In recent days, in what is surely a coordinated action by NATO and European authorities acting hand in glove, Russian news broadcasters have been taken off servers in Europe and effectively made inaccessible to the entire European public.  This modern day “jamming” concerns not just RT or Sputnik, the best known state owned voices of Russia because they broadcast in English and other languages that we all know, but virtually every news outlet based in Russia, public and privately owned, and broadcasting in the Russian language.

In this regard, EU Member States are waging an Information War of greatest significance that is absolutely not mentioned, let alone discussed in Western media, whether mainstream or otherwise. The victim is the European public, which, if bad turns to worse, will not know what hit them and why when cruise or hypersonic missiles descend on NATO bases or infrastructure. This enforced silence prevents Western civil society from taking any steps to save its own neck in what have become wartime conditions on the Continent.

The blockage is not uniformly enforced at all times, so that some Russian print and video producers can be accessed at one moment or another before going black.

In particular, one vitally important 3.30 minute video of Russian military spokesman Igor Konoshenkov yesterday and this morning remains accessible on youtube. I will detail below what he was saying, because the messenger and the message concern whether you and I will live to see another day.

Konoshenkov’s points in this video were the following:

1) Russia has now destroyed the entire Ukrainian air force that remained within the confines of Ukraine

2) There are also Ukrainian fighter jets that left the country and are now parked in Romania and other neighboring countries. If these planes are allowed by local authorities to take off from Romania, etc. and enter Ukrainian air space, Russia will consider the country from which they took off as a co-belligerent and will take appropriate action against them. The subtext is that Russia is ready to make missile strikes against NATO airfields that transgress the rules of war.

3) Russia is now about to destroy all military industrial complex factories in Ukraine and has formally warned all employees of these factories to leave the premises and stay away

4) Russia has received documentation from Ukrainian health authorities on the production of biological weapons  (anthrax, Siberian plague and much more) by Ukrainian labs in Kharkiv and elsewhere in cooperation with the United States. Stocks of such weapons were being stored in direct violation of international conventions.  On 24 February, in advance of the start of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, the Ukrainian health authorities destroyed these illicit biological weapons. However, Russia has obtained the official documentation certifying this destruction of what should never have been there. Moscow is now studying this documentation, which indicates United States participation in the development of the biological weapons and will publish the incriminating documents, starting from yesterday.

5) Russia has also obtained documentation proving that Ukraine, in cooperation with the United States, was since the presidency of Petro Petrushenko, actively developing nuclear weapons, including “dirty” nuclear devices using readily available fuel from its reactors.  Such activity was going on in the Zaporozhye nuclear plants, and it is very likely that the fire reported at a ‘training unit’ adjacent to an active reactor two days ago related to destruction of incriminating papers, if it was not otherwise a ‘false flag’ operation to allege a Russian attack on the power station, in violation of international law.

From this list, the most threatening to European peace in the immediate days ahead is point 2, regarding Ukrainian aircraft based outside of Ukraine and being assigned missions to fly back into Ukrainian air space to thwart Russia’s ongoing military offensive.  This bears directly on the patently insane plans of Secretary of State Blinken to allow the Poles to transfer to Kiev, its stock of Soviet era MIGs for missions into Ukraine.

As regards American involvement in the illicit production of biological weapons and of dirty or other types of nuclear arms, we may expect very heated discussions in the United Nations and other forums in coming days.

In the context of the Russian recovery of incriminating documentation that exposes foreign aiders and abetters of Ukraine’s hoped for but not yet achieved production of weapons of mass destruction, it is entirely possible that this explains the sudden and unanticipated flight to Moscow of Israel’s President Bennett two days ago for urgent consultations with President Putin. So far accusations of foreign participation are directed solely against the United States.

The link to Konoshenkov’s briefing yesterday afternoon (only in Russian language):

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

In my essay a couple of days ago about “Bunny Rabbits,” I was talking about the political class in Ukraine, and in particular, about the radical nationalists, call them ‘neo-Nazis,’  call them ‘terrorists,’ who took power in February 2014 following a U.S.-backed and stage-managed coup d’état.  Whether you had a stern oligarch like Poroshenko sitting in the presidential seat or, as today, the boyish hyper-communicator Zelensky occupying that seat, makes no difference whatsoever. The presidents are just front men for the militants who have delusional hopes of marching on Moscow with NATO help.

Now I want to direct attention to what everyone in the West is seeing daily on their television screens, whatever the channel: the Ukrainian refugees pouring into Western Europe in their hundreds of thousands. Perhaps one million five hundred thousand have fled Ukraine since the start of the Russian incursion. There will be many more. The subject gets so much attention in our media for a number of obvious reasons.

One unacknowledged reason is that there is not much else for them to report on. Neither the Russians nor the Ukrainian military forces have ‘embedded’ journalists in their troops. Reporters thus have very little  first-hand experience of the fighting, nothing to put on air other than interviews with fleeing civilians and some of the damage to residential homes in areas which are under Russian siege. For their part, the Russians are intentionally holding back all information about their present and next operations so as to keep the enemy off balance.

