In the various, shall we say ‘exotic’ panel discussion programs that I occasionally agree to participate in, you never know whom you will be matched with or what questions will be thrown your way, assuming you can actually hear the questions (which was not really the case yesterday in my session on Press TV, hence my not answering the first question thrown out to me).
Two days ago I appeared on a News X World (India) program in which I was matched with a former NY Times staff journalist and holder of the Pulitzer Prize who is a wholly committed Neocon and spouted the most outrageous calumny against Trump including all the Russia-gate accusations over interference in the 2016 elections that Tulsi Gabbard recently proved were fabricated and were backed by both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama in violation of federal law.
Last night I was matched with John Bosnitch, a journalist and political activist from Canada who probably has a Communist Party of the Soviet Union membership card in his back pocket.
That is the roll of the dice. It makes me all the more appreciative of the efforts of hosts like Judge Andrew Napolitano and University of Southeast Norway professor Glenn Diesen to bring serious discussants to the attention of their large audiences on their youtube channels.
Diesen: Hi everyone and welcome back. We are joined today by Gilbert Doktorow, historian and international affairs analyst and author of books such as “War Diaries – the Russia-Ukraine War”. And yeah, thank you for coming back on the program.
Doctorow: My pleasure.
Diesen So, yeah, the big news obviously is the Trump and Putin meeting in Alaska. And, yeah, after three and a half years since Russia launched its a special military operation, well, most of this time, the West boycotted diplomacy in an effort to isolate Russia. We now had a meeting between the Russian and American president. And the immediate reactions of course have ranged from extreme optimism to utter panic, especially then in Europe. And well, the media especially is hostile to their diplomatic efforts. And there’s been these efforts to portray Trump as weak unless he is tough on Russia, which is usually what we demand of all politicians, which effectively translates into prolonging the war, I think. But again, it’s an important summit. And I wanted to ask you, what are your main takeaways from this summit?
Doctorow: 1:20 Well, if we had this discussion 24 hours ago, I would be at a loss to say something that my peers had not already said, because everybody had a microphone in front of them in the minutes following the closing of the conversation. But since we are speaking today, a lot of fresh news has come in, which I hope we can go through, because it answers the question that immediately came up following the press briefings– so I think it was 12 minutes, 15 minutes, it was very short– that took place immediately following the summit talks in Anchorage. The question that arose was what did the Russians and the Americans agree on? Because Mr. Putin said, yes, we’ve come closer to solving the problem. Well, how did they come closer?
It was not– there was no information given out by either party in the minutes following the summit. And all of that has come out both by intent and by a subversive release to the press by people, I’m sure, like Macron. He couldn’t possibly resist the temptation to call reporters in to show how much he knew that was of interest to them. What I’m saying is that the basic agreements that Trump and Putin made have come out in the last 24 hours.
The first shoe to drop was soon afterwards and the most important information only came out I would guess in the middle of the night or early this morning. The last and very important information I read extensively reported in the “Financial Times”, their online edition this morning, talking about the territorial issue, specifically saying that Putin had proposed that Russia would receive or should receive all of the territory of the Donbass, that is, of the two oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk, and that it would compromise on the other two, the other two oblasts which form the new Russia and these are Zaporozhzhia and Kherson. In those two last two oblasts or regions, Russia would agree to a freeze at the line of confrontation. In the first two, strictly speaking Donbass, Donetsk and Lugansk, they would insist that Ukraine would withdraw completely from those territories, so that Russia would receive now a territory that it had not conquered. Our lying press has said, ah yes, the Russians only hold about 50% of the territory they’re now demanding be turned over.
First of all, out of the two oblasts, the Russians have 98%, maybe 99% of Lugansk. Lugansk was the easiest for them to recapture; from the very first days of the Special Military Operation, that was the case. With respect to Donetsk, before this summer offensive got underway, the Russians had about 50% of that. Now they have 70%.
So from the get-go, what our CNN and BBC are telling us is fabricated. The concession is one of time, time and lives, because it is apparent to anybody with military knowledge that the Russians will take the whole of Donbas in a matter of weeks. The story coming out of Kiev is that by giving up Slavyansk and Kramatorsk– these are fortified towns between the present line of confrontation around Pokrovsk to the east and the Dnieper River– Ukraine would be giving up its ability to resist a further Russian onslaught across the Dnieper into the rest of Ukraine.
Well, this is the same lies and fabrication that have been behind the Ukrainian story, which was repeated endlessly by the United States and the European allies over the last three years. I think most of us who have our brains screwed in right understand that Russia would never willingly take any Ukrainian territory in West Ukraine, because that would be really an occupation and not a governance, and they would expect a lot of difficulty ruling that area.
6:34 So the whole story of what the Russians want is now clear. The other, smaller issue which came out, which is the first shoe to drop, which I didn’t mention a moment ago, was that Mr. Trump announced he had switched his view, and essentially he’s aligned with Vladimir Putin, on what sort of an agreement is now before us. He had previously been aligned with the Europeans and with Kiev, saying we must have immediate unconditional ceasefire. And that was about to be imposed on Russia. This summit was supposed to end in the signing off by Putin of such a ceasefire and so forth.
What we have now is Trump aligned with Putin in saying that that is senseless, that is only provisional, it can be reversed, and what we need is a genuine peace treaty. The difference is very great. The Ukrainians are doing their best to confuse the general public about what the difference is and to suggest that a genuine peace is only setting the stage for further Russian offensive against them. The Europeans are trying to rope in Trump to the notion that when we have this peace signed, that we need to have peacekeepers to enforce the peace. These are absolute propaganda and lies.
Then the point of Mr. Putin is: we have to resolve the underlying issues behind this war and we have to remove the issues that separate us and have caused conflict. And if you have that enshrined in a peace treaty, there’s no need for peacekeepers, because there’s no conflict to break out again.
So this is where we are today, with Europe digging in their heels, finding any logic, however impossible and possibly irrational it is, like what I just described, that a peace treaty is only setting the stage for the next war.
Well, this is a very interesting interpretation of what peace treaties are about. Oh yes, when you have peace treaties that are disastrous like Versailles, that’s true. But if you have peace treaties designed with people of intelligence and compromise and diplomacy and goodwill, then a peace treaty is a peace treaty. And you don’t have to confuse it with a truce. So this has happened in the last 24 hours, and it is illuminating.
If I can just go one step further, I don’t want this to be a lengthy talk here, a lecture. I want to say that we really, Glenn, we’re living in a dark age. It’s very sad to say, but I listened to your interview yesterday with the minister, the member of parliament, the German former UN official talking about lack of respect, lack of diplomacy. Let me just change the term for this. We’re living in the Dark Ages.
This is a period of hate, a period of vile propaganda, a period of impunity. And where those who have committed crimes, including high crimes and treason, walk away without ever being brought to court and with no fear that their crimes will be fully exposed and that they will pay for them. This is where we are today, and it is terrible. I take it back in the United States to Mr. Obama who never did anything about those guilty for the invasion of Iraq. Though they all were sitting, Mr. Cheney was out there.
Oh yes, my last comment is on the first response of the British press and also some of the US press. How do they respond to the warmth and cordiality of Mr. Trump’s reception of Putin?
11:23 Well, either that Mr. Trump is being played by Putin, which is peculiar, since they hadn’t even met. The warmth and cordiality preceded the talks. As what do they do, they remind us, hey, they’re meeting in Alaska because there are not too many places where Mr. Putin and Trump can meet because, hey, remember that Mr. Putin is an international, is a war criminal, a war criminal, and he has been condemned by the International Court of Justice. Well, they pulled that one out of the hat, in case any of us forgot, that complete miscarriage of justice over the supposed kidnapping of thousands, or maybe it was several dozen Ukrainian children who were in the middle of the war zone without parents or custodians. Anyway, that’s my lengthy introduction to where we are today.
Diesen: Well, you’re right on the hate part and the rest for that sake, but the hate part is quite interesting because during the Cold War, when we’re speaking to Stalin or Khrushchev or anyone from the other side, there would nonetheless be some respect. You wouldn’t– you would address them properly. You would have diplomacy. You would be able to discuss what are the real security concerns? How might we be intensifying them? How may we alleviate it? None of this exists today.
12:53 Instead, I get the sentiment that you’re obliged to hate. The hate becomes a source of, it displays our morality. So how can you meet a war criminal? I even had people from the military ask me, how can you have diplomacy when someone has attacked another one?
