I am very pleased with today’s “Newsmakers” show. Though my time at the microphone was  compressed since the first half of the 25 minute video was devoted to an interview with Kiev mayor Klitschko, in the second half I did land some punches. I took the debate away from the usual contest over blame for the war and exchange of insults about who is spreading propaganda. I sent the conversation in a wholly different direction: namely showing the patent absurdity of Klitschko’s allegation that Russia seeks to occupy Ukraine or to recreate the Soviet Union via annexation of Ukraine. No, Russia will not remain in Ukraine one minute longer than necessary to demilitarize the country and ensure its permanent neutral status.

 My argument that the very unusual way that the USSR broke up, namely by secession of the lead nationality in a multinational empire, has great importance for the present and future of Russia:  Russia had its fill of supporting the parasitical habits of the other Union Republics and was glad to be free of them. Moscow will be happy to let Brussels feed, clothe and provide lodging for the population of its neighbor to the southwest.  The war over Ukraine is solely about pushing back NATO and securing Russia’s borders.

Take a look. The best is last

I use this opportunity also to offer for your consideration an interview with me that Tom Mullen Talks Freedom (USA) released yesterday.  The subject, of course, is the war in Ukraine and what lies ahead.

https://tommullen.net/podcast/51/.

 ©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Will the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine lead to a World War that quickly escalates to an end of the world scenario in nuclear exchanges?  That remains unlikely, but we are clearly well on our way. It is long past debate whether the conflict is merely between two neighboring countries at the eastern fringe of the European Union. It is a full-blown proxy war between the United States of America and the Russian Federation, and it is about ending or perpetuating American global hegemony.

The latest approval in Washington of $800 million in further urgent military assistance to Ukraine, including the Pentagon’s most advanced attack drones and powerful Soviet era S300 ground to air missile systems makes it perfectly clear that U.S. is sabotaging the ongoing peace talks between Moscow and Kiev for the sake of prolonging a war that can only result on the Ukrainian side in the utter shattering of civil as well as military infrastructure, mass emigration and ubiquitous, calamitous poverty for those remaining; and on the Russian side in wholesale and painful reorganization of the economy away from the West as well as civil discord amid deep disagreements over the war and crackdown on dissent. The centuries-long debates and hair-pulling in Russia between “Westernizers” and “Slavophiles” is breaking out into the open yet again, as we saw in Vladimir Putin’s remarks yesterday during a speech otherwise devoted to increasing social benefits at home. I will direct attention to that speech in a moment. 

So far the West has been spared the pain arising from pending economic distortions on a global scale. However, as the conflict progresses in the direction of total war, which is happening before our eyes now that the United States President and Senate have designed Vladimir Putin as a ‘war criminal,’ the share of misery borne by the broad public in the West may rise dramatically.  The Russians have yet to unleash their own “nuclear option” of economic sanctions against the West, meaning immediate halt in export to “hostile nations” (the USA, the EU in particular) of hydrocarbons, strategic metals, grains and other agricultural commodities. That may come in the days immediately ahead.

Whatever the outcome of the still virtual negotiations between Moscow and Kiev over a cease fire and implementation of a 15-point peace agreement, Moscow’s move on to its Plan C, namely direct nuclear confrontation with Washington remains ‘on the table,’ as they like to say in the American capital. Peak-a-boo surfacing of Russian nuclear submarines just outside U.S. territorial waters on the East and West coasts, daily patrols of Russian strategic bombers in the Caribbean – these threats have clearly been held in reserve by the Russians for their possible Plan C scenario.

Meanwhile, the American-led Information War has been proceeding apace, presenting to Western media for instant, unquestioning dissemination a stream of fake news that is intended to raise the public mood of hatred for Russia and things Russian to fever pitch. Our television newscasts are filled with scenes of destroyed apartment buildings in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities. Yesterday’s biggest news item was the destruction of a theater in downtown Mariupol said to have housed up to a thousand people seeking refuge from Russian air strikes.

The production of fake war videos became a big industry among American and British propaganda organs during the Syrian War, when Western audiences were shown utterly fraudulent films of alleged chemical attacks by the Assad regime.  Many featured the supposedly heroic and selfless work of  ‘white helmet’ humanitarian volunteers operating in the Syrian war zones. Now these talents and experience are being unleashed to whip up popular outrage over the conduct of the Russian campaign in Ukraine.

This morning’s Russian state television featured an expose of the latest fake news exploits being served up to world media by the Kiev regime. A half dozen such videos and photographic montages were analyzed by Russian experts who tracked down the original footage and on split screen show how what the Ukrainians are claiming to be Russian attacks on the civilian population in Kiev are, for example, footage taken from the SS-21 (Tochka-U) missile blast in downtown Donetsk city this past Monday which killed 21 people outright and injured critically 30 more. That attack was launched by the Ukrainian army from a distance of perhaps 30 miles. Other videos showing alleged destruction of civil buildings are taken from cities, mostly in the Donbas, several years ago, where the aggressor was Ukrainian militias, not Russians or their Donbas allies today. 

Of course, none of the Russian proofs of fraud perpetrated by Ukrainian propagandists with the help and guidance of their American curators will be shown on Western media.  However, we the people can for ourselves determine who is telling the truth and who is lying just by putting on our thinking caps when we look at what is shown on the BBC News, for example. 

I think in particular of an evening news BBC front line reporter in Kiev who stood before a heavily damaged 15 story residential building a couple of days ago in which all windows were blown out by some explosion. The lady journalist was well coiffed and dressed immaculately in what can only be described as a surreal setting. Pointing to the building, she told us indignantly that four people had been killed in this latest Russian attack.  Here, unnoticed evidently by her producers back in London, there is the kind of discrepancy between what we are shown and what we are being told that should set off alarm bells in anyone who has his head screwed on properly. The building itself and the kind of destruction we saw on our television screens should have yielded 400 fatalities, not 4 if this were anything but bogus information.  Instead, what the BBC was presenting aligns perfectly with the Russian narrative that in Mariupol, in Kharkiv, in Kiev and other Russian cities the Ukrainian army and militias of irregular radical nationalists fighting by its side are using the civilian population as ‘human shields.’ What this means is that residential buildings and civilian infrastructure are taken over by the army, who chase out the civilians and move artillery and other weaponry into the buildings from which they attack Russian troops and attempt to attract counter fire into genuinely civilian homes for the sake of atrocities to publicize on the internet.

Note:  we do not have any body counts relating to the destruction of that theater in Mariupol.  During the course of last evening, the BBC report shifted imperceptibly from claims that hundreds were sheltering there during the attack to claims that hundreds had been sheltering there in recent weeks. Meanwhile the Russians flatly denied that they were responsible for the destruction of the theater and laid the blame entirely at the Ukrainian army and its special propaganda mission.

Given the near total jamming by Europe, by the USA of Russia-based internet resources, the Russian counter charges do not reach the eyes or ears of Western audiences.  My own access to this information is chiefly coming from satellite channels that are not yet prohibited in Western Europe.