The spokesman for the Russian military, Igor Konoshenkov, in his daily briefings, gives only summary figures of tanks, planes, weapons stores that Russian forces have destroyed, as well as the names of villages that Russians or Donbas military have captured or retaken. This kind of ‘information’ leaves the Western press clueless about Russia’s intentions and about the degree of its successes.  But even in this vague presentation of data there is something of importance to find, if you have the will and the editorial encouragement to do so. For example, keeping in mind the latest news on the front page of today’s Financial Times, the reported negotiations between Washington and Warsaw to transfer Soviet era jet fighters in the Polish inventory to the Ukrainians, you should pay attention to Konoshenkov’s figures for the number of Ukrainian aircraft Russian forces destroyed on the ground, as well as in the air. If you just make that small mental effort, which our Western media do not do, you have to wonder what good the dispatch of Polish MIGs to Ukraine will do: they will be a write-off within a day or two of landing, i.e. if they can find a landing strip. And if the idea is for the Polish airmen to fly into Ukrainian air space for ‘day trips’ from NATO bases, then that is inviting the escalation of the war to a NATO-Russian war just as a declared no-flight zone over Ukraine would be. As for the Ukrainian briefings, no one with his head screwed on right takes the figures they spout regarding their military feats with more than a grain of salt.

Then there is the ‘human interest’ dimension to coverage of the refugees to justify Western media attention.  The movement of people inside Ukraine fleeing bombs and artillery, the movement towards and across the borders to the West is massive, as I remarked at the outset.  Among the refugees in transit and among those who have arrived in Hungary or Poland, there are a multitude of potential vignettes of the suffering experienced by innocents in their fear of the incoming Russians.  We are shown the tearful partings of young women in Kiev and other major cities holding their babies as they are about to board trains taking them into emigration. They are embracing their husbands, who, under martial law, are obliged to stay behind and defend the Fatherland.

I fully understand the human tragedy in all of this and extend my full sympathy to the civilians caught in the crossfire which their government and their radical militias have brought upon them. But in this essay, I want to look at what our Western journalists are not reporting because they have been parachuted into the conflict zone with no prior knowledge of the peoples and the issues, or because they are not looking at the other information sources readily available to them on Russian television, which provide an essential context and comparison to what these reporters are seeing in Kiev, at the borders with the EU and inside Hungary and Poland.

                                                       *****

 Let us start with the emigration itself.  As we know, more than two-thirds of the new refugees are landing and are presumably staying in Poland.  Why are they not all on their way to Germany or to the United Kingdom, the preferred destinations of the migration wave of 2015 nominally relating to the civil war in Syria, though mostly consisting of economic migrants from North Africa, Pakistan and other places farther afield?  The reason is not hard to discern if you have a little bit of background knowledge and a little bit of discernment.

Ukrainian migration to Poland has been going on in great numbers for the last several decades. It was driven by economic considerations above all.  Like the Baltic States, Bulgaria and Romania, post-Soviet Ukraine experienced rapid and destructive de-industrialization, which was worsened with each policy shift of their governments away from Russia, which was their longstanding export market and towards the European Union, which had little need for their industrial goods which were, in all cases manufactured according to different technical standards from those set by Brussels. All of these countries have seen loss of their able-bodied populations to Europe and to the U.K. amounting to as much as 25% of overall population.

The Ukrainian preference for settling in Poland was dictated by clearly identifiable factors, among them language and physical proximity.  Spoken Polish is rather close to Ukrainian and is easy for them to learn and bring up to the level necessary to function well in society.  By contrast, few Ukrainians were fluent in English or German or French.  Then the physical closeness of Poland made it easy for Ukrainians settling there to regularly go back to visit with relatives by car, by bus.

On the receiving end, the Poles were very happy to take in Ukrainians to fill the job vacancies for doctors and other medical staff, as well as for construction workers, not to mention unskilled labor given that so many of their own citizens had left Poland for better paying employment in Western Europe over the preceding twenty or thirty years, first illegally and then with full legal cover. Poles had no desire to take in Muslims during the 2015 wave, but were delighted to receive good Catholic (West Ukraine) neighbors from the East.  Moreover, Poland was quick to give naturalization papers to all Ukrainians who could prove (by real or fake documents) that they had some Polish ancestry. Given the way that borders have shifted so many times between Poland, Belarus and Ukraine over the last century, this test became especially diluted.

With respect to the naturalization question, I freely admit that my information is anecdotal though wholly reliable. For reasons of personal safety of my sources, I am not free to give details here and now, but will do so at the first opportunity when the war ends. From these personal sources well known to me over the course of four years of weekly conversations, I heard a great deal about Poland’s issuance of passports to Ukrainian arrivals.

In the context of the Russian invasion, chaos and declared humanitarian ‘disaster’ per the drum-beating of Western NGOs, Ukrainians who had once thought of leaving now pack their bags post-haste to take advantage of settlement conditions in Poland and elsewhere which those who migrated in the past decades could only dream about.

To this I am obliged to add a further snapshot of what is going on that you will not find in The New York Times or on CNN.  Yes, at the train stations in Kiev, only women and children are allowed to board. However, there are other ways of leaving Ukraine and the Russians are reporting that many young and able Ukrainian men are deserting the country via readily accessible escape routes rather than fight and die for Mr. Zelensky and the band of rogues who keep him in office.

I find it not at all surprising that our press is not looking for such cases.  They never did report that a great many if not most of the arrivals on European shores in 2015 were not the picture pretty mothers with infants fleeing the murderous regime of Assad in Syria, but were able bodied and quite muscular gentlemen from elsewhere who took advantage of the once in a lifetime indiscriminate opening of European borders to migrants.

I close out the migration question of Ukraine with an essential look at those who headed East during the past 8 years of chaos and death in Donbas meted out by the Ukrainian regular army and by the Azov Battalion and other radical militias all this time.  More than one million Ukrainians, perhaps two million moved to the Russian Federation to find safety.  Needless to say, you will find nothing about what motivated them or about the relatives they left behind when you pick up Western newspapers.