This is when you have diplomacy. I mean, these are people who are in leadership position, and they talk this excessive moralism, which makes it impossible to actually do any good in the world by talking to the other side. But in terms of what seems as a key achievement though, for the, I guess, achievement of peace would be that Trump, he moved away, as you said, from the ceasefire, which doesn’t mean peace, and moved towards addressing the root causes. And for me, this is interesting because in Europe since the 1990s, we decided let’s create a new Europe organized around the EU and NATO. Everyone should be part of it except for Russia. And also Russia shouldn’t have a veto or say over what we do because they’re not part of NATO.
So essentially we created, institutionalized Russia’s exclusion from Europe, and we kind of wished Russia away. But in reality, all you do is when you deny Russia any voice in international institutions to defend its and represent its security interest, the only thing to do is leave the military option as the only one. And then by now creating the conditions for, well, only a ceasefire, then we put peacekeepers or whatever you might call them there. It’s not going to work.
It’s just, it makes common sense. If you want to end the military conflict, you have to open up a political one, institutions where the Russians can also sit at the table and say, listen, you can’t put your missiles on our borders. We can’t put them in Mexico. You can’t put them there and then find a common agreement. This used to be common sense, but again, it used to be common sense to talk to each other with basic respect and not criminalized diplomacy, but it does appear to be a bygone thing.
15:07 But in terms of, yes, resolving the Ukraine issue is quite important. And I think accepting the Russian premise that we have to address the root causes is quite interesting. We kind of got that confirmed by all the Europeans who are now in full panic. But what I thought was interesting though is there appeared to be also a heavy focus on bilateralism. That is, Russia and the US aren’t simply hostages to what happens in Europe. I was wondering how you read into this focus on bilateral relations.
Doctorow: Well, I’ll get to that in one moment, but I want to go back to the hate issue and to the issue of respect, the lack of respect that you’ve touched upon. Some time ago, when I was in regular correspondence with Professor Stephen Cohen, he insisted to me when I was about to write something regarding George Soros’s visit to Brussels and his inability to remember anything on stage, I was about to mention the senility in my article. And he cautioned me, this was 10 years ago, the man is still alive. He cautioned me that ad hominem argumentation is really unacceptable in academic discourse.
I disagreed, and I continue to disagree. I, Russians of– you probably noticed, since you spent good time there, they don’t believe in phrenology any more. They don’t take the shape of somebody’s skull as meaning very much. I mean, the top part, for example, or the back part, but they do take physiognomy very seriously. They take facial expression very seriously.
16:58 And Americans, pretend it doesn’t exist. Anybody who was following Dick Cheney must have understood the man was mentally ill just by his crooked smile. But you couldn’t really speak about it because that’s an ad-homonym remark I mean, but his smile, you know, finally, unlike his nose or his ears, the smile is something you make. And it tells you something about what’s behind the face. The Mogherini, she became mentally ill in service. She became, you could see in her face the tension and she lost concentration. She wasn’t up to the job.
All right. I made my point that what can you say about the descent of political culture in the West? We know about the United States descent: never rose very high, with a few exceptions, but even from that medium bar, it’s descended since the 1990s. In Europe, it’s collapsed, an intellectual collapse. When I was growing up in the States, people said, “The British, oh, they speak so well. They always have really upper-crust people running the government.”
You can’t say that now. They’ve had a succession of idiots, which they themselves, which the City of London called out. When they threw out, was it Truss, I forget who, who lasted like six weeks, lasted less time than iceberg lettuce. Because she was intellectually incompetent.
What can you say about Kallas? She’s a laughing stock of Russia. What can you say about Annalena Baerbock? That Germany would have in its cabinet, a moron like that, I mean she’s a moron, is unthinkable. And so how can you look for respect, diplomacy, and the rest of it for people who are savages, uneducated, no knowledge of anything, people who speak about a 360-degree change of opinion?
This is beneath contempt. I think we have to look at the democratic processes that are putting these morons in power. Before we can start saying, well, they see this or they don’t see that. This has to be reexamined. Here in Belgium, we have very good political scientists who spend a lot of time working, talking about electoral processes, because we have to: we have this crazy situation of two nations under one roof, the Flemings and the Francophones. And so they try to find very inventive, progressive solutions to these problems.
20:04 That kind of creativity has to be used more within Europe to find solutions to bring out competent people to the floor. They are not there. And under those circumstances, you have the crazy reaction to yesterday’s summit that we see on the front pages of the European newspapers. They simply are not up to the challenge. I know you have addressed in some of your recent programs this question about Europe becoming geopolitically irrelevant because of the low level of political culture in present-day Europe.
There are no great people. There’s some brave people like Orban and Fico, but there are no great people. I don’t mean to say that great people are always wise people or likable people, but their intellectual capacities, their ability to look at big picture issues, it’s not here today. So that’s, I’m sorry, now that I’ve gone off on this tangent, I’ve lost the line of your question. Could you just remind me?
Diesen: Oh, no, I’ll, no, I wanted to move on and ask about the focus on the bilateralism. But if I can just first, a quick comment on the … interview I did with Mikael von der Schürrnberg yesterday, again, he’s not just a member of the EU Parliament, but as Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, he spent 34 years in conflict zones. He didn’t live in Germany and fly out. He resided there. He had houses. He lived in the conflict zones for 34 years.
And to now see him, you know, he saw hope in all of those areas, but in Europe now he just seems gutted, like this may, there’s no, he doesn’t see any solutions, because there’s no one addressing the problems. And I got that impression in this country as well, if you criticize, because I’ve been told I criticize Europe a lot, but yeah, I do. I think you criticize for course correction, but if you didn’t like it, then you shouldn’t live here any more. I mean, this is the mentality.
If you like Europe, then you have to support all the policies of Kallas, Van der Leyen and the rest of this insane asylum. Or also if you care about Ukraine, then you’re just going to pump in more weapons, keep the war going. Even though I know that this is just going to lead to the destruction of that nation. They’re never going to be able to rebuild. They’re not going to have the territory, the people, the infrastructure.
I mean, that makes no sense. But this is the mentality in Europe now. Just do as you’re told and support any insane policies. Otherwise you’re on the enemy’s side. It’s just, it’s something — the whole reason has shut down, I think.
22:56 Anyways, yeah, you know, I think the bilateralism was the direction I was going. Well, this has been in the past, going back to the fall of the Soviet Union, the bright new era that opened up in the 90s. I had colleagues who were so enthusiastic about the opportunity for American-Russian friendship, cooperation, strategic cooperation in all domains. For my take, well by the end of the 90s, they were still saying that. And I was saying, my goodness, we’re just lucky we’re not at one another’s throats at this moment. And you want to be strategic allies? It just is unreasonable.
But going back to what underpins such strategic cooperation, sually business is part of it, and trade is part of it. When Mr. Nixon did his detente with the Soviet Union, he was actively encouraging American business executives to go there and do business, to trade, and to invest in manufacturing capacity there.
In the case– my understanding though, is that this basis for bilateralism really doesn’t exist between the United States and Russia. Their economies have never been complementary in the same way as Russian-European relations were. The amount of trade done between the two countries never was very big. It’s not that it fell from great heights. It never reached any heights, not because of lack of will, but because the economics didn’t push people together the way they pushed Germans and Russians together, for example, in energy supply and raw material supply, which was something that Mr. Macron held out when he was still thinking about Russia in positive terms.
25:07 So that very strong foundation for genuine bilateralism doesn’t exist. And those who are calling out the project of train, tunnel, bridge across the Bering Strait, these are toys. This is not serious. That is not how to build a foundation for genuine bilateralism. The US and Russians have interests in world governance, which should be enough to justify decent relations and cooperation in many areas of security, global security.
But to build it out, they’re going to have cultural relations, they’re going to have economic ties of a great magnitude — is unreasonable, looking at the basic conditions for who produces what and who buys what. It’s not there. Still, as I said, the geopolitical common interests should be sufficient for bilateralism. As for the rest of the world, well, bilateralism does not exclude their both participating in regional societies of trade and other interests, including technological interests. It’s not an exclusive thing.
Certainly Russia is not going to close the door on BRICS for the sake of warm relations with the United States. As for Mr. Trump, he’s busy closing the door on the world. So that question for him doesn’t exist. Have I covered that? I mean, in the way that you expected, have I not answered the question in the manner you looked for?
Diesen: 27:11 Yeah. No, well, I think, yeah, there’s of course limits to the economic participation. But as you said, the geopolitical, the arms control, there’s a lot of other things to do. But even with the economic sphere, I don’t think Russia’s going to shift away from BRICS.
