Press TV, Iran is a global broadcaster and their international news programs deal with many of the same breaking news issues that attract the interest of Western mainstream, though with their own nuances. That, in any case, is the way I frame my answers to their questions as you will see from the following video of a live broadcast this morning.
Here in Europe the media are feasting on the tariff news from Washington. There is dismay, confusion, outrage and a lot of other heated emotion.
However, those who portray Trump’s move as harmful to the U.S. economy, as poorly conceived are really missing the point. The tariff policy is just one dimension of Trump’s demolition job on globalism, which is a key element in the Liberal Democracy world order that he wants to bring down. Free movement of goods is the counterpart of free movement of people, whether by legal or illegal means. Borders mean nothing because governments mean nothing as nation-states forfeit their sovereignty to transnational corporations and to the one global hegemon. The hitch is that the hegemon can no longer afford the global military presence that underpins his status.
I will return to the ideological issues of Trumpism in a dedicated essay within the week.
Translation below into Spanish (Chod Zom)
Los aranceles de Trump vistos desde Teherán: Entrevista de Press TV
Press TV Irán, es una emisora global y sus programas de noticias internacionales tratan muchos de los mismos temas de actualidad que atraen el interés de los medios principales occidentales, aunque con sus propios matices. Esa es, en cualquier caso, la forma en que enmarco mis respuestas a sus preguntas, como podrán comprobar en el siguiente vídeo de una emisión en directo de esta mañana.
Aquí en Europa, los medios de comunicación se dan un festín con las noticias sobre aranceles procedentes de Washington. Hay consternación, confusión, indignación y muchas otras emociones acaloradas.
Sin embargo, quienes describen la medida de Trump como perjudicial para la economía estadounidense, como mal concebida, en realidad no entienden de que se trata. La política arancelaria es solo una dimensión del trabajo de demolición de Trump del globalismo, que es un elemento clave en el orden mundial de la democracia liberal que quiere derribar. La libre circulación de mercancías es la contrapartida de la libre circulación de personas, ya sea por medios legales o ilegales. Las fronteras no significan nada porque los gobiernos no significan nada a medida que los Estados-nación pierden su soberanía frente a las empresas transnacionales y al único hegemón mundial. El problema es que el hegemón ya no puede permitirse la presencia militar mundial que sustenta su estatus.
Volveré sobre las cuestiones ideológicas del trumpismo en un ensayo específico esta misma semana.
Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)
Die Trump-Zölle aus der Sicht von Teheran: Press TV-Interview
Press TV, Iran ist ein globaler Sender und seine internationalen Nachrichtensendungen befassen sich mit vielen der gleichen aktuellen Themen, die das Interesse des westlichen Mainstreams wecken, wenn auch mit ihren eigenen Nuancen. Auf jeden Fall formuliere ich meine Antworten auf ihre Fragen so, wie Sie im folgenden Video einer Live-Sendung heute Morgen sehen werden.
Hier in Europa stürzen sich die Medien auf die Zollnachrichten aus Washington. Es gibt Bestürzung, Verwirrung, Empörung und viele andere hitzige Emotionen.
Diejenigen, die Trumps Schritt als schädlich für die US-Wirtschaft darstellen, als schlecht durchdacht, verfehlen jedoch den Punkt. Die Zollpolitik ist nur eine Dimension von Trumps Zerstörungsarbeit am Globalismus, der ein Schlüsselelement in der liberalen demokratischen Weltordnung ist, die er zu Fall bringen will. Der freie Warenverkehr ist das Gegenstück zum freien Personenverkehr, ob auf legalem oder illegalem Weg. Grenzen bedeuten nichts, weil Regierungen nichts bedeuten, da Nationalstaaten ihre Souveränität an transnationale Unternehmen und den einen globalen Hegemon abtreten. Das Problem ist, dass der Hegemon sich die globale Militärpräsenz, die seinen Status untermauert, nicht mehr leisten kann.
Ich werde in einem gesonderten Essay innerhalb dieser Woche auf die ideologischen Fragen des Trumpismus zurückkommen.
A couple of years ago, on this web platform, I invited volunteers to come forward and provide translations of my essays into a variety of European languages which I could post below the English texts. Though the well-educated stratum in each country across the globe almost always has studied foreign languages, it remains clear that everyone prefers to read serious texts in the language they know best, their own maternal language. It is for this reason that from the beginning my largest audiences were in English-speaking countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
Rather quickly volunteers came forward and provided translations into Brazilian Portuguese, into French, into Italian and into German. However, the work load of translating my stream of material gradually wore down the enthusiasm of the volunteers and in less that a year, the translations were down to one language: German.
The dedication of that translator, Andreas Mylaeus, was ensured by his lifelong dedication to the cause of peace in Europe and in the world.
I was particularly pleased that precisely German was being offered to my web community, because the role of Germany inside the European Union is of great importance in determining foreign and domestic policies. The German translations were frequently re-posted by German language websites of which the most prominent has been seniora.org in Switzerland. On those days, the German readership of these articles on my website rises to second place after the United States. Hooray!
Over time, Andreas Mylaeus has become a close collaborator. We are in daily contact, forwarding materials that could be of interest to the other and discussing in particular where Germany is headed in these turbulent times.
Six weeks ago, just ahead of Christmas, Andreas made his first ever trip to Moscow which had a business side to it. He and a colleague from Switzerland gave an hour-long interview devoted to the factors determining German and European foreign and domestic policies. In particular they focused on the lack of sovereignty, on the colonial dependence on the United States which has shaped not just political orientation but also shaped the cadres of the political parties in a manner that makes it very difficult for the voting population to ‘throw the bums out,’ as we say in the USA and vote in statesmen who have the interests of their country at heart.
Here below are the links to this extraordinary interview. One is in German, the other in Russian. For those of you with a command of these languages, I urge you to take the time and have a listen
Translation into German below (Andreas Mylaeus)
Teamwork zur Förderung der Völkerverständigung und des Friedens
Vor einigen Jahren habe ich auf dieser Webplattform Freiwillige dazu eingeladen, meine Essays in verschiedene europäische Sprachen zu übersetzen, damit ich sie unter den englischen Texten veröffentlichen kann. Obwohl die gebildete Schicht in jedem Land der Welt fast immer Fremdsprachen gelernt hat, ist es doch so, dass jeder ernsthafte Texte lieber in der Sprache liest, die er am besten beherrscht, nämlich in seiner Muttersprache. Aus diesem Grund hatte ich von Anfang an die meisten Leser in englischsprachigen Ländern: den Vereinigten Staaten, dem Vereinigten Königreich, Kanada, Australien und Neuseeland.
Recht schnell meldeten sich Freiwillige und stellten Übersetzungen ins brasilianische Portugiesisch, ins Französische, ins Italienische und ins Deutsche zur Verfügung. Aufgrund der Arbeitsbelastung durch die Übersetzung meines Materialflusses ließ jedoch allmählich den Enthusiasmus der Freiwilligen nach, und in weniger als einem Jahr beschränkten sich die Übersetzungen auf eine Sprache: Deutsch.
Das Engagement des Übersetzers Andreas Mylaeus war durch sein lebenslanges Engagement für den Frieden in Europa und der Welt gewährleistet.
Ich habe mich besonders darüber gefreut, dass meiner Web-Community gerade Deutsch angeboten wurde, da die Rolle Deutschlands innerhalb der Europäischen Union für die Festlegung der Außen- und Innenpolitik von großer Bedeutung ist. Die deutschen Übersetzungen wurden häufig von deutschsprachigen Websites erneut veröffentlicht, von denen die bekannteste Seniora.org in der Schweiz war. An diesen Tagen steigt die deutsche Leserschaft dieser Artikel auf meiner Website auf den zweiten Platz nach den Vereinigten Staaten. Hurra!
Im Laufe der Zeit hat sich eine enge Zusammenarbeit mit Andreas Mylaeus entwickelt. Wir stehen täglich in Kontakt, leiten Materialien weiter, die für den jeweils anderen von Interesse sein könnten, und diskutieren insbesondere darüber, wohin sich Deutschland in diesen turbulenten Zeiten entwickelt.
Vor sechs Wochen, kurz vor Weihnachten, reiste Andreas zum ersten Mal nach Moskau, wo er geschäftlich unterwegs war. Er und ein Kollege aus der Schweiz gaben ein einstündiges Interview, das sich mit den Faktoren befasste, die die deutsche und europäische Außen- und Innenpolitik bestimmen. Insbesondere konzentrierten sie sich auf den Mangel an Souveränität, auf die koloniale Abhängigkeit von den Vereinigten Staaten, die nicht nur die politische Ausrichtung, sondern auch die Kader der politischen Parteien in einer Weise geprägt hat, die es der wahlberechtigten Bevölkerung sehr schwer macht, „die Penner rauszuwerfen“, wie wir in den USA sagen, und stattdessen Staatsmänner zu wählen, denen die Interessen ihres Landes am Herzen liegen.
Hier unten finden Sie die Links zu diesem außergewöhnlichen Interview. Einer ist auf Deutsch, der andere auf Russisch. Wenn Sie diese Sprachen beherrschen, empfehle ich Ihnen, sich die Zeit zu nehmen und es sich anzuhören.
Today I call attention to the BBC’s role as the voice of the British Deep State.
The ‘free market’ British media, despite their anti-Russian predisposition, have of late joined U.S. print and electronic mainstream in accepting the inevitable and, likely, soon to come defeat of Ukraine in its war with Russia. The non-state British press, which also includes the stiff-upper-lip Financial Times reporting, by the way, is now often giving useful and truthful accounts day by day on how the war is proceeding.
However, do not look for ‘useful and truthful accounts’ from the BBC. They are serving another agenda which is to maintain hostility to Russia whatever happens next in the war and the peace that follows.
I was prompted to write this brief essay by the remarkably tendentious and mendacious half hour BBC One television program on the Russia-Ukraine war that John Simpson presented within his weekly series entitled, no irony intended, ‘Unspun World.’ Though Simpson may have spoiled my breakfast, I was prompted to return to the crime scene. And so I sat myself down before my computer and looked up the program on the BBC’s website to have another go at it. There I found the following link to the Sound version of the broadcast, which served my purposes adequately for what follows. I salute those of you who can locate the video version.
I compare this latest BBC work of fiction with the most recent article on the war by Luke Harding writing in The Guardian. For those who do not know Harding, he has long been notorious for his anti-Putin, anti-Russian writings. By his own admission, he was ‘the first foreign journalist to be expelled from Russia since the end of the Cold War.” That was back in 2011. He has not changed his stripes, but, judging by the article below, he has gotten better prescription glasses.
At the very start of today’s ‘Unspun World,’ which he recorded in Riga, Latvia, outside of Russia, Simpson sets out his overarching themes:
How the war has affected Russian society: “Disturbingly, the war is turning entire groups within Russian society into enemies of the state.”
Who is winning?: “President Putin…took the decision to invade back in February 2022 on the basis of some really bad advice and some totally false assumptions. He was lucky to survive an attempted coup by the Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin in 2023. And he’s had to recruit prisoners, North Koreans and Iran’s drone technicians just in order to keep going. But has the war now turned decisively in Putin’s favor?”
He begins his reportage by interviewing Sergei Goryashko, whom the BBC website describes as a member of their news team in Riga where he was transferred with other staff at the start of the Special Military Operation in February 2022. However, whatever salary he gets, it would be accurate to call him a ‘stringer.’ His name turns up as a contributor to numerous online media and he has authored many articles for Politico, especially on the death of Alexei Navalny and on the continuation of his cause by Navalny’s widow. He also could be called a turncoat. He is a Russian, a graduate in journalism of Moscow’s prestigious Higher School of Economics, and with his journalistic work for the BBC crossing all the red lines for enemies of the state, he will not be heading back to Mother Russia.
Note that Riga is an offshore nest for British news agencies covering Russia. That is the present home base of the Financial Times’ own genuine Briton, Max Seddon, who wears the nominal title of FT Moscow bureau chief though I have not seen any articles of his with byline Moscow. Note, too, that Simpson did not take testimony for today’s program from the BBC’s bureau chief, Steve Rosenberg, who returned to his offices in Moscow more than a year ago after being reassured that it was safe to do so. Rosenberg can be aggressive in his questioning of Vladimir Putin at press conferences, but is careful with what he says on air otherwise to maintain his privileged position inside Russia. Simpson faces no such constraints reporting from abroad.
It is interesting that Simpson’s chat with Goryashko assumes that Putin will win his war and turns our attention to whether the peace which follows will allow the Russians to attack the West thereafter. Goryashko obliges, saying “I cannot rule out the possibility that Putin will try to invade the Baltics, for instance….What is scary here is not that he would try to invade but that if the Alliance would not stand up….That would make him realize that the Alliance as everyone thought it exists actually does not exist and nothing can stop him to redraw the borders in Europe.”
Well said, Goryashko!
Simpson then moved on to his second issue, the impact of the war on Russian society. As he notes, “Wars tend to have a brutalizing effect on the societies that launch them. It has been particularly true in Putin’s Russia, where thousands upon thousands of murderers and violent criminals have been taken out of jail and put into uniform.”