Moreover, you will find nothing in the Western press about the present, ongoing artillery bombardment of Donbas villages by the Ukrainian army and irregular forces on the other side of the line of demarcation established in the Minsk Accords. How, you may wonder, can this be continuing now that the Russians have arrived?  The answer is that the Russians have left much of the fighting in the Donbas region to the forces of the Lugansk and Donetsk republics for reasons I set out in an earlier essay:  so that they can create their nations from the ground up, by their own efforts and not receive it all on a silver platter from the Russian Federation.

One has to bear in mind, that before the start of the Russian incursion into Ukraine, Kiev had massed two thirds of its total armed forces just near the Dniepr River and the line of demarcation.  These 150,000 or more men in arms were prepared to pounce on the Donbas, and would have done so had the Russians not brought an equal number of their own troops to the Ukraine border back in November 2021. Once hostilities began, the Russians have fanned out to other parts of Ukraine, meaning principally the southeast, the Black Sea littoral and the area surrounding the capital, Kiev. Their objective is pan-national, to force the regime to capitulate.  The Ukrainian army and radical battalions, however, seem to have remained in large numbers along the Donbas and it is taking huge efforts of the locals to neutralize them.

 And when the Donetsk and Lugansk forces, with air and logistical support of the Russians, take back one village after another from what had been the full territory of their oblasts before the civil war of 2014-15, the retreating Ukrainian militias are blowing up all infrastructure and homes out of pure vengeance.  You will not find in Western media any videos of the damage or videos of interviews with local residents whose lives are shattered now, at the very end of their eight years of occupation by Kiev forces. For that, you have only to go to Russian news coverage, which is readily available to our American and European editors if they cared to look.

All civilian lives matter, whichever side of the demarcation line is theirs.  The world is rightly deeply concerned by the several hundred civilian deaths in Kiev-administered Ukraine due to the ongoing war with Russia. The world has shamefully ignored the 14,000 mostly civilians, mostly Donbas residents who died under shelling and small arms fire these past eight years of low-intensity civil war.  Is it any wonder that the Russians said ‘enough is enough’?

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

“Are you aware that #IstandwithRussia #IstandwithPutin are among the top tending hashtags in India?”

The observation above was written to me by a professional Indian journalist in the employ of a leading worldwide news provider. This insight has persuaded me to pay more attention to the Indian ‘market,’ which may yet play a decisive role in the denouement of the ongoing reshaping of global politics brought on by the Russia-Ukraine war.

Yesterday I was scheduled to appear in panel discussions of that war hosted by two of India’s best known news providers, Times Now and the India Today Group.  I was unlucky on both. There were some technical problems at the former which arose while I was in the Zoom holding pattern. They could not be resolved and I was disconnected. And at the latter Group a most peculiar editorial decision was taken to scrub its discussion of the incident at the Ukrainian nuclear plant in Zaporozhye in favor of coverage of the death of cricket player and so all panelists were figuratively speaking sent home.

Nonetheless, I had prepared some remarks for both programs which I now will share with readers of this website. I will be brief and to the point.

In the months leading up to the Russian incursion in Ukraine, several of my peers had called attention to the Russian-Chinese rapprochement, which President Xi had publicly described as ‘higher than an alliance.’ These same peers argued that it was precisely the backing of the Chinese which gave Vladimir Putin the confidence to take on the United States and NATO in a direct challenge to U.S. global hegemony, with Ukraine as the chosen battlefield. Moreover, Putin’s visit to Beijing for the opening of the Olympic Games provided an opportunity for last minute coordination by the two leaders of scenarios for cooperation in the coming showdown with NATO.

However, the Kremlin’s preparations for the coming war involved face to face talks with one other global leader about which much less was said in the world media: namely his visit weeks earlier to Delhi for talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. To be sure, Putin’s delegation to Delhi was numerous and highlighted the growing joint activities in the energy field and also in not only procurement but also production of military hardware. India, like Turkey, had acted in defiance of U.S. pressure over its military suppliers and was accepting delivery of the cutting edge S-400 air defense systems from Russia come what may from Washington.

I would stress that the visit to India was no less important to Moscow than the visit to Beijing.  Whereas the United States has for the past five years been applying ever greater efforts to de-couple from China and to implement a variety of military, political and economic policies to “contain” the PRC, it has been at equally great pains to woo India away from its decades long friendship with Russia and to bring Delhi into active participation in the plans for ‘Indo-Pacific’ defense directed against the People’s Republic of China.

Now, when push came to shove in the United Nations General Assembly meeting a week ago on the motion to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine and to call for an end to hostilities, which at this moment would signify a Russian defeat, we note that the two countries, China and India, cast the very same vote: abstention.  China did not exercise a veto in favor of its ‘friend.’  It abstained.

Of course, in such a vote, abstentions carry great meaning. They are given in the face of massive U.S. diplomatic efforts to bribe or blackmail a host of UN member states and ensure they vote as America dictates.  In the end, the United States got what it wanted: an overwhelming number of member states supported the resolution.  However, given the abstentions of India and China, as well as the abstentions or vetoes of other populous states including Iran, South Africa and Vietnam, one can say that states accounting for more than 4 billion people, or more than half of humanity, did not support the propagandistic resolution authored in Washington. This constitutes a moral victory for the Kremlin in a vote which, after all, carries no legal consequences.