I think this greater-Eurasia initiative they’re pursuing now which replaced their goal of a Greater Europe, which included Russia, I think is very much permanent. But the Russians do want, I guess, more of a balance of dependence. So you don’t want excessive dependence on an actor like China, which is more powerful than you, given that Russia will always be more dependent on China than China is on Russia. They can’t be equal economies. But the asymmetry can be offset if they just diversify, have more partners, don’t put all eggs in one basket.
28:04 And I think from this perspective it would be in their interest to have better trade relations with the US, also more predictability, I would say, which would be good for both sides. But no, I think if the ambitions of Trump is for Russia to turn its back on China, you know, I think it’s fantasy, it’s not going to happen. But in terms of what can be learned from the summit in Alaska is, I guess one of the reasons why more can be learned now as opposed to 24 hours ago is that a meeting is going to be set up between Trump and Zelensky on Monday already if I’m not mistaken, which is a few hours from now. But based on what they’re going to discuss, do you know what this will be all about? And does it tell you anything about how the meeting went between Putin and Trump?
Doctorow: Well, the Europeans are counting on, they’re preparing Zelensky for the meeting with Trump on the assumption that if he’s properly programmed, he can avoid crossing sensitive points with Trump, can avoid the kind of blow up that happened six months ago when they met in the Oval Office, and that he can turn Trump around. After all, we all know that Putin played Trump, that Trump was talking ceasefire, when he went to the summit; he was talking peace treaty when he left the summit. So well, I could tell you again, I think they’re missing the point. What Trump has only let out false information, misleading information to keep his opponents off balance, to keep the press off balance, without his being turned by anybody.
30:05 He’s only very gradually putting into place what he surely had in mind before. This brings up the whole question, what does he know? So many of my peers assume that he is a lightweight, that he has no concentration, that he changes his opinion from day to day, and that he’s ill-informed. When he repeats that the Russians have lost a million men or they’re losing 30,000 a month, they’re saying, “Oh, you see, he’s being fed bad information by his assistants.” I really am stunned by the lack of imagination of former CIA analysts.
It is depressing. Well, maybe it’s good news. It tells you the CIA doesn’t really have much analytic talent at any given moment, which is, I don’t mean to say that the whole institution is that way. But when I look at some of the analysts’ remarks, I’m stunned. To think that Trump would know less than they know is very peculiar.
I’m sure he knows it all. When he said Russia is a war machine, that tells you the whole story. He doesn’t have to go into the figures, the killer figures. He was repeating the rubbish that the press is talking about. Again, to keep them off balance, to let them think that he thinks the way they do, when it is most improbable that he thinks the way they do or that he has accepted any of the rubbish reports on what the battlefield really looks like.
So I think he is well informed, I think he has his own course how this will go and that takes us into the question that you just raised: what’s going to happen tomorrow? I think that he will repeat what he has told Zelensky on the phone, that he has adopted the position of the Russians with respect to how this war should end and in what time. And that part of the war ending is Ukraine conceding once and for all, not temporarily, probably de jure, that it has lost the Donbass and parts of the other two regions that I mentioned, the part of new Russia that is Zaporozhzhya and Kherson, and that it will not have an army above a certain force, and that it will not be part of, enter NATO.
When you look at the comments coming from Europe, as recently as yesterday, that, “Oh, it’s just temporarily they can’t enter NATO”, they’re not listening. They’re not listening to Trump. He has made it clear: never.
Then you’ve got the whole question of the “coalition of the willing” readiness to put troops’ boots on the ground in Ukraine for the sake of protecting Ukraine from further Russian aggression. I think that the news that the Europeans have put out, that Trump is on board, though they don’t know to what extent the United States will participate, I think that is fake news. I think they are trying to, again, to entrap him, putting in his mouth words that he never spoke or, if he spoke them, words that he never intended to implement, because his way of dealing with his enemies is not, generally speaking, not to contradict them directly but to say what they want to hear and then go off and do what he wants to do.
So the meeting tomorrow, I think, will be very tough for Mr. Zelensky. I think the Europeans will not get any satisfaction out of it. And I imagine that Trump is setting up the case for turning his back on Ukraine and the Europeans, when they show that they are putting a monkey wrench into the works, as Mr. Putin said in his press briefing after the summit.
Diesen: 34:46 Yeah, well, there’s, I guess, two different hypotheses in terms of Trump’s rhetoric, which is often shifting. And as you said, the first one, which I hear, I guess most often is, you know, he’s uninformed, doesn’t know what he’s saying, or he’s just stupid. But alternatively, as you suggest, one also has to recognize the reality that he’s in a difficult spot though, because he has to navigate between two positions which seemingly can’t be bridged. On one side you have not just hostile allies in Europe, Zelensky and indeed the Washington political establishment, which wants none of this at all, what he’s trying to do. And on the other side, you have Russia with fairly high demands in terms of what it wants in this peace agreement, given that this has been going on unresolved now for 30 years.
And it did remind me a bit about, I did an interview with Fyodor Lukyanov. He’s got actually several positions. We used to work together in same department in Moscow and well every year at the Valdai discussion club he’s the one sitting next to Putin interviewing him. And he was making the point, because I asked him, what do you make of Trump’s rhetoric shifting back and forth?
And he had a good point, though, which is, well, we have to see at what point he starts, because Europeans, of course, they boycott all diplomacy. They don’t want to talk to Russia. Zelensky, he ruled out talking to Russia. He wants no negotiations, no diplomacy, just more weapons. Anything else is unacceptable. But he was making a point. Well, just look at the gradual steps.
And now two months down the road, you have in France, they’re now discussing whether or not they should reopen diplomacy with Russia. You’re having Zelensky. Yeah, well, he’s sending his team. They’re meeting with the Russians, talking. They’re looking for a way to resolve this.
So there has to be a step by step. So it’s, I mean, maybe it’s a bit of both. Maybe some of the information Trump isn’t really on top of, But I think ignoring, as you say, ignoring this difficult positions between demanding Russians and very unflexible and demanding Europeans and Zelensky that he has to navigate the space, I’m not sure.
But also I’ve heard another theory that, well, which I also see as probable, that the United States isn’t necessarily that eager to give up all containment of Russia, but they rather want to outsource it to the Europeans. I was wondering what you thought about this.
Doctorow: 37:37 Well, this would have been certainly a good interpretation before Mr. Trump and his associates gutted the CIA, gutted the National Foundation of Democracy, before they took all the bad guys that they could find out of the federal government. I don’t know who is continuing this type of intervention, neocon intervention. Maybe it’s just the Soros foundation or similar organizations. Certainly, the Brits are deep in this, probably much more responsible for any of these nefarious developments than the Americans are.
The problem with Trump, and which puts me in an awkward position is the sharp contrast between what he is doing as a peacemaker in Ukraine and what he is doing as an enabler of genocide in Gaza. When I listened, I think it was Politico, it was being interviewed this morning by the BBC about Mr. Trump as a peacemaker and how it pains him to hear about people being killed in war. What can I say?
That is not the Trump that I am an apologist for, so to speak. I am in favor of what he’s doing in Ukraine. I believe it is well planned that he has very able assistance, in Steve Witkoff, to keep him in line, to keep his thinking solid. But of course, he is working with the same Witkoff doing this very, very nasty cooperation with Netanyahu’s government in genocide.
So it’s a mixed picture, a very mixed picture. But to think that he shifts from day to day, well, I can’t abide that. There is clearly a very heavy commitment of that man to find a peace in Ukraine, not because he loves peace and is worried about people being killed, but because of much bigger things, how he wants to reshape global geopolitics. And yes, of course, you’re right. The idea of separating Russia from China is an idee fixe of many people in his circle, starting with Rubio, his secretary of state.
So that is certainly guiding his attention to Russia and his attempts to deal diplomatically and cordially with Mr. Putin.
Diesen: 40:43 I think Russia would have been more vulnerable to be swayed by this earlier, because from ’94 when they established the OSCE, they thought, okay, now finally we have an inclusive Europe. And then came 1999 with the NATO expansion. And then they always tried to find an agreement. Under Medvedev in 2008, they had this proposal for a new European security architecture in 2010. Putin pushed forward this idea of a EU-Russia union, and all the way up to 2014. But 2014, I think this is when things began to break and they began to shift from greater Europe to greater Eurasia. However, yeah, in 2022, I think that sealed the deal for certain. But if this would have been back in 2008, 2007, eight, well, seven, when Putin made that speech at Munich, I think that was kind of the last chance to accept, including Russia into this Europe they were building.
I think it’s just too late at this point. They also don’t see a future in Europe, although this is the important thing as well. It’s not only to see Europe as hostile and stagnant, but also the Russians have less historical baggage in Asia and there’s more giants there. They’re not feared or hated as much. And economies are better.