He explores this with Nina Nazarova, another Russian ‘exile’ working for BBC Russian in Riga. She describes the case of a young man who murdered his girlfriend somewhere in the Russian Far East, was sentenced to 17 years in prison but a year later accepted recruitment by the Wagner mercenary group and was released from prison by Putin to go fight in Ukraine. From this she concludes that some kind of major social experiment was started in a country of 140 million people, telling us that the very idea of justice was cancelled there. And so “people have to adapt to this new society without any rules.”
Simpson throws out the idea that with Donald Trump coming to power there is the possibility that the war will be over fairly soon ‘in some form or another.’ And so, he continues: “how difficult will it be to get back into some form of normal life again?” Nazarova’s answer: “There have been changes in Russian society that are irrevocable… The war has scarred Russian society for a long time.” Nazarova closes her remarks by saying that she has no intention of returning to Russia.
Simpson turns to his next witness, an investigator into social trends in Russia for BBC Russian, Aleksandra Golubeva, to discuss what he calls ‘a particularly ugly process which governments with their back to the wall are often tempted to encourage – the isolation and persecution of minorities and return to older, supposedly better values.” The minorities in question are….LGBT. The government with its back to the wall must be Putin’s.
However, their discussion starts first on a different topic – what Golubeva calls Putin’s obsession with historical truth.
Golubeva: “They [Putin and his men] see historical truth as an information weapon or information tool and they want…to set history straight as they see fit.”
Simpson: “In the interests of Stalin and the Stalin dictatorship?”
Golubeva: “Those who write and try to speak about Soviet repressions and nowadays repressions, they are simply viewed as enemies.”
It is curious that ‘historical truth’ is so dangerous and can be ‘weaponized.’ This stands in stark contrast to the Kremlin’s denunciation of Western amnesia over the Nazi past and present in its own midst during the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz and the lifting of the Siege of Leningrad 10 days ago.
Simpson next moved on to the question of how LGBT people are treated today in Russia.
Golubeva: “In every aspect of life [the Kremlin] is dividing people into enemies and friends. Black and white. Good and bad. LGBT people and the LGBT movement are considered extremists in Russia, alongside with Navalny, and some horrible terrorist organizations in the world.”
With that, Simpson seems to have run out of dirt on Putin’s Russia and the last third of the program consists of his own personal reminiscences on how Russia has changed since his periodic visits there starting in the 1970s and running through the Yeltsin years. To show whereof he speaks, Simpson includes an excerpt from a televised report he made from Moscow during the attempted coup to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991.
He says this about the Yeltsin years:
“The economic horrors of the 1990s explain a great deal about how older Russians support Putin even now.”
Turning to the Putin years: “You could make a good case saying all of this, the social problems, the brutality, Putin’s sense of insecurity and his need to even the score all come from the way the old Soviet Union ground to a halt”
And this is what resulted: “Although [Putin] at first seemed friendly to the West and Western ideas, he soon showed signs of resentment and hostility. In 2014, ignoring a treaty which Yeltsin had signed to respect the borders of an independent Ukraine, I watched as Putin used mercenaries in Crimea to cut it off from Ukraine and turn it into a Russian possession. This is the new reality, today’s reality….When in 2022 he finally invaded Ukraine, apparently believing the people there wanted to join up with Russia again, the Cold War turned uncomfortably warm. Volodymyr Zelensky staged an extraordinarily strong resistance to the Russian invasion. I went to Kiev soon afterwards to interview him for ‘Unspun World.”
This narrative takes us swiftly to Simpson’s key learnings from the past three years of war: “Over the three years since then, the Russians have upped their game. With the help of China, Iran and North Korea. Now the question is how President Trump, who has often expressed his admiration for Vladimir Putin will achieve his intended aim of bringing the war to an end fast. In all of this the key factor has been the way the old Soviet Union collapsed. The humiliations, the economic devastation, the resentment. Everything now depends on the way Putin emerges from a Trump organized peace negotiation over Ukraine. If he is seen as the winner, or at least not the loser, he’ll be free to continue challenging the West.”
Simpson concludes his report with a look at the other side of the coin: what happens if Putin fails to recapture one part of the old Soviet Union, Ukraine. He tells us that in Latvia, from where he is reporting, a lot of people are afraid that then he will turn his attention to the Baltic States. Thinking aloud, Simpson asks whether President Trump, with his concern to put America First, really cares very much if Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia are taken. And will Trump care if Putin starts up his invasion of Ukraine again.
There you have it. Avuncular as he may wish to sound, Simpson is saying what the British Deep State would like you to hear: Russia as a threat if it wins…and also if it loses in Ukraine. Russia is an ugly, distorted society that deserves to remain a pariah, kept away by a high wall of sanctions. The only positive note that I flag in this report is Simpson’s understanding that the game is up and Ukraine is losing the war.
*****
I recommend Luke Harding’s article entitled “Everybody is tired. The mood has changed: the Ukrainian Army’s desertion crisis.” It is an easy read and I will not take your time to summarize its contents other than to say that Harding has done something admirable and unexpected given his long record as a Russia hater: while in Kiev he interviewed a number of army deserters and he tells their stories with considerable empathy, maybe even sympathy. This tells us that the game is up for the Kiev regime. At least Harding does not dabble in what Russia, as winner, may do to us all.
BBC: die Stimme der zutiefst antirussischen britischen Regierung
Heute möchte ich auf die Rolle der BBC als Sprachrohr des britischen Deep State aufmerksam machen.
Die britischen Medien des „freien Marktes“ haben sich trotz ihrer antirussischen Einstellung in letzter Zeit dem Mainstream der Print- und elektronischen Medien in den USA angeschlossen und akzeptieren die unvermeidliche und wahrscheinlich baldige Niederlage der Ukraine in ihrem Krieg mit Russland. Die nichtstaatliche britische Presse, zu der übrigens auch die Berichterstattung der Financial Times gehört, die mit eiserner Disziplin berichtet, gibt jetzt oft Tag für Tag nützliche und wahrheitsgemäße Berichte über den Verlauf des Krieges.
Allerdings sollten Sie nicht auf „nützliche und wahrheitsgemäße Berichte“ von der BBC hoffen. Die verfolgt eine andere Agenda, nämlich die Feindseligkeit gegenüber Russland aufrechtzuerhalten, unabhängig davon, was als Nächstes im Krieg und im darauf folgenden Frieden geschieht.
Ich wurde durch die bemerkenswert tendenziöse und verlogene halbstündige BBC One-Fernsehsendung über den Russland-Ukraine-Krieg, die John Simpson im Rahmen seiner wöchentlichen Serie mit dem Titel „Unspun World“ („Unverfälschte Welt“ – nicht ironisch gemeint) moderierte, dazu veranlasst, diesen kurzen Aufsatz zu schreiben. Auch wenn Simpson mir damit den Appetit verdorben hat, war ich doch geneigt, zum Tatort zurückzukehren. Also setzte ich mich vor meinen Computer und suchte auf der Website der BBC nach der Sendung, um sie mir noch einmal anzusehen. Dort fand ich den folgenden Link zur Tonversion der Sendung, die für meine Zwecke für das Folgende ausreichend war. Ich ziehe den Hut vor denen unter Ihnen, die die Videoversion finden können.
Ich vergleiche dieses neueste BBC-Fiktionswerk mit dem jüngsten Artikel über den Krieg von Luke Harding, der in The Guardian erschienen ist. Für diejenigen, die Harding nicht kennen: Er ist seit langem für seine anti-Putin- und anti-russischen Schriften berüchtigt. Nach eigenen Angaben war er „der erste ausländische Journalist, der seit dem Ende des Kalten Krieges aus Russland ausgewiesen wurde“. Das war 2011. Er hat sich nicht geändert, aber dem folgenden Artikel nach zu urteilen, hat er eine bessere Brille bekommen.
Gleich zu Beginn der heutigen „Unspun World“, die er in Riga, Lettland, außerhalb Russlands, aufgenommen hat, legt Simpson seine übergreifenden Themen dar:
Wie der Krieg die russische Gesellschaft beeinflusst hat: „Beunruhigenderweise macht der Krieg ganze Gruppen innerhalb der russischen Gesellschaft zu Staatsfeinden.“
Wer gewinnt? „Präsident Putin … traf die Entscheidung zur Invasion im Februar 2022 auf der Grundlage einiger wirklich schlechter Ratschläge und einiger völlig falscher Annahmen. Er hatte Glück, dass er einen Putschversuch des russischen Kriegsherrn Jewgeni Prigoschin im Jahr 2023 überlebte. Und er musste Gefangene, Nordkoreaner und Drohnenexperten aus dem Iran rekrutieren, nur um weitermachen zu können. Aber hat sich der Krieg nun entscheidend zu Putins Gunsten gewendet?”
Er beginnt seine Reportage mit einem Interview mit Sergei Goryashko, den die BBC-Website als Mitglied ihres Nachrichtenteams in Riga beschreibt, wohin er zu Beginn der militärischen Spezialoperation im Februar 2022 mit anderen Mitarbeitern versetzt wurde. Unabhängig von seinem Gehalt wäre es jedoch zutreffend, ihn als ‚freien Mitarbeiter‘ zu bezeichnen. Sein Name taucht als Autor zahlreicher Beiträge in Online-Medien auf, und er hat viele Artikel für Politico verfasst, insbesondere über den Tod von Alexej Nawalny und über die Fortsetzung seines Anliegens durch Nawalnys Witwe. Man könnte ihn auch als Überläufer bezeichnen. Er ist Russe, hat einen Abschluss in Journalismus von der renommierten Higher School of Economics in Moskau und mit seiner journalistischen Arbeit für die BBC, die alle roten Linien für Staatsfeinde überschreitet, wird er nicht nach Mütterchen Russland zurückkehren.
Beachten Sie, dass Riga ein Offshore-Nest für britische Nachrichtenagenturen ist, die über Russland berichten. Dies ist der derzeitige Heimatstandort des echten Briten der Financial Times, Max Seddon, der den Titel des FT-Moskau-Büroleiters trägt, obwohl ich noch keinen seiner Artikel mit der Byline Moskau gesehen habe. Beachten Sie auch, dass Simpson für die heutige Sendung keine Aussagen vom Büroleiter der BBC, Steve Rosenberg, entgegengenommen hat, der vor mehr als einem Jahr in seine Büros in Moskau zurückgekehrt ist, nachdem ihm versichert wurde, dass dies sicher sei. Rosenberg kann Wladimir Putin auf Pressekonferenzen aggressiv befragen, ist aber vorsichtig mit dem, was er im Radio sagt, um seine privilegierte Position in Russland zu wahren. Simpson unterliegt bei der Berichterstattung aus dem Ausland keinen derartigen Einschränkungen.
Es ist interessant, dass Simpsons Gespräch mit Goryashko davon ausgeht, dass Putin seinen Krieg gewinnen wird, und unsere Aufmerksamkeit darauf lenkt, ob der darauf folgende Frieden es den Russen ermöglichen wird, den Westen anzugreifen. Goryashko kommt dieser Bitte nach und sagt: „Ich kann nicht ausschließen, dass Putin beispielsweise versuchen wird, in das Baltikum einzumarschieren. Beängstigend ist hier nicht, dass er versuchen würde, einzumarschieren, sondern dass, wenn das Bündnis nicht aufstehen würde … Das würde ihm klar machen, dass das Bündnis, wie alle dachten, dass es existiert, in Wirklichkeit nicht existiert und nichts ihn davon abhalten kann, die Grenzen in Europa neu zu ziehen.“
Gut gesagt, Goryashko!
Simpson ging dann zu seinem zweiten Thema über, die Auswirkungen des Krieges auf die russische Gesellschaft. Er merkt an: „Kriege haben in der Regel eine verrohende Wirkung auf die Gesellschaften, die sie vom Zaun brechen. Dies gilt insbesondere für Putins Russland, wo Tausende und Abertausende von Mördern und Gewaltverbrechern aus dem Gefängnis entlassen und in Uniformen gesteckt wurden.“
Er untersucht dies mit Nina Nazarova, einer weiteren russischen „Exilantin“, die für BBC Russian in Riga arbeitet. Sie beschreibt den Fall eines jungen Mannes, der seine Freundin irgendwo im russischen Fernen Osten ermordet hat, zu 17 Jahren Gefängnis verurteilt wurde, aber ein Jahr später die Rekrutierung durch die Söldnergruppe Wagner annahm und von Putin aus dem Gefängnis entlassen wurde, um in der Ukraine zu kämpfen. Daraus schließt sie, dass in einem Land mit 140 Millionen Einwohnern eine Art großes soziales Experiment gestartet wurde, und sagt uns, dass die Idee von Gerechtigkeit dort abgeschafft wurde. Und so „müssen sich die Menschen an diese neue Gesellschaft ohne Regeln anpassen.“
Simpson wirft die Idee auf, dass mit der Machtübernahme von Donald Trump die Möglichkeit besteht, dass der Krieg „in der einen oder anderen Form“ ziemlich bald vorbei sein wird. Und so fährt er fort: „Wie schwierig wird es sein, wieder zu einer Art Normalität zurückzukehren?“ Nazarovas Antwort: „Es hat Veränderungen in der russischen Gesellschaft gegeben, die unwiderruflich sind … Der Krieg hat die russische Gesellschaft für lange Zeit gezeichnet.“ Nazarova schließt ihre Ausführungen mit der Bemerkung, dass sie nicht die Absicht habe, nach Russland zurückzukehren.
