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

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.

                                                                              ****

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