Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQdNcL7XkU8

Diesen: 0:00
Hi everyone and welcome back. We are joined by Gilbert Doctorow, historian, international affairs analyst and also author of the Russia-Ukraine War or more specifically _War Diaries, the Russia-Ukraine War_. I always carry it with me. It’s an excellent book, and I really recommend it.

So welcome back to the program. We see that President Putin just gave a speech at the Valdai Discussion Club in Sochi. Many people had waited for this speech with some suspense because of the dangerous times we live in and also at this annual Valdai discussions he usually devotes four hours to discussing all world events. So many eyes were on this meeting, and also because of course the proxy war between NATO and Russia continues to escalate as the Ukrainian army suffers more on the battlefield. We see now discussions of Tomahawks, the US providing long-range missiles. No, it’s also long range intelligence for doing the long-range strikes.

1:07
We see _Financial Times_ reporting that the British are already engaged in attacks deep inside Russia in cooperation with the Ukrainians. So there’s a growing pressure, is my point, on Putin to restore Russia’s deterrence. And to a large extent, you feel he did not deliver on this. Am I correct?

Doctorow:
Yes, you’re correct. I was deeply disappointed in his presence at the Valdai Discussion Club meeting in Sochi. Although I watched it from afar, there was complete coverage with some delay, provided by several different YouTube channels. I can’t say that I saw all four hours of it. It took a great deal of patience to do that. And I doubt that too many other of my peers spent more than a short time watching it and using the subject to project what they wanted to hear, but in fact did not hear.

When I looked yesterday at YouTube, and of course YouTube presents, it has AI-directed proposals to you and suggestions to you, knowing what your preferences are. So each day I got a menu of YouTube channels and they were consistently speaking about Putin threatens, Putin warns, Putin denounces. And they made it seem as though he was doing what everyone expected him to do, but in fact he did not do. Or to the extent that he issued warnings, they were so vague, so indefinite, that they have no meaning. Moreover, the most important fact is that the warning, the very clear red line that he described one year ago, oh, one year, two months ago, in several interviews, there’s a red line about use of long-range American or other missiles to strike deep within the Russian Federation.

He said very clearly that any country supplying this, And first of all, the United States, because the missiles in question, they weren’t named as Tomahawks, but it was known that all of the missiles striking Russia from Ukraine are in fact targeted and controlled by NATO member states. He said specifically that if long-range missiles were supplied to Ukraine and they struck Russia, then Russia would consider the [countries] supplying, delivering such missiles to Ukraine to be co-belligerents, co-belligerents for which Russia would reserve the right to strike back militarily.

3:55
That’s not what we heard on Thursday. That very clear and very strict warning to the United States was erased. Instead, what we heard was, well, if the United States supplies these missiles, they really won’t change the situation on the battlefield, even though they’re awesome. They are outdated. And more importantly, what they will do is spoil our budding relationship, cancel out the light at the end of the tunnel. Oh my goodness, that is not calling the United States a co-belligerent. If that were all that Putin said at this meeting, I would maybe try to find excuses for him.

But things were much worse from my perspective, and none of this is being carried by my peers. My peers on some very widely watched programs are speaking about Putin as a gentleman, Putin as the adult in the room and so forth. They’re saying what they said about him for years and they’re ignoring intentionally or not, they’re ignoring what happened at Valdai, Kekwelo. Namely, his so obvious attempts to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump that I would say he sacrificed Russian sovereignty then and there.

5:18
What do we name? Well, there was his lengthy homage to Charlie Kirk, the lengthy discussion of the son of a CIA director, directoress, who died as a Russian soldier fighting for Russia in Donbass. But more to it. His answer to a question from the audience, “What do you think about President Trump’s 20-point peace plan?” And he said, that is Putin said, “This may surprise you, but I approve of it. And I think that it has a lot of merit. Of course, I would add to it that it should acknowledge specifically the two-state solution.”

And then he went on to say, because the question was also asked about the designation of Tony Blair to be on the governing board, the interim governing board, I think he called it a peace board, which he, Trump, would head that would manage affairs in Gaza until such time as it was determined that the Palestinians could govern themselves. Well, Tony Blair on the peace board. Tony Blair, the unindicted war criminal, the man who encouraged Bush to fund his murderous and illegal invasion of Iraq against all the provisions of the United Nations Charter.

7:02
This man was then praised by Vladimir Putin as an experienced statesman and a person with whom he had personal contact and rapport, going back to the start of the new millennium when he spent one or more days in Blair’s residence and they both had shared coffee while in their pajamas. A touching note. But I just wonder how we can reconcile this statement with Mr. Putin as the defender of the Third World, of the members of BRICS, of the Palestinians, it is reconcilable. It is, as I say, a sacrifice of Russian sovereignty for which Russia may pay very dear. And we also, because it puts us in line for World War Three.

Diesen: 8:06
Yeah. Well, that was, one might, I guess the critical takeaway as well was that, well, it looked like the main message he wanted to get across to signal Russia’s main objective was for Russia and the United States to continue improving their relations while at the same time making it clear that Russia is now done with the Europeans because, well, he used words like describing them as weirdos and they, well, there’s no, I think everyone now recognizes strategic vacuum in Europe and there’s, he doesn’t see any way of fixing this, but also no desire either. So this is kind of the main thing he wanted to go for.

But I did share some of your ideas or thoughts on this because I was there at Valdai, and the day before we met with Lavrov, and he was also asked about Tomahawks and he came with this dismissive attitude as well. “They’re not going to change anything.” But what happened, but this is the, you know, okay, you exude confidence, but this is not what you want to say if you want to uphold a deterrent. It almost sounds like they, invite it in. And I think this can be very dangerous because if they do have more impact than expected, then Russia will strike back, and then we have war.

9:30
If the Tomahawks go in, the Germans will then see, “Oh, maybe we can go too now.” And the Germans will definitely get hit by Russia. So I think like almost a soft tone, but it might nonetheless escalate the risk of war. Same as you mentioned celebrating the Americans. So Charlie Kirk you know is a hero just like Russian conservatives.

He praised Americans fighting with Russia in Ukraine. And Trump of course I think he leaned a bit heavy into how easy it is to work with him and authentic, all of this. I think the European experience is that you don’t want to bow too heavy towards Trump because he’s the kind of guy who will, you know, buy his enemies and sell his friends. He’s very, well, if you praise him too much, he owns you. So I think this is what the international system he’s going for as well.

10:32
And the effective thing is what the Indians did is they pushed back a little bit. So I think this can only possibly embolden Trump further. So I don’t think that was helpful either. And the one area I would maybe disagree with you is the issue of Tony Blair though, because he kind of expressed some loathing of Blair and then the only positive thing he could say was, yeah, he has good coffee. I mean, it’s a, it’s a worth, it’s not a great compliment to give to someone, but you know, maybe I was reading it wrong.

Just as a last note, I spoke to different people in the audience there before and after this, you know, a lot of ambassadors and generals, mostly foreign, and they are, you know, so academic. Many had the same takeaway though, that they expected Russia to really have to come in with a message that they’re going to restore their deterrent, authentically so. And that’s what I heard before, and that’s also what I heard afterwards was it didn’t deliver what they had expected.

Doctorow:
We are in a world of real-politik and there’s very little room for personal rapport and for nostalgia for public relations in the past or supposed cultural affinities. This is a dynamic world that is changing, constantly in flux.

And that is something that Russia’s partners have to consider and that Mr. Putin did not help by his presentation in Valdai. I was on Indian radio yesterday, and the Indians were following Mr. Putin’s remarks at Valdai, at Sochi, with respect to his backing India in the face of American secondary sanctions and making reference to their long history of rapport with Russia going back to Soviet Union, and Soviet support for India in moments of need like in 1972. All of this is fine, but if you paid attention to this backtracking that I mentioned a moment ago, from hard red lines to very mushy, fuzzy lines, you wonder what Mr. Putin’s guarantees are worth. Well, I don’t have to wonder. You don’t think they’re worth much.

And that’s certainly true of Iran. I was on Iran’s Press TV and the question is, what do you make of Mr. Putin when he is backing the Trump plan? For that matter, so is India. So Iran in BRICS is in a tough spot there. Their close allies are on the other side of the fence on an issue that’s of great importance to Iran.

13:32
But there is, the personal aspect has been brought up repeatedly, that “I had good rapport with Trump and he’s a good conversationalist and he listens.” All that’s fine. But in the big order of things, when Putin tries so hard to ingratiate himself with Trump, he can only earn contempt, which is not a good basis for a durable relationship.

Diesen:
I was also wondering if Russia is being lulled into a false sense of security a bit as well, because he spent quite a lot of time discussing why the war more or less almost is over because he looked at the attrition rates and he looks at how the losses the Ukrainian army is taking, both men and material, and why it’s not possible to replenish this. And so more or less, you know, going with numbers and statistics to show that this is coming to an end, likely sooner than later.