Simpson wendet sich seiner nächsten Zeugin zu, Aleksandra Golubeva, einer Ermittlerin für soziale Trends in Russland für BBC Russian, um über das zu sprechen, was er als „einen besonders hässlichen Prozess“ bezeichnet, „zu dem Regierungen, die mit dem Rücken zur Wand stehen, oft versucht sind, ihn zu fördern – die Isolation und Verfolgung von Minderheiten und die Rückkehr zu älteren, angeblich besseren Werten.“ Die fraglichen Minderheiten sind … LGBT. Die Regierung, die mit dem Rücken zur Wand steht, muss Putins sein.
Ihre Diskussion beginnt jedoch zunächst mit einem anderen Thema – dem, was Golubeva Putins Besessenheit von der historischen Wahrheit nennt.
Golubeva: „Sie [Putin und seine Männer] betrachten die historische Wahrheit als Informationswaffe oder Informationswerkzeug und wollen … die Geschichte nach eigenem Gutdünken zurechtrücken.“
Simpson: „Im Interesse Stalins und der Stalin-Diktatur?“
Golubeva: ‘Diejenigen, die über sowjetische Repressionen und heutige Repressionen schreiben und versuchen, darüber zu sprechen, werden einfach als Feinde betrachtet.“
Es ist merkwürdig, dass die „historische Wahrheit“ so gefährlich ist und als Waffe eingesetzt werden kann. Dies steht in krassem Gegensatz zu der Verurteilung der westlichen Amnesie über die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit und Gegenwart in der eigenen Mitte durch den Kreml während der Gedenkfeier zur Befreiung von Auschwitz und der Aufhebung der Belagerung von Leningrad vor zehn Tagen.
Simpson ging als Nächstes auf die Frage ein, wie LGBT-Personen heute in Russland behandelt werden.
Golubeva: „In jedem Aspekt des Lebens teilt [der Kreml] die Menschen in Feinde und Freunde ein. Schwarz und weiß. Gut und böse. LGBT-Personen und die LGBT-Bewegung werden in Russland als Extremisten betrachtet, ebenso wie Nawalny und einige schreckliche Terrororganisationen auf der Welt.“
Damit scheint Simpson nichts Schmutziges mehr über Putins Russland zu haben, und das letzte Drittel der Sendung besteht aus seinen persönlichen Erinnerungen daran, wie sich Russland seit seinen regelmäßigen Besuchen dort seit den 1970er Jahren und während der Jelzin-Jahre verändert hat. Um zu zeigen, wovon er spricht, fügt Simpson einen Auszug aus einem Fernsehbericht hinzu, den er während des versuchten Staatsstreichs gegen Michail Gorbatschow im August 1981 aus Moskau gesendet hat.
Über die Jelzin-Jahre sagt er:
„Die wirtschaftlichen Schrecken der 1990er Jahre erklären zu einem großen Teil, warum ältere Russen Putin auch heute noch unterstützen.“
Zu den Putin-Jahren: „Man könnte durchaus argumentieren, dass all dies, die sozialen Probleme, die Brutalität, Putins Unsicherheit und sein Bedürfnis, die Rechnung zu begleichen, auf die Art und Weise zurückzuführen sind, wie die alte Sowjetunion zum Stillstand kam.“
Und das ist das Ergebnis: „Obwohl [Putin] zunächst dem Westen und westlichen Ideen gegenüber freundlich zu sein schien, zeigte er bald Anzeichen von Groll und Feindseligkeit. Im Jahr 2014 ignorierte er einen Vertrag, den Jelzin unterzeichnet hatte, um die Grenzen einer unabhängigen Ukraine zu respektieren, und ich musste mit ansehen, wie Putin Söldner auf der Krim einsetzte, um sie von der Ukraine abzuschneiden und in russischen Besitz zu verwandeln. Das ist die neue Realität, die heutige Realität … Als er 2022 schließlich in die Ukraine einmarschierte, offenbar in dem Glauben, dass die Menschen dort sich wieder Russland anschließen wollten, wurde der Kalte Krieg unangenehm warm. Wolodymyr Selensky leistete der russischen Invasion außerordentlich starken Widerstand. Ich reiste kurz darauf nach Kiew, um ihn für „Unspun World“ zu interviewen.
Diese Erzählung führt uns schnell zu Simpsons wichtigsten Erkenntnissen aus den vergangenen drei Kriegsjahren: „In den drei Jahren seitdem haben die Russen ihr Spiel verbessert. Mit Hilfe von China, Iran und Nordkorea. Nun stellt sich die Frage, wie Präsident Trump, der seine Bewunderung für Wladimir Putin oft zum Ausdruck gebracht hat, sein angestrebtes Ziel erreichen will, den Krieg schnell zu beenden. Bei all dem war der Schlüssel zum Erfolg die Art und Weise, wie die alte Sowjetunion zusammenbrach. Die Demütigungen, die wirtschaftliche Verwüstung, der Groll. Alles hängt nun davon ab, wie Putin aus den von Trump organisierten Friedensverhandlungen über die Ukraine hervorgeht. Wenn er als Sieger oder zumindest nicht als Verlierer gesehen wird, kann er den Westen weiterhin herausfordern.“
Simpson schließt seinen Bericht mit einem Blick auf die andere Seite der Medaille: Was passiert, wenn Putin einen Teil der alten Sowjetunion, die Ukraine, nicht zurückerobert? Er berichtet uns, dass in Lettland, von wo aus er berichtet, viele Menschen Angst haben, dass er dann seine Aufmerksamkeit auf die baltischen Staaten richten wird. Simpson denkt laut darüber nach, ob es Präsident Trump, der sich dafür einsetzt, dass Amerika an erster Stelle steht, wirklich wichtig ist, ob Lettland, Litauen oder Estland eingenommen werden. Und wird es Trump wichtig sein, wenn Putin seine Invasion in der Ukraine erneut startet?
Das ist es also. So sehr Simpson auch wie ein Onkel klingen möchte, sagt er doch, was der britische Deep State Sie hören lassen möchte: Russland als Bedrohung, wenn es in der Ukraine gewinnt … und auch, wenn es verliert. Russland ist eine hässliche, verzerrte Gesellschaft, die es verdient, ein Paria zu bleiben, ferngehalten durch eine hohe Mauer aus Sanktionen. Der einzige positive Punkt, den ich in diesem Bericht hervorhebe, ist Simpsons Verständnis dafür, dass das Spiel vorbei ist und die Ukraine den Krieg verliert.
*****
Ich empfehle den Artikel von Luke Harding mit dem Titel „Alle sind müde. Die Stimmung hat sich geändert: die Fahnenfluchtkrise der ukrainischen Armee“. Er ist leicht zu lesen und ich werde Ihnen nicht die Zeit stehlen, seinen Inhalt zusammenzufassen, außer zu sagen, dass Harding etwas Bewundernswertes und Unerwartetes getan hat, wenn man seine lange Geschichte als Russlandhasser bedenkt: Während er in Kiew war, interviewte er eine Reihe von Deserteuren der Armee und erzählt ihre Geschichten mit viel Einfühlungsvermögen, vielleicht sogar Sympathie. Das zeigt uns, dass das Spiel für das Kiewer Regime aus ist. Zumindest beschäftigt sich Harding nicht mit der Frage, was Russland als Sieger mit uns allen anstellen könnte.
Translation below into Spanish (ChodZom)
BBC: la voz del visceralmente anti-ruso Gobierno británico
February 1, 2025
Hoy quiero llamar la atención sobre el papel de la BBC como portavoz del Estado profundo británico.
Los medios de comunicación británicos de «libre mercado», a pesar de su predisposición anti rusa, se han unido últimamente a la prensa escrita y electrónica dominante de Estados Unidos en la aceptación de la inevitable y probablemente próxima derrota de Ucrania en su guerra con Rusia. La prensa británica no estatal, que incluye, por cierto, la serena y autocontenida información del Financial Times, ofrece ahora a menudo informes útiles y veraces sobre el desarrollo de la guerra día a día.
Sin embargo, no espere encontrar «informes útiles y veraces» en la BBC. Están al servicio de otra agenda, la de mantener la hostilidad hacia Rusia pase lo que pase en la guerra y en la paz posterior.
Me impulsó a escribir este breve ensayo el programa de televisión, notablemente tendencioso y mendaz, de media hora de la BBC One sobre la guerra entre Rusia y Ucrania que John Simpson presentó dentro de su serie semanal titulada, sin intención de ironía, Unspun World. Aunque Simpson puede que haya arruinado mi desayuno, sentí la necesidad de volver a la escena del crimen. Así que me senté ante el ordenador y busqué el programa en la página web de la BBC para volver a verlo. Allí encontré el siguiente enlace a una versión de audio de la emisión, que me sirvió adecuadamente para lo que seguía. Mi saludo a aquellos de ustedes que puedan localizar esta versión en vídeo.
Comparo esta última obra de ficción de la BBC con el artículo más reciente sobre la guerra de Luke Harding en The Guardian. Para quienes no a Harding, él es famoso desde hace tiempo por sus escritos anti-Putin y anti-rusos. Reconoce que fue «el primer periodista extranjero expulsado de Rusia desde el final de la Guerra Fría». Eso fue en 2011. No ha cambiado sus galones, pero, a juzgar por el artículo siguiente, ha conseguido unas gafas mejor graduadas.
En el principio de Unspun World del día de hoy, que fue grabado en Riga (Letonia), afuera de Rusia, Simpson expone sus temas principales:
Cómo la guerra ha afectado a la sociedad rusa: «Inquietantemente, la guerra está convirtiendo a grupos enteros de la sociedad rusa en enemigos del Estado».
¿Quién está ganando? «El presidente Putin… tomó la decisión de invadir en febrero de 2022 basándose en consejos realmente malos y algunas suposiciones totalmente falsas. Tuvo suerte de sobrevivir a un intento de golpe de Estado por parte del jefe militar ruso Yevgeny Prigozhin en 2023. Además, ha tenido que reclutar prisioneros, norcoreanos y técnicos de drones iraníes sólo para poder seguir adelante. Pero ahora, ¿se ha decantado la guerra decisivamente a favor de Putin?».
Comienza su reportaje entrevistando a Sergei Goryashko, a quien el sitio web de la BBC describe como miembro del equipo de noticias de la BBC en Riga, adonde fue trasladado con otros miembros del personal al comienzo de la Operación Militar Especial en febrero de 2022. Sin embargo, sea cual sea su salario, lo correcto sería llamarle «stringer» (Traducción: periodista a tiempo parcial o freelance). Su nombre aparece como colaborador en numerosos medios online y ha escrito muchos artículos para Politico, especialmente sobre la muerte de Alexei Navalny y sobre la continuación de su causa por parte de la viuda de Navalny. También podría calificarse de tránsfuga. Es ruso, licenciado en periodismo por la prestigiosa Escuela Superior de Economía de Moscú, y con su trabajo periodístico para la BBC, en el que ha cruzado todas las líneas rojas para los enemigos del Estado, no volverá a la Madre Rusia.
Cabe destacar que Riga es un enclave extraterritorial para las agencias de noticias británicas que cubren Rusia. Esa es la actual base del propio y genuino británico Max Seddon del Financial Times, que ostenta el título nominal de jefe de la oficina del FT en Moscú, aunque no he visto ningún artículo suyo firmado desde Moscú. Cabe señalar también, que Simpson no ha tomado en consideración para el programa de hoy al jefe de la oficina de la BBC en Moscú, Steve Rosenberg, quien regresó a sus oficinas hace más de un año tras recibir garantías de que era seguro hacerlo. Rosenberg puede ser agresivo en sus preguntas a Vladímir Putin en las ruedas de prensa, pero es cuidadoso con lo que dice al aire para mantener su posición privilegiada dentro de Rusia. Simpson no enfrenta tales restricciones cuando informa desde el extranjero.
Es interesante que la charla de Simpson con Goryashko asuma que Putin ganará su guerra y dirija nuestra atención a si la paz que siga permitirá a los rusos atacar a Occidente después. Goryashko se compromete, diciendo: «No puedo descartar la posibilidad de que Putin intente invadir el Báltico, por ejemplo… Lo que da miedo aquí no es que intente invadir, sino que, si la Alianza no se mantuviera en pie… eso podría hacerlo darse cuenta de que la Alianza, tal y como todo el mundo pensaba que existía, en realidad no existe y nada puede impedirle redibujar las fronteras en Europa».
¡Bien dicho, Goryashko!
Simpson pasó entonces a su segundo tema: el impacto de la guerra en la sociedad rusa. Como él señala, «Las guerras tienden a embrutecer a las sociedades que las comienzan. Esto ha sido particularmente cierto en la Rusia de Putin, donde miles y miles de asesinos y criminales violentos han sido sacados de la cárcel y puestos en un uniforme».
El analiza esto con Nina Nazarova, otra «exiliada» rusa que trabaja para la BBC rusa en Riga. Ella describe el caso de un joven que asesinó a su novia en algún lugar del Lejano Oriente ruso, fue condenado a 17 años de prisión, pero un año después aceptó ser reclutado por el grupo mercenario Wagner y fue liberado de la cárcel por Putin para ir a luchar a Ucrania. De todo ello ella concluye, que se inició una especie de gran experimento social en un país de 140 millones de habitantes, donde se canceló la idea misma de justicia. Por eso, afirma, «la gente tiene que adaptarse a esta nueva sociedad sin reglas».