It’s hard to argue against. If you take the point of departure, what is in Russia’s interest, it kind of makes sense why they’re not really looking to Europe any more.
Doctorow: 42:32 Let’s not speak about Europe. Let’s speak about who runs Europe. Who runs Europe is Germany. And the responsibility for this lost opportunity I put directly at the door of Angela Merkel in 2008. You have mentioned the Medvedev initiative. I followed that very closely when it was made. It was very badly prepared by the Russians. Mr. Lavrov made an attempt to revive that after it was cursorily dismissed by Merkel, to breathe some life into it because the text that Medvedev released, and I think he released it on social media, he was trying to be very, very “with it”, very up to date. America still had public diplomacy as a flag they were flying, and he used that. Anyway, it was badly done. Nonetheless, she dismissed it out of hand.
“We have security done. It’s called NATO. Don’t bother us.” And that was a disastrous, lost opportunity because Mr. Medvedev say he was the stand-in for Putin, but he was the president. And he didn’t have “stand-in here” across his chest. He could do something and sign something and negotiate something. And everyone said, “Oh, Merkel, she speaks Russian. She gets on with them. She is the intercessor with the Russians” and so on.
She hated the Russians from her childhood, obviously. And she was dismissive of them in the most crude way. When in 2012 she ended all talk about visa-free travel saying they just– “We’re not going to let those crooks into our country”, as if every Russian was an oligarch. And those thieving oligarchs all got into the country anyway, but normal citizens were not able to. She was the point of departure for where we are today. I say that because she had control of the appointment of the president of the Commission.
Wienker was put in at her suggestion because he was manageable, in the usual sense. That’s to say they had the goods on him. So he was under her control. The parliament, the European parliament, was under her control effectively because the European People’s Party even back then, in circa 2015, had complete control of the European Parliament. And she missed the opportunity.
The German, why? It wasn’t an accident. Because Germany had done a switch. Germany was no longer interested in the East. Germany was interested in Mittel Europa.
Germany had found very good colonies in Poland and the Czech Republic for very cheap labor to facilitate its export industry of manufactured goods. They never put in to the, particularly in Poland, complete cycle production. They put in “bits and parts” production. So the Poles had nothing, the Germans had everything. They had all the profit coming from the exports.
46:03 And given that the economic interests of Germany, the number of Germans employed, thanks to Mittel Europa, no doubt many times exceeded the 400,000 Germans in 2015 who were said to owe their jobs to the Russian trade, Germany economically decided, the Mittelstand decided that the Mittel Europa friends within the former Soviet bloc were more valuable to them than good relations with Russia. And it so happened that those countries, Poland and the Baltics, they’re Russian-hating. And Germany joined the Russian-hating gang.
So, I say we can talk about Europe’s mistakes, but I think we’re missing the point. We’re missing the point today, considering where Mr. Merz is. He didn’t come from nowhere. He’s in direct line of this German turn against Russia. He’s an aggravated case. He’s an ugly case, but it’s the same line that you can find in 2008, and still better in 2014 with the Minsk Accords, to which she was a party. She was anti-Russian, and she and Germany controlled the European institutions.
Diesen: Yeah, just as we said, the 2008 proposal by Medvedev for new European security architecture, It didn’t actually call for replacing NATO or disbanding NATO. It recognized solely that we need a wider pan-European umbrella over this because NATO is a military block. It has zero-sum security. It does not subscribe to indivisible security.
So in order not to end up in a situation where the borderline states, be it Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, have to choose between East and West and we rip up the society and pull them in each direction that we have some common security architecture so we don’t end up that everything is zero sum. This was it, and they poured cold water on it.
Doctorow: They poured cold water on him. And this was a terrible mistake. They didn’t have good Russian knowledge. They should have understood that this is the most optimistic, sunny man running Russia for, I don’t know, 200 years. There was no one like Medvedev. He was very well disposed to the West. He was a very outgoing person. And to confuse him with Medvedev today is a tremendous mistake. He was a potential good friend of Europe. And they spurned him. They humiliated him.
Diesen: 48:47 Yeah, Now I remember then when I lived in Russia, the way they talked about him, “Ah, he’s weak, blah, blah, blah.” You know, he put himself out there and they humiliated him.
So again, it’s indistinguishable from the Medvedev you see today though has become, I guess, learned from his past and become very hawkish. My last question, though, was just, I guess, is a smaller question. What do you make sense of the meeting which took place in Alaska? Is this, as some have suggested, just to get as far away from Europe as possible, unburdened by this conflict?
Doctorow: No, I think that Trump was advised, I don’t think that he initiated this, but certainly got very clever advisors who did, for symbolism, so many elements of symbolism, taking Alaska. Some of them have been called out, including by Putin at the press briefing after the summit. But others which have not been called out generally, as I said the first thing that I wanted to call out is that it was bought. And it could be a model for how to end the Ukraine War if somebody would like to take it up, but it seems like nobody does.
50:08 And the other thing is that despite its [being] outside of Russian control since 1857– I think that was the year of the purchase, the Seward Purchase– there is a lively Russian community there, including the patriarch, sorry, the Metropolit, whom Putin met yesterday to give him two icons from Moscow, and the how many communities that are, Orthodox church communities, in Alaska, with mostly Eskimos in there as congregants, Inuits it is, properly speaking.
And the physical proximity, to remind everyone that Russia and the United States are not separated by oceans, but are separated by four kilometers of sea. The two islands that they both hold in the middle of the Bering Strait. This is important. It also would be, as it is on American soil, it’s the possibilities of wiretapping.
“Wiretapping”, it’s an old-fashioned term. Simply of snooping on the exchanges if it were taking place in the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia. Let’s not kid ourselves, it must be bugged like hell. And if they want to have complete confidentiality, until of course, they pass the bomb to Macron for what they decided, when it confidentially ended. Nonetheless, if they wanted to have a few moments of confidentiality, it was best assured of the United States.
It also gave Mr. Trump the opportunity to have a B-2 fly over them. Just to remind Mr. Putin, in case he forgot, the Americans do have a little bit of military technology out there. So in many respects, it was very convenient.
52:14 Also, the issue of flight rights, if it were to be in some places, it would be difficult for the Russians to get the flight passage authorization. Here there was no issue of the sort. They just flew over their own territory till they flew into American air space. These were reasons.
Of course, the opportunity for Putin to pay his respects to the nine Soviet Russian airmen whose tombs are just near that base and whom he visited after the summit. All of these are very important, symbolically, and to separate it from all other meetings that have been had and will be had as the negotiation and the war continues.
Diesen: 53:19 Yeah, whenever the Russians want to reach out to the Americans, they usually point out the shared war effort in the Second World War. But I guess this could be also a positive one, that they have this shared cultural heritage found in Alaska. The fact that it was also purchased in 1867 after the Civil War as opposed to taken by force, it makes it easier to celebrate a common heritage there as opposed to if it would have shifted hands in a more brutal manner.
But yeah, I don’t know. I thought it did take me by surprise. I had my money on United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia. So I, yeah, I was mistaken on this. Gilbert, Doctorow, thank you so much for your time.
I can strongly recommend this lengthy interview to the Community, because it is far-ranging and deals with the points on which Trump and Putin agreed in their Summit but which were not divulged in the press briefing that immediately followed their talks in Alaska.
Though the plans of the European backers of Zelensky to join his visit to the White House tomorrow was not yet known when Glenn Diesen recorded our chat, everthing in the video will be useful to make sense of what happens tomorrow.
This morning’s interview with India’s largest global broadcaster in English, WION, has received a significant number of views. I found it interesting to peruse the Comments section, which indicates a shift in Indian public opinion away from pro-US to more balanced praise for both Russia and the US compared to Comments in my earlier appearances on this station going back a year or more. Contempt for Zelensky seems to be firmly established now.
I am pleased that WION has not made any cuts in my statements, though their senior editors are unlikely to have been happy with it all.
Those in the Community who read my essay this morning on Substack will be heartened by what I had to say a few minutes ago in my weekly chat with Judge Andrew Napolitano.
I introduced a pessimistic note this morning with reference to the discussions Donald Trump had with European leaders and with Volodymyr Zelensky via video conference. Trump was said to have promised Zelensky not to deal with the territorial issue when speaking to Vladimir Putin, nor would he discuss anything other than the Ukraine cease fire. Moreover, other sources said yesterday that Trump threatens Putin with “consequences” if he does not agree to a ceasefire tomorrow.
All of this sounded as if Trump had caved in to European pressure and reversed his position on the “summit,” essentially depriving it of any reason to be held.