But I guess my pushback against this would be that I agree with this assessment, but there’s other variables at play which won’t remain constant over time. That is that the Europeans are preparing for more direct warfare, they’re also seizing ships, discussion of blocking trade routes, which is an act of war. There’s this threats against Kaliningrad. It’s this possibility that the Russian economy might start to do worse a few months from now. Who knows?

15:13
It’s possible that China and India can’t stand up to American pressures forever. I mean, I’m not saying this will happen, but there’s a lot of unknown variables. And if you’re in a good place now, which I think Russia is in this war, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to be in a good place necessarily in six months or 12 months. So it does beg the question why, why would they still slow-balling this whole thing. I mean, they’ve got current success now, but if something goes wrong, given that Russia sees this an existential threat, then they would have to break out the nuclear weapons if things would start to go terribly wrong. So I’m just saying it seems strange to me that this will be the core variable to focus on.

Doctorow: 16:00
They’d have to break out nuclear weapons or they’d have to change their leader. That should not be off the table for discussion. But I think Putin was looking in the wrong direction, so was Lavrov. The issue is not whether the Tomahawks or the German missiles, Taurus, will change the situation on the battlefield.

No, they will change public opinion, which is where war must begin and end. If Russia is struck by a Tomahawk, if a major population center is struck by a Taurus, well, who cares what’s going on on the Donbas front, that will change the whole war entirely and it will go very badly for the Russian leadership. The public, which is now living very comfortably, earning salaries three times what they got before the war started, will be enraged by a strike that kills civilians in any major city, enabled by this lax response that we heard in Sochi to American plans to send in Tomahawks. And I agree completely with you that the real threat from the Tomahawks, which may very well never be supplied, is that this opens the door to Merz to do what Scholz didn’t dare do, because they’re saying, waiting for the Americans to go through the door first. And practically speaking, Donald Trump just went through that door, even if he never supplies a single Tomahawk.

17:43
Which means that we may, there’s not a question of delivering the Taurus to Kiev. Surely they’re already there in big numbers. The question is implementing them, using them. And if that happens, yes, well, who knows what Mr. Putin will say then. Maybe it’ll just spoil relations with Germany. He backs away from destroying the one factory in Germany that makes these terrorist missiles. It opens a lot of uncertainty. And instead of a clarification from the speech that Dmitry Peskov said would be important, we have new uncertainties.

Diesen:
Yeah, there was a lot of ambiguity. Again, I’m not sure how to interpret the optimism though, because if he’s too calm, too optimistic, it kind of signals that the guard is down, we’re not really going to do anything. Or if it’s just, maybe he knows something we don’t know if this is the reason behind it. Because I go to the Valdai every year and I’ve never seen him in such a good mood. He kept making jokes the whole time. He was such a loose, relaxed attention.

And also, you know, afterwards when President Putin goes backstage, I hear he’s away from the audience and the cameras, he’s still super optimistic and positive and like happy. So I’m not sure. He’s not putting on a, I guess, a show. I think it’s authentic. But as you say, if he’s like, Tomahawk’s this, nothing is that important.

19:33
It’s kind of strange because again, back to the thing when it’s kind of praising Trump. I’m glad they get along well, and it’s important to when the two largest nuclear power they have to be able to get along and reduce tensions. But on the other hand, this is a country which is now more or less at war with Russia. It’s their missiles, with their intelligence, their targeting data, the war being planned by their generals, killing thousands of Russians. And they’re now talking about escalating, so opening the doors to flooding Ukraine with more weapons. And if the only response is, yeah, he’s a good guy, We can work with him.

I mean, it’s, there has to be a balance somewhere where, yes, we’ll be, we’ll work with him. We happy for good relations. So we can end this war. But at the same time, if there has to be a deterrent somewhere, I didn’t necessarily see that balance, I guess.

Doctorow: 20:31
Well, the, it’s not my, discovery, the Russians say, hopefully that Trump is surrounded by enemies. And although they may have a rapport with him and understanding with him, they are aware– this is what comes out of Russian state television– that Trump may not be able to carry through his programs, particularly his reconciliation with Russia. Therefore, for Vladimir Putin to put so much trust in what he believes is an agreement with Donald Trump to normalize relations is strange to say the least.

There are three, I see at least three major threats to Russia. We discussed a while ago, this is for Tomahawks. You mentioned in passing the second threat, which is the blockade of the Baltic, interruption of trade routes. And we’ve seen various manifestations of that. That’s this whole hysteria over supposed Russian drones everywhere in the states bordering the Baltic by the way, and not just in places like Romania. That is the detention of the captain and some mate on a gray fleet Russian tanker by France. This is another manifestation of the attempt to intimidate Russia, to interrupt its trade routes and to establish an air and maritime blockade on the Russian use of the Baltic Sea. That is, as you said, an act of war.

22:12
What I would have expected is for Vladimir Putin to say, “Gentlemen, you pursue this, and by international law, that is an act of war, and we will declare war on you the next day.” He didn’t do that.

Now, all he has to do is to say the obvious: “Gentlemen, if you use, as you intend to use, the 145 billion euros in Russian state assets that are now frozen in euro here in Belgium as collateral for a loan to Ukraine, which by your own terms will not be repaid unless Russia agrees to pay tribute, to capitulate and to pay war damages to Ukraine. That is effectively confiscating our state assets. Under international law, that is an act of war, and we will declare war on you if you proceed with this.”

This would be normal. That would be a threat. What he said in his Q&A, these weren’t threats. They were mulling over what should we do. It was a variation on Maria Zakharova’s constant refrain. Can you imagine? Well, yes, we can imagine almost anything now.

Diesen:
Yeah, well, I guess the same as Tomahawks can be applied to the… Well, it turned out not to be a Russian ship, but irrespective of it, a ship was seized by the French. The French thought it was Russian and their objectives are more or less open. They want to disrupt the Russian trade. That’s the same reason the Europeans are also participating in striking deep inside Russia, its energy infrastructure. They also want to disrupt this transportation corridors. But again, this is an act of war and President Trump, sorry, President Putin, he made the point that, well, this is piracy.

It’s like, well, yes, it is. But condemning it and pointing out how dangerous is one thing. But again, if the main objective was to restore deterrent, that was a little bit left out of the conversation, because if it’s just one ship and then it’s never again yeah why go down the route of escalation especially when you’re winning on the battlefield. But the whole point there is things that the precedent, he siezes a ship, he releases it soon thereafter, no foul, then there’s no reactions from the Russians. Well, now you can do this again.

I mean, this has been the lessons of sending weapons. Remember the beginning, the West didn’t want to send any tanks because this was seen as being overly provocative and, you know, making the West directly involved. The F-16s would mean World War III, but now we’re just openly speaking about participating in striking deep inside Russia. I guess my main fear is the illusion of escalation control because it seems that we might not have the same assumptions about how we move up and down the escalation ladder. For the West, we slowly go a little bit up, we pull down if there’s too many fierce reactions, but the Russians, they tend to make, do nothing and then come up, come with a big response.

I think it was around the Crimean speech in 2014. President Putin made this comment that, you know, you treat us like a spring, you pushed us further and further back. At some point, we’re just going to lash back hard. That’s not how the West escalates. We do this slow incrementalism, setting precedents.

I’m just wondering if we think that the Russians are weak, but they’re actually building up an arsenal, Oreshniks or something, preparing to hammer us. I would like to see more certainty, as you said, more specific, setting the rules for proxy war because everything is unclear and that creates a lot of risks for miscalculation, I think.

Doctorow: 26:18
The issue here is not whether or not Western military experts properly evaluate Russia’s military potential. The issue here is how political experts advising the leadership in Europe and the United States evaluate the determination and risk-taking readiness of Russian leadership. There is the weak point.

As I said, this is a parallel to the question of whether or not these missiles will change the situation on the battlefield. Let’s assume they don’t, but it will change the political atmosphere which runs the war. If there’s a strike against Petersburg or strike against Moscow, all hell will break loose in Russian political life. And as to strikes deep inside Russia, they are already going on. As you mentioned at the outset, thanks to particularly British assistance, the Ukrainians are striking, effectively destroying Russian refineries and creating local areas, particularly in the southwest as I understand in Belgorod and probably in Korsk, maybe nearby Russian oblasts.

27:39
They have created a serious shortage of fuel. Now this is not getting proper attention in alternative media. In fact, it’s getting no attention in alternative media. But it is a reality. Now why Russia’s response has been to step up its strikes on Ukrainian oil production, gas production, gas pipeline, pumping centers, and so forth.