Simpson lanza la idea de que, con la llegada de Donald Trump al poder, es posible que la guerra termine pronto, «de una u otra forma». Y continúa: «¿Cómo de difícil será volver a alguna forma de vida normal?». Nazarova responde: «Se han producido cambios en la sociedad rusa que son irrevocables… La guerra ha marcado a la sociedad rusa por mucho tiempo». Nazarova concluye su intervención diciendo que no tiene intención de volver a Rusia.
A continuación, Simpson se vuelve a su nuevo testigo, una investigadora de las tendencias sociales en Rusia para la BBC rusa, Aleksandra Golubeva, para hablar de lo que él denomina «un proceso particularmente feo con el que los gobiernos que se encuentran entre la espada y la pared se ven a menudo tentados a fomentar: el aislamiento y la persecución de las minorías y el retorno a valores anteriores en el tiempo y supuestamente mejores». Las minorías en cuestión son… LGBT. El gobierno que tiene su espalda contra la pared debe ser el de Putin.
Sin embargo, su discusión comienza con un tema diferente: la obsesión de Putin, como la llama Golubeva, por la verdad histórica.
Golubeva: «Ellos [Putin y sus hombres] ven a la verdad histórica como un arma de información o una herramienta de información y quieren.. poner la historia en el sitio que mejor les parece».
Simpson: «¿En el interés de Stalin y la dictadura stalinista?».
Golubeva: «Aquellos que escriben e intentan hablar de las represiones soviéticas y de las represiones actuales son vistos simplemente como enemigos».
Es curioso que la «verdad histórica» sea tan peligrosa y pueda ser «convertida en arma». Esto contrasta fuertemente con la denuncia del Kremlin sobre la amnesia occidental acerca del pasado nazi y actualmente presente durante la conmemoración de la liberación de Auschwitz y el levantamiento del sitio de Leningrado hace 10 días.
Simpson continuó con la cuestión del trato que reciben hoy en Rusia las personas LGBT.
Golubeva: «En todos los aspectos de la vida [el Kremlin] divide a la gente en enemigos y amigos. Blanco y negro. Buenos y malos. Las personas LGBT y el movimiento LGBT son considerados extremistas en Rusia, junto con Navalny, y algunas horribles organizaciones terroristas en el mundo».
Con esto, Simpson parece haberse quedado sin trapos sucios sobre la Rusia de Putin y el último tercio del programa consiste en sus propias reminiscencias personales sobre cómo ha cambiado Rusia desde sus visitas periódicas allí, que comenzaron en los años setenta y se prolongaron durante la época de Yeltsin. Para demostrarlo, Simpson incluye un extracto de un reportaje televisado que hizo desde Moscú durante el intento de golpe de Estado para derrocar a Mijaíl Gorbachov en agosto de 1981.
Dice esto sobre los años de Yeltsin:
«Los horrores económicos de los años 90 explican en gran medida por qué los rusos mayores apoyan a Putin incluso ahora».
Volviendo a los años de Putin: «Se podría argumentar que todo esto, los problemas sociales, la brutalidad, la sensación de inseguridad de Putin y su necesidad de equilibrar la balanza se deben a la forma en que la antigua Unión Soviética terminó».
Y este es el resultado: «Aunque [Putin] al principio parecía amistoso con Occidente y las ideas occidentales, pronto dio muestras de resentimiento y hostilidad. En 2014, ignorando un tratado que Yeltsin había firmado para respetar las fronteras de una Ucrania independiente, vi cómo Putin utilizaba mercenarios en Crimea para aislarla de Ucrania y convertirla en una posesión rusa. Esta es la nueva realidad, la realidad de hoy… Cuando finalmente invadió Ucrania en 2022, aparentemente creyendo que la gente de allí quería unirse de nuevo a Rusia, la Guerra Fría se volvió incómodamente caliente. Volodymyr Zelensky organizó una resistencia extraordinariamente fuerte a la invasión rusa. Fui a Kiev poco después para entrevistarle para Unspun World.
Esta narrativa nos lleva rápidamente a los aprendizajes claves de Simpson sobre los últimos tres años de guerra: «En los tres años transcurridos desde entonces, los rusos han mejorado su juego. Con la ayuda de China, Irán y Corea del Norte. Ahora la cuestión es cómo el presidente Trump, que a menudo ha expresado su admiración por Vladímir Putin, logrará su objetivo de poner fin rápidamente a la guerra. En todo esto, el factor clave ha sido la forma en que colapsó la antigua Unión Soviética. Las humillaciones, la devastación económica, el resentimiento. Ahora todo depende de cómo salga Putin de una negociación de paz sobre Ucrania organizada por Trump. Si él es percibido como el ganador o, al menos no como el perdedor, tendrá libertad para seguir desafiando a Occidente.»
Simpson concluye su informe con una mirada a la otra cara de la moneda: ¿qué pasaría si Putin no lograra reconquistar esa parte de la antigua Unión Soviética que es Ucrania? Nos cuenta que, en Letonia, desde donde se encuentra informando, hay mucha gente teme que entonces él dirija su atención hacia los Estados bálticos. Pensando en voz alta, Simpson se pregunta si al presidente Trump, con su preocupación por poner a América en primer lugar, realmente le importa si Letonia, Lituania o Estonia son tomadas. ¿Y le importará a Trump si Putin recomienza su invasión de Ucrania?
Ahí lo tienen. Tratando de sonar solícito, Simpson está diciendo lo que al Estado Profundo británico le gustaría oír: Rusia es una amenaza si gana.. y también si pierde en Ucrania. Rusia es una sociedad fea y distorsionada que merece seguir siendo un paria, alejada por un alto muro de sanciones. La única nota positiva que destaco en este informe es que Simpson es consciente de que el juego ha terminado y Ucrania está perdiendo la guerra.
*****
Recomiendo el artículo de Luke Harding titulado ”Todo el mundo está cansado. El ambiente ha cambiado: la crisis de deserción del Ejército Ucraniano”. Es de fácil lectura y no voy a dedicar vuestro tiempo a un resumen de su contenido más allá de decir que Harding ha hecho algo admirable e inesperado dado su largo historial como odiador de Rusia: durante su estancia en Kiev entrevistó a varios desertores del ejército y cuenta sus historias con considerable empatía, quizá incluso simpatía. Esto nos indica que el juego ha terminado para régimen de Kiev. Al menos Harding no se atreve a hablar de lo que Rusia, como vencedora, puede hacernos a todos.
Reading over the questions and my answers in this interview, I am obliged to say mea culpa: I followed the well trodden path of professional interviewees and delivered my thoughts on the subject without specifically answering the well crafted questions posed by the WION presenter. Given the encouraging words of Mr Chanana at the end, I will try to play fairer in future. Only one faux pas on WION’s part: I am actually in Brussels, not Berlin.
Transcript submitted by a reader
WION, Shivan Chanana: 0:00 The conflict with Ukraine will end in a month or two at max if Kiev is out of ammunition. This is the latest statement which is coming from the Russian President Vladimir Putin. He then even went on to add that Ukraine has zero sovereignty, and they will not exist even a month if their ammunition stops.
Now Putin also said that Russia is open to peace talks with Ukraine, but not with Zelensky. Does Russia want a Ukraine without Zelensky? Is Zelensky harmful for peace in Ukraine? To discuss this further with me on Game Plan, I’m being joined by Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, who’s joining me from Berlin. He’s an international affairs analyst, an author and historian. Dr. Doctorow, thank you so much for joining me on Game Plan. Can the Russia-Ukraine conflict end in a month? And will the Trump administration stop weapons to Ukraine?
Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 0:47 First of all, I’d like to congratulate you, WION, for covering or watching the interview which Mr. Putin gave last night. It’s an unusual interview. It was in his limousine as he was traveling from Moscow to Samara where he had speaking engagements. And seated next to him, was the reporter Pavel Zarubin, who has been the reporter of the two most important statements that Putin has made about the war, going back six months. Now, this interview was important for the reasons you mentioned. They set out, he set out a brief timeline of what the first negotiations for peace looked like in March, April, 2022.
1:33 And I insist that there’s a lot of relevance [of] that timeline, to what is about to happen now, the most important fact being that at the insistence of the Ukrainians, the Russians in good faith pulled back their forces from Kiev. They were surrounding Kiev at the time. This is just after they had arrived there from Belarus, where they were stationed before the start of the military intervention. They pulled them out in good faith so that the Ukrainians did not feel that they were under duress when entering into the negotiations.
2:11 And that has relevance to the situation today and what preconditions Mr. Putin made in June of last year for the opening of negotiations, namely the pullback of Ukrainian forces from the four provinces that Russia has integrated into its federation. And so it is very timely. As regards Mr. Zelensky, Putin made it clear that Russia does not consider him to be a legitimate president, that his time expired and according to the Ukrainian constitution, there is no provision for his stay in office to have been extended. Therefore, according to the constitution, the legal representative of Ukraine would be the Speaker of the Rada, of the parliament.
But that is a detail. The main point is that Mr. Zelensky is illegitimate. He is not an appropriate signatory to any peace negotiations that may be conducted. And his signature on the document would not be valid for purposes of the enforcement of that treaty. Therefore, it is senseless to pursue to proceed with him.
WION: 3:25 Dr. Doctorow, you know when Putin says that he is open to peace talks with Ukraine, but not with Zelensky, that there is a distinguishment which has been there. You’ve elaborated on it in your first response. He’s open to peace but not with Zelensky. Does Russia want Ukraine without Zelensky? Is that more in Russia’s favor?
Doctorow: Oh absolutely. Not just because of the legal technicality that his signature on a document would be invalid, but because he stands for a regime which the Russians want to see off. He stands for a neo-Nazi-controlled government. That has been the position taken by Mr. Putin from before the war.
This was the issue of dispute with German Chancellor Scholz when he visited Moscow at the very critical point, the start of this war, that he laughed, Chancellor Scholz laughed at the remarks by Putin that this was a neo-Nazi regime. Well, indeed it was. And these statements were made once again a couple of days ago when the Russians were commemorating the liberation of Leningrad, the breaking of the blockade, and when they were making the remarks on Holocaust Day, which was being celebrated at the same time in Auschwitz, that this regime in Kiev is neo-Nazi and that they refuse to accept a rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe.
5:15 So the problem essentially is not between Russia and Ukraine. From this statement it seems Russia’s issue is with Zelensky and Zelensky’s ties with the Western nations. Now of course with the change in government in the US, perhaps that equation is bound to change.
But at this point, I also want to get into the internal dynamics within the European Union. Ukraine’s refusal to continue the agreement of gas transit to Europe since the beginning of this year, the first January, it is putting a lot of pressure especially on Eastern European countries. Andrei Danko, deputy speaker of Slovakia’s parliament, said that Zelensky’s politics, and I’m quoting here, his politics is “harmful for Europe”. I wanted to ask you, sir, is Zelensky harmful for peace in Ukraine? And is he harmful for Europe?
Doctorow: 6:04 Well, let’s not put this strictly in personal terms of Mr. Zelensky. He’s not standing by himself. He has around him an entourage of these the same people who surrounded the president, the newly-appointed president, after the coup d’état in February 2014. These are the same people. These are extremists. They are extremist nationalists. They are pursuing an identification of Ukraine as a single-culture country, a culture of the West Ukraine, in point of fact.
And this is unacceptable as a way forward for what was a country that had many different languages and ethnic groups and nationalities in fact, within its borders. So it’s not just Mr. Zelensky, though he has in the last three years been the personification of everything that is wrong about Ukraine.
WION: Finally, Dr. Doctorow, a lot of nations within Europe, and they have only increased in number in recent months or as the war has progressed, they have leaned towards re-establishing or strengthening their ties with Russia. Do you feel the Russia-Ukraine war has brought the entire EU in the eye of the storm, which is pushing more nations to stand out, stick their neck out and say, “We don’t want this with Russia, we want good ties, it is advantageous for us to keep indulging and keep engaging with Russia, and we need to now distance ourselves from this war which is enveloping us as well.”
Doctorow: 7:47 Well let’s put the numbers in perspective. There are 27 member states in the EU. Of those, only two, Hungary and Slovakia, have come out in the manner you described, opposing now for good, substantial economic reasons, the continuation of sanctions, which actually they passed for a variety of reasons which we don’t have time to discuss.
But these two countries have opposed the continuation of sanctions on Russia. They have looked for re-establishing something like normality in dealing with the big neighbor to the east, for the sake of their own economic welfare, not because they are sympathetic to Mr. Putin. That is an irrelevancy that is introduced by Western propagandists.
8:34 But the EU as such has big internal fissures. Germany itself, going into the elections of the 23rd of February, has very big internal discussion and differences of opinion between the leading party, the Christian Democrats, headed by Mr. Merz, and the fast-rising party, the Alternative for Germany, that is opposed to the present war, to the present sanctions on Russia, not for any, because of any particular sympathy for Mr. Putin the man or for Russia as a nation, but for their own material benefit, which has been greatly harmed by the policy of sanctions that were initiated by the United States and were taken up by the European Union after the MH17 crash. This is a situation that has to be addressed.