World leaders and the mass media of the United States and allies have been hyperactive, nearly hysterical in their reporting on the progress of the Russian advance into Ukraine and in disseminating speculation on what the Kremlin’s end game will be. The loss of focus, the confusion underlying the hysteria arises due to a memory span that usually does not go back beyond two weeks and a power of forecasting that does not reach beyond one week. The media are, in effect, lost in time and they are drawing the broad public into the same fog.

Considering the progress now achieved by the Russian forces on the ground in Ukraine, given that their numbers are generally well below those of the Ukrainian military, militias and recently hired mercenaries deployed by Kiev; considering that the worst of the Ukrainian radical nationalists, a.k.a. terrorists are now surrounded in places of their concentration, as for example, Mariupol; considering that Ukraine’s commercial life will soon be cut as the Russian forces take full control of the Black Sea littoral, I believe the conflict will not go on for more than a week or two before Russia achieves its objective of Ukraine’s unqualified capitulation and the hostilities come to an end.

If so, Russia will have achieved in Ukraine what Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Ryabkov said back in December when negotiating with the United States and NATO over Russia’s demand to revise the security architecture of Europe:  “move or we will move you.”  Russia will have exposed the ultimate uselessness of NATO to European defense and will mark a turning point in global power relations.

What will emerge from the changing power balance will be the formal end of U.S. global hegemony and of its monopolar moment. The world will become bipolar for the first time since the end of the Cold War:  the US/EU on one side and RU/PRC on the other side. 

The new bipolar world is a vast improvement on global U.S. hegemony over the past 30 years, which resulted in endless wars, in the death of millions of civilians and of whole national economies in places like Libya, Syria, Afghanistan in senseless and hopeless U.S. striving to remake the world in its image in keeping with the promises of the Neoconservative ideology set out very efficiently by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History in 1992. Far from being the defenders of the status quo, the United States used its moment of unfettered power to artificially accelerate the historic trends towards liberal democracy that it believed were destined to bring universal peace in some indefinite future.

The reinstatement of a bipolar world is a good in itself. You need not be a Manichaen to appreciate that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely: it is better for there to be opposing forces nominally designated as Good and Evil than to have a sole power that declares itself to be the Good.

But the bipolar world is not good enough to protect the rights, liberties and well being of the world’s peoples, who may not well appreciate the compulsion to choose this side or that on every global issue. Moreover, it falls short of the multipolar world that has been so widely promised, in which the major economic and military powers of the world will have their proper seats and weighted voting rights at the world’s board of directors’ table.  This is where India can yet play a determining role for our common welfare: by directing the emerging New World Order towards multipolarism.

In doing so, India would be reestablishing the preeminent position in global politics which it enjoyed way before it had the economic wherewithal and other power attributes that it possesses today. Along with Yugoslavia, it was for decades the leader of what was designated the Nonaligned Nations.

Let us hope that the Indian leadership appreciates the opportunity before the country to play a very constructive and necessary role in reordering not just the security architecture of Europe, but the forces that govern world politics.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

As we all know, Ukraine is today the poster boy of the “international community,” meaning the United States and its allies. Translated into comic book images, the present military conflict between Ukraine and Russia pits a cuddly bunch of bunny rabbits (Ukraine) against the Big Bad Wolf (u know who).

Regrettably that is the intellectual level of most Western reporting on developments in an unfolding tragedy. Almost everything that the supposedly innocent victims say about their attackers instantly is disseminated at God’s honest truth. The exception is numbers. Generally the casualty figures cited by Kiev for both their own civilian and combatant losses and for the Russian soldiers they say they have killed are preceded in our newspapers and on the air as being ‘unverified’ or ‘unconfirmed.’

Now the latest front page news regarding the alleged Russian bombardment of a nuclear power station in Zaporozhye in southeastern Ukraine is a perfect test case for us to see who is really the villain in the piece, the bunny rabbits or the wolf.

The alleged bombardment ignited a fire near a main reactor but happily it was extinguished quickly and no leakage of radioactivity was reported by the Ukrainians, nor was there any interruption of critical functions of the reactor. The whole point of the incident was to establish that Russians are firing indiscriminately on infrastructure, worst of all on nuclear installations with a potential for incalculable damage, moreover that they were in violation of international rules to safeguard the operations of nuclear plants. 

The intent here was to internationalize the Russian-Ukraine military conflict in the same way as the supposed poisoning of the Skripals in 2018  in the United Kingdom turned what would have been strictly an attempted murder under English law into a violation of the international rules governing nerve agents and other prohibited chemical weapons. Or in the same way that the supposed chemical weapons attacks on civilians in Syria by the Assad regime would have turned a civil war into a breach of international law that was intolerable. Or in the same way that the destruction of a commercial airliner over the war zone in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, the MH17 case, raised the fighting on the ground in Donbas to an international incident meriting the condemnation of the entire civilized world and imposition of sanctions on the assumed culprit who was abetting the local conflict, that same wolf.

Each of those three major incidents of the recent past was a ‘false flag’ operation carried out by enemies of Russia for the sake of clearly defined geopolitical objectives. I will not take the reader’s time with the proofs of my assertion here. The relevant literature in favor of the ‘false flag’ interpretation is extensive. What I wish to do here is simply to note why today’s allegations with regard to the Zaporozhye stink to high heaven and to note why the cuddly rabbits are the true villains.