However, in the couple of hours before the start of ‘Judging Freedom’ I listened to the latest broadcast of the authoritative Russian state television news and commentary show ‘Sixty Minutes’ and to a news wrap-up of Rossiya 1. This made it clear that Russia remains optimistic about the meeting with Trump and expects it to be substantive and successful. They named the five members of the Russian negotiating team – Minister of Defense Belousov, Foreign Minister Lavrov, Head of the Foreign Direct Investment Fund Dmitriev, Presidential advisor Ushakov and Finance Minister Siluanov. This indicates that a broad program of discussions is anticipated, including surely restoration of normal trade ties. The Russian commentary indicated that stabilization of global politics has been put on the agenda by the Russians.
As I said to Judge Napolitano, it is clear that Trump is lying to someone – either to the Europeans or to Putin. I choose to believe that he is lying to the Europeans and that he will come back and put them in their place if he indeed reaches an amicable agreement on the major issues with Vladimir Putin, as his envoy Steve Witkoff seems to have done when the notion of a summit was discussed.
I used the opportunity in the interview to mention that the Russians have made stunning advances of more than 21 km yesterday in their ongoing offensive along the line of confrontation in Donbas. This greatly accelerated advance proves that the pace of Russian military action in the war is not dictated by the cautious rules of war of attrition alone but is susceptible to political scaling up as the geopolitical situation demands. Should these talks tomorrow fail, I have little doubt that the Russians will make a very fast advance on the still untouched Ukrainian oblasts of Nikolaevsk and Odessa, reducing Ukraine to a land-locked rump state in preparation for its military obliteration.
Sputnik Globe: Putin’s Master-Move: How BRICS Has Become the World’s New Control Room
This brief commentary on why Vladimir Putin reached out to BRICS leaders following his acceptance of the Alaska summit with Donald Trump underscores the cohesion of BRICS
I was pleased to be one of the respondents to Sputnik on this issue. To what they have quoted here, I add the point they did not put up: that just as Joe Biden’s sanctions and encirclement policies drove together Russia and China, Russia and Iran, so Donald Trump perversely is strengthening greatly the alliance in BRICS of India, Russia, China and South Africa by his bullying. https://sputnikglobe.com/20250812/putins-master-move-how-brics-has-become-the-worlds-new-control-room-1122599591.html
I have not appeared on News X World (not to be confused with a competing Indian broadcaster, News X) for a couple of months because our schedules did not mesh. However, when the production team finally did reach me yesterday for an interview on the current state of the Russia-Ukraine war ahead of the Alaska summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, they decided to make the most of it. Consequently in their 37 minute “World Report” yesterday they gave me a series of segments for analysis of different aspects of the war, from the situation on the ground in Ukraine today to the notion of an exchange of territories in the context of a global settlement of the war as suggested by Donald Trump, to the voices of European opponents to any settlement of the war in which they and the Ukrainians do not participate. My appearance begins on minute 3.00 and end on minute 18.
Please note that I did not mince words. My statements constitute a forceful defense of the peace efforts of Donald Trump and a condemnation of the false friends of Ukraine in Western Europe who do not want to see the war end because its continuation is essential for them to continue to hold power and to divert the budgets of their countries away from social benefits and towards military production. All of this has been reproduced by News X World from the live broadcast to the video presented in the link below.
RT: 0:00 Let’s discuss this topic now with author, historian and geopolitical analyst Gilbert Doctorow. Gilbert, thanks a lot for joining us on the program. I just want to ask you, what do you think about this, your thoughts on the upcoming Putin-Trump meeting?
Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: Well, as your colleague at RT said a little bit earlier, this whole event is filled with symbolism, and I would like to unwrap some of the symbolism.
Some of my colleagues have tried to parse the language of Mr Ushakov when he was describing the agreement to meet with the American president. I say that the skills needed for this are not criminology. The skills are those of someone entering the Easter egg hunt. And what I mean by that is that we have to look at who initiated everything that is about to happen. That is Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump is known as a real estate man. And I haven’t heard anybody pay attention to what that means in a given instance other than to say that territory will be swapped. That’s the least of it.
1:04 As you just pointed out, swapping a little bit of Sumi, a little bit of Kharkov against a substantial amount of land in the Donbass that is not yet occupied by Russians, that isn’t a very interesting swap, is it? However, the swap will take place because something else is involved. Now, before I get to that something else involved, I want to look at another symbolism, the date. The date is the 15th of August. To most Americans, that doesn’t mean much.
To Europeans, it means a lot. To Catholics, it means a lot. The 15th of August is known as the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. However, it all goes back 2,000 years to the Emperor Augustus, from which the month of August is named. And this date, 15th of August, is the Feira Agosto.
That is the celebration feast day of the Emperor Augustus. And who was Augustus? He was the founder of the Roman Empire, and he was the founder of the Pax Romana, the perpetual peace enforced by the Roman Empire. Mr. Trump is today’s Emperor Augustus, and he would like to be known for his Pax Trumpiana.
The point is that the day was not arbitrary. It’s highly symbolic. The place was not arbitrary. It’s highly symbolic. And the fact that it’s only two miles away from separating Russia and the United States is coincidental, but not decisive.
2:35 What is decisive is how did this territory become American? I haven’t heard a word about that. By the way, it was bought. It was bought. It was sold by the Russian Tsar, and it was bought by the Americans.
And that’s what we’re going to see now in Ukraine. And nobody’s saying a word about it. But let’s use our minds. Let’s expand a little bit. Let’s be extravagant like Mr. Trump is. The Russians have $350 billion worth of assets that are now frozen in the West. Practically speaking, they have written that off. In their bookkeeping internally, they recouped most of that money by the extraordinary profitability of selling hydrocarbons in the first days of the war. So $350 billion, well, you can buy a lot in Ukraine with that, can’t you?
And the opinion of Mr. Zelensky about refusing or accepting the $350 billion in exchange for all of the territory of Ukraine that Russia wants, which is the whole Donbass, the four oblasts that were named. Well, that’s a deal. That is Mr. Trump’s great art of the deal.
And I haven’t heard anybody talk about it yet, but it’s just hanging there, low-hanging fruit in front of our very noses. So I expect that there will be a deal. And I expect that whatever Mr. Zelensky thinks, if he doesn’t like it, they’ll be overthrown at once because the Ukrainian people would like to have that money to rebuild.
RT: 4:04 That’s a fascinating take, to be honest, about Augustus; and of course you have a deep understanding of the history of Alaska and Russian-US relations obviously. But I want to ask you, why do you think Zelensky himself, all things considered, wasn’t invited to this summit in the first place?
Doctorow: His opinion is not wanted, because the decision at the end will not be his. It will be the decision of the Ukrainian people. Either he goes with what the polls are saying, which is that 70 percent of the Ukrainians now want the war to end, or he’ll be overthrown.
So to invite his opinion is useless. In fact, it’s counterproductive. The parties, the United States and Russia, will tell him what his deal is. The Ukrainian people will go for that deal, because it’s fantastic for them. And that will be it, whether Zelensky stays or goes, that will be his decision, but it will have no influence on the outcome of this war.
RT: 5:01 Well, you mentioned the art of the deal, how obviously Trump is approaching this as a businessman in large part. And the Kremlin also pointed out that these two countries, they’re neighbors, right? And both Alaska and the Arctic, they both hold great potential for joint projects. So do you think that this could be in part an attempt to come to a peace agreement, but also in part to expand some sort of joint projects there?
Doctorow: Joint projects, of course. Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Direct Investment Fund, has been an integral part of all discussions. And everyone knows that he is a backer of the old idea of a tunnel bridge connecting Russia and the United States over the Bering Strait. So that, of course, is an element that cannot be excluded. At the same time, the real possibilities for further development of whatever is reached on the 15th of August are on a different level. They are at global security.
6:00 The time on the New START treaty, the arms limitation treaty, is expiring in ’26. It is entirely predictable that if the parties reach an agreement on the 15th in the little petty business of the Ukraine war, they will move on to the big global issues of arms control, removing the threat of intermediate-range missiles in Europe, which would come with the introduction of American missiles in ’26 in Germany. These issues will then be next on the agenda. So what we’re looking forward to is a big rollout of a global realignment for which the first step will happen on the 15th of August.
RT: 6:48 Well, you brought up a lot of good reasons for why this meeting is set to take place in Alaska. But also, there were other options that we heard about before, right? The United Arab Emirates was brought up. And of course, there are other more neutral countries that could have been chosen. Again, Alaska is not neutral territory. It’s a state of the United States. What do you think was the main factor in them choosing Alaska over these other potential venues?