                                                                             *****

As the USA and Europe have each day piled on new sanctions against Russia, the awareness of a ‘total war’ situation has penetrated the consciousness of Russia’s leadership and the tone of public discourse about the war has hardened noticeably in recent days. Talk shows which I follow regularly have changed course yet again from what I reported a week ago.  On the Vladimir Solovyov evening programs, the bearer of grim expectations about war prospects, Mosfilm general director Karen Shakhnazarov, has disappeared, his place taken by others who take the conversation in a wholly different direction, including fierce denunciations of unpatriotic personalities within Russia. Still other newcomers are presenting their own half-baked speculations on how the entire Russian economy and society has to be reorganized to respond to the new realities of a total permanent break with the West. While the Putin government remains resolutely pro-business and pro-entrepreneurship, though with a heavy dose of state direction of the economy, the new panelists in talk shows denounce free markets as just one more manifestation of the West’s hijacking in the 1990s Russia’s domestic political economy.  Still other panelists on the Russian talk shows are talking about purging the government and all public institutions of Liberals, who are synonymous with Fifth Column traitors and have no place in Russian society under conditions of a war for the country’s survival.

As BBC and other Western journalists have remarked, Vladimir Putin addressed the issue of the Fifth Column in a televised speech yesterday that was otherwise dedicated to the increases in pensions and social benefits that he just announced to counteract negative results of the newly imposed Western sanctions. In the BBC interpretation, the scum and traitors denounced by Putin are the oligarchs. These are the people who live there, meaning in the West, either physically or just mentally, while earning their money in Russia.

However, this identification with the oligarchs only shows how little Western news organizations, Western think tanks and Western government leaders know about Russia and about what makes it tick. No, oligarchs were not in the sights of Vladimir Putin yesterday: it was the multitude of little traitors to the country and its people who have in recent weeks come out of the woodwork and taken flight in an attempt to avoid having to publicly take sides in the conflict and so lose their fortunes and/or their social standing.

The broad Russian public has been utterly shocked at the departure of a good many stars in the entertainment industry, the kind of folks who in the West are images on the covers of People magazine and of the yellow press more generally. Veteran singer Alla Pugacheva and her husband Galkin have been darlings of Russian television and music halls across the country for decades.  They are known to have quietly flown to Israel, where so many of their friends from show business and from high society have already found refuge earlier still.  Then there is one of the two leading television news presenters, Sergey Briullov, host of The News of the Week on Saturday nights. Sergey carries a British as well as Russian passport; his family is based in their home in England and his children study there.  About a week ago, Briullov disappeared from Russia and eventually surfaced in Brazil, where he says he is doing a film project about the Brazilian attitude to the Ukraine-Russia War.  No one is fooled for a moment about the fact that Briullov is just one more traitor to his homeland, and comments on the Russian portals bear this out daily.

No, Messrs BBC News, it is not oligarchs whose behavior if not their very existence has embittered the middle and lower class Russians during the current war. Those middle and lower classes constitute the 70% of the population which backs Putin through thick and thin. It is the smaller fish of Fifth Column populations who exist in much greater numbers: as, for example, Russian  lawyers who have homes near the Champs Elysees and split their time between France and their law offices in Moscow, whence the money from their servicing oligarchs comes. Then there is the intelligentsia, the university dons, the occupants of often important offices in government and private public institutions who loathed Putin from his first election to the presidency in 2000 and have never relented. Their contempt for the broad Russian public, which they see as the great unwashed, as a herd of animals, was never well hidden, and this contempt is now being reciprocated on Russian state television and on the internet.

All of these fissures in Russian society are being deepened and discussed on Russian media as a result of the ongoing war for survival.  If Russia is becoming a much less free society, that is a direct result of Western pressure. But there is nothing new under the sun.  This was precisely one of the key arguments in favor of détente as opposed to confrontation during the 1990s.

****

The accusation that Putin is a ‘war criminal’ coming from the top U.S. leadership has far greater importance than Western media have given to it. For them, it is just one more joke in a long line of adjectives vilifying the Russian leader.  For Biden as Vice President, Putin was ‘a thug.’  For Biden one month into his presidency, Putin was ‘a killer.’  Now the words ‘war criminal’ are actionable, not merely descriptive.  In this regard, Vladimir Putin is no longer a man with whom you can negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine  Instead, he is a dangerous man who you can justifiably assassinate.

A call for Putin’s assassination was made by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham on 4 March. That utterly outrageous and vile statement was never properly rebuked by the President, by the Secretary of State. 

If there are officials in the Biden administration who are actually seeking to have the Russian President assassinated, then it is one more example of their total ignorance of the ‘enemy,’ an ignorance that is possible only because anyone who knows something worth knowing is denounced in American universities and on air as a Putin stooge.

The murder of Vladimir Putin in the present context of the ongoing war to the death over global overlordship would surely precipitate the launch of Russia’s nuclear arsenal against the United States.  As I have said in the past, the Russian political elite is much more aggressive and much readier to push the button than Vladimir Vladimirovich.  I have also said and here repeat, that the Russian Federation likely has First Strike Capability, meaning that it can launch a nuclear attack first, destroy nearly all of America’s arsenals and most important population centers, disorganize or frustrate any counter attack, and rely on its well developed anti-ballistic missile defenses to ward off any of the residual U.S. capability. That was the clear objective of Putin back in 2007 when Russia was humiliated and impotent before the American hegemon.  He reached that objective in 2018.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

My Russia-Ukraine war essays published on my website and reposted on many alternative news portals in Europe and the United States express personal observations of the author. They are “primary sources” and are not represented as academic works. Hence, no footnotes and only very rare critiques of what others are writing or saying. Their added value to the reader comes from the fact that the author is watching with equal concentration both what is being reported in mainstream Western media and what is being reported on Russian print and electronic media produced for the domestic Russian audience.  What I see daily might be best described as parallel worlds or parabolic mirror images, meaning freakish distortions of similar events occurring on this or that side of the line of demarcation in Ukraine.

I offer here several examples from the past few days.

On the morning of 13 March, all Western news agencies reported on the devastating Russian attack on facilities at two locations west of the Ukrainian city of Lviv and in close proximity to the Polish border. We were told that 35 people died and many more were hospitalized with serious injuries.

Who were these people?  It appears to me that Western media said not a word. “People” could mean civilians or soldiers or something still different. What was the sense of the attack?  Major Western media noted that this attack seemed to follow the warning a day earlier from Major General Igor Konashenkov of the Russian military command that flows of armaments into Ukraine would henceforth be considered ‘legitimate targets’ by the Russian forces.

Meanwhile, Russian media reported that one of the bases was a training facility used by NATO in its work with the Ukrainian military and also used to receive Western ‘mercenaries’ arriving in Ukraine. The other facility was used as a logistical center to receive and pass along incoming military equipment and supplies from the West. Konashenkov later said that the whereabouts of all inbound Western volunteer fighters was known and they would be shown no mercy. Russian sources also gave a much higher number of deaths, namely 100 more. We are left to conclude that the fatalities were such fighters and possibly their NATO handlers.

The U.S. response to this event de facto was an urgent warning coming from the White House that Russia was about to implement a chemical weapons attack in Ukraine. The Ukrainian response came yesterday when a powerful (Tochka-U) * missile packed with a hundred ‘cartridges’ of explosives was fired at the city center of Donetsk. The missile was partly destroyed by Donetsk air defenses, but one cartridge landed in a downtown street where it instantly killed 20 civilians including children and pensioners waiting outside an ATM to withdraw funds; dozens more were injured.  Had all 100 cartridges exploded over Donetsk as had been planned from Kiev, the fatalities would have been 100 times greater.  The Russians denounced this missile firing as a war crime.