Let us go back to the very beginning of the Russian ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.  One of the first acts of Russian forces after they crossed the Belarus border into Ukraine was to seize the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, where there is the sarcophagus of the unit which exploded and also other units which are still operational. The Russian forces immediately entered into collaboration with the Ukrainian operational staff to ensure that the facility would remain secure.  Why did they do that?  Precisely because they did not want any radical Ukrainian militias to gain access to the nuclear waste buried on the site to build one or more dirty bombs, or otherwise to put the working stations in danger.

These militias, including the infamous Azov battalion, which has had concentrations of its combatants in Mariupol and other  locations in the southeast of Ukraine, were the forces that turned street demonstrations of the Maidan into a coup d’état that overthrew the legitimate president of the country in February 2014. They have been the power behind the throne in Kiev ever since.

It has taken some time for the Russian forces to move across the southern tier of Ukraine as they gradually take control of the entire Black Sea coast to close down Ukraine’s commercial shipping, strangle the economy and force capitulation on the Kiev regime. In this sweep yesterday they approached the Zaporozhye atomic power plants with intent to capture them and keep them out of harm’s way.  In these conditions could there have been any sense whatsoever for the Russians to bombard that installation?  Absolutely not. But could there have been any reason for Ukrainian radicals to stage some kind of showy but not overly risky blast at the facility?  I rest my case there on cui bono reasoning, which is entirely sufficient for the moment and until full forensic work can be performed by outside investigators.

Now I turn our attention to nomenclature.  The Kremlin has chosen to call the radical nationalists in Ukraine “neo-Nazis.”  Within Russia, this designation makes good sense.  Among the Ukrainian arch nationalists are a great many who venerate as a national hero Stepan Bandera, an ultra-right political and military leader who actively collaborated with Hitler’s forces.  Bandera was and his memory in Ukraine remains today a conflation of their own national identity with a near-racial hatred for (Soviet) Russia, or in folk language, for the Moskali, or Muscovites.

Outside of Russia, the designation “neo-Nazis” does not resonate in the same way.  This is why German Chancellor Scholz was so dismissive of the term, which he found “laughable,” to the outrage of his hosts in Moscow during the joint press conference with President Putin a couple of weeks ago.

Sometimes, however, Putin speaks of the radical nationalists in Ukraine as “terrorists.” That is really the term which should be used when addressing the international community, which knows little of Bandera, but a lot about terrorists. In this connection, the Kremlin has in recent days pointed out that the nationalist militias have been using the civilian population as human shields for their own protection. The Russians say the radicals have so far refused to allow civilians in besieged towns and cities to avail themselves of escape corridors which the Russian military was making available to them. In this connection as well, the Ukrainian militants were placing weapons in residential buildings and firing on Russian units in the hope of attracting return fire to cause civilian deaths that will be reported to international humanitarian organizations.  And, I maintain, the attack on the Zaporozhye nuclear installation was almost certainly the work of these same terrorists claiming to be Ukrainian patriots.

Dear Western journalists,  do please try to be more discerning and stop telling fairy tales about cuddly rabbits and the Big Bad Wolf.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

For those who believe that the intolerance and occasional viciousness of American media have no equals, I can recommend that they take a look at Republic TV in India, specifically at the daily program “Debates” hosted by Arnab Goswani

When I agreed to take part in one of their programs, I had gone by their self definition set out in their invitation.  I quote:

“India’s first independent global news venture. Republic Media Network — India’s Number 1 All-India News Network— is now beaming to over 300 million viewers in English (on Republic TV), Hindi (on Republic Bharat) and Bangla (on Republic Bangla).”

The eye-watering prospect of reaching 300 million viewers is not one you dismiss lightly and I blithely agreed to appear in a session entitled Has The West Turned A Mere Spectator To Russia-Ukraine War?

As we went on air in the afternoon (Central European Time) on Monday, 1 March, I found myself among panelists from the USA, from Belarus and several other locations nearly all united by determined hostility to Russia and its present campaign in Ukraine. There is no surprise in that, of course. The surprise was the behavior of the “moderator,” who spoke in the most heated, shrill manner and who proceeded to interrupt and crush the one voice ahead of me, a Chinese, who tried to explain the formally neutral position of the PRC on the Ukraine conflict and his country’s sympathy for the security concerns of Russia vis-à-vis NATO that underlie the ongoing military operation to demilitarize Ukraine.

Accordingly, when the microphone was made available to me, I used my several minutes of air time to rebuke our host for rendering impossible anything resembling intellectual discourse.  And then, when Mr. Goswani flatly rejected being “lectured” by a guest, I simply hung up, cut the Skype connection.

The only saving grace in the episode was that the videotape of this whole affair which Republic TV later put on line did not excise our little spat. But I found this out after something quite remarkable happened in the meantime.

About an hour after I parted company with the show, I received the following email:

“Dear Professor,
Being an Indian please accept my sincere apologies on behalf of my country for the behavior of a commentator of the Indian news channel that I happened to witness.
With my sincere regards.”

And then an hour later, this came to my Inbox:

“Respected Professor, Hope you are doing good.

Television Viewers across India, who abhor & boycott “Republic TV” channel for its nonsense, snooped over yesterday & this morning 02.03.2022, and the clip of your closing comments directing at the moderator, who is known for insults & abuses and not decency & respect, has gone viral & is all over social media spreading like wild fire.

And every one asking who is “Gilbert Doctorow” who taught a lesson on manners & behaviour to that moderator.

Thank you for your appearance.
Request you to kindly write on your experience as to what happened in this news panel.
Eagerly waiting for your article here.”