Doctorow: 7:13 Well, Mr. Trump’s a showman, first of all, and nothing could be showier and more symbolic than having it in Alaska, which was purchased by the United States from Russia. And that is what he probably has put on the table to Mr. Putin, that Russia purchase the land that it now occupies and that it claims as part of the Russian Federation from Ukraine on condition that there be a complete and permanent peace between the countries, which puts an end to any Ukrainian claims against Russia, and puts a big “Nyet” on all the hopes of warmongers in Europe to continue this conflict.
Now, why Alaska? There are other reasons, one of which nobody has mentioned, security. To reach this meeting in Alaska, Mr. Putin flies only over Russian territory. That’s not a bad solution.
He doesn’t have to cross anybody’s territory and doesn’t have to have 20 jets accompanying his jet so he isn’t shot down. This is reality. This is the world we live in today. And I believe that was another factor.
RT: 8:30 All right. Well, we have a little bit more time left, but if you could give me a pretty short answer to this next question, right? Donald Trump ran on peacemaking. I mean, the Ukraine conflict was one of the main things that he said he was going to fix during his campaign trail. But he’s put a lot of things on the back burner in terms of things he promised on the campaign trail. So after, let’s say this is done with in Alaska and a peace deal is reached, where do you think Trump is going to go next in terms of promises that he made on the campaign trail or different foreign policies that he’s looking to establish?
Doctorow: 9:03 The big outstanding contradiction to his peace mission is, of course, the genocide in Gaza. And that is an issue that will not go away even after this deal is signed or is reached on the 15th of August. It won’t go away for a little bit of time because the general accommodation with Russia, that is Mr. Trump’s intent, and I would say possibly also, however paradoxical it may sound, an accommodation with China, which may come in September if the next Yalta meeting is held there for the celebration of the 80th anniversary in Beijing of the end of the war in the Pacific.
9:51 These accommodations have to go through Congress. And Mr. Trump is very dependent in Congress on the Zionist majority in both houses, pro-Zionists. People say the Israeli lobby, well, the Israeli lobby was a factor, but there are also other factors. There are these born-again Christians who are Zionists also.
And so Mr. Trump has this problem of navigating Congress, and he is stuck with this Zionist presence in Congress. And he cannot, he doesn’t have much wiggle room in dealing with Israel for that reason. For this very reason, it is incumbent on Europe to do something and to take a lead and do something of importance on the world stage and not just kick the tires about Trump’s policies here and there. So, Europe has a great opportunity to lead peace in Palestine. I hope they take it. Mr. Trump, unfortunately, because of political realities, cannot do that on the other burning issue of world peace.
RT: 11:07 All right, Gilbert Doctorow, author, historian and geopolitical analyst, thanks a lot for joining us on the program.
An extraordinary interview on RT International that must have the producers scratching their heads
Long ago, to be precise in 2016, when I appeared multiple times on different domestic Russian talk shows, I saw firsthand that Russia does not censor those who appear on live television, nor do they make cuts when the videotaped programs are put up on the internet.
That freedom of expression stands in stark contrast to the production methods in the USA. In the USA, you give 15 minutes of interview to CNN and maybe they put on air 2 minutes of what their producers want to hear.
When in 2015 I said on air on a Euronews panel discussion that Russian media were freer with respect to Ukraine coverage than US media, my fellow panelist, Elmar Brok, chairman of the European Parliament committee on foreign affairs, said rudely, offensively: how much did the Kremlin pay you to say that?
What I said in 2015-2016 I repeat today with regard to RT. My answers to their prepared questions in this afternoon’s interview about the US-Russia summit in Alaska next week must have left some of the producers gasping. BUT not a word of what I said has been cut in the video they just posted on the internet.
I hope that the Community will find value in this and share my appreciation for freedom of expression in Russia today.
Prof. Glenn Diesen: 0:00 Hi everyone and welcome back. We are joined today by Gilbert Doktorow, a historian, international affairs analyst and also author of books such as “The War Diaries: The Russia-Ukraine War”.
So I tend to be more pessimistic than you in terms of the future of this war, the ability to reach some peaceful settlement. But I was struck a bit by some optimism now with this recent meeting, that is Witkoff going to Moscow. And again, anyone familiar with the NATO-Russia relations over the past 30 years is probably aware that deception has been a key component. But what we saw is the deadline expired. That is what began as a 50-day, then became a 10-day deadline.
Instead of sending weapons and sanctions, at least for now, Witkoff went to Moscow and his peers were getting a meeting between Putin and Trump. What are you reading into this quick development? Do you see something which has happened behind the scenes, or is this just noise?
Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 1:15 Well, a lot of things clearly have happened behind the scenes, and for that reason it’s difficult to judge the degree of agreement that Witoff reached with his Russian counterparts, Putin and this Shakov and who else was there, Mikhail Dmitriev. Look, in my recent interviews, I look at comments, one of them was, “Oh, Doctorow has become really an apologist for Trump.” I consider this progress, because before, six months ago, they would have said Doctorow was an apologist for Putin. So we’re getting there.
I tried not to be an apologist for anybody. And if Trump is doing something stupid, I will not hesitate to say that. If what he’s doing is unlikely to succeed to my knowledge, I will also say that. There is one troubling note here in the brief information that has been sent out as to what was discussed and how our preparations are being made for the Trump-Putin meeting in the near future, meaning possibly in the coming week. That is the– what I find disturbing is the notion that Zelensky would have been invited. Because that goes contrary to what I understood was the hopeful sign coming out of the Witkoff- Putin talks.
2:51 The hopeful sign being that the discussions would go far beyond the particulars of the Ukraine crisis, the territories that each side would retain or have to give up, the question of Ukraine in NATO and the rest of it. And they would talk about bigger issues, constructive discussion they had. I think Ushakov said it was, there was the probability, likelihood, of discussing strategic cooperation.
Well, yes, that would definitely interest the Russians and would bring Mr. Putin together with Mr. Trump, but Mr. Zelensky doesn’t fit into that at all. And so if indeed Zelensky were to be invited, that puts in question the first point. Are they discussing only Ukraine and only the terms of the ceasefire, or are they discussing the issues which the Russians really want to talk about?
3:50 Now what are the issues the Russians want to talk about? One of your recent guests put out some ideas. And he is well informed; I’d say he’s probably a centrist person within the American foreign policy establishment. And he was saying, yes, they would talk about cooperation in the Arctic, and they would talk about ending the sanctions and reintegrating Russia into the greater world, the Western world. Because as he said, Russians in general consider themselves to be Europeans, to be part of Western civilization, and they are very disappointed that they are excluded from that context, from that place where they believe they belong to be, by the sanctions which are caused by the war.
4:44 Here I disagree completely. Five years ago, yes, that would have been an accurate statement. As I have been saying for some time, and this is not just my own observation; the Russians have been talking about it with great insistence. The war has brought forward new elites. The war has made even among the intellectuals who are almost by definition not supporters of the Putin regime, so to speak, that they had become patriotic and that they were less concerned that they couldn’t spend a summer vacation in Paris or elsewhere in Western Europe or even visit the States. So if they could come back with a lot of stories to discuss with their friends.
5:36 That’s over. Russia may not feel comfortable with Chinese cars. That’s now being discussed, how these cars are being accepted or rejected by Russian consumers. They may not feel comfortable with spending a summer vacation on North Korea’s latest tourist beaches, But they certainly will not exchange the loss in treasure and in life of the last three years for the sake of going back to the status quo ante and being integrated into Western economy and society.
6:15 That’s gone. That is over, and it will not come back. There will be some accommodation with the West, but not in the sense that existed before. No one talks about it, but I’ll say it right here and now. Russia had a big inferiority complex across the board. Anyone you spoke to, other than a handful of super patriots, before this war, the predominant feeling in Russia was, “we can’t make anything”.
This takes me back to late 1990s. I remember a very smart taxi driver was taking my wife and me around downtown Petersburg and he remarked, we Russians, we make very cute babies, but we’re lousy at making cars. Now, that was a widespread belief. And I think that the last three years and the re-industrialization of Russia and the import substitution in Russia and the takeover of Western companies by Russian entrepreneurs or the Russian state producing virtually the same products under a different name. That’s changed it all.