Since approval for such a missile strike could only have come from the highest levels of the professional Ukrainian army, not by or from the irregular militias, Russia is now reevaluating how it should deal with the Ukrainian forces, in the sense of no longer distinguishing between regulars and militias and “neutralizing” both with equal measure of devastation.

Did you read or see anything about this missile attack on Donetsk yesterday in your daily newspaper or television news?  I believe not.

Let us take a look at one other set of recent linked events, action and reaction, that captured the news headlines on both sides mainly with one hand clapping. I have in mind the alleged Russian artillery attack on a maternity and children’s hospital in Mariupol on 9 March. At least 17 people were said to be injured and headlines in the West spoke of ‘global horror, outrage.’  In particular, there were videos provided by Ukrainian sources showing a wounded heavily pregnant woman who was yesterday reported to have died.

The official Russian response to these allegations of a war crime were total denial and counter-accusation that the entire incident was a ‘false flag’ operation stage directed by Kiev authorities. They said the hospital in question had been taken over by nationalist militiamen and the patients were sent elsewhere so that the facility could be used as a military center. The ‘wounded’ pregnant woman was an actress and all pictures of her were fake.  We do not know if her reported death has any substance to it.

The mirror image attack occurred two days ago when the Ukrainian army and irregulars evacuated the Donbas town of Volnovakhi, which they had occupied for the past eight years, destroying all civilian infrastructure and much residential housing as they departed. As part of the devastation, their tanks fired on a functioning hospital filled with patients. Fortunately no one was killed, though video coverage on Russian state television showed a gaping blackened hole a couple of meters wide on the third floor and extensive damage elsewhere to the building.  Have you read about this atrocity in your morning newspaper in New York or London?  Of course, not.

Finally, yesterday afternoon Russian news agencies reported on and Russian television later showed video coverage of the evacuation of hundreds of civilians from the besieged city of Mariupol, where some 400,000 residents have been held hostage by the neo-Nazi Azov battalion and by regular Ukrainian army units that have moved their weaponry into residential buildings and infrastructure and have not allowed anyone to avail themselves of the escape corridors to the East opened by Russian forces encircling the city. The same reportage spoke of 450 tons of humanitarian aid, mainly foodstuffs, which were delivered to the city by a Russian convoy.  All of this was made possible by the Russians’ precision missile attack on most, but not all of the artillery placements held by the Ukrainian nationalist forces.  Russian press briefings are silent about how their soldiers entered Mariupol, where they are and what resistance they still have to overcome on the ground. Did you hear about any of this yesterday on your news sources?

Today’s Western newspapers and television are carrying uncritically the story put out by Zelensky’s office that several hundred civilians left Mariupol and humanitarian aid arrived thanks to his Ukrainian forces!  One look at the map makes clear that this is a bare-faced lie. The whole issue of stalled evacuation of civilians from Mariupol was about the direction they should take, East to Russia or West to Ukraine.  Opening corridors to the West would have meant breaking the siege which the Russians imposed precisely to crush the radical forces within the city. The Russians had indeed not allowed this.

                                                                        *****

Let us be perfectly frank: the Russians have lost the Information War over their ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine in Western media, meaning especially in the United States and Europe.  The situation globally is, of course, more nuanced, with nearly half of humanity, meaning India and China, on the sidelines or predisposed to side with Russia.

Let us remember that the Russians never did well in the Information War in the West.  They lacked the skills, and the ‘market’ was virtually closed to them by tight U.S. government control over all major media and patriotic self-censorship in editorial and production offices.  The shutdown of RT and Sputnik has been an insignificant factor working against dissemination of the Russian narrative.

Let us also be clear-eyed: the loss of the Information War in the lands of their enemies changes absolutely nothing for Russia. They never were liked.  The ongoing war, and the greater threat of its escalation to a more generalized Third World War that quickly becomes nuclear has put into the equation an element of fear, which may sway some minds in the West towards greater realism. Or perhaps it won’t.  But all of this changes nothing as regards the outcome if the Russians can complete their mission in the coming weeks and not face growing domestic discontent that compels them to change their negotiating terms at the end. If completed quickly, the Russian military operation will be decided by two things only: Blut und Eisen, or ‘blood and iron,’ as Bismarck would have observed.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

*The Tochka-U is known in NATO parlance as the SS-21. Their deployment by the USSR within the Warsaw Pact in the late 1970s-early 1980s led the United States to threaten introduction of its Pershings in Europe and ended in the conclusion of the INF Treaty. The missile is nuclear capable and has a range of up to 180 km. This was the missile which Vladimir Putin mentioned in his remarks denouncing the Ukrainian nuclear program discovered at the Zaporozhye atomic stations.

For visuals of the destruciton in Donetsk city from the missile strike, see https://ria.ru/20220314/donetsk-1778051454.html

Warning:  it is “highly likely” the United States is now about to carry out a ‘false flag’ operation in Ukraine in which it will accuse the Russians of using chemical weapons

Unfortunately, it appears the Biden Administration does not listen closely to the President, or simply ignores him at times.

Joe Biden, or “Slow Joe,” has been much more sensible than all of his civilian cabinet members and assistants about avoiding anything which might precipitate a direct military clash with Russia in and around Ukraine, and opening the risk of escalation to nuclear war. I pointedly exclude the Pentagon here from the list of fools, because, on the contrary, they appear to be most sensitive to Russian capabilities and intentions.

Biden personally vetoed the madcap idea of transferring 29 MIGs from Poland to the Ukrainian air force notwithstanding the support it had from his Secretary of State. He personally vetoed declaring a ‘no flight zone’ over Ukraine which would be enforced by the United States and its NATO allies notwithstanding strong petitions to that effect from his own Democratic Party within Congress.  In both cases, Biden seems to have taken with utmost seriousness the threat from the Russian military authorities to not merely shoot down warplanes entering the Ukraine theater but to missile attack the air bases from which they took off.

 But now, ‘late breaking news’ from USA Today, if true, suggests that somehow people in his Administration are outflanking the President and preparing the way for global war by unleashing yet another ‘false flag’ incident that will raise the temperature in the US-Russian confrontation by many degrees.

The caption which yahoo.com is now carrying reads as follows:

USA Today: Russia could be preparing for chemical weapons attack; 35 killed in strike on base near Lviv: Live updates

Now why would Russia stage a chemical weapons attack in Ukraine?  The idea defies all reason. Russia has vast possibilities of destroying Ukraine that it has not deployed to date precisely to avoid civilian casualties. These include cyber attack, electromagnetic pulse (EMP) and more intense use of its airpower which has been restrained due to shortage of smart bombs and reluctance to use munitions that might cause greater collateral damage.   Given these manifest signs of Russian caution in staging the war, even at the cost of greater casualties among its own troops and slower progress in a campaign that is very time sensitive, one would have to be utterly mad to consider using universally banned chemical weapons.  I rest my case: any so-called chemical attack which may be staged in Ukraine in coming days can only be the dirty work of the United States and its agents.