These strikes, of course, have been denounced in Western media, as strikes against civilian infrastructure, and nobody says a word about what they’re a response to, because there is a kind of omerta, kind of conspiracy of silence, to describe in the public agora what is happening to Russian infrastructure, which Russian drivers of cars in the locale that is affected understand perfectly well. Why it’s not reported by us is an open question.

Diesen: 28:48
I think the one key thing that could destabilize is also the assumption we have in the West often that Putin is a dictator. You know, he wields all power.

Now, well, this is kind of important because if you think that he’s okay, he’s not going to retaliate in a big way, he’s going to let this one go. As you said, that’s an assumption that it’s all up to him. But you know, there’s a lot of other political forces in Russia and if they, as you suggest, get upset enough, that either creates, well, it creates an immense amount of pressure on Putin. I used to write articles around 2015-16 about how the military and the key opposition were seeing Putin as being weak because they said, you know, we see that NATO, you know, we try to reach out a hand, we see that they’re not taking it. Instead, they’re building up capabilities along the border.

They’re preparing the Ukrainians for a war. And, you know, again, this back in 2015-16, and the main argument was we should prepare for war instead because it is coming. But, yeah, forward to today or to 2014, it would be impossible for him then not to react. And I think the same happens now. If we read his body language or his words and think that we can step over a red line, it’s not up to him necessarily.

There will be a demand coming from the political system that this is unacceptable. And I don’t know, do you see him possibly put in being undermined, this political credibility by taking too soft of a stance?

Doctorow:
Well, I’ve said something that is unspeakable for the last couple of weeks, that he may be removed from power. And yes, people say, oh, how could it happen? Who would do it? He has 80% popularity ratings. Well, a year ago, I would have said that this was indeed impossible. There were people like John Helmer, who was saying back then, people like Paul Craig Roberts, who was saying back then that Putin is leading us to World War III. In the case of Helmer, he paid attention to the general staff, saying there’s a lot of unhappiness in general staff with the go-slowly, turn-the-other-cheek approach of Putin to the way the war is being conducted. I didn’t believe that for a minute.

I thought that Helmer was getting information, if he was getting any real information from very few discontents who were not actually in the active service. However, considering what’s going on now, considering that Russia is facing three major threats that we discussed on this program, [1] the extension of this $145 billion to Ukraine, which can extend the war for now three years. [2] The long range missiles, which, either German or United States, can be used for political advantage to undermine the government by creating popular hysteria in Russia. It’s kind of terrorism. [3] And of course, there’s blockade in the Baltic.

32:09
These are major threats. And I can see where Russian patriots close to the government would look for a way out. Now I have in mind where and why. I’ve done my own poll. Your program, “Judging Freedom” and a few other, one or two other very important alternative media interview programs are now being systematically translated, not translated, dubbed into Russian using AI techniques by a YouTube channel called Parusky in Russian.

And they have, they provide data as a YouTube channel on the number of hits or views and the number of thumbs up, the number of comments and the numbers come pretty big. My Wednesday interview with Judge Napolitano had, the last time I looked, 78,000 views. It had approximately 920 reader comments, which were almost all negative. That’s to say, we Westerners are idiots, we can’t possibly understand Russia, and our president is the best president of the world. Okay, fine.

33:26
So I’d say 900 no’s for the idea that the conduct of the war is going badly. But 1,800 thumbs up. That’s to say those who agreed with the notion that the war is being badly conducted outnumbered those who love Putin at any price. Two to one. That’s not reflected in the 80-percent approval ratings that the Russian state pollsters or official pollsters give us.

I’m sure those are completely accurate, but they’re asking the wrong questions. So there is, I believe, taking under 75,000, that’s a lot of people, that’s much more than any usual poll takes to find out public opinion. And two to one, the votes who bother to write in what they think, most active people, they are two to one against the conduct of the war as it is today. So could there be at higher levels of say the FSB or other agencies at the top, [objection] to what Mr. Putin is doing?

Of course there could be. I’m just an observer here, and I have no recommendations to anybody in Russia or outside Russia what should happen. But I do think that we in the West as careful observers cannot ignore the possibility that he will be removed.

Diesen: 34:55
Well, I think so far, yes, it’s stable given that he’s been, well, he’s attributed for saving Russia. Even, you know, as Gorbachev once said as well, that if he hadn’t been for Putin, Russia would probably have been destroyed. And I guess they look at other variables as well. For example, Moscow now is truly one of the nicest cities in the world. It certainly was not in the 90s. So the way that Russia has recovered and strengthened itself, to a large extent, his credit.

But I do agree with you, though. I get the sentiment that many people do not agree with this slow, attrition war. But it’s not even just the Russians. Like I said before, I was speaking with all these different ambassadors and generals from not just China, India, but also from the West. No military there, but only diplomats from the West. But nonetheless, a bit of confusion was why Russia hasn’t attempted a capitation strike.

I mean, they know where everyone [is], they have their weapons. It seems to be an issue of intent, of not wanting to do it. So, but given all the human suffering both on the Ukrainian and the Russian side that this war brings. And also that it brings us closer and closer to World War III as the Europeans are now pulling themselves into this conflict. It seems, well, as more than one of these military and diplomatic people told me that they asked, you know, why they couldn’t understand why Oreshniks haven’t rained down upon the government buildings in Kiev, which sounds brutal.

36:47
But they saw this, well, what’s the alternative? Because Russia can’t end it. That’s capitulation. So if the option is between decapitation strikes and this slow grinding attrition war, Why not even try to go for a decapitation strike like the Americans and the Israelis tried in Iran? I don’t really know the answer to this. Again, I’m not a military strategist, but it is strange, given how many casualties have been ramped up over the past three and a half years.

Doctorow: 37:22
The man has been in power for 25 years. That is a very long period. I think we’re witnessing the end of an era. His wonderful foreign minister is tired. He’s tired. The man, I don’t think he spends more than one night a week in his own bed. He’s traveling constantly. The recent images I’ve seen of Sergei Lavrov, the man is finished. So this is an end-of-era phenomenon that we’re witnessing, but I don’t see my peers recognizing that.

Doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. Maybe he’ll link, he’ll go serve his term until the end, But I see cracks, and I see non-performance. I see a lack of vigor in his response to these latest challenges from the West that [is] troubling.

Diesen: 38:17
Yeah, no, I am, well, what I found fascinating this year was usually after he gives these speeches every year at the Valdai Discussion Club, the assessments are often, you know, everyone seems to more or less end up around the same interpretation.

But what I thought this year was kind of unique is how different people perceived it. Some saw this as being the strict warning to the West, like, you know, don’t cross here, this is our deterrent, while others have interpreted it as being so, yeah, being soft to the point that they might just pull back the red lines and thus embolden NATO to escalate. So it is, it’s very, and I never left this speech as being more confused, I guess, than I was now, which is not great when you’re a country at war, you want to be very specific, you want to communicate clearly and what you’re communicating should be credible and you should have the capabilities as well to back it up. This is the three C’s of deterrence, communication, credibility and capabilities.

Doctorow:
You were there on the spot, and your reading of the audience and the notables in that audience of course is the most valuable, more than anything that I can find on television, and yet … and yet, there were things obvious.

Diesen:
But I’m wondering if there’s something, again, the way he often speaks, because he talks about the Europeans getting more aggressive and he points to the polls and then he reads a poem. He talks about how Blair is a horrible person, but he makes good coffee. And I’m wondering now if he, in this super optimistic, friendly, let’s-all-get-along, cumbaya speech, if he was at the same time– If I turn on the news, the Russians are just hammering Ukraine even harder and harder. Their missile attacks seem to have learned a way of working around the Patriot systems which can’t intersect properly and more so.

40:41
So things seem to be getting, hardening dramatically on the battlefield and at the same time he seems to be lowering his guard. So again, I’m not sure if there’s something I didn’t pick up on.

Doctorow:
The situation on the battlefield is not a hundred percent covered in the West, not in alternative media for sure. There was apparently a rather big and initially successful counter-attack by Ukraine in the Sumy region. I’ve seen very little about that.

What we see now on Russian state television is the counter-counter attack and how they’ve driven them back and recovered. They never described how they lost. So to say that this is one way that the Russians are really crushing the Ukrainians, I think it’s not quite accurate. Yes, in places the Ukrainians are falling back. They still have a long way to go to reach the Dniepr.

41:39
And this is the point. If 145 billion comes to Ukraine, they will hire any number of mercenaries. They will find ways to embolden their soldiers, and the war is going to drag on until Europe is ready to fight Russia, which would be too damn late.

42:00
Well, thank you so much for sharing your views on this. As I said, speaking with the different people there, their interpretation was so widely different that– and I must say, there were several who were leaning towards your thoughts as well, that this was definitely not what they had expected. So I’m not sure if you have any final thoughts before we wrap this up.