WION: 9:36 Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, thank you so much for joining me on Game Plan. It’s always a pleasure speaking with you. You always back up your answers with context and perspective and of course, historical documentation along with that with dates and events that have happened in the past drawing parallels, which always brings reason to your arguments and your statements. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure speaking with you. Would love to have you on the show again.
WION interview taken 29 January:Putin Says Ukraine War Will End In A Month Or Two
As promised in my essay on the subject a couple of days ago, I offer below the video link to this 10 minute interview which I gave to WION, India’s largest English language broadcaster.
In the time since the recording, the interview in Russian by Pavel Zarubin with Vladimir Putin which was referenced by the WION moderator and is quoted in the subject line above has been widely shown in major international media, including with English language voice over on a link which I provided here a day ago.
Nonetheless, the point is that the Indian media have been following developments in Russia relating to the war far more closely than most, providing as in this particular case a ‘scoop’ that was worth my commending them. They may have released my interview only today, but their one-two minute news briefs showed their global audience excerpts from Putin’s remarks to Zarubin already early on the 29th.
That Judge Andrew Napolitano’s youtube channel has a large audience is clear from his subscription numbers. The tags from those leaving comments show that this audience comes from across the world, though the U.S. is of course the largest component. It is also clear that the Russians find his program to be a valuable source of information about Washington politics. As part of the ‘press pool’ of Judging Freedom, my weekly show time is now regularly being reposted on the so-called ‘rutube’ in Russian voice over. Till now these were clearly machine translations. Today’s is just as clearly a superior human translation: https://rutube.ru/video/7892c9aa27d43993b5852b16c57ce264/?ysclid=m6k8bl90ft589524895
Transcript submitted by a reader
Judge Andrew Napolitano: 0:33 Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for “Judging Freedom”. Today is Thursday, January 30th, 2025. Professor Gilbert Doctorow joins us now. My dear friend, always a pleasure. Welcome back to the show. Thank you for letting me pick your brain every week. Professor Doctorow, from the perspective of the Kremlin, is the war in Ukraine effectively over?
Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: Practically speaking, yes. And I’d say that even reading the mainstream newspapers like the “Financial Times” and the “New York Times”, you can come to the similar conclusion, Which amazes me that Mr. Trump is said to be influenced in his rather ignorant and offensive remarks regarding Russia by disinformation coming from the CIA. I wonder why he doesn’t just pick up a newspaper from time to time. I understand that the “Financial Times” may not be in his class, but surely the “New York Times” is. And after all, they have stooped to giving most of their readers gourmet news and restaurant reviews. So why isn’t Trump picking them up?
Napolitano: 1:53 Well, what was the Kremlin’s reaction to some of the absurd statements that he made? And we don’t know if he made these shooting from the hip, he has a reputation for that, or if he was given intentionally false information. For example, when he said the Russians have lost a million troops, Putin is destroying Russia. What is the Kremlin reaction to statements as absurd and irrational as those?
Doctorow: Well, they don’t take it personally.
Napolitano: Thank God.
Doctorow: That’s the one hand. The other point is, well, there are two other points. One is that they think this could be part of his normal approach to negotiations, to deal making, to put out a lot of bluster and to say things that are outrageous and to put his talking partners off balance. They may consider this to be just a game that he’s playing.
But I think the more serious interpretation within the Kremlin circles is that it really doesn’t make much difference who is the president. That the basic American foreign policy course is set by the deep state. And the occupant of the Oval Office can only do little bits here and there, but not really change the course of history, which is being determined by the deep state.
Napolitano: 3:26 Do we know if the Joe Biden pipeline to Kiev through its various permutations, through Poland, through Romania, through Great Britain, et cetera, is still flowing?
Doctorow: Well, even last night or this morning, the Russian experts were saying that they are aware of what many in your audience are also aware of, that the United States has been shipping 90 slightly-used air defense systems, Patriots, from Israel to Ukraine. So if that part is operating, then it can be assumed that other parts of the pipeline of American and Western arms to Ukraine continue to be open.
Napolitano: 4:17 Is there any geopolitical significance to this shipment, that it’s coming from Israel? I mean, are they prying it loose from Israel? Do the Israelis not want this? Is it second-rate material? I know you’re not a military person, but perhaps you can enlighten us on this.
Doctorow: Well, I know that some military experts have said, perhaps it was on your program, perhaps it was on one or another of the widely watched programs of military experts talking about current events. They have said that these really are of second quality and shopworn, and Israel was simply disposing of what it no longer has a use for. From the perspective of the Russians, that really isn’t an issue. From the perspective of the Russians, whether it’s first-quality, second-quality or whatever, it’s useless, because they are actively destroying Patriots of first quality on the ground in Ukraine.
Napolitano: 5:20 Are the Ukrainians still firing American and British missiles into territorial Russia?
Doctorow: This is not being reported. And if it’s not reported, I can assume it’s not happening. The Ukrainians are very busy doing what they do much more effectively, though with less public relations value. That is firing their own attack drones and other critical infrastructure in Russia. And I say it has less PR value because these are cheap. These are simple and they do not meet the standard of serious Western assistance that Mr. Zelensky demands for internal political consumption.
6:11 So it’s– a peculiar thing is that the most effective armaments against Russia in the Ukrainian arsenal are the cheap and simple ones that are working and doing a lot of destruction in Russia, whereas the ATACMS have had almost negligible destructive value, because they’re quite easily shot down by the Russians.
Napolitano: We yesterday interviewed Patrick Lancaster, you may have seen the interview, the intrepid and courageous American independent journalist who goes right to the belly of the beast. He came to us from Kursk.
Doctorow: Yeah.
Napolitano: 6:48 I was shocked to learn that the battles are still going on in Kursk. There’s nothing in the West about it. I have neglected to ask you about it. You’re our eyes and ears. And according to Patrick, the noose is continuing to be tightened, but the Ukrainian troops are still there inside Russia, and they are killing Russian civilians. He saw that with his own eyes.
Doctorow: Yeah, this has been featured on Russian news, and this morning on a program that I don’t usually watch, something called Mashi, which is “Our Boys”, there was a military intelligence expert who spoke and addressed just this question. The noose is around the neck, which gets thinner and then gets thicker. Because perversely, the Ukrainian forces at the instructions, or at the insistence of their president or ex-president Zelensky are continuing to throw the best-trained, best-prepared, best-equipped military units in their armed forces into Kursk.
That is to say that each time that we see the numbers of Ukrainian soldiers in Kursk being shot to hell and reduced significantly, the Ukrainian armed forces are dispatching replacements, so that, according to this expert, the latest figures show that there are 30,000 Ukrainian troops presently in Korsk.
8:29 That is an important consideration. It’s not as though they just are being wiped out and exterminated. Yeah, they’re being exterminated, and being replaced by others who are going to be exterminated. The issue has not gone away. As to the atrocities being committed against civilians, this was also addressed on this morning’s program. And I assume that your panelist from yesterday was not aware because it wouldn’t be watching a program on Russian state television this morning.
That is to say that the Russians are accusing the Brits of inciting the Ukrainian troops to commit atrocities, in the hope and expectation that this will have a big political uproar in Russia and put pressure on Putin and destabilize the government as all kinds of terrorism do. And Russian state television has been interviewing soldiers who have shown, of course, with restrictions on the video so that you don’t see faces of mangled and tortured people, you just see vaguely the bodies of civilians, grandmas and so on who’ve been tied up, who’ve been tortured in their basements before they were shot in the head or elsewhere.
So these atrocities are being shown on television, and they’re preparing for something which has to be mentioned also. That is their own Nuremberg trial at the end of this, when they intend to capture and put on trial in Moscow as many of those who are perpetrating these atrocities as they can.
Napolitano: 10:11 Wow. Is MI6 behind– If the Russian allegations are true and the British are fomenting this, that must mean MI6.
Doctorow: They named precisely MI6.
Napolitano: 10:22 Wow. Wow. Could you imagine MI6 and Ukrainian military officers on trial in Moscow a year from now?
Doctorow: Oh, very definitely. If Mr. Putin succeeds in what he is now carrying out, implementing rather successfully, then there will be enough captured foreign advisors, and they definitely have been building a case. They have their investigators out after each atrocity to describe in a manner that is suitable for presentation in court, what they have seen.
Napolitano: 11:06 Here’s President Putin. This is a great interview. He’s in the back seat of an automobile. You may have seen this two days ago. It’s a long interview. There are many segments, but Chris cut a very nice one, and this is President Putin’s view about negotiating with President Zelensky. Cut number 13 Chris.
Zarubin: 11:28 [English translation, v.o.] But if Zelensky says that he can be a negotiator, do you think that you can negotiate with him?
Putin: You can negotiate with anyone, but he is illegitimate, so he cannot sign anything. If he wants to take part in the talks, he can designate and appoint people for holding these talks. It is a matter of signing these documents and their final versions so as to guarantee security for both Ukraine and Russia in the long run. So everything must be perfect in this regard.
12:09 But according to the Ukrainian constitution, the president of Ukraine, even during martial law, a president of Ukraine cannot renew his term or stay in power after his term runs out. Only the national parliament can give the president this possibility.
Napolitano: 12:33 How significant is a statement like that from Vladimir Putin talking about negotiation without getting into the technical niceties– and maybe I’m diminishing the significance of this because it’s more than a technical nicety– but without getting into whether or not President Zelensky participates in the negotiation, how significant is it that Vladimir Putin is preparing for negotiations? And maybe this takes us back to my first question to you a little while ago, which was, in the Kremlin’s mind, is this war over?
Doctorow: 13:11 Well, The interview itself is very important. You’ll notice that the reporter who was asking the questions, the same Pavel Zarubin, whom I have called Putin’s shadow, because he’s always traveling with the president and taking where possible what look like spontaneous remarks and interviews, [have] actually been well prepared and should be taken to be official Russian government positions. So everything that you heard is the official position.
And that is to say that Mr. Putin is ready to agree to the start of negotiations on the understanding that they cannot be signed by the present illegitimate ruler in Kiev, but they can be taken, prepared for signature by whoever is designated finally as a legitimate president. Note that this is unlikely to be the constitutionally envisaged head of the parliament, of the Rada, because the Rada itself is technically illegitimate. It has also not had an election which was scheduled.
14:38 Therefore, what Russia wants aside from satisfying the nominal way, the demand of Donald Trump that they enter into negotiations. What exactly Russia sees as the timetable for someone signing this document is not clear. But it would not be the military. That was also ruled out in discussion among these very well-advised Kremlin insiders.
Napolitano: 15:08 I mean, would the parliament, the legislature of Ukraine deputize some human being other than President Zelensky to possess presidential powers and participate in negotiations? It seems to be that’s what President Putin was driving at in that back seat conversation we just witnessed.
Doctorow: Their designation of someone is not foreseen by the Constitution. The acting president or the president of Ukraine can only be elected, but the Constitution of Ukraine provides for the acting powers of president to be exercised by the president of the parliament.
Napolitano: I see.
Doctorrow: It’s a distinction.
Napolitano: 15:51 Okay. Switching gears slightly, you have reminded me, and you’ve reminded everybody that reads your materials, that next week is the 80th anniversary of Yalta. That’s the conference in February of 1945 between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt, as they were convinced that World War II was coming to an end. Does president Putin have in mind in your view, Professor Doctorow, another Yalta, this one with Donald Trump, a big-picture negotiation for long-term peaceful relationships between Russia and Europe and Russia and the United States?
Doctorow: 16:42 I think that Vladimir Putin had this in mind from before December 2021 when he and his team presented their demands to revise the security architecture in Europe to the United States in one version and to NATO in a second version.
I think he clearly was referring to what happened in Yalta, and there’s more to it. It is not just what you just mentioned. The Yalta agreement, aside from putting finishing touches on preparations for creation of the United Nations, it also addressed security in the Far East. That is to say, it corresponds to what has been a topical subject among international affairs experts for the last six months or more, that the end of the war in Ukraine should take in not just security in the West, the peninsula at the Western end of Eurasia called Europe, but also the eastern part, the Pacific part of Eurasia. and deal with China and all of the security problems around China.
17:59 So I would go on to say that in Mr. Putin’s thinking, he probably has also a big three. As there were big three in Yalta, a big three now being Xi, himself, and Donald Trump.
Napolitano: 18:15 Fascinating observations. This of course would presume that the conflagration in Ukraine was over. This is not the negotiation and the problems in Ukraine. This is a vaster, grander scheme, which might play right into Donald Trump’s personal and political aspirations.
Doctorow: Very definitely. In the person of Mr. Trump, the Russians have someone who understands spheres of influence, who understands, shall we say, real estate and how it is divided up and distributed. This is a man who is speaking the same realpolitik language as they are. And if anyone had any doubts, you look at what he said in the first days of entering into the Oval Office, about his plans for taking over for reasons of state necessity, Greenland, and taking over the Panama Canal.
This is the kind of big-boys stuff that the Russians can relate to, not because they’re dictators, but because they understand how the world works, how it always did work, and how it always will work, where like it or not, might makes right. And they would like to align right with might in a positive way.