I call readers’ attention to the second half of the lead sentence in USA Today: the remark about the results of the Russian attack this morning on a U.S. and NATO training and logistical center outside of Lviv and close to the Polish border.  The Russian attack was closely linked to the statement of the Russian military a day ago that it would consider all incoming foreign arms as ‘legitimate targets’.  Stores of such arms were in the base.  The USA Today article mentions that the given base was occupied by U.S. military from Florida as recently as two weeks ago.  It does not take a stretch of imagination to realize that among the 35 killed in the attack were Americans and/or NATO personnel.  The threat of a false flag chemical attack is the U.S. response.

However, that need not be the driver of the possible new dirty trick from the USA. News about a chemical attack in Ukraine would divert attention away from the growing scandal over U.S. supervised and financed biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine, and possible U.S. curatorship over the Ukrainian efforts to develop a dirty nuclear bomb.

If the chemical attack proceeds, it will take us all one step closer to Armageddon. 

High time for Biden to put his house in order.

©Gilbert Doctorow,  2022

In my report on “Day Sixteen” of the Ukraine-Russia war a couple of days ago, I provided a brief summary of the opening segment of the 9 March edition of the Russian political talk show “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov.” I directed special attention to the words of Mosfilm Director Karen Shakhnazarov, who set the tone for an unusually grave discussion of war prospects and political stability within Russia.

However, I saved for separate discussion and did not mention one key point made by Shakhnazarov that was picked up by other panelists and became a general topic for discussion:  that the Americans are doing everything in their power for this to be a long war and Russia must avoid at all costs following their playbook.

 For the Americans, the longer the war drags on, the easier it is to impose ever more punishing sanctions to which European and other allies will also adhere given the negative impact on public opinion about Russia from the scenes of destruction in Ukraine that are shown daily on television. The prolongation of war is supported by the never ending messages of support to the valiant Ukrainian fighters coming in from the United States and the Collective West, from the $13 billion in aid just approved by Congress, from the weaponry and munitions that NATO Member States are now sending in to Ukraine.  No one in the West is telling Zelensky to save  his country, to save  his people by just giving up and submitting to Russia’s demands, though there are reports that Israeli Prime Minister Bennett did just that a day or so ago in a telephone conversation with the Ukrainian leader.

Of course, a separate issue is whether Zelensky could raise the white flag and live to see another day. Russian social media which reported the story of Bennett’s call also posted comments to the effect that Zelensky counts for nothing, that the army and radical nationalists will not follow any orders he may give.

Perhaps for these reasons, the Russian military command through its spokesman Major General Igor Konoshenkov today declared that any convoys carrying foreign weaponry into Ukraine will be considered to be ‘legitimate targets’ and will be destroyed. When the military materiel is exhausted, the Ukrainian forces will have no choice but to surrender.

Meanwhile there are questions about how the Russians will impose demilitarization and denazification in case of victory.  Yes, they will have destroyed the military assets of Ukraine by their bombing campaign. However, if the Russians simply get up and leave Ukraine upon signing a peace agreement on recognition of the independence of the Donbas republics and on recognition that Crimea is now Russian, it is entirely foreseeable that the West would rearm Ukraine very quickly, possibly within one year by simple drawdown of the surplus tanks and other gear now in storage in EU countries.

As former Soviet-Russian diplomat, political scientist and activist Nikolay Platoshkin argues, denazification means more than arrest of Nazi radicals in the army, which is by itself beyond the capabilities of the 150,000 Russian troops now at work on Ukrainian territory. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVp_AONS2BY -in Russian)   It means bringing into play Ukrainian Russian-speaking civil society, which has been cowed into submission by eight years of terror inflicted by radical bully boys across the country, so that identification and court proceedings against neo-Nazis and nationalist gangsters proceed without Russian participation. The whole educational system in Ukraine must be reformed to replace the hate literature that currently fills the classrooms and libraries in the guise of textbooks is purged. All of this requires a more comprehensive and effective outreach to the Ukrainian public than the Russian leadership has demonstrated in its conduct of the war till now.

As I mentioned in my last essay, a long, drawn out war may destabilize the Russian government as war protesters rise in numbers and effectiveness. It would also put in jeopardy the support Russia receives from its close friends abroad, China and India.  Already now Chinese international broadcaster CGTN is broadcasting news on the Ukraine conflict that is almost undistinguishable from CNN or the BBC in its one-sidedness in favor of the Ukrainian ‘victims’ of Russian aggression.  The notion that the Russian-Chinese relationship is ‘greater than an alliance’ will come into question if the war goes on more than one month.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

I am pleased to share with readers the link to today’s panel discussion on TRT Turkish public broadcasting in which I participated along with a professor of international relations in Australia and an analyst in London focused on energy markets.

I commend the producers of Newsmakers for the well-balanced selection of experts, for a highly professional preparation of introductory information for the audience and for posing very relevant questions to the panelists.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEBUgOLVVJQ

From before the war and in its early days, I have used the widely followed political talk show “Evening With Vladimir Solovyov” on Russian state television as a valuable indicator of the thinking processes of the country’s elites. Virtually the only significant contingent of opinion makers who do not appear on such shows are business leaders, who tend to operate only behind the scenes and not in public view.

In today’s essay, I direct attention to Solovyov’s show broadcast on 9 March.  In the past, I would watch  this program and other key state television programs like Vesti on youtube.com.  However, since the early days of the ongoing war, youtube, a Google subsidiary, has thrown nearly all Russian state television channels off its servers. Happily, several months ago, a special Russian internet portal www.smotrim.ru opened its doors and in now carries the most popular programs for viewing by live streaming or as recorded video. The link to the Solovyov show in question is here:

https://smotrim.ru/video/2390629

As usual, this particular broadcast had a cast of panelists representing different walks of life, including area specialists from universities or think tanks, a retired general and the General Director of Mosfilm studios, cinematographer Karen Shakhnazarov, who appears on almost every show hosted by Solovyov together with about half of the other panelists.

The mood of the show on 9 March was very different from the exuberance I reported in shows before the start of the war, when the long awaited reckoning with the enemy across the Atlantic was almost eagerly anticipated. This evening the show was sober, grave.  The host, Vladimir Solovyov, cracked very few jokes during his opening remarks and they fell flat. Though he normally is fairly generous in the time he allots to Shakhnazarov to ramble across the waterfront of recent news, this time it was all the more striking because of what the Mosfilm Director was saying. And we must keep in mind that of all the panelists Shakhnazarov is surely the closest to Russia’s “chattering classes” and “creative professionals” thanks to his position in the movie industry.

In a nutshell, Shakhnazarov was critical of the way the war is being conducted and very nervous over its possibly going on much longer than anyone wants, leading to destabilization of Russia’s political structure. The Ukrainians had proven more resistant than was anticipated, and apart from Kherson in the south major cities all were proving difficult to capture and hold. Consequently, the Russian armed forces had changed tactics, were now inflicting devastating damage on selected cities and refugee flows numbering in the millions were passing the frontiers to Poland, Hungary and elsewhere.

In Shakhnazarov’s view, the result of watching scenes of damage to civilian quarters in Ukrainian cities and scenes of refugees en marche were awakening the long inculcated antiwar sentiments of various strata of the Russian population and setting the stage for civil disorder if the war is not wound down in the coming two weeks or so and instead goes on for months. It was this factor of refusal to inflict on Ukrainians the same misery their militias and army had inflicted on Donbas which is the greatest threat domestically in Russia. By contrast, the damage to the Russian economy from Western sanctions and relative isolation from the West are manageable and less consequential for the average Russian, per Shakhnazarov.