Doctoorow:
No, just a great appreciation to you for sharing what you saw, because you were there. And for widening to your audience a variety of views on issues that they should see from many different angles.

Diesen:
Yeah. Well, just on that, I did ask a question to Putin there about how the geopolitical consequences of Finland and Sweden joining NATO, but then specifically in terms of the Arctic and the Baltic seas, now that tensions are, or pressure is mounting on Kaliningrad.

But again, in the spirit of the good mood, he didn’t touch on the Kaliningrad. But this is the US general threatened to invade. So again, I’m not sure if his efforts to lighten the mood resulted in ignoring some of the severity of what’s happening. Again, I’m not sure how to read President Putin either in terms of his performance there. But anyways, it’s worth watching in full, even though he does go on for four hours. So, yeah. Anyways, thanks again for joining us.

Doctorow: 43:32
My pleasure. Thank you.

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https://www.urmedium.net/c/presstv/134767

PressTV: 0:14
Hello and welcome to “Spotlight”. Tensions between Russia and NATO are escalating once again with Moscow warning the US about the potential deployment of long-range missiles to Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed that such a move would mark a new stage of escalation in the conflict, significantly raising the stakes between Washington and Moscow. Putin also expressed concern over Europe’s increasing militarization, particularly Germany’s plans to strengthen its military and warrant a retaliatory measures. As NATO member states pledge to boost military spending, Russia insists that these actions, coupled with the flow of weapons to Ukraine, are fueling the war. Moscow maintains that NATO, not Russia, is responsible for the ongoing conflict and the rising tensions in Ukraine.

Story by Hamid Shahbazi: 1:06
Tensions between Moscow and NATO countries are once again on the rise over the war in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in his latest speech, warned the US about the potential supply of long-range missiles to Ukraine, saying that it will mark a completely new stage of escalation between Washington and Moscow.

Putin:
Using Tomahawks without the direct participation of American military personnel is impossible. This would mark a completely new, qualitatively new stage of escalation, including in relations between Russia and the United States.

Shahbazi:
The comments come shortly after it was reported that the White House has approved intelligence sharing with Ukraine, while weighing up whether to send Tomahawk cruise missiles to Kiev.

The supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles, which are known to have a range of at least 2,500 kilometers, would significantly boost Ukraine’s ability to strike Russian targets. Russian President Vladimir Putin also expressed frustration over Europe’s military buildup, noting that he is monitoring the trend and warned of retaliatory measures.

Putin: 2:14
We are closely monitoring the rising militarization of Europe. In Germany, for example, they’re talking about how the German army should once again be the most powerful in Europe. Well, we’re listening carefully, watching what exactly they mean. Retaliatory measures by Russia will not take long. The response to such threats will be very significant.

Shahbazi:
He accused Europe of stoking hysteria to justify rising military spending and said Russia is not a threat. In June, NATO member countries have pledged to nearly triple their military spending under pressure from US President Donald Trump, deepening militarization across Europe despite ongoing social and economic strains.

NATO claims its military buildup is for self-defense. But Russia argues that it is this very buildup, along with the constant supply of weapons to Ukraine, that is fueling the war. Moscow insists that NATO’s actions, rather than any Russian attack, are the real cause of the conflict, and warns that continued militarization will provoke significant retaliation, with Russia holding the West responsible for escalating tensions in Ukraine.

PressTV: 3:23
Joining us on tonight’s “Spotlight”, we have radio host and journalist at CPR News, Mr. Don Debar joining us from New York.

And we also have independent international affairs analyst, Mr. Gilbert Doctorow, who’s joining us from Brussels.

Gentlemen, welcome to the program. So the Russian president, we’re going to start off with Mr. Debar, New York. The Russian president has warned against Europe’s escalating militarization amid this conflict with Ukraine. Vladimir Putin said effectively all NATO states are at war with Moscow right now, and his country is going to respond to any threat against its security. Break down the recent warning from Putin.

Debar:
Well, here in the US, to me, the most significant part of it was that he reminded the world that the United States came through World War II unscathed because of the two oceans that separated it from the European and Asian wars, and that these would not be a barrier to the US’s full participation in a response from Russia to the threat. In other words, we’re getting to the point where they’re talking about trading missiles back and forth across the oceans.

And we know what those missiles carry. And in fact, because we can’t know what they carry while they’re in transit, everyone that goes off the ground, the other party has to assume it’s carrying a nuclear warhead and respond in kind while they’re able to. This is the policy and the doctrine they followed for many years. Now, we’re looking back to 1962, October, what’s it, 63 years now, and because the Soviet Union had installed some mid-ranged nuclear weapons missiles in Cuba which was 90 miles off, I’d say analogous to the location of Ukraine, the United States directed, but it said basically, number one, any missile launched from Cuba against anyone else in the world considered launched by the USSR against the United States and will see a full retaliatory response. And secondly, that the missiles had to be removed or there would be an invasion, you know, a full-scale invasion by the US of Cuba.

6:00
Now the analogy here is strong enough, but we were talking then about missiles that could only reach, say, from Washington, D.C., to Dallas, Chicago, maybe, or somewhere inside that kind of range, not the entire U.S., not New York, etc. And you had launch time, you know, there was a lot of time, relatively speaking, between launch and when these things would land. Now we’re talking, okay, when I was in Moscow in 1990, they installed cruise missiles in Germany, much further than Ukraine, and the time was 18 minutes from launch to its arrival in the Kremlin. So there’s a hair trigger here that didn’t exist 63 years ago, many more weapons, and the United States is behaving in a belligerent fashion across the board talking about that open war, and that was not the condition in 1962. This is the scariest moment in human history.

PressTV: 7:01
Gilbert Doctorow, Putin accused European nations of fueling instability by increasing military spending and deepening integration under NATO. What is the end game for Europe here, in your opinion? Russia has in the past said that Washington has subjugated Europe in order to wage war against Moscow. What does a winning scenario look like for Europe?

Doctorow: 7:27
Regrettably, remarks that you’ve been quoting come from yesterday’s speech by Vladimir Putin at the Valdai Discussion Club gathering in Sochi. What was regrettable about it is that he has backed away from his own red lines of a year ago. He, in the speech, he was essentially saying, good Americans, bad Europeans. The part that you just asked me to comment on is the bad Europeans. I would like to put attention also to the good Americans.

Mr. Putin was very solicitous and very careful to please Mr. Trump. And this was an alarming aspect of his appearance in the speech and more importantly in the question and answers. You in Iran must be particularly interested in what he had to say about Trump’s 20-point peace plan, which he approved. You in Iran must be particularly interested in his calling the unindicted war criminal Tony Blair an “experienced statesman”, whom he had spent a day or more together with in his residence back at the beginning of the millennium. Well, I’m sorry, this was too big an effort to please Trump, which cannot end well.

PressTV: 9:02
Right. Don Debar, Putin warned that supplying US Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine would lead to a whole new level of escalation, including in the Moscow-Washington relations. Where does that scenario lead to? Ukraine sought these missiles since the Biden administration, but the US rejected that over fears of escalation. Is it likely to happen now?

Debar:
I mean, it’s difficult to tell what’s going to happen. It’s so volatile. And it’s also difficult to know in many, like in some fundamental ways, what’s really going on. There is an apparent– “rift” is a kind way of putting it– in the ruling circles here in the United States, with Trump sitting in the White House and almost everybody else treating him as the enemy, And the population divided somewhere around 50-50 on this. And when Trump ran for president, he ran, he promised that this war would come to an end in 24 hours. But certainly he conveyed the idea strongly and intentionally and rather blatantly that it wasn’t going to be escalated but rather shouldn’t be going on and was going to come to a halt as soon as he could get his hands on it.

Either that’s true or it’s not, in terms of his intent. And then it’s either possible or not for him, but then the question becomes if he’s removed, because this is one of the strongest bases of the support that keeps him in office in the face of the apparent onslaught from all the other political quarters, then if he loses that support, who comes into office?

It’s not going to be anyone who’s ever mentioned that they shouldn’t have a war with Russia. And everyone else in this country, in terms of the ruling circles, they’re belligerent as hell towards Russia and support everything that is offered in terms of dealing with it. You look to Lindsey Graham, for example, as sort of the center of opinion outside of Trump’s White House.

PressTV: 11:19
Gilbert Doctorow, let’s discuss these two serious potential escalations. One we mentioned earlier, the supplying of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine. And the other is the talk of seizing Russian cargo ships on the high seas. How do you see Russia responding to these situations?

Doctorow:
Like a wimp. This is exactly what I’m talking about. By ingratiating himself with Donald Trump or attempting to, Mr. Putin is playing a very dangerous game. He said one year ago, this question of Tomahawk– well, they weren’t named– but of long- range American missiles being supplied to Ukraine was discussed directly by Vladimir Putin. And he said– he didn’t say what he said yesterday, that this would be an escalation. He said that this would make the United States a co-belligerent and we would have the right to strike them, strike them militarily.