I am honoring that request with this brief essay.

The ball did not stop there.  I have since then received invitations to take part in debates or be interviewed on two other major Indian television channels, both fully aware of my positions and of my refusal to participate in a ‘kangaroo court’ on the subject of the Russian military operation in Ukraine.  These were planned for this afternoon, but were trumped by a newly scheduled televised speech of the Indian premier.  I expect to hear from them again next week and if they proceed I will post the results for comparison and contrast with the Republic TV show which is available in full (my ‘speech’ starts from minute 22) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI1HOlVLQEk&t=1268s  and in a two minute excerpt showing only my rebuke at https://scroll.in/video/1018531/your-programme-is-against-the-interests-of-your-own-country-tv-show-panelist-to-arnab-goswami

Yesterday, I found that the second largest contingent of viewers of my website after the USA now comes from India. At the same time, my Linked-In account shows Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai and a couple of other Indian cities as home to the greatest number of visitors to my latest articles reposted there, pushing Brussels, London, Paris down the list. 

I heartily welcome the new readership, some of whom have sent in requests to join my Linked-In network. It is very heartening to see that the vicious anti-Russian propaganda now disseminated daily by Western governments and amplified by Western media is not swallowed whole in the broader world and that free thinkers still exist.

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As a separate issue, I use this communication to share the link to a 2 March discussion program hosted by Iran’s Press TV:  “Press TV Spotlight:  Russian-Ukrainian Conflict” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM5w0ZVsnDo

The program runs for 25 minutes.  For those with less time to spare, I can suggest the following 2 minute excerpt that was separately posted:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dng-TBhHpxQ

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

I offer visitors to my website the link to yesterday’s 20 minute video interview with the Belarus radio and television broadcaster.

This chat dealt with issues raised in my latest written report on Day Five of Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine, but it went further to probe the reasons why America’s success in provoking Russia to engage in a war with Ukraine will likely not achieve its intended purpose of burying talk of a revised security architecture in Europe.  On the contrary, both sides, the U.S.-led West and Russia, are escalating their aggressiveness precisely because the struggle is, in the last analysis, about expanding and enhancing NATO or smashing it to pieces. Ukraine just happens to be the field of combat for this historic struggle that will shape the world order for decades to come.

The murder in the U.S. of George Floyd gave momentum to the Black Lives Matter movement and also provided an image that captured the imagination of the nation and the world:  the knee on the neck of a prone victim.  That image is entirely appropriate to describe the essential nature of the NATO alliance and of the European Union, which NATO has de facto taken hostage.  It is absolutely stunning to witness how in the days since Russia launched its ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine the whole of Europe has snapped to attention and is doing its very best to implement the orders coming from Washington. 

Should the Russians succeed in their mission in Ukraine and continue on their way in the face of the ‘nuclear bomb’ economic sanctions that Washington and Brussels have directed at Moscow, the whole NATO alliance will appear to be a sham, and the security umbrella of Washington will be blown inside out by gale force winds.

I call attention to the fact that until now the Russians have not responded to the latest waves of sanctions apart from their closing their air space to all nations that have shut out Russian airlines, meaning the entire EU.  However, the freezing of Bank of Russia assets in the West remains without a response, as does the partial exclusion from SWIFT. This is not for lack of options on the Russian side to inflict extreme pain on the West.  The confiscation of all Western corporate assets in Russia would largely balance the frozen Russian assets in the West.  The shut-off of gas and oil supplies, of uranium for French and other European power plants, and of still other essential raw materials that are largely or even exclusively sourced in Russia would be very damaging to the European economies.  None of this has been done because the Russians expect to finish up their business in Ukraine rather soon, and then to negotiate a gradual return to normality with the West.

Fortunately such colossal confrontations as we are now witnessing come along once in several generations. Let us hope that this one will end sooner rather than later, and will see us all through safe and sound to a new world order that is better balanced and just than the one that we have known till now.

                                                            *****

These are busy days for Russia specialists, I am sad to say.  My ongoing vacation in the Lisbon area has not provided the rest and battery recharge it was supposed to do because of a flow of demands from broadcasters and others to grant extensive interviews or to participate in panel discussions of the Ukraine-Russia crisis. 

In this connection, I close this note with mention of the podcast chat with me that Tom Woods released on the internet a day ago:  https://tomwoods.com/ep-2074-russia-ukraine-and-nato/

The podcast is well over an hour long, which made it possible to go into the history of the present conflict in and over Ukraine in some depth.  I hope listeners will find it especially informative.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

I am not a military expert and will not comment daily on the action on the ground during this military operation. However, the analytic possibilities of even military professionals are severely limited due to the intentional withholding of information by the Russian side as regards all activities outside the Donbas area, which they cover extensively in minute detail for reasons I will set out below.  As regards the “news” released by the Ukrainian authorities, its propagandistic nature is evident both in inflated and fake reports and videos of Russia-caused devastation and death and in reports on the extraordinary bravery and successes of their own forces.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, some things begin to become clear about this operation at the strategic as well as tactical levels.

Firstly, what we received from the Russian side at the outset was only their war objectives and their conception of the path to victory.  The objectives were two:

1. to denazify Ukraine by killing in battle or arresting and sending onward to trials those radical nationalist elements who were behind the coup d’état of February 2014 and worked hand in glove with the Americans to establish a viciously anti-Russian government that has oppressed Russian speakers throughout Ukraine and waged an incessant war on the breakaway republics of the Donbas
2. to demilitarize Ukraine and establish its future development as a neutral country that does not participate in any alliances

To this, in recent days the Kremlin has added a third objective:  Ukrainian formal recognition of the loss of Crimea and of its incorporation into the Russian Federation.