Other panelists may not have agreed with his assessment but were not quick to criticize.

                                                             *****

Cyber-warfare. 

In the past several years a key element in Western accusations against Russia within the envelope of “hybrid warfare” was the potential for devastating cyber attacks  We were told periodically about Russian cyber attacks that shut down internet web sites of government offices in Estonia or in other EU countries, not to mention the massive cyber attack on U.S. government and corporate computer systems within the past year for which Russia was blamed.

However, an outstanding feature of the Russian operation in Ukraine is the apparent absence of any cyber attacks whatsoever on the part of the Russians.  On the other hand, what I see is a lot of cyber attacks on Russian websites of all kinds.  Whether they are coming from Ukraine, where computer geeks are very experienced in such measures or coming from other locations under instructions from the U.S. or EU governments cannot be determined from public sources at present.

My own experience indicates that the attackers are persistent up to a point, then move on.  For two days straight earlier this week I was unable to access the Sberbank Online site. Access denial is a typical hack situation when hundreds of thousands of sign-on attempts overwhelm the given servers.  On the third day of my attempts, the hackers must have been taking a smoking break. And so I successfully entered Sberbank Online to pay some bills.  As regards www.smotrim.ru as well:  now you see it, now you don’t.  The website exists but for long periods of time may be inaccessible.

Meanwhile, the Russians have not used their capability of knocking out communications within Ukraine or have done so only accidentally when repeater towers for mobile networks are destroyed during fighting.  Thus, two nights ago, I watched on an evening BBC News program devoted to the war an interview with a spokeswoman for the Kiev authorities living in Kharkiv. She gave a ten minute interview from her well-appointed upper middle class apartment in downtown Kharkiv, a city which in general, as we know from news reports, is being deconstructed brick by brick from intensive Russian shelling to force a surrender on the municipal authorities. The lady in question was well coiffed, her dress was elegant and her demeanor was calm even if her message was shrill in denouncing the Russian aggressors. The entire setting was surreal given the reported Russian onslaught, but this seems not to have occurred to the BBC presenter and presumably was not detected by the British and overseas audience.

                                                           *****

Changing Russian war objectives and changing Russian military strategy and tactics.

I see maximum flexibility and responsiveness of the Russian forces to realities on the ground which from the beginning frustrated their conduct of the war.  The Russian military command had wrong assumptions about the possibility of separating the professional Ukrainian army from the Nazi and other radical nationalists like the Azov battalion which were some time ago incorporated into the regular armed forces   There were wrong assumptions not only about the level of resistance, but also about the level of training and military hardware available to the enemy.  Blitzkrieg very quickly disappeared from the realizable outcomes.  Surrounding the Ukrainian armies and creating ‘cauldrons’ in which the Russians would, figuratively speaking, turn up the heat till the enemy raises the white flag – this has gone slowly, too slowly to be sustainable in light of changing public attitudes towards the war within Russia.

In the meantime, Vladimir Putin has added to the Russian ultimatum addressed to Ukrainian leadership:  now it is not merely denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine, as well as exclusion of all possibilities of joining NATO that the Russians demand, but also direct recognition of the loss of Crimea and of the now independent republics of the Donbas.  It also would appear from the remarks made in Antalya yesterday by Dmitro Kuleba, the Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs following his meeting and talks with Sergei Lavrov, that simple adoption of “neutral” status within a convention to be monitored by unspecified Powers is not enough to satisfy the Kremlin.

I see this build-up of demands as having one logic only:  to prepare for a settlement with Ukraine that looks like a compromise in which both sides give up some of their demands to reach an agreement. Surely some of what Putin has added to Russian demands will enable him to jettison other demands that were put up at the start of the conflict, in particular, denazification. As Shakhnadzarov remarked on the Solovyov program, this is simply unrealizable, because you would have to have not 150,000 Russian soldiers on the ground but ten times as many to go through this vast country and make arrests.

                                                                             *****

Nominally the entire Russian ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine was about protecting the Donbas from a Ukrainian onslaught.  Back in November, Russia raised its military forces at the Ukrainian border to over 150,000 in order to precisely counter a similar number of Ukrainian troops and irregulars which had been reached as the culmination of several years’ efforts. Now we are told and shown in Ukrainian documents presented publicly by the Russians, that the Ukrainian forces had indeed planned to unleash an all-out assault on the Donbas on 8 or 9 March which, if successful, would move on to recapture Crimea as well.

In light of this war priority of Moscow from the onset, it is paradoxical that the daily artillery strikes and other attacks on the Donbas republics today is as bad or worse than at any time in the past.  Every day a large part of Russian television programming is devoted to the suffering of the villages of Donetsk and Lugansk republics under attack. We are shown houses destroyed earlier in the day by bombardments, and the now homeless owners, generally pensioners, are interviewed at length. In effect, the Russians are showing on their screens a mirror image of the scenes of destruction and human misery coming from the Ukrainian cities under Russian assault.  And it may well be that the level of suffering in Donbas has been a determinant in the transition of the Russian military policy these past few days from ‘softly, softly’ to aggressive destruction

Of course, none of the scenes of misery in the Donbas today are reported or shown in Western media, just as they were never shown during the past 8 years of the simmering civil war.  And so the Russians’ new aggressiveness in pressing the war is left utterly unexplained other than by reference to the supposed maliciousness of the invader.  Nor do you read or hear in Western media about the peculiar “resistance” that the Russian armed forces have encountered: namely the way that the Ukrainian army as well as its irregular battalions chase civilians from residential apartment buildings and infrastructure buildings then install artillery and fire on the Russians from these new supposedly protected and off limits surroundings. This is how the Russians have explained their dramatic bombing of a hospital for children and laying-in facility:  it had been emptied of its civilians and was being used as a military center by the Ukrainian forces. They went on to say that the televised videos of women in labor who were supposedly injured in the bombing were fakes.  At present neither accusations from the Ukrainians nor counter-accusations from the Russians are verifiable, but in the coming weeks the truth may come out. In the meantime, the Russians have undeniably received a bloody nose in the PR realm.

Why are the Donbas residents suffering more bombardments?  The answer is plain to see.  As I noted several times in my ‘war coverage,’ the Russians let the Donbas republics fight for their own statehood, providing only some logistical support. On their own, these local forces have succeeded in recovering territory from their pre-2014 boundaries by taking day by day one village after another. This has occurred chiefly in the north, in Lugansk, where success has been greatest but where resistance has been least severe. The Donetsk forces have been stalled in their movement south at Mariupol to join up with Russian troops arriving from the Crimea.  Meanwhile, at the line of demarcation in the West, the military hardware and manpower at the disposal of the Donetsk armed forces is inferior to the very large and well equipped Ukrainian forces on the other side of the border, which have the most up to date equipment supplied by the USA and other NATO member states. 

It is appropriate to mention that today in his televised meeting with his military advisers Vladimir Putin ordered them to provide Russia’s most recent armaments to the Donetsk and Lugansk fighters to level the playing field.  Also worthy of note, today Vladimir Putin agreed to requests of these same advisers to allow foreign fighter volunteers to join the Russian forces in Ukraine, in a mirror image response to the increasing presence of European and American soldiers of fortune who in their thousands have joined the ranks of the Ukrainian forces in recent weeks.  To draw an analogy, we are witnessing formations of foreign combatants similar to what occurred in the Spanish Civil War.