Napolitano: 19:37 Does Putin trust Trump?
Doctorow: He doesn’t have to. Of course they don’t trust the Americans. But as Reagan said, trust and check. And in that sense, it’s a very limited type of trust in which they could enter into negotiations. But surely any agreements that they reach will be enforceable by Russian force of arms. And they will not be dependent on anybody’s say-so or word of trust or good handshake. Those days are absolutely out of discussion.
Napolitano: 20:12 What’s your view as to whether this grand Yalta 2.0 can come to pass and be successful. Or am I asking you effectively to predict the future?
Doctorow: It would be very, very good, Judge, if after your meeting with Lavrov, you were invited into the Oval Office to share what you learned and to put this kind of advice to Mr. Trump. Because if he stops and thinks about it, this should be exactly what he could use, both to introduce us to this golden age of peace that he was talking about in accepting the oath of office, taking the oath of office, but to put behind us all, the wreckage in Ukraine that the Biden administration wreaked.
Napolitano: 21:05 Wow. Fascinating stuff, Professor Doctorow. Absolutely, utterly fascinating. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you for being our eyes and ears in Moscow. You know you can come back to us whenever there’s breaking news, but we all look forward to these weekly sessions together, and I hope they’ll continue. I hope we can see you next week.
Doctorow; Well, very kind of you.
Napolitano: Thank you. Thank you, Professor. Have a fine day. And coming up later today at one o’clock here, Aaron Mate; at two o’clock, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson; at three o’clock, the always worth waiting for Professor John Mearsheimer.
I strongly urge the community of subscribers to this web platform to read attentively this transcript because in the ample time that was given to me by host Nima Alkhorshid I had the opportunity to go well beyond anything I have said in my recent essays about the skeletons that the Russians have taken from their closets to show the massive participation of ordinary Europeans from France, from Belgium, from elsewhere in the armies that Hitler directed against the USSR, as well as the key role that Finns played in enforcing the murderous, genocidal Blockade of Leningrad. My remarks here regarding Yalta and its relevance to the forthcoming Summit between Trump and Putin also are more explicit than my last essay and amount to essential reading.
To ease the task, I have cleaned up the transcript in a modest but I think effective way to improve the grammar while removing dilatory or repetitive words.
Transcript submitted by a reader
Nima R. Alkhorshid: 0:05 Hi everybody, it is Thursday, January 30th, 2025, and our friend Gilbert Doctorow is back with us. Welcome back, Gilbert.
Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: Well, thanks. Good to see you.
Alkhorshid: Let’s get started with your piece on your blog, on your website, in which you’re talking about the collective memory in Russia and the collective amnesia in the West. What are the main points of this new piece on your part?
Doctorow: Well, let me explain. My role, as many of your viewers will know, is to communicate what Russians are saying. Some of these points I agree with, some of them I don’t, but it is essential that they get adequate and representative coverage for discussion in our own debates, on our side. And what I’m saying here in that essay is what I have heard from very authoritative, serious Russians looking at the proceedings that took place last Friday in Oświęcim or Auschwitz in Poland, to commemorate the liberation of those remaining inmates, prisoners, in the death camp when the Red Army came through and freed them. This is 80 years ago.
1:32 Of course, the exceptional nature of this event, which is in contrast to all preceding round-number remembrances of the anniversary — five years ago, for example, the Russians were invited, which is logical. To be exact, the Red Army, not the Russian Federation, liberated Auschwitz and the other camps, but they liberated all of the death camps of the Nazis, most of which were in Poland, in fact.
2:13 But the day’s commemoration was precisely for Auschwitz, which coincides with Holocaust Day, an internationally recognized day of remembrance for the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi crimes.
And of course, there were many others. Reportedly, 1.5 million were killed in Auschwitz, people that is, of whom 1 million were Jews. That means 500,000 were not Jews. There were others, they were gypsies, they were political opponents of the regime, of the Nazi regime, they were other minorities that were considered to be Untermenschen by the Nazis. Well, one million Jews.
3:02 In the big order of things, this is how we all think, the general public, the mainstream media in the West, and everywhere, who spoke about Holocaust Day and Auschwitz. They remembered in terms of this scientifically engineer-designed rooms for gassing and for very efficient, effective destruction of people and whatever remained of them.
The reality of course is a subject of discussion, I wouldn’t say dispute, but at least of active discussion among academics in what was launched several years ago by a certain Timothy Snyder, who is a Yale history professor, who did a lot of research in Poland and in Ukraine for his masterwork. It’s called “The Bloodlands”, which gives an additional understanding of what happened. Maybe a few million died in these, all of the concentration death camps put together.
4:15 But six million is the overall number, and the vast majority of those people were killed in the killing fields across East Central Europe and Western Soviet Union or Russia today, Belarus today. And that is not a minor detail, which if you allow me to explain how this fits into our understanding of the Holocaust day and of what it was commemorating. The point is that you could have a few criminals, relatively few criminals, who would run these death camps that were engineered, as I say, by good German engineers using state-of-the-art technology to destroy people. And they could be run by relatively few people. And these relatively few people were criminals of one sort or another who were placed into these positions.
5:16 That gives you an interpretation of the Holocaust and of Germany’s role in it, which is wrong. The fact is that a vast number of Germans were involved in the destruction of Jewry in Europe, by the Wehrmacht, in the regular German army, not in SS units as such, yes, they played a big role, but [it] was ordinary Germans who were the murderers in the fields of Eastern Europe and Western Soviet Union. And Timothy Snyder’s research changed completely our understanding of the Holocaust to those of us who care to know facts and not just to repeat glib generalizations.
6:06 In any case, the commemoration on the 27th of January of the liberation by the Red Army of these remaining prisoners in Auschwitz was marred by the treatment of Russia, which was excluded from invitations. Because as everyone knows– and I’m being ironic here, because some people have missed my irony in that essay that you’re referring to– we all know that Russia is the aggressor and is violating all laws of human rights and civilized conduct.
6:52 Well, in any case, for reasons that were particular to the EU and to Poland as the most outstanding, egregious promoter of Russia hatred in Europe, Russia was excluded from the invitation list, whereas they had regularly been present. In fact, Putin himself was present at one of the commemorations, early in his presidency after the turn of the millennium. They were excluded. And so the Russians on television had good reason to analyze and discuss what’s going on, why they were excluded, and the leader of a country that is ruled by neo-Nazis from their perspective, I’m speaking about Zelensky and his regime in Kiev, he was invited. He was not just invited, but he was celebrated.
7:50 The article in British newspapers– “The Guardian” is the one who had the longest and most detailed article on the events in Auschwitz– their biggest photo, and a color photo, was of a very contrite and concerned Mr. Zelensky placing one of these candles, a Jahrzeit candle to be precise. This is wax in a glass so that it burns for 24 hours. He was placing one of these memorial candles, among others placed by other dignitaries. And he was captured in a photograph in the British newspaper.
What was he doing there? There’s still more. What was Scholz, the Chancellor of Germany doing there, when the people who liberated Auschwitz are absent and the people who perpetrated Auschwitz are present. This is a very interesting presentation. And the Russians find it interesting in the sense that it colors their appreciation of the world order today, that the world order in the West is standing on its head. That values have been turned upside down. That the ravings of the Russophobes in the Baltic States and Poland in particular have become the narrative of the European Union and also the United States.
9:34 What ravings am I talking about? This goes back to the question of who was really responsible for World War II. And the revisionist position that countries like Poland and the Baltic states have been promoting is that Stalin’s Russia was at least as guilty of the crimes against humanity that were perpetrated before, during, and after World War II, as guilty as Nazi Germany was.
So the guilt that they want to lay at the door of Russia is part of the overall project which America initiated, and Europe has very happily continued, to portray Russia as a pariah state, as a state that cannot be invited to civilized events like the memorial services in Auschwitz.
10:37 That was one event last Friday, which caught the attention of the thinking, the talking classes in Moscow and Russia. The other event was their own event. This is the commemoration of the 81st anniversary of the liberation of, the breaking the blockade on Leningrad, which cost the lives of one million or more, nearly all civilians, and was in terms of the present-day definition of the word “genocide” was a genocide. It was the intentional starving to death of the civilian population of the city and the plans to raze the city to the ground if the German armies were successful in their venture. Again, I use the word German army.
11:39 The murder of a million or more Russian civilians in Leningrad was the work of the German army, which means the nation in arms. This means that there were hundreds of thousands of ordinary German citizens who were participating in these atrocities. And it has to influence our understanding of a question that is very timely today, thanks to our loud mouth, close advisor to Mr. Trump, Elon Musk, who spoke in this very same time period about Germany moving on and moving past its war guilt from the Nazi era.
This is a question which was also raised on television by the same program that I’m referring to, this happened to have been the “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov”, one of the two or three most important talk shows or news and analysis shows on Russian state television. So these issues are topical in East and West.
12:48 On the Russian side, they were highly critical of the forgiving or forgetting. They prefer to call it forgetting, in the sense of amnesia: “we, the generation today, cannot be answerable for the crimes of our ancestors.” This is a certain issue which I have discussed with readers of my essays, who have questioned this and have every right to question it. Who wants to be held responsible for the sins of grandfathers, or still earlier?
13:37 But the issue cannot be resolved with that little magic wand, “we aren’t responsible”. Let me just remind everyone that for Americans in particular, this is highly topical, because it’s all about woke, which has been a kind of ideological mantra of the Democrats in their vote-gathering efforts among the black and other minority populations in the States — woke that we are responsible and answerable for crimes committed by two or three generations before us.
So this issue on Russian television also should resonate with audiences in places like England, which has its own woke and the United States, where it went very far and found expression in legislative acts and programs that Biden instituted and which Trump is now busy dismantling for inclusiveness, preference to minorities of every imaginable variety, and so forth, at the expense of the majority of the population.
14:52 So the Russian commemoration of the 81st anniversary of the liberation of the city of Leningrad, today’s Petersburg, from a stranglehold siege that was mainly carried out by the Germans, but also carried out by the Finns. And I bring this up to those who have not paid attention to it.
The Russians in the present state of open confrontation with virtually the entire West, have finally put up on the screen and shown to their population facts, documentary films that never ever left the archives in the proceeding 70 years, 80 years, 100 years, because they worked against the overriding principles of brotherliness, of forgive and forget, which was the Soviet position on these matters, and which the Soviet Union could afford because it politically controlled those countries which otherwise would be deeply offended by the truth coming out.
16:15 The truth about the Finns’ participation in the strangling of Petersburg or Leningrad was never ever shown to the Russian people. It was a deep secret, because the Finns were quiet. The Finns were friends. The Finns had learned their lessons and were no longer a threat to the Russians.
Well that’s all been turned on its head. The Finns are now trying as best they can to be the biggest threat and security risk to Russia that they can be. And the Russians have now let loose the facts that were in their archives. I can say at the same time, this goes back six months or a year, that the documentary films in the Soviet archives about the participation of all of Europe on the Hitler side in the armies attacking the Soviet Union, those documentary films have been put on television and we find for example that the Russian figures show that there were more French participating in Hitler’s armies attacking Russia than there were French resistance fighters fighting Hitler. They have put on television, films showing that there were vast numbers of Belgians, and particularly Flemish, who were gladly taking part in Hitler’s armies in his attack on the Soviet Union.
17:53 So these difficult facts from the past, which were kept in the archives, not to upset relations with now-friendly countries, have– in the course of the special military operation and in the course of the evolving open hatred for Russia that the European countries have allowed themselves to engage in– well, the Russians have started opening the door, opening the boxes and showing who was who when, and who has a right to speak, and who should just shut up.
And I close this remark by pointing to the hideous statement by the acting, and I say acting because he lost his ruling position last June when his parties were voted out. The acting Prime Minister of Belgium, Mr. De Croo– at the gathering, this is about 10 days ago, of the Europeans, for European members present in the Davos Economic Forum– De Croo from the dais said, “Mr. Putin is our enemy.” May he hang his head in shame for making that outrageous remark. But unfortunately, he was only joining the general mood of 25 of the 27 European member states.
Alkhorshid: 19:29 And if they believe that Russia is their enemy, then are they going to continue the fight? Are they going to change their strategy? Because this sort of strategy on their part is harming Europe more than Russia.
Doctorow: Nima, in several months, I will publish volume one of a two-volume collection of my essays since the spring of 2021 under the title “War Diaries”. And the overriding picture, which I will describe on the back cover of volume one is that I am writing history looking forward, when we’re all in a state of confusion, whereas academic [historians] of the war are writing them looking backwards, when everything that happened is known.
20:19 No, we don’t know today how Europe will break up, but break up it will. It’s in the process of breaking up. We have all been caught out in making predictions about how close the end of the Ukraine war was. I am looking at things that I wrote in the spring of 2121, and I say, “My goodness, how wrong you were.” But so was everybody else, on the Russian side, that is.
20:50 On the United States side, everybody predicted a war would come, and they should have known, because they were doing everything possible to precipitate one. On the Russian side, they were doing everything possible to avoid it, And the general talk was about no war. In any case, answering your question, how will Europe proceed? Nobody knows. I’m in an active discussion with my close colleague and the translator of my works, my essays in Germany, about what’s going to happen on February 23rd.
