada, as well as their handmaidens including Ukrainian television towers would now be instantly destroyed.  De facto regime change would be the direct consequence.

While the leaders of several European countries have in the last couple of days publicly discussed whether Russian actions in Ukraine constitute “genocide,” as Joe Biden blithely declared, no one seems to remark on the most glaring contradictions to any notion of Russia’s presently staging an all-out war in Ukraine. 

Ursula van der Leyen, Boris Johnson and the prime ministers of Poland and several Baltic States calmly travel to Kiev, stroll down the boulevards of central Kiev together with Zelensky, as if no war existed.  To be sure, they are surrounded by security escorts, but these are only of value should there be some violent passersby on their route.  The possibility of a Russian missile attack seems not to cross anyone’s mind.  In light of Konashenkov’s remarks, all that may change abruptly at any moment.

Finally, I am obliged to mention that not all military professionals in Russia have remained silent over how the ‘military operation’ is being conducted. Last week, reporting live from Mariupol and surveying the scene of utter destruction around him, Yevgeny Poddubny, the most experienced war correspondent of Russian state television, veteran of the Syrian war and other hotspots, quietly muttered, as if spontaneously: “in a military campaign you normally bring in forces six times the numbers of your opponent and here we were nearly matched in numbers.” Surely therer was nothing “offhanded” about that.

The point was repeated in yesterday’s edition of the semi-official newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta in an interview with Lieutenant General Leonid Reshetnikov, a retired officer of the foreign intelligence service. Reshetnikov said:

“When on the attack, military science tells you that you should have a minimum of three times the numbers of the defending side. But on the ground, according to available information, we are artacking from a minority position. We are achieving results that come very rarely in history, in Izyum, in Novaya Kakhovka and in other territories. This shows the mastery of our soldiers and command.” Yes, Reshetnikov has cast his remarks as a compliment, but the hidden criticism is there for anyone who cares to look closely.

                                                                     *****

From the beginning, I have directed attention to what Russian social, academic and political elites have to say about the ‘special military operation.’  One of my key markers has been the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov political talk show and yesterday’s edition provided a lot of food for thought.

First, with regard to sanctions, there was near unanimity among the panelists that it is time for Russia to respond directly and strongly to the full economic and hybrid war that the United States and Europe are now waging against their country.  They call for an immediate cut-off of gas supplies to Europe, to an embargo on export of titanium and other essential raw materials for advanced industrial production in the West.  One alternative to these cruel and devastating moves against Europe would be to try it all out first on Japan, which has been a fervent enforcer of the trade war on Russia and even in the past few days publicly came out in support of the Azov ultranationalists, by removing them from the list of global terrorists.  Russia should impose a total commercial embargo on Japan, beginning with hydrocarbons and extending into all spheres, such as fishing concessions. Moreover, Russia should position tactical nuclear weapons and other significant armaments on the Kurile Islands as a firm reminder of who owns these territories now and forever.

As regards military action, the consensus of the panelists was also in favor of all-out war on Ukraine, to hell with collateral civilian casualties. The war must be ended quickly, decisively and with minimum further Russian casualties. Period.  As several noted, it is highly likely that television viewers are also confused by Russia’s ‘softly, softly’ approach till now.  While they trust the Commander in Chief, they want more decisive action in the air and on the ground.  It is worth mentioning that the panelist who represents Russia’s ‘creative’ classes, director general of the Mosfilm studios, Karen Shakhnazarov, who had been wavering in his support for the war a couple of weeks ago, was now ‘all in’ and doing his best to find solutions to winning the kinetic war at once.

Then there was also the question of war mobilization. The consensus of panelists was that the Russian economy has to be put on a full war footing, with decision making concentrated in the Executive and removed from the hands of entrepreneurs.  This is required not for the ongoing conflict with Ukraine but for continuation of the wider war with the U.S.-led West that constitutes the context for the conflict.  Dispatch of longer range missiles to Kiev would make the USA a cobelligerent and Russia should be prepared to strike at the ‘decision making’ institutions there.

In short, the logic of the discussion on Solovyov’s show was that the Russians should make perfectly plain to Washington that it is courting disaster, that we are not in a video game but in a life and death struggle in which Americans do not enjoy immortality.

How much of this feistiness will influence the next moves from the Kremlin remains to be seen. But American analysts would do well to cast an eye on programs like Solovyov’s lest we all move on to end of the world scenarios out of ignorance and miscalculation.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022