                                                                ****

The question of Western sanctions and Russian counter-sanctions merits a word of comment at this point. Both U.S. and European economic sanctions have come close to the absolute limit of possibilities with very few additional options being held back, and they, such as total exclusion from SWIFT, are nearly impossible to implement because the blowback to the West would far exceed any incremental pain they might inflict on Russia.

Against this background, the Russian response has so far been very restrained. Yesterday, President Putin signed a decree placing a great many product categories under export ban till the end of the year.  However, when you look at the list it becomes clear that the measure is to protect the Russian economy from domestic or foreign speculators rather than to impose pain on the United States and the Collective West. Now that the Russian ruble has fallen to record lows, representing a loss of value in the past several weeks of 40%, Russian movable assets can be scooped up and sold abroad instantly for the respective differential as profit. That is the sense of a ban on export of medical equipment or motor vehicles and so much else.

Russia has not yet used its own “nuclear option” with regard to hydrocarbon exports, although in the past couple of days Deputy Prime Minister Novak, who has for the past decade been the leading Russian government official in the oil and gas sector, said pointedly that the country is considering halting operation of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline.

Nord Stream 1?  The reasoning here is clear.  Germany’s Chancellor Scholz has turned out to be one of the most determined advocates of sanctions on Russia, though so far sparing oil and gas from the list of sanctions imposable on Russia due to his country’s utter dependence on Russia at this moment.  Nord Stream 1, like the ill-fated Nord Stream 2 which Scholz suspended, or shall we say, cancelled, is Russia’s direct supply to its single biggest customer in Europe, Germany.  If the long serving pipeline is closed down by the Russians, while the Yamal and Ukrainian pipelines remain open, Germany will have to beg Austria and other countries receiving Russian gas via these routes to Central Europe to divert gas supplies to Germany. That will spell humiliation for the Chancellor and his cabinet of Russia-haters, as well as a steep rise in the country’s expenditures on energy.

Another vector of possible Russian attack on the Collective West is in nationalization or expropriation of the assets of companies that have left the Russian market.  The estimated value of factories, retail installations and the like approach 150 billion dollars.  That is to say, Russian nationalization could yield to the Kremlin value approximating the financial reserves of the Bank of Russia in Western banks that have now been frozen. So far the legislation enabling such confiscation is under preparation in the State Duma.

                                                               *****

What are the medium and long term consequences of the war that we may prognosticate at this stage?

Firstly, Russian-European relations will not be the same for a generation to come, if ever. The sheer hatred of things Russian that European authorities have not merely watched indifferently but actively encouraged cannot dissipate in a matter of weeks. That will take years to run its course.   See the several years that it took for the United States to put behind it the paroxysms of hatred for France and things French following the French refusal to go along with the planned U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, a refusal that denied to the USA cover of United Nations authorization. “Freedom fries” in place of French fries did eventually leave the lexicon, but it took time.  In the case of Russia today, the irrational hatred that is being encouraged by the European Institutions and by the cowed leaders of European Member States will leave a long residue of rejection of Russia.

This extends to culture, or rather to the “anti-culture” movement spreading across Europe, whereby lectures on Dostoevsky are cancelled then reinstated in an Italian city, where Tchaikowsky is withdrawn from concert performances and similar idiocy has become rampant in supposed towers of culture in the West. It is simply incredible how easy it is for cave-man instincts to prevail and drive away all tolerance in mature societies of the West however much they pay mouth honor to ‘universal values.’

I say this not merely as an abstraction but as something we in our family experienced firsthand in Brussels, Belgium.  For reasons of security, I cannot go into the details here but will only say that the offense was directed at our eleven year old grandson because he has a Russian first name even if his family name is as Flemish as they come.  

Other casualties of the war would appear to be “rule of law,” “presumption of innocence” and due process.  The lead in this degradation of supposed “European values,” the standard to which the European Union holds the entire world to account, is to be found in Britain. The freezing of assets on the Russian oligarch, Abramovich, owner of the Chelsea football club, yesterday is a case in point.  The supposed justification is his alleged closeness to Vladimir Putin, on the basis of which he is said to have amassed his fortune.  However, Abramovich was never close to the Kremlin. He was close to Boris Berezovsky, the Kremlin’s great enemy until he was murdered by British intelligence. Abramovich had for years been the fair-haired boy carrying the suitcases of Berezovsky before he found his own path to fortune in that milieu of crooks and moved out from under his protector. 

Moreover, the arbitrary confiscation of private property that Britain’s prime minister is now implementing extends incredibly not merely to spouses of the oligarchs under attack but to their children, even to children born to their lovers out of wedlock. No further comment on this return to barbarism is required.

I assume that the oligarchs have teams of lawyers and will vigorously defend their rights. With the passage of time, they may even unfreeze their improperly seized assets.  But in the meantime, rule of law has gone to hell in Britain and further afield on the Continent.

Since it takes two to tango, the widespread disappointment of ordinary Russians to the undignified, shabby and “racially” motivated treatment they now receive in Western Europe as students, as musicians or ballet performers will leave an indelible residue of disgust. A Russian pivot to Asia, Latin America and Africa is inescapable.

Thirdly, NATO expansion in the former Soviet Union is finished, though expansion into Scandinavia is almost a certainty. Despite all the rhetoric of journalists and politicians across the Continent, anything approximating a Russian victory over Ukraine will amount to a serious diminution of NATO’s status as it exposes the animal fear of NATO’s leaders to risk a war with Russia, which is what the alliance is supposed to be all about. To cover these traces, it is probable that NATO will induct as members the two Scandinavian countries that have been on the sidelines till now.  But in terms of NATO power, that will mean little or no increment, because under long existing Memorandums of Understanding both Finland and Sweden already are obliged to open their territory and make available facilities and manpower whenever NATO asks. As for the Russians, having these two NATO states on their border cannot be compared to Ukraine: neither is belligerent or rabidly nationalistic in the way that Ukraine has been post-2014.

European consolidation has been given a big boost, but what that means is still undetermined. In defense, it is a certainty that the European Union will now seek to strengthen its own capability to defend itself without an American umbrella. In this connection the recent decision of Germany to raise its military budget by 100 billion Euros and reach the NATO target of 2% of GDP has been seen as a boost to NATO, but that is very questionable. More likely the new resources will boost European common defense aspirations and independence from U.S. dominated NATO.  There is a great deal to do not merely to line up multinational battle units but to rebuild the European defense industry which has been gutted by decades of forced acquisition of U.S. manufactured hardware.

These are just a few of the most easily identifiable consequences of the Russian-Ukrainian War, which is ushering in a new political configuration on the Old Continent for better or worse.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

En español:

My thanks to Juan Manuel Harán at ReporteAsia for the following translation of “India’s Moment to Shine”:

Crisis en Ucrania: el momento de la India para brillar

In addition, I am grateful to a couple of Italian portals for their translations of other articles.