21:25 The overall consensus in mainstream is that Mr. Merz, the leader of the Christian Democrats who had at last polling 32% popular vote, that he will be victorious, he will put together a governing coalition from the center, of the centrist parties, and that things will get even worse, because Merz’s position on Russia is even less realistic and, shall we say, insane, very much in line with the absurd statements that come out of people like Lindsey Graham, whereas Scholz will look like a peacenik if Mr. Merz takes over.
22:09 But we don’t know. Thanks to the help from Elon Musk, the leader of the Alternative for Germany, Frau Weidel, her ratings rose from 19 to 31%. At the same time– that’s on the right. On the right, which is for peace and for normal relations with Russia, among many other things, but our interest on this show is what do they think and what are they saying on international affairs. The other side on the left, formerly from Die Linke and having formed her own party, is Sahra Wagenknecht. And she had at last polling 11%. If you add 31% and 11%, my goodness, that’s a bigger block than Mr. Merz can easily put together. So how Germany will move is an open question.
23:14 Which part of Germany, which part of Europe is going to collapse first is unpredictable. We all can make a guess, but let’s acknowledge that we’re all making educated guesses, not based on concrete facts that we can rely on.
Alkhorshid: 23:37 And, Gilbert, do you see that the way that Donald Trump is dealing with Russia is helping to build trust between the two nations, between the two governments in order to go after some sort of solution in Ukraine?
Doctorow: Well, it’s good you raise that question, Nima, because it is very topical, and it is widely discussed, and I’d say disputed, among well-informed experts, both in mainstream and in alternative media. There are those who say that “watch what Mr. Trump does, not what he says”. There are those who say that Trump is just creating this fog, repeating the absurdities that Blinken and Sullivan were disseminating for three years, because he wants to keep his enemies off guard, not to allow, give them material that they could use to attack him and to throw off course his domestic program in Congress, which is his first and most important consideration.
24:47 This is all possible. I don’t deny that this is an explanation, although I would say it’s a terrible way to run a railway. My point is that I don’t see a need for that. He is also conducting another very important policy initiative. And of this, there can be no doubt that this is going on, that he has a secret diplomacy with Iran, with Tehran going on, to resolve the fundamental issues of the Iranian nuclear program and other issues between the States and Iran that have been the justification for very cruel sanctions on the Iranian economy that had cost them very dear and which they would like to overturn.
And there is every reason to expect that a deal will be done with Iran, despite the fact that a war with Iran has been the greatest ambition of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is now on his way to Washington to confer with his great friend Donald Trump. So do we hear anything about the secret diplomacy? Is Mr. Trump walking around and talking about how many nuclear bombs Iran is about to deploy. No, he has had the good sense to keep his mouth shut about Iran.
26:27 And I ask, why doesn’t he keep his mouth shut about Russia and Ukraine? I don’t see the purpose of his making inane statements which only undermine his credibility among Russians and undermine the chances for a successful meeting and negotiations to end the war and to resolve other issues of a much greater scope for the security of the world that are within reach of the United States, Russia and China, if they can be persuaded to do something constructive as opposed to destructive.
Alkhorshid: 27:07 It seems that the way that Netanyahu and the administration in Israel are seeing the situation between Iran and Russia and the way that Russia is helping in negotiations and they have been helping the negotiations, JCPOA, they were part of that, of those negotiations. It seems that doesn’t feel good for Israelis. That’s why they’re not happy with Russians. They don’t want Russians to be part of that. They don’t want Russians to facilitate the process of negotiations. Do you see that’s the main reason, the way that they’re behaving toward Russia?
Doctorow: Well, the Russian relations with Israel are very complicated. They’re also very secretive, and none of us knows the full picture, to give an evaluation of them. There are many factors, including the ones that you just mentioned. But there was the unanswered question, why the Russians did not provide air cover to Syria. Why they didn’t provide advanced air defense systems to Syria. Why they allowed Israel over years to freely bomb various towns and arms caches in Syria.
28:29 So that just as an example of the peculiarities, why was Russia going easy on Israel when it could have, and perhaps many will say should have, been on the other side, on the side of Iran and Syria and Iraq in combating forces that were supported by the United States to the detriment of Russia in the Middle East?
These are questions that we cannot answer. There are many other questions about Mr. Putin’s time in office. He has many detractors, particularly, I won’t name them, you know them, you’ve interviewed one of them recently, who are saying that he’s weak and pusillanimous and he’s not really defending Russia’s interests. I can’t answer that question. Nobody can. But I do admit freely that there are questions why he tolerated, for example, the reign of corruption and bleeding of Russian interests, and I would say sabotage that people like Chubais did for 20 years. And this was open knowledge in Russia that the man was a threat to Mr. Putin and to his government.
29:57 And nothing happened to him. He was allowed to sneak away and to rejoin some of the billions of dollars and euros that he had stolen from the Russian treasury in various scams relating to the very high offices that he occupied over the course of decades as the head of Rosnano, which was a completely fake organization, which was as you remember, the nano business was in its own time, which is going back a little more than a decade, as widely promoted as the artificial intelligence nonsense, sorry, is today. That was where you placed all your bets. Well, Mr. Chubais was sitting on all those bets and taking out his commission.
30:49 Everyone knew that and nothing happened to him. So there are a lot of questions about Mr. Putin’s time in power, which will only be answered in due time, certainly after I’m gone and possibly after a lot of other people who are watching it are gone.
Alkhorshid: 31:07 You mentioned the way that Donald Trump is treating Russia today and the perception on the part of Russians. But do they really feel that even Keith Kellogg and the way that he’s talking is just not the main objective of Donald Trump? Because that could be so much unconnected to the reality.
Doctorow: Well, Russians are not paying so much attention to each of these personalities. They’re not even paying that much attention to the personality of Donald Trump. The underlying principle, point of analysis, is that the United States foreign policy and much else is directed by the deep state and it’s almost a matter of indifference who sits in the Oval Office. Or least of all, is it a matter of indifference who is advising or pretending to advise the man who sits in the Oval office.
32:01 I’m not sure I agree with that. I do think that the American president has a good deal of latitude to influence and shape events. And whether he succeeds depends on his ability to manage in general, whether or not he can get people who are nominally subordinate to him to actually do what he tells them to do. So that remains to be seen. There are people who say that during his first administration, Trump performed very badly in that respect, and that his efforts, his instructions, his direct executive orders were being subverted by his deputies. We’ll see how he does this time.
The Russians, as I say, they’re looking at the big picture in which they see the deep state and much less interested in the personality quirks. In America in particular, a great deal is made about the personality of people in power and people who are not in power. Personalities tend to take precedence over issues, over political issues and political causes and interest groups. The Russians are more likely to focus on the interest groups behind events than they are on the personality flukes of one person or another.
Alkhorshid: 33:19 The other move on the part of Donald Trump, which was so interesting to watch, is that he said that he’s going to put pressure on Saudi Arabia to reduce the price of oil, which was, it seemed, that rejected by Saudis so far.
But on the other hand, it seems that he’s trying to get closer to Chinese, to Xi, and in order to, the same sort of policy that the Biden administration tried to manage, but they were not successful in those attempts. Do you think that Donald Trump would do better than Joe Biden? He thinks that he can put pressure on Russia this way?
Doctorow: Well, I think it’s too early to reach conclusions as to whether what Donald Trump is saying and even some of the things he’s doing are indicative of his overarching plans for the future. He has his own notion of how deal-making goes on.
Part of it is bluff and bullying and saying things and doing things which are not his intentions and which are to keep his talking partners and the rest of us off guard and clueless. What he really has in mind, we don’t know. We’ll find out in the fairly near term. But I would like to touch upon one other aspect of this. To what extent the utterly ignorant and incorrect statements that Trump has been making about Russia and about the state of its economy, about the state of its military, about the number of casualties it has suffered.
35:13 I have heard some of my peers attribute this to disinformation coming from the highly corrupt CIA and other intelligence agencies. That is possible, but I would like to ask a simple question that nobody seems to be asking or even considering. Doesn’t this guy ever open a newspaper? If you just, all right, I admit, I don’t expect that Donald Trump is reading “Financial Times”. Okay.
Maybe that’s too high-brow for him. But I was considering how this “New York Times” has descended over 20 or 30 years into a newspaper featuring more cuisine and gastronomy articles than news, than world news. He might just dip into the “New York Times”. And every day now, the truth about the state of combat on the ground between Russia and Ukraine is being fairly, accurately reported. It is clear that there’s been a decision in the editorial offices, “Enough is enough. We know we’re going to lose the war, so let’s prepare the public for it.”
36:35 And they are reporting fairly accurately what’s going on. So Donald, open “The New York Times” and throw away the scrap of paper you’re getting from the CIA.
Alkhorshid: 36:48 Maybe that’s why Vladimir Putin recently sent a video message to the people in the West — the main reason was on Trump. The other thing, Gilbert, with the 80th anniversary of the Yalta conference, that you believe that it’s more relevant to today’s geopolitics than ever before. What’s the main point of that?
Doctorow: Yes, on the 4th of February, that’s to say next Tuesday, the Russians will be celebrating, they’re not commemorating but celebrating, the Yalta Conference, which opened in the Crimea, by the way. And the Crimea, when it opened, was part of the Russian Federation, by the way. The Yalta Conference was a meeting of the big three, there was Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, in February of 1945, when the end of the war, the victory in Europe was already very clear to everyone, everyone except Adolf Hitler. The outcome on the battlefields was clear. The Russians were 65 kilometers from Berlin. And they met, three met to discuss and to reach agreement on the post-war map of Europe. Territorial map, political map.
38:24 These were all realist thinkers. There was also this humanitarian overlay, the values-based overlay of a United Nations, which already had been agreed and certain points in how it would operate were hammered out in the Yalta conference. So that aspect of the post-World War I order was also furthered and defined at Yalta. But the main thing was in the realm of realpolitik, of national interests and recognition of the principle of spheres of influence.
How Russian or Soviet, properly speaking Soviet, control over Eastern Europe would evolve was not entirely clear. It may not have been entirely clear even to Stalin. The principle though was that Russia needed a buffer. It would not allow the neighboring states to be such easy ramps for a West European invasion of its country. And the principle was defensive, for Russia’s interests not to undergo this terrible catastrophe that they were just barely surviving in February of 1945.
39:52 And so the principle was spheres of influence. The principle was that the major military forces in the world would gather and resolve issues about how the post-war world would be operated. That was three countries, actually it was two countries, the United States and Russia, and Britain was there for the ride, because Britain’s glory days were already long past. But nonetheless, France was, could just as easily have been inserted, but it wasn’t. France was barely mentioned when it came to the partition of Germany and what little slice it would get as one of the victors.
40:48 Now why is it interesting to bring up Yalta now? Other than the fact that the 80th anniversary is rolling around, and people should say something about it. I believe that the Yalta Conference was closely re-examined by Vladimir Putin in the days before he issued the ultimatum to the United States and a separate ultimatum to NATO to revise the security architecture in Europe, essentially to roll back the NATO military installations and deployment, temporary or otherwise, of NATO personnel in the area that was formerly the Warsaw Pact countries, and also that was included, countries that had been part of the Soviet Union, that is the Baltic States, to roll this back.
42:03 So he was looking in December of 2021 for an overall agreement with Washington about the rollback of the NATO expansion that had been a violation of agreements that were reached, oral agreements to be sure, that were reached between Russia, well, the Soviet Union, under Gorbachev, and United States, and Germany and other interested parties in Europe before Russia agreed to withdraw its forces from the Warsaw Pact countries. And this whole experience of Yalta was seen by Putin as highly relevant, what he wanted next.
43:05 The means of reaching agreement diplomatically failed. They failed as we saw by the middle of January [2022], after there were several meetings, separate meetings by the way, between Russian representatives and representatives of the NATO powers, the OSCE. These were involved in meetings in Europe, and they all led to nothing. Jens Stoltenberg had been the first and the quickest to say that these were non-starters, that they would not negotiate. Washington was slower and never said no, but it never said yes either.
And it went beyond the time limit that the Russians set for getting a definitive answer to their request for review of the security architecture. And the next step was that Russia moved on to “military technical means”. That was how they called it. We all were confused and I have to admit with or without my knowledge of Russian, I was also confused. I’d say it was more appropriately what they meant is what the Americans call kinetic warfare.
44:23 It was very simple, in which you use a lot of military hardware. Yes, that’s the technical part. So the start of the special military operation was the consequence of the failure of the American interlocutors and of the EU member states to deal seriously with Mr. Putin’s demand for revision of the architecture, which would ensure that Russia has some genuine security and is not facing American missiles at its borders and facing a five- or seven-minute time before it is annihilated at any time of choosing of Washington.
45:06 So these were the issues. And I believe that they are still uppermost in the mind of Mr. Putin as he is considering what he’ll be talking to Donald Trump about. The Russians have already made it perfectly clear that they consider the war is over, just as all the parties to Yalta considered the war was over. It wasn’t over. We all know it wasn’t over until May 9th, but in February they considered the war was over, and they were deciding what comes next.
So it is today with the situation on the ground in Ukraine. From the Russian standpoint, the war is over. Yes, of course, there are still fighting soldiers on the front lines. There are still what is estimated now to be 30,000 of Ukraine’s best elite forces still deployed in the Kursk province of Russian Federation. But the denouement, the end game is perfectly visible.