He has backed down yesterday from that important red line, which suggests to Europeans and also to people like Lindsey Graham in the States and all of the hostile people to Donald Trump in the States, that Mr. Putin is indeed a paper tiger. That is a terrible thing for him to have done yesterday. As regards the second threat, I don’t agree that it’s the seizure of tankers. That is an ongoing threat. Generally speaking, the NATO countries are trying to establish a blockade, a sea blockade and an air blockade on the Baltic for Russia.

13:01
That is, under ordinary understanding, an act of war. And it is high time for Russia to say openly, gentlemen, this is an act of war, and we will go to war with you if you persist. So it is also with the seizure of Russian state assets that are frozen. What is now being discussed by the EU is very clever, but it’s too clever by a half. They’re not seizing the assets outright, but they’re calling them collateral for a loan to Ukraine, which will never be paid back.

In effect, it is seizing those assets. It is high time, if Russia has any self-respect, to say to Europe, “Seizure of state assets like these is, by international law, an act of war. And we declare war on you.”

The point is that Russia now has a military advantage over NATO and over Western Europe. That advantage is being diminished day by day as Europe spends this $150 billion in arms improvements, as Mr. Merz in Germany spends his one trillion euros to make Germany the biggest military force in Western Europe. And that will reach a culmination three or four years from now when Europe says it will be ready to fight a war with Russia. It is not ready now, which is to say that if Mr. Putin wants to defend Russia, he should do it now, not three years from now.

PressTV: 14:35
Okay, Mr. Debar, would you like to add anything to what Mr. Doctorow said, whether you agree with him or not? And of course, regarding the “paper tiger” comment, which just came up as well, Vladimir Putin hit back at that at the US President. He said, “If we’re fighting all of NATO and we’re a paper tiger, then what does that make NATO?”

Debar:
Well, I agree with Mr. Doctorow on facts and on his analysis, and I respectfully disagree about the conclusions, because [of] just the stakes. You know, there’s a very strong resemblance to me historically, and to others, it’s not original with me for sure, to the period before the beginning of World War I. And this is something that’s interesting, There’s the dramatic reenactment of the diaries of Robert Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis called “13 Days Here”, where they have some of the, you know, the script basically contains the actual transcripts of the discussions that were going on in the White House during that event. And one of them was a reference to a book that had come out back in August of 1962, I believe, called _The Guns of August_.

15:39
And it was an analysis of the, basically, miscalculations that the various states had made about what each other would do under the stressful conditions that existed at that time. That they thought they knew this [glitch] going down the line, and that the miscalculations were all based on outdated data and consequently didn’t apply, and that people found themselves in a war that none of them wanted, apparently. This is the opinion of JFK through the transcripts. And yet, you know, it was this bloody, horrible, you know, Holocaust that swept over Europe. You know, that pales to the level of destruction that stands before us in the event of even a single nuclear exchange between Russia and/or Europe and/or the United States.

And I assume either China would play the role of the US if it could get, if it could do that, and watch and pick up the pieces later as the US did after World War II or participate. And I’m assuming it would participate on the same side as Russia. They’ve been manufacturing weapons for a very long time. They seem to have the skill and the set of factories that can crank out an awful lot of stuff pretty quick. So I’m guessing a war that included China as an adversary to the West and the US would be a very very significant one to be…

PressTV: 17:41
Mr. Debar, I want to stay with you for the next question. Russia says the Western military aid to Ukraine including the additional missiles would inflict damage but it won’t change the balance on the battlefield. Do you agree with those comments?

Debar:
Yeah, I mean, what will happen is– look, the way the West should conduct a war if Russia didn’t have nuclear weapons the way they would conduct it, if they’re going to attack Russia, the first thing you do is take out its ability to respond on the ground. You take out their airplanes and their missile silos, you know, and all of these different things.

That’s what they hope to do. Maybe they think they have a secret weapon that will enable them to do that, or a series of systems to minimize the response or whatever. But that is insane thinking. Whatever the United States does in terms of military action against Russia, a military action by proxy or otherwise is going to meet a response when it starts to affect on the ground at any scale. I mean, We’ve been looking at attacks inside Russia at the periphery in the mean, with the exception of a couple of terrorist attacks in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

18:55
But an actual overt military attack on the target inside of Russia– particularly Moscow or St. Petersburg or any of the other major cities, Vladivostok, etc. even– there’ll be a response. There will have to be. And I agree with Gilbert there that at that point in time, Putin or whoever’s making policy in terms of this military aspect, that their hands will be tied, they will be forced to–

Look, part of the effort to– these people want Russia’s resources. And part of the effort to do that is to remove the government that is using those resources for the Russian people and for their own use, whatever it is, that it’s not filling the coffers of ExxonMobil, Chase Manhattan Bank, whoever it is that’s got the ear of a power hero or the hand of a power hero. But the people there, if they’re afraid and see that the government can’t protect them, will not be married to the government that they right now strongly support. And so that government’s existence basically is going to rest on it standing up at some point. Maybe that point is now, and maybe not.

PressTV: 20:06
Mr. Doctorow, your thoughts on the same issue as well. There was also the question, it has been looming since this war escalated: will this support result ultimately in this conflict spilling over into other regions and possibly turning into something bigger? There have been threats of nuclear retaliation on several occasions. There are also the scares with Poland and Bulgaria, if I’m correct.

Doctorow:
I’ll have a direct answer to your question. What is galling to Russian patriots? And by that I mean in the intellectual class, in the governing class, the political establishment in Russia. What is galling is that Russia has developed many conventional war arms that are very sophisticated, that are years ahead of anything in the West. It used to be said at the turn of the new millennium that Russia was a nuclear power but had no conventional forces that were worth talking about. And nuclear weapons by definition can’t be used because they will bring a direct response at the end of the civilization, certainly the end of the party that uses it first.

21:21
However, now with the new weapons systems, and in particular the hypersonic missiles that no one has deployed as Russia has, the Oreshnik, the Russian patriots are asking, why not finish this war tomorrow? Several Oreshniks directed at what’s called Bankovskaya Urytsa, that is the street in downtown Kiev where the main government offices, the decision-making centers are, would decapitate the Zelensky regime, would end the war tomorrow. And Europe would stand by powerless and speechless, and Mr. Trump would give a congratulatory handshake to Mr. Putin, because that is what Trump has been saying for the last several weeks, which Putin has not listened to. He’s been saying, “Vladimir, get it over with.”

PressTV: 22:21
Don Debar, let’s rewind to a past statement by then US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who said one of Washington’s goals in Ukraine is to see a weakened Russia. Why does Washington want to weaken Russia and have the sanctions weakened Russia’s economy or have they somewhat backfired in your opinion, especially with European countries?

Debar: 22:47
Well, Biden spilled the beans– he’s not quite as sentient, I don’t know, as Austin– that the real goal was not just to weaken it. The reason you would weaken it is to set up for the next step. They want regime change there. And regime change not in the form of a different president, although it would likely include that, but rather they thought they took the resources in Russia in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and in the period of the 90s, and particularly the oil and gas and some of the other more important aspects of Russian holdings. And instead they were taken back, and again they’re being applied to Russian aims, whatever that might be. I can see from being there that people are doing pretty well since this thing changed in about 20 years ago, 25 years ago now.

23:54
The goal is to get hold of Russia’s oil, gas, and other material wealth to remove it as a potential rival. I mean, Russia also stands as a strategic umbrella over China. And these people would of course like to move from being a 49% holder to a 51 or 100% holder, of ownership, of China’s industrial base. And so, you know, it’s a strategic purpose across the board, both to grab the resources and also to take away the possibility of a rival on the global stage.

PressTV:
All right, gentlemen, we’re going to have to leave it there. That’s all the time we have for tonight’s show. Thanks to radio host and journalist at CPR News Don Debar, joining us from New York. And thanks to independent international affairs analyst Gilbert Doctorow, speaking to us from Brussels. And a special thanks to you, our viewers, for staying with us on tonight’s edition of “Spotlight”.

24:46
It’s good night for now, and see you next time.

Conversation with Professor Glenn Diesen: Restoring Russia’s Deterrent or Emboldening NATO?

My latest essays and video interviews with Americans, Indians and Iranians disseminated as podcasts on  internet channels in the USA, in India and in Iran set out my impressions from Vladimir Putin’s 4-hour speech and Q&A session on Thursday, 2 October in Sochi at the 22^nd annual Valdai Discussion Club gathering. They stirred considerable controversy as you can see in the Comments sections of the respective videos and in my substack.com entries presenting the links.