In italiano:

“You won’t know what hit you and why” :

Non saprete cosa vi avrà colpito né perché

“Bunny Rabbits and the Big Bad Wolf”

I teneri coniglietti e il lupo cattivo. Ovvero il conflitto tra Ucraina e Russia visto con la lente dei reportage occidentali

“The Russian Way of War”

https://www.aldomariavalli.it/2022/03/04/la-via-russa-alla-guerra/

“U.S Nailed to the Wall on Illicit Biological Weapons Labs in Ukraine”

Laboratori illegali di armi biologiche in Ucraina. Le responsabilità degli Stati Uniti

“Day Five of Russia’s ‘Special Military Operation'”

Un primo bilancio dell’”operazione militare speciale” della Russia in Ucraina

En français:

[machine translation]

ausouffledelesprit.org/2022/03/11/la-voie-russe-de-la-guerre

Multilingual (20 language versions on offer):

U.S. Nailed to the Wall on Illicit Biological Weapons Labs in Ukraine

A couple of days ago, when I presented a summary of the dramatic information and warnings conveyed in the latest televised briefing by the spokesman for the Russian military, Igor Konoshenkov, I received back from some readers the comment that this was all just Russian propaganda, similar to the kind of propaganda we hear regularly coming from the Pentagon and State Department. The allegations of biological weapons banned under international convention being produced in experimental laboratories in Kharkiv and other Ukrainian towns under programs paid for and supervised by Americans had to be fake news, these skeptics and cynics maintained. The same had to be true of Konoshenkov’s asserting that the Ukrainians were working on dirty nuclear bombs at their Zaporozhye nuclear power stations, which had just been captured by Russian forces.

Nonetheless, yesterday the story about biological weapons labs received convincing confirmation from the U.S. State Department, when Victoria Nuland, Under Secretary for Political Affairs, said publicly before microphones that the USA fears that its biological labs in Ukraine will “fall into the wrong hands.”  That is a very convoluted admission that the Russians’ allegations are perfectly true. The U.S. is battening down the hatches against the coming storm of international indignation, at the same time trying to divert attention away from itself by suggesting that the Russians might do something dastardly with what they find.

American evasion and attempted dissimulation were stymied however when, also yesterday, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanded an explanation from the United States of what exactly Americans have been doing not only in their Ukrainian labs, which were situated in cities across the Ukraine from Kharkiv to Lviv, but in a total of 336 such labs spread out across the world.  Intense Chinese concern is understandable since one such laboratory was in Wuhan, the point of origin of Covid19.

Still on the subject of biological weapons being prepared in Ukraine under United States funding and guidance, Russian experts were on television this morning explaining how leaks from these labs have been monitored over the past few years. In one such case, 450 Ukrainian civilians were said to have died from biological agents that contaminated their residential block. This number, you will note, is higher than the total number of civilian deaths in the ongoing “barbaric” Russian operation in Ukraine as reported in The Financial times (characterization as “barbaric” by Andrew Bacevich, Chairman of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a self-described American think tank for peace). The Russians are now examining whether outbreaks of swine flu and avian flu that caused havoc with their livestock in farming areas close to the Ukrainian border may not have been artificially induced by saboteurs coming from Ukraine. Work on viruses transmissible from animals to humans was also reportedly being done in the Ukrainian facilities.

Let us now turn to the question of Ukraine’s program to produce nuclear weapons, which Konoshenkov also mentioned in his briefing.  Today Russian news is saying that they possess more than just documentary proof of such development, which contravenes the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, to which Ukraine is a signatory. The Russians now claim to have found sample “baby bombs” which will prove beyond doubt the nuclear ambitions of Kiev for which the United States was a guiding force.

All of the foregoing points to what may be expected when the Russians finish their demilitarization and denazification campaign in Ukraine in the next several weeks.  They may well convene an international tribunal to try the Ukrainians who were responsible for the illicit programs involving weapons of mass destruction. We may expect the Chinese to join them in running the tribunal, as well as other closely interested countries.  It is also reasonable to expect that this tribunal will identify and seek to extradite their American handlers.  This may be difficult, because Moscow has already said today that the Americans on the ground in Ukraine overseeing the biological weapons laboratories all carried diplomatic passports.  However, the Russians, like the Americans, can be very resourceful in cases like this.

                                                                    *****

Finally, before closing today’s bulletin of latest developments in the Russia-Ukraine war at the political level, I direct attention to the question of Poland’s turning over its fleet of Soviet-era MIG jet fighters to Ukraine, which has been a hot issue on Western news these past few days.  The Poles had been in discussions over this possibility with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week, and Blinken seemed to be approving.  For the Poles, the proposed “donation” to support Ukraine would be a godsend.  They would get rid their fleet of old Soviet planes and would receive in exchange from the United States F-16 fighters, thereby better integrating Poland into the standard equipment of NATO fully at the charge of Uncle Sam. Let us assume the transaction would come to half a billion to one billion dollars to the benefit of Warsaw and to the cost of U.S. taxpayers.

Is it any wonder that several other former Warsaw Pact countries, now NATO member states yesterday said they too were ready to help the comrades in Ukraine by turning their old MIGs over to Kiev and taking in exchange United States fighter planes.

Warsaw announced yesterday that it intended to fly its MIGs to the Ramstein air base in southwestern Germany for the hand-over. This news release apparently took the U.S Government by surprise.  At her testimony before the Senate a little later in the day, Victoria Nuland said she had no pre-warning of the announcement and would not comment till she got back to her office and studied the matter further.

This announcement was indeed remarkable.  Ramstein is the headquarters of the United States Air Forces in Europe and also of the NATO Allied Air Command.  If the MIGs had simply been transferred to Ukrainian pilots on Polish territory and then flown into combat in Ukraine, then they would bring down on the dispatching airport in Poland the instant retribution that General Konoshenkov stated explicitly two days ago.  By sending the planes to Ramstein for the hand-over to the Ukrainians, the Russian response, cruise or hypersonic missile attack, would go instead against the United States air base. 

Dear promoters of Poland as the defense shield of Europe in Washington:  pay close attention to what your friends would do to you.

However, none of this will come to pass, as we may conclude by today’s announcement from the Pentagon that the deal is unacceptable and is outside the competence of Poland to offer.  Today the Pentagon spokesmen say plainly that the issue at hand concerns all of NATO and can be taken only by NATO collectively, not by one member, Poland.

This is a nice formally correct explanation from the Pentagon.  The subtext is that the U.S. Chiefs of Staff have taken with the utmost seriousness the warnings of retaliation from Konoshenkov,  against NATO, Article 5 or no Article 5 pledges of ‘one for all and all for one.’  Meanwhile, the general public in the United States is clueless because virtually nothing about this appeared in major media.

                                                                     *****

When the war started, President Putin was hopeful to come to a quick understanding with the leading officers of the Ukrainian armed forces regarding capitulation and regime change.  However, in a matter of days it became clear that the Ukrainian military has been thoroughly infiltrated by radical nationalists and is unable to act in the interests of the nation independently. It now appears that this type of analysis would be better applied to the United States of America.  Only the senior generals in the Pentagon have their eyes and ears wide open to the Russian capabilities and intentions.  The political classes, both Democrats and Republicans on The Hill, are lost in their own virtual world of unlimited United States power. That alone explains the potentially suicidal demand from Democrats yesterday that Biden now impose a ‘no-fly zone’ over Ukraine.