Secondly, at the strategic level, the Russians from the beginning said they planned to separate the professional Ukrainian army from the radical nationalist battalions who were the main aggressors in the conflict at the line of demarcation between the breakaway Donbas republics and Ukraine proper, and who have been the ‘force behind the throne’ in Kiev ever since 2014 as presidents of Ukraine come and go. Indeed, the Kremlin’s stated ambition was to do a deal with the senior command of the Ukrainian army establishing a period of martial law during which the denazification could proceed.

The opening days of this military campaign have put in serious doubt the validity of the assumptions underlying that strategy. It is now becoming fairly obvious that the past 8 years of military reorganization in Ukraine under the tutorship of the USA and other NATO powers has established discipline within the armed forces, while the political indoctrination from radical nationalists embedded within the military ensures that defection, raising the white flag is not easy any more.

By bringing up reinforcements to the initial 80,000 troops that Russia committed to operations within Ukraine, the Kremlin has indicated that it is about to change its game. Today, we understand that the ‘cauldron’ has been closed around Mariupol, the port and Ukrainian naval base on the Azov Sea, which has a substantial radical nationalist force defending it, the infamous Azov Battalion, in the environs. We will see in the coming days how the Russian command deals with these worst of the Ukrainian elements and whether ordinary Ukrainian army forces in their midst are treated any differently. How this plays out will indicate the further conduct of the Russian troops throughout Ukraine.

Thirdly, I wish to share an observation that bears on my previous description of what I called “the Russian Way of War.”  There is a very specific consideration in how the Russians have prosecuted the incursion, invasion, however you wish to call their operation, in Ukraine.  That consideration arises from the special relationship of the two peoples, Ukrainian and Russian.  In a way, the present conflict is fratricidal, or a form of civil war.  Ukrainians and Russians are very extensively intermarried.  A great number of Russians have relatives in Ukraine and vice versa.  Moreover, during the past eight years there have been several million Ukrainians who fled their country not to the West but to the East and have settled either temporarily or permanently in the Russian Federation.  This being the case, the Kremlin wanted to avoid any brutal assault on Ukraine that would generate enormous casualties, both of combatants and of civilians.  Such an eventuality, much more than the plight of aggrieved oligarchs caught in the sights of Western sanctions, could pose a threat to the stability of the Russian government.

Fourthly, and in conclusion, I call attention to the fact that nearly all Russian news coverage of the opening days of the campaign in Ukraine has focused on the combat being waged by the military forces of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republic with only minor support from the Russian Federation.  This is a key point both for the population of those republics and for the Russian ‘mainland’ in the RF. These republics must win their own territory back by their efforts, not be handed it on a silver platter by RF forces.  The net result of this approach will be to reinforce the sovereignty and national pride within these republics and obviate the need to annex them to Russia, which Moscow plainly does not want to do.

Instead, the independent, Russia friendly Donbas republics are a model for what may be the division of Ukraine into several different states, among which the westernmost based in Lviv will be the homeland of the dyed-in-the-wool radical nationalists. It will be land-locked and sufficiently far from Russian borders not to pose a greater threat to Russia when it joins NATO and the EU than do Slovakia or Poland. In the middle of what is today still Ukraine the Russians may oversee the formation of a country with its capital in Kiev and with genuinely mixed ethnic Russian and ethnic Ukrainian populations that is tolerant of minorities and freed of all radical nationalists and neo-Nazis.  I am not saying that this endgame solution is already set, but it does exist as a possible denouement.

Time will tell.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

Yesterday RT International was licking its wounds over the forced closure of its operations in the European Union by order of the EU Institutions in Brussels. Here is yet another pitiful demonstration of the false claims to Western values of tolerance and respectful debate with those holding different points of view that the herd of ignoramuses and cowards running Europe today perpetrate day by day. Like their darling of the moment, the Kiev regime run by book burners and radical ideologues, the gang headed by von der Leyen and Michel daily abuse the trust of the European peoples and take away value from the institutions they head. By their grandstanding, they also dilute the authority of the only person who can, if he wishes, speak for his country and for NATO in a direct negotiation with the President of Russia. It is the Babel now going on which works against the kind of settlement reached in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a crisis that was resolved one on one between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev while the rest of the world just held its breath.

In this context, RT International in Moscow invited me to speak on air yesterday. They kindly allowed me swiftly to move on from their own problems to the greater problems we all now face as both nuclear superpowers have put their arsenals on full alert.  Regrettably, willy-nilly we are all hostages of the ill-advised refusal of Mr. Joe Biden and his advisers to reach out to Moscow and together agree on readily available compromises that will snuff out the present conflict over Ukraine and over the architecture of European security architecture.

The main thrust of my brief remarks was to direct attention to the history of the Pearl Harbor attack by Imperial Japan:  it was a unforgettable lesson on how economic warfare converts to kinetic warfare when the pressure exerted on your adversary crosses a certain red line.  It is a pity that the leadership in the USA has either forgotten or never learned this lesson.

Western ‘collective amnesia’ | Economic sanctions may cause WWIII

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

I am pleased to offer followers of this website links to the lengthy interview which Canadian journalist Trish Wood taped with me on Friday, 25 February and released on the internet yesterday.