I insist that stirring controversy in this way is good and is necessary. Too many of the Alternative Media broadcasts resemble the Mainstream Media they supposedly are countering by borrowing from one another and standing shoulder to shoulder behind interpretations that are not challenged. When there is no debate, the results tend to be second rate whether in the camp of the ruling class or in the camp of the Opposition.

The chat that Professor Diesen recorded with me this morning is likely to stir even more debate, which hopefully will remain polite and constructive.  I am suggesting that the era of Vladimir Putin is coming to a close, that his performance at Sochi demonstrated that he no longer has the courage of his convictions, that his threats meant to deter Western enemies are empty verbiage, indeed that himself he has pulled up the red lines he clearly set out just one year ago with respect to long range missiles being supplied to Ukraine, and that he is drawing out the war in Ukraine by not using the Wunder Waffe that Russia has in the form of the Oreshnik and other hypersonic missiles to end the war now, without taking or inflicting further casualties on the young and not so young men at arms on either side of the demarcation line, without letting the war roll on for several years until the West succeeds in the remilitarization that is now underway and has a chance of defeating Russia in a conventional arms war.

This question of Putin’s succession will play out in Russia whatever we may think, but I am saying that this eventuality which we never openly discussed now is ripe for discussion here in the West even if it is verboten in Russia.

I particularly recommend this video to the Community because you will find in it the impressions of someone who watched the Valdai proceedings from afar on the internet (mine) compared with the impressions of someone who was present in the auditorium in Sochi when Putin delivered his address and who compared notes with ambassadors, political scientists and other participants of the event (Glenn Diesen).  Do check to see how our impressions did or did not match up.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aeigb0SeHrA

Doctorow: 0:00
He has been persuaded that controlling the whole world is too big a task and highly controversial and leads you into wars which you usually lose. Fighting in Afghanistan, fighting halfway around the world at great logistical disadvantage versus powers that are there on the spot, assisting Ukraine against Russia when you’re four or five thousand miles away and Russia’s right there. This is a fool’s game. And I think that advisers to Trump have persuaded him of that obvious point. However, bullying Venezuela, bullying Panama, that’s an American game that Mr. Reagan was very good at. The question of beating up little countries, well, there are plenty of little countries to beat up on in Latin America.

WTF – Fatseas: 1:01
Hey, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the “What the Finance” podcast. On this episode, I have the pleasure of welcoming on Gilbert Doctorow. So Gilbert is an author and geopolitical analyst with really interesting perspectives on what’s happening around the globe. So Gilbert, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.

Doctorow:
Well, it’s my pleasure.

Fatseas:
I’m looking forward to the conversation, because I was just talking before we sort of went on air. There seems like there’s been so much happening in the global sphere and sort of geopolitics overall. So interested to dig into it. What is your current outlook on what we’re really seeing in geopolitics overall?

Doctorow:
Well, I’d just like to emphasize, considering whom I consider, perhaps mistakenly, but whom I consider to be a prime audience, that the geopolitical conflicts that we see now are not isolated from the rest of politics. And they’re certainly not isolated from who is in power and what kind of finance policies, credit policies, and so forth these governments are pursuing. That is to say, the powers that be in Europe are all globalists, neoconservative in outlook, values-based foreign policy. And they also– and so you could call them, in American context, we would call them all progressives.

2:25
“Progressives” is a very nice word, but it hides the fact that they are war hawks. And that they, like politicians who don’t have such attractive labels attached to them, are ambitious people who have taken power by using various particular levers that we can discuss like the Green Movement, and are wholly dedicated to holding power. So these are preconditions for any discussion of geopolitics. And I raise this because of the recent analysis of who said what about Donald Trump’s speech last week in the General Assembly, where what he had to say about Russia was denounced because he was being provocative — by the very same people who are actually enemies of his anti-globalist, anti-renewables positions in other parts of domestic and foreign policy.

3:32
So these things are inseparable, whether we like it or not. And they have a lot of bearing on what the outlook for people interested in finance will be as these governments stand or fall in the wake of the ultimate collapse of Ukraine, which is a matter of months away.

WTF:
Okay, yeah. Thanks for laying that out. And I think it’s something that’s really interesting that you pointed out there. If we look at historically, or maybe it’s at least 25 years ago, the hawks seem to be the conservatives and then the liberals were sort of, I guess, maybe you could say the Peace Party, and now it seems to have been a complete switch. Is that something that we commonly see, a switch between, I guess, different leanings, or is this something that’s quite unique?

Doctorow:
Well, taking just the American case, the Democrats were always the party of the working man. Republicans, by definition, were the party of the bosses. And that has reversed itself completely. This is something that Donald Trump has worked on, but he’s not the first one.

Ronald Reagan was the first one to see the opportunity to take away the working class votes from the Democrats because they had actively undermined the interests of the working class by their globalist pursuits, including in particular, their multilateral free-trade agreements, their concessions in taxes to American corporations that had operations abroad and kept their profits abroad and declared them in very low taxing countries and districts.

So the Democrats, from being the working-class party, evolved into what Donald Trump openly denounced as the elitist party. And the Republicans, despite themselves, under Trump’s stewardship, have returned to principles of Reagan, where they are attempting to look after the interests of the working man. And that is what the whole tariff policy is about, the re-industrialization of the United States.

So the position of right and left has flipped. And that has to be understood. It’s true in the States where it’s so transparent and obvious. It’s true in England with Mr. Farage. He has completely gutted the conservatives and gutted the labor.

5:58
And so who is right and who is left? And everyone will say, who is the Labor Party, that Mr. Farage is on the right. Well, that’s a very subjective statement which we can examine. In Europe, the right and the left is almost meaningless. The left has largely been vanquished. And so what we really have is the right and the center. And in Europe, that is even complicated further because most countries have coalition governments and they don’t have a first-pass-the-line kind of electoral system that is true in the first-past-the-post in the United States and in Europe. And the coalition governments, what each party stands for more or less becomes meaningless because of all of the swapping and concessions and compromises over policy to get in the number of the parties and the parliamentarians, the number of deputies necessary to have a majority in parliament to rule. Therefore, it’s very much fudged and unclear where right and left stand.

7:11
But where we are headed in Europe, I believe, is going to follow the pattern in the States because Mr. Trump and the United States are very, very important in determining policies in Europe and politics in Europe. It will take some time, but I think things will head that way.

WTF:
Yeah, and I think it’s a great point. If we look at it, it’s more like a political class with traditional parties versus, I guess, not revolutionary, but the new parties that are trying to push into this, you know, one system, one, you know, political class that are sort of driving basically the same agenda. At least that’s what I’ve seen in the UK and I think it’s probably quite similar sort of throughout the rest of Europe.

Doctorow: 8:01
And again, issues, it’s very easy to use the category right and left when you take an issue like sustainability and carbon footprints as a political issue and a way of gaining votes and winning elections. The point is that this is totally unrelated to where the given spokesman for Green stand on other things, like war and peace. Going back 15 years, the most warlike, the most viciously anti-Russian, the most sanctioning party against Russia in the European Parliament were the German Greens.

Is that a necessary association? I cannot say for sure, but it is true that this is the association. The Greens paid for it because of who their leaders were initially and who their leaders became, what kind of people they were, how they were shaped by American sponsorship, turned these Greens, who were appealing to young people in particular, who would like to break with the stasis of the centrist parties and with their indifference to global warming and so on. These parties, the Greens, combined a concern for the environment with readiness to destroy the world in a nuclear war. So it becomes very, very difficult to speak in traditional right and left terms wherever you look.

WTF: 9:49
Yeah, it’s really interesting. And how has Trump shifted what we’re seeing globally? Because it does seem like he’s had a large impact on the geopolitics and what we’ve been seeing. Would you agree with that?

Doctorow:
Yes, I believe he is having. To say that he’s had is a bit premature. But assuming that he stays alive and that he is not taken out to the woodshed by what remains of the deep state in the United States and told, “If you don’t change your ways, you’re going to have a short life.” Assuming that he continues the bold implementation of policies that he has ruminated over for several decades and the formulation of which he has been assisted in by some very capable advisors who have been with him through thick and thin, he will have a big impact on global geopolitics, as well as on domestic politics in large parts of the world. What he spoke about at the General Assembly, particularly the question of open borders and the question of the Green Movement. These are going to be reversed in front of our eyes as Mr. Trump’s tenure in office proceeds.

11:21
It is often … not understood how certain individual principles– well I mentioned before the question of greens and how that is deceptive for their actual policies other than environmentalism when they come to power. But there are other issues which seem to be progressive, attractive, which unfortunately are promoted by people who are not progressive and attractive. On the contrary, are just the opposite of that. They are authoritarians, and they wouldn’t know democracy if they tripped on it. And I have in mind, for example, here in Europe, the Federalists, the people who are talking about harmonizing Europe, consolidating Europe, giving it a consistency that was lacking up to the 1990s.