Russia didn’t produce any cheese before. Ridiculous. They didn’t produce cheese. In 1912, Russia was supplying butter to Denmark. This is not my guess. I have a yearbook on my library shelf. A 1912 yearbook was published in the UK, all describing all the trade relations between Russia and UK and the West, and they were exporting butter to Denmark. Well, they can’t, they weren’t making any cheese. Well, they’re making all kinds of cheese now. The, as I said before, what Mr. Trump wants to do with his tariffs is to imitate what the Russians have done, thanks to Western sanctions, to re-industrialize. So the game has changed. The idea that this could be an issue for discussion that would bring Mr. Putin, Mr. Shakov, Dmitriev to the table and, “Yeah, well, let’s get on with it. We’ll have an immediate ceasefire, and you’ll put us back into the European and American markets.”
That’s gone. So what could they talk about? What is the big issue that would have persuaded Mr. Putin and his close advisors that they should meet with Trump now? What could Mr. Witkoff have brought with him? Well, I think he had to have addressed the core issues. What he could have done to make the whole thing palatable to all sides, meaning also the Ukrainians if they are strong-armed and the Europeans, is to speak about phasing in what is essentially the Russian solution and presenting it in such a way that it would not look like what it is, which is virtual surrender. Virtual surrender is not acceptable to NATO, is not acceptable to the United States.
9:20 Mr. Trump will be pilloried if he does nothing to sweeten the settlement and to make it seem as though he’s in control. All the news we see on every possible subject these weeks has one newsmaker, and his name is Donald Trump. It gives you the sense that he’s in control of things even if he absolutely is not. And he is certainly not in control of how this war will end.
But he has to have the appearance of that. And so he has decided that he should meet with Mr. Putin. And Mr. Putin has responded.
Although if you read yesterday’s and today’s “Financial Times”, oh, no, sorry, if you listened to the BBC this morning, you would understand that Putin was eagerly pursuing Trump for a meeting, because that will restore his prestige as an international player. That’s how they turn everything on its head.
Well, coming back to this answer to your question, I’ve been a bit long-winded, but the answer to your question: the Americans probably brought a phasing in, stage one, stage two, stage three, which makes it possible to sit and negotiate. The end result will be very much in accordance with the Russians’ demands, which are not maximalist. They haven’t changed one iota from where they were in June 2024, when Mr. Putin reiterated what he first said in February 2022, what Russia’s ambition is, although he put it more clearly and in easier-to- understand terms. But essentially it came to the same thing, what this denazification, well that’s regime change, the demilitarization, well the Ukrainian army goes, but mostly it’s evaporating in front of our eyes. So these things are being achieved and now they want to codify it, but they cannot do it in one session. That will be too awful for the West.
11:28 So I think the issue to discuss is how to phase this in, in a way that leaves Mr. Trump at least with an off-ramp that’s respectable and the Europeans can go to hell. They’ll have to accommodate to whatever the Americans and the Russians agree, because they will have no weapons to supply to the Ukraine and Ukraine will sink.
So that is what I see coming, a discussion of the timetable for arriving at the Russians’ Dzerak, their requirements for peace treaty.
Diesen: 12:04 I was told by a credible American source that not only was Washington becoming much more eager to find a settlement because of the disaster happening on the front. That is, it looks like a total collapse could happen within the next few months. But I was also told that Zelensky, that he had apparently changed a bit as well. While in the past viewed himself as being this new Churchill who will bring back the glory of Ukraine and defeat Russia, all of this has now begun to fade away. And if the Americans put something in front of him and pressured him, he would likely sign. So it’s again, it’s none of the certainty.
12:53 And indeed the Russians are asking for a lot. But now this, yeah, Kremlin advisor Yuri Ushakov, he was in the news arguing that the Americans had put forward a proposal, which they, which he said was seemingly acceptable to Moscow. This is, I never heard this language before. And given how far the parts, the two different sides have been apart, it seems as if something significant must have shifted. Because my first impression was perhaps this Witkoff going to Moscow, talking about a Trump-Putin meeting is just a way to get Trump, well, save face after he made this silly, you know, 10 day deadline, which I don’t understand.
But there seems to actually be some substance in place here. But did you read the comments by Oshokov the same way? And if so, what do you think such a deal must include? Because again, the Russians aren’t going to, after 30 years of struggling over the European security architecture, more than three years of losing men on the front lines. Now, finally, at the cusp of victory, it’s going to just throw it away.
14:14 I assume that there’s a reason why they’re able to put these harsh demands. So what do you think might be in this deal that Osakoff is referring to?
Doctorow: I’m not quite sure, but there are sticking points here. Again, to address that question with being an apologist for Trump, I have no illusions about the humanitarian motives that are absent from his peace seeking. Nor do I accept the notion that the man is so vain that he’s doing everything for the sake of getting the Nobel Peace Prize.
I don’t think even Mr. Trump is that vain, to put aside national interest of the United States and the lives of all the other parties to this conflict, for the sake of getting that piece of paper, that little award which Obama received for doing nothing whatsoever, just for not being Bush. I think there’s much more to it, but it’s in conflict in my mind. What exactly? The overall overarching concept could be “separate the Russians from the Chinese so we can proceed with taking on China”.
15:31 However, that falls flat. There is no way conceivable that Russia is going to betray China. No way. When I said the other day that one, that Mr. Witoff could have been talking to Dmitriyev about getting access to Russian-produced rare metals, rare-earth metals, as the point for negotiation or preparing for negotiation with the Chinese in the coming week or two, where the Chinese are withholding those urgently needed materials to frustrate any plans of punishing tariffs or any limitations on export of technology to China by Mr. Trump. It is inconceivable that Mr. Putin will give free access to Russian rare-earth metals to spite China. That is off the table.
16:37 So what exactly Mr. Trump hopes to achieve considering that Russia and China are inseparable, I’m not quite sure. So we really have to look a little bit further. And I’m not sure that Mr. Trump is, his advisors are blind to that reality. I also have mentioned the timing coming back to why 10 days or what 50 days because September 3rd is inconvenient.
It’s too close to the convening of this end of the Pacific war for World War Two the 80th anniversary celebrations will be in Beijing, to which Mr. Trump presumably is desperate to be invited. That is possible. It suggests that the Yalta type meeting that we all thought might possibly happen, when Moscow celebrated the 80th anniversary of the end of the European war, and didn’t happen. Maybe would happen now in the Pacific, in Beijing. It’s possible.
17:46 As I’ve said recently, I don’t have a microphone under Mr. Putin’s pillow. We really don’t have a microphone under Mr. Trump’s pillow. And there are contradictory objectives when you look at what he says and even what he does, to complicate our reading of these tea leaves, our attempting to make sense out of it all. It could be that they still have some illusions or delusions with respect to separating Russia from China. I find it hard to believe, but Americans can be peculiar. What else could be going through their minds? What else [could they] be using to reach a quick accommodation with Mr. Putin without looking like they’ve lost the war?
And I think Putin will be very amenable to helping them off the off-ramp. He’s certainly smart enough. He did that with Obama with respect to the bombing Syria over the alleged use of chemical weapons. So he knows how to let his opponents off the hook, getting what he wants without embarrassing them to the point where he’s got enemies. But for me right now, it’s a bit hard to say just how this trick will be done.
Diesen: 19:16 Yeah, I would have been more reassured if I heard some talks about actually the European security architecture, because so far there’s been too much reference to an unconditional ceasefire and Trump still in his language. I mean, there’s a contradiction. His language still refers to this as as if it would be a war between Ukraine and Russia, which is problematic for the peace efforts if it takes NATO and America’s role out of this. On the other hand, he calls the war Biden’s war, which Biden began by pushing NATO.
So it’s not very consistent. If it’s Biden’s war, how is it only limited between Ukraine and Russia? But again, with Trump, you never know what is the noise and what does he actually know. I was wondering though, how you read his, if you think Trump is misinformed either deliberately or just out of ignorance by his advisors, because from Trump we hear these comments such as, I think he said, there’s 20,000 Russians dying a month, which is, it doesn’t make any sense in any way. It’s quite outlandish.
And also when he was asked about what’s happening in Ukraine, people elderly people being dragged to the front. And he said, Oh, I don’t know anything about that. And now of course, putting this deadline to begin with, the 10-day deadline … if he knows that Russia considers this to be an existential threat, they’re willing to fight this all the way, why would he think that they would capitulate now, in other words, accept freezing the front lines and allowing NATO to revive the conflict in the future if they would need to put pressure on Russia. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense that this was always ridiculous, that the Russians would accept this. Is this misinformed or is it just, you know, talking to his own base or what is he? I have a very hard time understanding some of the strange information and decisions which are coming out.
21:35 Well, they’ll confuse the other side, but don’t confuse yourself. I would take as an operating assumption that he is not confused and that all of these confusing and oftentimes very bizarre statements that come out of him are intended, are a demonstration of his contempt for the press and for his opponents who are the most vocal elements of society at large. The silent majority doesn’t say much. His opponents say a lot and are hurt a lot and what they say is picked up by media.