The program opened with an excellent introduction to the subject of the Russia-Russia-Russia problem in America, namely segments from the 2019 presentation of his then newly published book War With Russia?  by professor Stephen Cohen.  As you may be aware, I was a colleague of Steve’s in the fight for sane relations with Russia and I greatly valued his friendship up to his untimely death a little more than a year ago.

Trish Wood also put in the introductory segment of the podcast some wise words by the widely known commentator on US-Russian relations, Vladimir Pozner, taken from an address he made in 2018 at Yale University. He spoke about the danger presented by general indifference both in the USA and in Russia to the risks of nuclear war. This indifference is in stark contrast to the mortal fear of such a war among the broad populations of both countries back in the midst of the original Cold War from the 1960s till the 1980s

Regrettably the last point is all too relevant to where we sit today, on Sunday 27 February, when both Russia and the United States have put their strategic nuclear arsenals on full combat alert.

Yesterday, in answer to a journalist’s question why the United States is just imposing economic sanctions on Russia as its response to the ongoing Russian intervention in Ukraine, President Joe Biden said that “the alternative would be World War III.”  This sounds sage, but anyone with some knowledge of history will wonder how the President and his advisers have forgotten or never learned the lessons of Pearl Harbor.  The fact known to every fair minded historian of that subject is that the attack on Pearl Harbor was precipitated precisely by very harsh sanctions on Imperial Japan which jeopardized its access to hydrocarbons and so imperiled their economy. At a certain point economic warfare leads to kinetic warfare.  In our relations with Russia today, it appears that we are crossing that tipping point.

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/gilbert-doctorow-inside-russia/id1513237951?i=1000552280022

https://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/show/twcritical/id/22262462

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

What I am about to say should be self-evident to anyone following closely the move of Russian forces into Ukraine and having a recollection of what the same Russian general command did in Crimea and then did again in their Syrian campaign.  Regrettably, Western audiences do not find these observations on CNN, the BBC, The Financial Times and The New York Times, not to mention on the still less reputable television channels and print media that provide 99% of the (mis)information which the public receives daily on the Ukrainian conflict and on much else. Their producers and editorial boards, their journalist staff all are looking at one another or just contemplating their belly buttons. They have for some years now been living in a virtual world and paying little heed to the real world.  I can only be surprised that an astute observer of commercial opportunities like Zuckerberg took so long to launch Meta.

I have three points to make today about how the Russians are conducting their military campaign in Ukraine.

The first point is a generalization from the remarks I made yesterday about their humane treatment of the enemy’s servicemen. This approach to the military tasks results from awareness that the military is a handmaiden to diplomacy and to politics, not vice versa, as has been the case in each of the major wars that the United States fought and ultimately lost in the past thirty years. That is why the Russians are not practicing “shock and awe,” which is the American way of war.

The second point closely abuts the first.  The ascent of Russia’s military capability in the past decade was defined not by their celebrated cutting edge hypersonic missile technology or the deep sea nuclear drone Poseidon..  After all, in the final analysis once parity is established in means of nuclear deterrence, the weapons become useless in the garden variety conflicts that we see everywhere and in every age.  Ultimately what counts to project power at the regional level, which is where Russia positions itself, is conventional weapons which can be and are used in attempts to resolve intractable conflicts by force of arms. This is precisely where the Russians amazingly caught up with the United States, bypassing, incidentally, all of the weapons industry of Western Europe in quality and quantity. 

So the Russians have their ‘toys for the boys,’ which they designed, manufactured and implemented in their ground, air and sea forces. They did all this at bargain basement prices. But they use them sparingly and demonstratively rather than as blunt instruments of mass destruction. This is a cardinal difference from the American way of war.

The third point is that there is continuity in Russian military behavior which makes it predictable.  In the takeover of Crimea, the game-changer favoring the Russian PsyOps was their ability to disrupt entirely the military communications of the Ukrainian enemy, so that field units lost touch with their commanders and were exposed on the spot to calls for surrender and desertion, to which the vast demoralized and confused majority acceded at once.  There is evidence that the same technique is being practiced today by Russia in Ukraine

Yesterday anyone watching Euronews on one screen and Russian state television on another would have been perplexed by the totally contradictory coverage of both with respect to the fate of the armed detachment of Ukrainian border guards on one island in the southeast of Ukraine.  Euronews carried the address of President Zelensky awarding posthumous designation as Heroes of Ukraine to the entire detachment, which reportedly resisted the attacking Russian forces and were slaughtered.  Meanwhile Russian news showed those same border guards seated at tables and signing sworn statements that they voluntarily lay down their arms and awaited repatriation to their homes and families.

Was Zelensky engaging in brazen propaganda?  No, he was simply misinformed because the detachment had been wholly cut off from its superior officers in Kiev and they feared for the worst.  This is what the Russians practiced so successfully in their Crimean campaign in 2014.

Finally, I wish to share one more defining pattern of Russian military behavior today that carries over from their operations in their Syrian campaign to destroy the US-backed terrorist groups in that country. In Syria, the Russian army established special units to sort out in field conditions the bad terrorists from the very bad terrorists. The former were allowed to lay down their arms and go home to their families. The latter were fought to the death and “neutralized.”

This slow, painstaking effort to distinguish enemies who can be brought back into civil society from those who cannot is unique to the Russian way of war today, and it deserves much more attention than it receives in our media. It is surely enabled by advanced psychological training of officers in charge. And it is an entirely different mindset from the “counterinsurgency” techniques that David Petraeus popularized and rode to fame and advancement in the Iraq War.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022