12:17
That sounds great, but regrettably, the very same people who are talking in those very respectable, very progressive-sounding and attractive terms are also warmongers, are also spoiling for a fight, with Russia in particular, and use militarization to justify and consolidate their grip on power. And I can name names. If we go back to the 2010s, you had a group called Aldi that was a substantial minority group within the European Parliament, headed by the former prime minister of Belgium, Guy Verhofstadt. Verhofstadt fell from grace after he was one of the several leaders in Europe, the Germans, the French, who openly resisted Bush’s intention of using the United Nations Security Council, to allow for his invasion of Iraq.

13:23
And so Mr. Verhofstad, who would otherwise have become the head of the European Commission, was sidetracked and he formed a group within the European Parliament called Audi, which after Mr. Sarkozy– Sarkozy, sorry– after Mr. Macron was elected, his parliamentarians joined, merged with Verhofstadt and formed a rather substantial bloc that is present and rather influential in the European Parliament today. Those people are pursuing policies on the Europe-wide level in foreign policy, which will lead us straight to World War III if they’re not checked. And they are federalists, and they’re looking to increase the powers of Brussels at the expense of the sovereignty of the member nation states.

14:17
So as I said, single issues like federalism, like sustainability and the green and renewables, which are sound fine and give certain people and certain parties a claim on the electorate, are unfortunately linked to broader intentions that are quite odious.

WTF”
Yeah, and is this sort of why they, if you look at it, they’ve been very, yeah, definitely hawkish against sort of Russia. Is it sort of trying to find a common enemy to to find an excuse to unite and to federalize and to gain more power is that what you’re seeing as a mechanism for this?

Doctorow:
Well yes, Russia is a very convenient bogeyman, and it gives the leadership at present in Europe the possibility of saying to their electorate, stay with us, bear with us, our countries are under threat, we are the stewards, We are the ones who are most interested in national defense, and we will protect you.

This is precisely what Mr. Starmer was saying at the Labour Party convention in Liverpool yesterday, when interviewed, and was explaining how Mr. Farage would cozy up to Putin and threaten the security of Britain. That’s in a nutshell what these people are saying to hold their grip on power and to deprive the electorate of a reasonable debate on all policies, including the remilitarization of Europe and the merger, essential merger, of what is NATO and what is the EU. These are serious issues today. And unfortunately, in the mainstream media, no one is looking at these constellations as I have just set them out.

WTF:
Okay, really interesting. So maybe we can come back to that point, but if we go directly to sort of the Russia-Ukraine war, how are you currently judging that? You know, a lot of people, it’s very hard to see what the actual, what’s actually happening. Some people say Ukraine are almost going to beat Russia. Others are saying Russia is going to walk over them soon. What is your current outlook?

Doctorrow: 16:40
Well, at this stage of events, for anyone to be saying that as the “Financial Times” yesterday and today as a lead page, so to speak, in their online edition, I forget it was Rashman or one of their regular contributors is explaining, or trying to explain, why Ukraine is really winning the war.

And I think similar to what is being said in the States, even in the circle of President Trump, that, “Wow, the Russians should have solved this problem and defeated Ukraine long ago, and we see they’ve only had such limited territorial gains in the last three years, that proves that Russia’s losing.”

Of course, this is utter nonsense. The latest figures even coming out of Ukraine from military sources, is that Ukraine has lost 1.7 million dead and severely injured soldiers. Out of respect to Russia, someone with as much experience and good sources as Colonel Macgregor has been saying that Russia has lost 120,000 soldiers dead. Discrepancy is more than 10 times, 12 times. That is reasonable to expect when you consider from the very beginning of this war of attrition, Russia had 10 to 12 times the amount of artillery shells and tubes, artillery tubes, compared to Ukraine and NATO. So the figures correspond. The actual mortality versus the actual, is in line with the actual relative armaments and wherewithal of the respective sides.

18:33
To say that Russia is losing and to ignore this vast discrepancy in fatalities is to be irrelevant and is, simply speaking, a propagandist. The situation at present is: the Russians have accelerated their move in all fronts, in part in the Donbass, which is the principal area of interest to the Russians. They have found weak spots, undermanned positions on the Ukrainian side here and there. And they are taking advantage of this, but not in the most obvious way.

They don’t storm in and push the Ukrainians back 50 kilometers. No. They take some land and hold it, inviting the Ukrainians to come and counterattack, which they do, and they get slaughtered. So this is repeated in various places. The Russian game is to demilitarize Ukraine by destroying its manpower in the army. They’re doing a good job of it.

19:39
Now you can send to Ukraine everything you want by way of new artillery and new Bradleys and new xxx-powered tanks, but if they have no one to man it, or if when they come out in the open field those tanks are destroyed in minutes by Russian drones and artillery, then how can you speak about the Ukrainian counteroffensive ever taken back what they’ve lost? So for people who are following the facts on the ground, as are being quite objectively reported by many different sources, it should be clear that Ukraine is on the ropes. The problem is that politically, the group around Mr. Zelensky have a stranglehold on the Ukrainian nation. They have since they came into power.

They have since the coup d’etat of February 2014. And the Ukrainian nation has been deprived of all possible alternative news to the state-run media or to the supposedly free press that has in fact from the beginning been financed by the United States USAID, essentially the CIA, and NGOs acting in the name of the US government. So the Ukrainian people only see the large increase, regular increase in cemeteries, but they don’t have a sense of the balance of power between Ukrainian and Russian forces.

What is happening now is, as I said, in advance, the Russians are moving on on Donetsk, which was the most important of the two oblasts in Donbas, which have been largely, majority, held by Ukrainian forces when this special operation began, and which even today are at least 30-35% held by Ukrainian forces and 65-70% held by Russian forces.

21:56
The Russians want to sweep to the Dniepr River. That’s probably a matter of weeks, if not a very few months away, since they are knocking out these substantial fortified towns that the Ukrainians fortified over the course of eight to ten years precisely to prevent such a Russian sweep. The Russians are very cautious. They want to keep this ratio, kill ratio that I mentioned before stable. They do not stage large-scale, widespread assaults on these towns because in any situation like that, the attacking force always has bigger casualties than the defending force. So they are softening these towns up, and I have in mind Pakrovsk in particular, and several others in the Donetsk province.

We see the, as I said, the partial takeover of Pakrovsk, which is a major logistical hub and fortified point, barring the way to the two lesser fortified cities in the very center of Donetsk, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. And then as a free plane, free rolling to the Dnieper River. The Russians have been moving on this Pakrovsk, which they call Krasnoyarsk. And they have had significant success in the last week in a similar town, taking a similar town on the outskirts of Kharkiv, that is northeast Ukraine, on the border with Russia. And it’s the city that is the second- largest in Ukraine with predominantly Russian-staking population but has been used by the Ukrainian government as a staging ground for attacks on the Russian border provinces.

23:53
This goes back more than a year, a year and a half, to a raid, the first raid within Russian Federation territory that was staged by a group that the Ukrainians helped form, called the Russian Volunteer Unit or Corps. These are the people who have been defending the fortified town near Kharkiv that the Russians now have surrounded. And these renegade Russians who were turning on their own people and staging terrorist raids across the border are among those whom the Russians are very busy slaughtering right now to remove the most obnoxious forces in the Ukrainian military.

25:04
Well, so that’s what’s going on in Northeast around Kharkov. That’s what’s going on around the center and the Donetsk, Lugansk, the two core oblasts of what they call the Donbas. And now the Russians are turning their attention to Odessa. Odessa is not so far away. When you consider where the Russians are in the neighboring province, Ukrainian province of Kherson, it’s a rather short distance to by land to Odessa.

But Odessa so far has been attacked by the Russians by air, using missiles, using drones. Odessa is the most important port facility of Ukraine. It’s what they have used for all their grain exports, and it’s also a very important military base. It would be a still more important military base if the war is frozen, if there’s a settlement that is a provisional settlement and not a profound settlement like the Russians want, and the borders are fixed where they are now. In that case, the French and the British would certainly move into Odessa, set up shop and prepare Odessa to serve their purposes in attacking Crimea, which is rather close by sea, if you just look at the map, close by sea from Odessa.

26:35
For that very reason, the Russians are now saying among themselves, “We cannot be free of the threats to us, to our security, coming from Ukraine if we don’t take Odessa, which was always a Russian city anyway.” So that is probably the next area of military attack by the Russians as they roll on and take the whole of the Donbass in a month or two to come. If they take Odessa, then the rump Ukraine will lose almost all of its interest to France and to Britain, and the war will be ready to be wound up.

WTF:
Yeah, thanks a lot for the in-depth analysis of it. Do you see, is there any way that this can be resolved through this settlement, or it would have to be quite large, sort of, I guess, you know, basically Ukraine giving Donetsk and other parts of the country. Is that the only way for that to be a settlement soon?