22:11 There are contradictions here, and I think It’s much too early for us to present with clarity what is going to happen when they meet and what is the intended outcome, why the Russians would have agreed to this meeting when it goes against all of their rules. Russian television is informing us that yes, contrary to the general rule of preparing in great detail and over considerable time for summit meetings, the Russians are prepared this time to make an exception and to hold this very quickly, and they’re working like mad. The Americans are working like mad to observe this shortened schedule. Supposedly it’s about agreeing a ceasefire, but I don’t believe that.
23:07 There’s no way that the Russians can accept a ceasefire when the Europeans are not present at this. The Americans, by definition, are not going to be supplying further weapons to Ukraine. The Europeans are. And the Russians do not accept under any condition that a ceasefire will take place while weapons are being dispatched into Ukraine. So that is a non-starter.
There’s something else going on in Ukraine. We don’t know it. But I think it’s best not to assume that people are ill-informed, that some maliciousness is at work. The advisors to Putin, to Trump, or I should say even to Putin one of one very well-known former economist and at a high level in American politics is insisting that Mr. Putin is being deceived and misled by his advisors.
24:04 I think it would be safe just to hold back and let’s see what happens at this meeting. But there are definite contradictions in the structure of the meeting, which is what is called out now. How can you agree on a ceasefire when Europeans aren’t present? The only person who was called out, the need for Europeans has been Urban, who came out yesterday with a statement that Merz and the French Macron should go to Moscow now, or after the meeting that Trump has with Putin, and present the European position to Moscow, because the EU institutions are totally incapable of doing that.
24:47 Well, I agree with him on that point. But whether or not much will be achieved by Macron and Merz going to Moscow … well, better to talk than not to talk. That can’t see a solution on the ceasefire without the Europeans being brought in. But obviously not at the first meeting, just as it’s senseless to have Zelensky there when the only thing that could have motivated the Russians to agree to a meeting has nothing to do directly with the Ukraine conflict. It has to do, as you said, with revising the security architecture of Europe, for which Mr. Zelensky has no place at the table.
25:26 So there are confusing signals that you and I have detected, and I suppose others as well, which make it difficult to predict what the outcome of this meeting would be.
Diesen: I got that impression both from some Americans and Russians that they need to first get the big pieces in place, that is the European security order, which effectively means the relationship between the Americans and the Russians. And then once this is an order, then the Ukrainian issue can be resolved. So you want to deal with it in the right order and also been told that yeah that they have the same both the Moscow and Washington have the same views of the Europeans, that yes, they have to be brought in, but first after the decisions have been made.
So, and then, you know, if you can get the Washington, Moscow, and then get the Kiev to sign under then the Europeans will just be a formality, I guess. But let’s say this, I wonder what the post-war settlement might look like when the war is done. Because in terms of the wider European order, if you thought about this, let’s say next week they hash out the deal, I’m not so that optimistic, but the war can come to an end within a few weeks.
The Russians make the point that they have to deal with the Americans because they have to. America remains a very important part of the international system. And also, if you want the world to function and have stability, Russia and America always have to work together. But as you suggested before, there is a longing to return to Europe. It seems to be gone.
27:15 Indeed, when you talk to migrants from Russia in Europe, many say that they were initially surprised. They knew that Russia was always a bit mocked for being an economic mess, but they were surprised about how much hatred there is towards Russians. But now, of course, this inferiority complex, it’s more or less gone. I guess this is what happens when you defeat NATO on the battlefield, but it’s also the sense of admiration for Europe, which is gone. I mean, throughout the Cold War, yes, there was some animosity towards Western governments, as you would [think], but overall there was some admiration for the way society was organized.
The economies we had, the social systems, the technologies, there seemed to be some moral or values. But now, of course, a lot of this is seen as decaying and indeed the culture wars we’re having where everything has to be deconstructed. This has become a source of mockery in the Russian media. What do you think, or your sense, what kind of relationship do you think the Russians want with Europe once this war is actually over?
Doctorow: 28:28 Well, I think they would be very happy to go back to their position as very close economic partners of Europe without taking it to the embarrassing extreme that Macron described several years ago, that Russia was a big, great supplier of raw materials.
I think that notion is not satisfactory or sufficient for restoring economic ties with Europe. But let me just make an attempt. What could they possibly have said to President Putin, what Witkoff could have brought with him, that would be considered constructive and could justify this meeting? And let’s take, put it in the historical context. What did the Americans and the Russians, who disliked one another, who didn’t necessarily respect one another, always put forward as the first topic for discussion? Arms control.
29:26 Arms control. That is the most value-neutral thing that they could discuss next week, which would set the tone for solving all the other issues, which would receive the undeserved acclaim in Europe and the United States. If they were to discuss restoring the intermediate and short-range missile agreement in a new form and preventing or removing the advance-positioned Russian missiles and the plans for stationing American missiles in Germany next year, that would be hailed by everybody. And from that good atmosphere, they could proceed to the really tough and miserable discussions about concluding the Ukraine war.
So there might be something, I say this completely off the table, but nobody’s talking about it because it’s all been kept very highly secret from all of us, whereas it should be till now.
30:37 So I wouldn’t eliminate the possibility some concrete positive and promising could come out of a meeting between Putin and Trump in a week’s time, one which has no need whatsoever for Mr. Zelensky or for the Europeans to be present. And that could set the tones I’d say for dealing with the really tough questions of resolving the Ukraine war and also revising European architecture. If you take off this five-minute long delivery strike times of missiles within the European theatre, life gets a lot easier. You can breathe much easier, and the tension over European security would be toned down considerably. So that could be it, but it’s a guess, nothing more than a guess.
Diesen: 31:31 Well, you know, this is a problem when the diplomacy, of course, is behind closed doors. Just my last question though is, if this peace agreement goes through, if they actually deal with the European security architecture, what happens to NATO? Again, I think that one of the reasons why the Europeans are or seem to prefer keeping the war going is as long as you have a conflict, then NATO will still have a purpose and it will keep the Americans on the continent. You and I discussed before that the fear of the Europeans is once the Americans get to leave Ukraine, they will also likely leave Europe to a large extent, both resource priorities and everything going to Asia. So do you think peace in Ukraine could destroy NATO?
Doctorow: 32:27 Again, if it’s taken by itself, yes. If it’s put in a broader context, such as I just was mentioning, just on the arms control or also with regard to new technologies and putting a lid on drone warfare, putting a lid on AI warfare, robotics, putting a lid on these new technologies, which are awesome, frightening, and drive the anxiety on all sides, then these other issues, the traditional issues of territory and language rights and the rest of it, become much easier to deal with. And NATO’s fading away is almost an afterthought rather than the first urgent concern, which it is today for Europeans. So I don’t know how smart these people are. I don’t know how wide, broad their perspective is, whether they’ve taken it in, in a sense that I just presented it or not.
33:41 But I would give them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think, unlike Craig Roberts, I don’t think Mr. Putin is being managed by his advisors, who are all lovers of foie gras and the Mediterranean coast. I think that there are some serious people on the Russian side. I hope they’re equally serious people.
I don’t consider Witkoff to be anything but a very serious man. And I don’t think he would have wasted his time on this mission if he saw it as hopeless. I’m being an optimist. I don’t deny the right of pessimists to also claim the same territory.
Diesen: 34:34 Well, this week at least, we’re much closer to your optimism as, yeah, there seems to be some movement, which you suggested in the past as well, that there are things happening in the background.
But yeah, well, as you said before, you used to be referred to as a Putin apologist. Now you’re a Trump apologist. I do think this is one of the wider problems we’re having though. It’s always during wars. So you see that if you’re not sufficiently, for example, anti-Russian, then you can be accused of being pro-Russian.
So everything is so polarized. It’s either black or white and all gray is just eliminated. So this is one of the things I’m most fearful of now in the West as well, the inability to consider the security concerns of opponents. I always make this comment that the media, the politicians, I never hear anyone talk about the Russian security concerns, the Iranian, the Chinese. It’s always, it’s always colored in the language of just being belligerent and evil, essentially.
I think this is a, makes it much more difficult to understand our opponents. But unfortunately, if you try to understand Trump, that label fits as well, then you’re a Trump apologist.
Doctorow: Well, as we gather today, the tea hasn’t even been poured. One week from today, we can read tea leaves.
Diesen: Well, as always, thank you so much for your insights, and have a great weekend.
Gilbert Doctorow 