It may be that the war will end when the Pentagon generals and their Russian counterparts sit down and talk about revising the European architecture of security, leaving Blinken and his associates to look on through the windows.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Yesterday, while perusing the daily digest of Russia-related news and opinion to which former U.S. diplomats and businessmen based in Washington, D.C. are the principal subscribers, I came across a passage in the latest opinion piece by American historian, professor emeritus of Boston University, Andrew Bacevich:

I do not mean to minimize the thuggishness of Russia’s president or the barbarism of the Russian forces that have invaded Ukraine. Both deserve our condemnation. 

“Thuggishness” of Putin?  “Barbarism” of Russian forces amidst reports in The Financial Times yesterday that less than 400 Ukrainian civilians had thus far died in the war as it passed into its eleventh day, whereas by this point in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 several hundred thousand Iraqi civilians had been wantonly slaughtered by the incoming waves of American troops destroying everything in their path to Baghdad.  These generalizations about Russia’s President and his forces could just as easily have been issued by Dick Cheney or Don Rumsfeld in their glory days, those unprosecuted, untouched war criminals.

In the past, going back more than a dozen years, I fairly regularly read Bacevich’s books, which he published at two year intervals, on how the United States errs in its wars of choice and I even put out reviews of a couple of his books. I was generally complimentary though I questioned his views on causality and the motor driving the U.S. fighting machine. I knew then that his strength was strategic and tactical analysis of military affairs, coming from his own life experience, not politics or economics as such. His interest in and knowledge of things Russian was always weak.  Then it did not matter; today it is of paramount importance to anyone who opens his mouth from a public platform.

Since Bacevich does not know much about Russia on his own, I assume he has been drawing upon the broad knowledge of Anatol Lieven, the recently recruited Senior Fellow to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, of which Bacevich is President and Chairman of the Board.

Anatol Lieven bears a family name with great resonance to Russianists.  His older brother Dominic is the world’s leading historian of Imperial Russia. He has written invaluable volumes on the tsarist bureaucracy and its leading families, on how the Russians defeated Napoleon’s Grande Armée thanks to logistical superiority, vast numbers of horses, better discipline and élan rather than thanks to Father Winter, as has been supposed till now. These books were all extensively researched in Russian and Western archives, and he was the first to draw upon both sources this way.

However, Anatol is not Dominic.  His profession is journalism, notwithstanding his Ph.D. in political science, and as is customary in journalism he has written about a great many things, including as war correspondent for major media in Afghanistan and elsewhere. His Wikipedia entry lists nine “areas of expertise and interest.” Among them is Russia and the Former Soviet Union, but that does not prepare him for the role of Russia expert that he now assumes.  At the American Committee for US-Russia Accord, Lieven has been assigned pride of place, as a replacement for Professor Stephen Cohen, who passed away in September 2020, leaving an intellectual hole in the organization which none of the founders could fill on their own.

Anatol Lieven is also no Steve Cohen. Here is where we get to the point I highlight in the title of this essay:  the distinction between sheep and goats. Cohen was a goat; Lieven is a sheep. And whatever I am saying about Lieven could just as easily be said about a host of worthies who get prime real estate in the publishing world to opine on the issues of our day. Just to take a name out of a hat, I can point to the recent writings of one E. Wayne Merry, former State Department official whose recently issued op-ed piece “The consequence of being clueless in Ukraine” in The Hill sounds as if he was looking in the mirror when he was writing. His likening Vladimir Putin to Nicholas II, and the current military operation in Ukraine to the Russo-Japanese War is ignorant drivel.

In fact, my “sheep” are the vast majority of American and European academics who dance from foot to foot when passing through the minefield of Russian matters.

It is a constant feature among academic (and not only academic) lecturers to organize their talks about the 3 points of this or 4 points of that.  It is understandable; this is a trick of mnemonics.  It is also a constant when academic historians or political scientists approach controversial issues yet want to appear fair minded that they declare both parties to an issue as sharing the blame. This is precisely where Anatol Lieven comes into the picture.  In all of his writings, Russia is doing something illegal or vicious, even if there are, shall we say, extenuating circumstances, not to mention precedents in Western behavior which are still more illegal and vicious. And these casual insertions, like the sentences I quoted from Bacevich above, amount to taking the knee.

Besides the mindset of university dons to go for the middle ground, there is the greater factor of saying nothing which might cost them the respect and society of their peers, who are in very great proportion anti-Russian, in line with the general public thanks to the Information War.  Still worse, since tenured positions are getting rare as hen’s teeth, they can be simply dismissed for speaking without self-censorship and without due attention to the consensus views. This is particularly so in the highly politicized and divided USA, where anti-culture and wokism have established tyrannical control over what can be taught, what can be said that carries over into all subjects, not just race relations.

So Lieven is watching his P’s and Q’s, and Bacevich is getting bad advice on an issue which should be central to the work of the Quincy Institute.

All of this is not to say that there are no outstanding professors and think tank researchers who speak out, write openly against the present mass hysteria relating to Russia and try to bring sanity and realism to bear on policy by Speaking Truth to Power. The outstanding living exemplar is Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. His “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault” published in the September-October 2014 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine was a tour de force and the act of a very brave man.

But when he wrote that piece, Mearsheimer was already battle-tested. In August 2007, he and Harvard professor Stephen Walt coauthored The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. For this book, both faced condemnation from peers and the threat of being drummed out of university life.  They survived, licked their wounds and resumed brilliant careers.

Now, when American intellectual society and policy makers need Mearsheimer most, he has stayed true to his North Star and is speaking out, writing in the same vein, explaining why the blame for the epic confrontation we see around us lies predominantly with the United States.  His latest interview in The New Yorker is well worth reading:  https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine    I also heartily recommend the video of Mearsheimer’s discussion of the same issues with veteran peace activist, former CIA analyst and intelligence briefer of American presidents, Ray McGovern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppD_bhWODDc&t=2344s

Till his untimely death, the most widely known voice for reason in our approach to Russia, in our policy on European security was Professor Stephen Cohen, whom I got to know fairly well from our daily correspondence when setting up and then running The American Committee for East West Accord, on which I had multiple directorships to his chairmanship.

During the three years of our closest friendship, Cohen was living a tormented life because of the ostracism and flashes of hatred to which he was subjected by members of his own profession solely due to his being open-minded about Russia when most others were wallowing in Russophobia. 

Whereas in the late 1990s, Cohen was the toast of the town, was the expert whom American television channels went to for featured interviews to comment on developments in Moscow, as from 2014 he was blacklisted in a way very reminiscent of McCarthyism at its height. This was so even though Cohen always held back a bit, did not lay all his cards on the table, so as to avoid providing still more grist to his detractors.

Nonetheless, even if he was excluded from major media, in his final years Cohen maintained an audience that numbered in hundreds of thousands if not millions via his weekly radio chats dealing with the New Cold War. From transcripts of these programs, he assembled his final book, War with Russia? which was also his freest expression of  his inner convictions, holding nothing back.  I believe the medium of the spoken word helped greatly to shape the message of this book, which will constitute his legacy to American society.

Cohen was well aware of the cowardice of students and colleagues when facing possible censure of the mob rule that is the reality of university departments. He told me that he was especially tolerant of young faculty who had families to look after. He forgave them their silence on the issues of war and peace.

I am not so tolerant as was Cohen.  Those who must bite their tongues or lie to their colleagues and students to hold their jobs would do much better to turn to driving taxis or whatever and retain their self-respect.

 

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022