Doctorow: 27:38
Well, I don’t want to be dogmatic or to say that the scenarios as I just described are obligatory and the only way out of this conflict. Of course, there are always variations. What I will say is that what Mr. Trump was saying in New York last week when he was say taunting the Russians and saying that, “Gee, they thought they would do this in a week. It’s now the third year. They haven’t finished the job. Maybe Russia is a paper tiger.”

Well, of course that was a taunt. And a lot of people initially took what Trump was saying to be that, “Ah, he’s changed his position, he’s a pivot, he’s seen the light, he’s now on our side.”

Which was, after they reflected a little bit on this, they understood that they were being trolled. That is, the European leaders were being trolled, and Trump’s domestic opponents, like Lindsey Graham, were being trolled by Trump, when what he really meant was the opposite of what he was saying. He said, the essence to the Europeans was, “OK, you like the war, you want Ukrainians to win, good luck, and you’re on your own.”

28:56
The position of Mr. Trump with respect to Putin is a little bit different. Yes, there was a taunt. And yes, Mr. Trump wants to be the peacemaker, but not in the sense that the European leaders and his domestic opponents and the majority of the American political establishment believes. You see, the real message of Donald Trump to Vladimir Putin was, “Vladimir, get it over with. Crush Ukraine, finish them off, do it in a week, so that you and we can then move on and do real business. We can do business extending the about- to-expire New SALT treaty.”

That is to say, the only major remaining agreement on arms limitations, nuclear offensive weapons, missiles, submarines, and air-delivered weapons that we have today. It expires on the 2nd of February. And Mr. Trump, despite his seeming belligerence and unwillingness to accept arms limitations agreements in general, I believe he has been persuaded that it’s in America’s interests that there are not being new arms race.

30:32
So these, Mr. Trump’s desire– I believe, and this is, and I cannot prove this, it’s simply my take on the situation– his desire is for normalization in relation to Russia. First of all, for security reasons of the United States. Russia is now well ahead of the United States in updating its nuclear triad, and well ahead of the United States in not just development, but actual implementation, deployment in the field of advanced offensive weapons, hypersonic missiles of various kinds. And I think that Trump has been persuaded that it is in America’s interests to put a cap on these developments.

WTF: 31:24
Yeah, and I think this links quite well to the point you were making before about NATO and Europe. Do you see, so this is a mechanism for the US to almost withdraw from Europe, withdraw from NATO, and then to sort of push further to towards the East, towards China and Asia? Is that sort of how you’re seeing this trajectory?

Doctorow:
Yes and no. I don’t believe that Mr. Trump really wants to go after China. His secretary of state has, from long ago, made it clear that China is the biggest threat, la, la, la. And Mr. Trump is going along with that. And he is, again, Trump is assumed to be a dullard. He’s assumed to be a superficial man. He’s just a real estate developer. What does he know about global politics? I beg to differ. He’s had decades to mull over these questions, and he’s had some very smart, if not brilliant, advisors to help him along, starting with Henry Kissinger.

32:30
Everybody in the press has a memory that goes back about two weeks. And our political scientists in their journal articles have a memory that goes back maybe three, four, five years. Let’s look back a little further. During the 2016 presidential campaigns, Henry Kissinger was a key advisor on foreign policy, and I’d say a mentor to Donald Trump. And so strategic thinking was given to him in a kind of tutorial for at least six months, close to a year, by Henry Kissinger.

These principles, I don’t believe he’s forgotten them, and if he did, he has them in his new suite of advisors, some other very smart people who also understand geopolitics and can give him specific pointers as we go along. So as regards the world at large, Mr. Trump is interested in the American– in perpetuating, reinforcing, consolidating the American hegemony in the Western hemisphere and in Latin America. That is clear from the day he took office. That is clear in his whole Greenland acquisition move. That is clear from his gunboat diplomacy with Venezuela today.

34:06
Let’s remember what’s happened in the last 20 years. China has moved in to Latin America as a very big consumer of its raw materials, investor in minerals production, and investor in logistics, as we see in their involvement in the Panama Canal.

Mr. Trump would like to uproot all of that. I think that’s his primary concern. Going after the People’s Republic of China over Taiwan, I think is a negligible interest of Donald Trump, even if it is a concern of Republicans in Congress and of his own Secretary of State. So withdrawal from Europe, not completely, but he wants to end and he is succeeding in ending Europe’s free ride. They’re having less than 2% of GDP devoted to military purposes in their own defense. He has done what he could to motivate Europeans to raise their defense spending while preparing the way for a lesser role of the United States in Europe. That is not the same thing as isolationism and withdrawal of the United States from the world, which is what Mr. Trump’s enemies attribute to him.

As I just said, he wants to control half of the world. It’s called the Western Hemisphere. And he is less interested in America’s being the policeman of the world and of being widely overextended outside its own sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere.

WTF: 36:07
Okay. So a return to the Monroe Doctrine.

Doctorow:
Oh, exactly. I think he was being persuaded that controlling the whole world is too big a task and highly controversial and leads you into wars which you usually lose. Fighting in Afghanistan, fighting halfway around the world at great logistical disadvantage versus powers that are there on the spot, assisting Ukraine against Russia when you’re four or five thousand miles away and Russia’s right there. This is a fool’s game. And I think that advisors to Trump have persuaded him of that obvious point.

However, bullying Venezuela, bullying Panama, that’s an American game that Mr. Reagan was very good at. The question of beating up little countries, well, there are plenty of little countries to beat up on in Latin America.

WTF: 37:12
Yeah, okay, really interesting. So you say it sounds like there’s gonna be spheres of, you know, as you said, the Western Hemisphere, you know, Europe, and then probably the Eastern, Eastern Hemisphere of China leading the way and I guess the BRICS countries, is that how you sort of see the world moving forward?

Doctorow:
Well, I think there is going to be a regionalization of power. And that is a good thing, where people in countries that are directly involved and directly knowledgeable about their neighbors are, with those neighbors, some of the neighbors, making common policy to resolve issues that concern them directly, without the intervention, without the big thumb on the balance, of a country that is very far away and has its own peculiar ideas about how the world should look, meaning the United States. So there will be– the Chinese hegemony in the Far East will be ultimately accepted by the United States. The Russian interests in its immediate neighborhood, not to control these countries, but to ensure that they’re not being used as weapons by the countries halfway across the world, to undermine Russian security.

38:40
So Russia is not going to control Poland, Estonia, and the rest of it. It’s all nonsense. But that these countries not be hostile to Russia. If they form some kind of written agreements on security, mutual security, I think that’s what we will see evolving around Russia. And the United States will remain regrettably, but let’s face it, this is a long story, the big bully in its own neighborhood.

39:12
Okay, really interesting. Gilbert, thank you so much for your time today. We’ve sort of covered basically going over the whole globe. But my last question is, what is one message you want people to take away from our conversation?

Doctorow:
Stay calm. Look, I am on a number of YouTube channels. I consult YouTube regularly to see who is saying what. There is a lot of sensational headlines attached to people who are otherwise quite respectable and balanced, which if you read them and see them daily, your hair stands on end. The end to the world is not coming. That is my single message.

And Mr. Trump is– whether is this shall I say despite himself, but I think in favor of what he really wants– acting against the war hawks, acting against the conspiracy here in Europe to maintain tension for the sake of keeping those in power in power. So overall, I do not see reason to be alarmed. And I take a phrase from Charles Dickens, in _Tale of Two Cities_, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” To my, as an, I’m an historian by training, and looking at the world in the past, the present, and I believe the future, that statement has always been true.

WTF: 40:51
Great message. Thanks so much for your time. If anyone wanted to find out more about your work and what you do, where would the best place for that be?

Doctorow:
Well I have a Substack account, the “Armageddon Newsletter”, which shouldn’t get people too worried by the title. It also was catchy, but it was not intended to alarm anybody.

I also, if you just look [for] me, Google me in Amazon, you’ll see what I have written. I have eight published books and a couple more in the works. My activity has been as a chronicler of our times. And that comes out in my two volume memoirs. It comes out in my latest book, _War Diaries_. So I invite the audience to investigate this aspect of my work and perhaps it will interest them.

WTF: 41:50
Perfect, I’ll pull that in the description below, but thanks again for your time.

Doctorow:
All right, my pleasure. Bye bye.

WTF:
Hey everyone, thank you for listening. I really appreciate the support. If you got value out of this, I’d really appreciate it if you could like, subscribe or comment, you know, good or bad feedback, I’m always open to that. But it really helps to the channel. As I said before, only about 14% of people actually subscribe to this channel. So if you were to do that, it would really help. It could mean we could continue to grow. If not, thanks for watching and see you on the next show.

42:20
You also might like this video right here. All right. Thanks again.