46:12 All of these Ukrainian forces will be destroyed, destroyed or surrender. And if it happens in two weeks, if it happens in two months or longer, is a matter of indifference to Moscow. It will happen. And increasingly, our major media are saying the same thing. And so it is timely to reflect on what happened in Yalta and what does it mean for the prospects of Mr. Trump when he finally meets with Mr. Putin.
Just remember, as I said, Yalta was a very complex agreement. Yes, it was about the settlement in Central Europe, the areas that were under Russian occupation because they had beaten back the Wehrmacht in all of Eastern Europe. But it was also about Eurasia. This is, we’re forgetting, this is a term that came up months and months ago, that what is needed is a settlement not just for the peninsula at the western end of Eurasia that’s called Europe, but also for the eastern parts of Eurasia, for the Pacific basin countries of Eurasia.
47:37 And let’s remember that that was also dealt with at Yalta. Nobody talks about it very much. Certainly, we tend to forget that at Yalta, the United States and Russia agreed on Russia’s entering the war against Japan, which was scheduled to take place several months after the end of the war in Europe. And the Russians were going to deploy very important forces, and they were going to make available to the United States air bases. First, it was talked about Vladovostok and then I think you went further up to the interior of Russia along the Amur River, they would allow Americans, Air Force bombers to be based there for their bombing raids over Japan.
48:28 The cost of that, which was also set down in writing, and not just in oral agreements, was that the Russians would receive certain territorial compensation. They would receive once again territory that had been taken from them after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, which they lost. And that meant Kamchatka, that meant southern Sakhalin, that meant the Kurile Islands, which are a very topical subject today, since the Japanese refuse to acknowledge the settlement terms of Yalta as it pertains in their territories. In any case, there was this aspect of Yalta which concerned the eastern part of Eurasia. And so it also is topical.
49:15 The logic of this, of course, is that any meeting that Trump has with Putin has the opportunity to go beyond the wreckage of Ukraine, which can only look like a debacle for the United States if it is the whole and total sum of their points for discussion, to an area of win-win, which is defining in terms that a person like Trump understands perfectly, territorial division of the world, since he’s working hard on that in the Western hemisphere with his pretensions vis-a-vis Greenland, Panama, and so forth. So this is the kind of talk that could really appeal to a man like Donald Trump.
50:04 And there are many, of course, listeners who will find this terribly offensive. But for the peace of the world, that is a much better approach to dealing with the other global players than anything that the Democrats under Biden were trying to do.
Alkhorshid:: Thank you so much, Gilbert, for being with us today. Great pleasure as always.
Doctorow: Well, thanks for the opportunity to discuss these things.
This discussion is notable especially for the material on the situation in Kursk, where the Ukrainians perversely have been topping up their fighting forces with their best prepared and equipped units every time that the Russians hammer them down and exterminate large numbers of their men. Russian intelligence experts now estimate that there are 30,000 Ukrainian fighters in Kursk at this moment. The reinforcements to Kursk are coming at the expense of the front lines in the Donbas, which are crumbling.
Moreover, the Ukrainian troops in Kursk are torturing and murdering civilians and this is being recorded by Russian investigators who are preparing to put the offenders on trial in Nuremberg type proceedings in Moscow when the war ends. They say it is precisely the British, namely MI6, that is inciting the Ukrainians to do this in the expectation that it will outrage the broad Russian public and destabilize the government in Moscow.
Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)
„Judging Freedom“-Ausgabe vom 30. Januar: Vertraut Putin Trump?
Diese Diskussion ist vor allem wegen des Materials zur Lage in Kursk bemerkenswert, wo die Ukrainer ihre Kampftruppen jedes Mal, wenn die Russen sie niederschlagen und eine große Anzahl ihrer Männer auslöschen, auf perverse Weise mit ihren am besten vorbereiteten und ausgerüsteten Einheiten aufstocken. Russische Geheimdienstexperten schätzen, dass sich derzeit 30.000 ukrainische Kämpfer in Kursk befinden. Die Verstärkung für Kursk geht zu Lasten der Frontlinien im Donbas, die bröckeln.
Darüber hinaus foltern und ermorden die ukrainischen Truppen in Kursk Zivilisten, und dies wird von russischen Ermittlern aufgezeichnet, die sich darauf vorbereiten, die Täter in einem Verfahren nach dem Vorbild des Nürnberger Prozesses in Moskau vor Gericht zu stellen, wenn der Krieg endet. Sie sagen, dass es genau die Briten, namentlich der MI6, sind, die die Ukrainer dazu anstiften, in der Erwartung, dass dies die breite russische Öffentlichkeit empören und die Regierung in Moskau destabilisieren wird.
Some subscribers to my website occasionally write in to say they are so pleased to find that a day after I post each video interview here I also put up a written transcript, because they prefer to read the argumentation rather than to watch the original audio visual version. Others say the opposite.
What you will find in the lengthy conversation today with host Nima Alkhorshid is my oral presentation of the material in my last two essays. The first dealt with the commemorations in Auschwitz and Petersburg last Friday pertaining to the liberation of prisoners at the infamous Nazi death camp by Red Army forces 80 years ago and the breaking of the Leningrad Blockade 81 years ago. The second dealt with the upcoming celebration in Russia of the Yalta Conference between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt that established the spheres of influence and control in Europe by the respective Allies at the war’s end and also the areas to be taken over by the USSR in the Far East in compensation for its joining the war against Imperial Japan.
The time on air also gave me the opportunity to talk about what skeletons the Russians have been removing from their closets (archives) to air on television as relations with all of Europe have gone from bad to worse in the course of the Special Military Operation.
Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)
„Dialogue Works“-Ausgabe vom 30. Januar: Kollektive Amnesie im Westen
Einige Abonnenten meiner Website schreiben mir gelegentlich, dass sie sehr erfreut sind, dass ich einen Tag nach der Veröffentlichung jedes Videointerviews hier auch eine schriftliche Abschrift veröffentliche, da sie es vorziehen, die Argumentation zu lesen, anstatt sich die ursprüngliche audiovisuelle Version anzusehen. Andere sagen das Gegenteil.
Was Sie in dem heutigen langen Gespräch mit Gastgeber Nima Alkhorshid finden werden, ist meine mündliche Präsentation des Materials aus meinen letzten beiden Essays. Der erste befasste sich mit den Gedenkfeiern in Auschwitz und Petersburg am vergangenen Freitag anlässlich der Befreiung der Gefangenen im berüchtigten Todeslager der Nazis durch die Rote Armee vor 80 Jahren und der Beendigung der Leningrader Blockade vor 81 Jahren. Das zweite Thema war die bevorstehende Feier in Russland anlässlich der Konferenz von Jalta zwischen Churchill, Stalin und Roosevelt, auf der die Einfluss- und Kontrollbereiche in Europa durch die jeweiligen Alliierten bei Kriegsende festgelegt wurden, sowie die Gebiete im Fernen Osten, die von der UdSSR als Ausgleich für ihren Kriegseintritt gegen das kaiserliche Japan übernommen werden sollten.
Die Sendezeit gab mir auch die Gelegenheit, darüber zu sprechen, welche Leichen die Russen aus ihren Archiven geholt haben, um sie im Fernsehen zu präsentieren, da sich die Beziehungen zu ganz Europa im Verlauf der militärischen Spezialoperation immer weiter verschlechtert haben.
We each have our own preferred topics for research and publishing, and I am no different from my academic and journalist peers in this respect. However, I am on frequent call from one or another media outlet from a variety of countries requesting interviews which interrupt my personal agenda and compel me to take a look at issues that had not been on my ‘to do’ list.
Thus it was earlier this morning when I went to my computer to do a quick preparation for an interview with the Russian commercial television station NTV later today that will be included in the documentary video on the Yalta Conference they have scheduled to air on the weekend.
Why Yalta? Why now?
Last Friday, 27 January, Russians commemorated the 81st anniversary of the lifting of the Blockade of Leningrad. On the same day, Europeans and invited guests from North America were commemorating in Auschwitz (Oświęcim, Poland) the 80th anniversary of the liberation of survivors of that death camp by the Red Army of the USSR, albeit without any representative of the Russian Federation having been invited.
Meanwhile, on 4th February, less than a week from now, the Russians will be ‘celebrating’ the 80th anniversary of the opening of a Conference in the Crimean city of Yalta between the Allied leaders Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. The end of the war in Europe was approaching. Soviet (Russian) troops were just 65 kilometers from Berlin after rolling back the German Wehrmacht from Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. This Conference decided the allocation of spheres of influence and control in post-war Europe….and not only in Europe insofar as this was also when the entry of the USSR into the war against Imperial Japan was decided, together with what territorial concessions Moscow would get in the Far East for its participation. For those with an appreciation of irony, please note that at the time, the Crimea was still an integral part of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic; its transfer to Ukraine came later, under Stalin’s successor Khrushchev.
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The Wikipedia entry on the Yalta Conference tells us in its summary of the points in the ‘Declaration of Liberated Europe,’ the closing document signed by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, that “Germany would undergo demilitarization and denazification.”
My reading of the Declaration shows that those precise words do not appear there, though the overarching principles they represent surely are there in the conditions for dismemberment of Germany, for payment of reparations and for trying Nazi war criminals. Why is this important? Because it is perfectly clear that Vladimir Putin had in mind the timing of Yalta in the final days of Europe’s deadliest war to that time; who participated in Yalta, namely the leaders of the principal military powers of the time; and what they agreed to, namely a geopolitical solution based on the national interests of the victor(s).
What I am saying is that Vladimir Putin clearly had in mind a Yalta type conference as the wished-for outcome when in December 2021 he presented his demands to the United States and to NATO for revising the security architecture in Europe. It is also highly likely he had in mind negotiations going still further with Washington to take in Eurasia as a whole, all the way out to the Pacific Region.
“Demilitarization and denazification.” These were the stated objectives of the Special Military Operation which Vladimir Putin delivered his televised address to his nation just ahead of launching his invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
Why are the above observations important? Because of their relevance to the coming discussions between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump over the end of the Ukraine war. From the standpoint of the Kremlin, the war with Ukraine is already over, just as effectively the War in Europe was already over in February 1945. The Russians have won. What they want to talk about with Trump is precisely the security architecture of Eurasia, and this gives the American president the opportunity to bury the rubble of the disastrous, failed campaign of the Biden Administration to impose a strategic defeat on Russia under the edifice of a new global age of peace within the terms of a Yalta 2.0 agreement in which everyone wins.
Logically this Yalta 2.0 agreement should go further than allocation of spheres of influence, just as Yalta 1.0 did when it set out guidelines for implementing plans to establish the United Nations. The additional dimensions today should cover the outstanding issues on global strategic stability that restore prohibitions on deployment of medium range ballistic missiles and ensure that no country enjoys the illusion of having a first strike capability against competitors or adversaries. For these talks, just as with respect to spheres of influence in the Far East, it is obvious that the People’s Republic of China should be a party to the talks.
Needless to say, all of these issues cannot be resolved in a single Summit meeting, just as Yalta was not the first or the last meeting to establish the contours of the post-WWII world among the victors. But the coming Putin-Trump meeting can lay down the principles of the way forward and set up working groups to deal with the details.
The question of the moment is who will describe this path to the Nobel Prize for Peace to the occupant of the Oval Office.
80. Jahrestag der Konferenz von Jalta: aktueller denn je für die heutige Geopolitik
Jeder von uns hat seine eigenen bevorzugten Themen für Forschung und Veröffentlichung, und ich bin in dieser Hinsicht nicht anders als meine akademischen und journalistischen Kollegen. Allerdings werde ich häufig von dem einen oder anderen Medienunternehmen aus verschiedenen Ländern um Interviews gebeten, die meine persönliche Agenda unterbrechen und mich dazu zwingen, mich mit Themen zu befassen, die nicht auf meiner „To-do-Liste“ standen.
So war es auch heute Morgen, als ich an meinen Computer ging, um mich kurz auf ein Interview mit dem russischen kommerziellen Fernsehsender NTV vorzubereiten, das später am Tag stattfinden und in dem Dokumentarvideo über die Konferenz von Jalta enthalten sein wird, das am Wochenende ausgestrahlt werden soll.
Warum Jalta? Warum jetzt?
Am vergangenen Freitag, dem 27. Januar, gedachten die Russen des 81. Jahrestags der Aufhebung der Blockade von Leningrad. Am selben Tag gedachten Europäer und geladene Gäste aus Nordamerika in Auschwitz (Oświęcim, Polen) des 80. Jahrestags der Befreiung der Überlebenden dieses Vernichtungslagers durch die Rote Armee der UdSSR, allerdings ohne dass ein Vertreter der Russischen Föderation eingeladen worden war.
In der Zwischenzeit, am 4. Februar, also in weniger als einer Woche, werden die Russen den 80. Jahrestag der Eröffnung einer Konferenz in der Krimstadt Jalta zwischen den alliierten Staats- und Regierungschefs Stalin, Roosevelt und Churchill „feiern“. Das Ende des Krieges in Europa rückte näher. Sowjetische (russische) Truppen waren nur 65 Kilometer von Berlin entfernt, nachdem sie die deutsche Wehrmacht aus Polen, Rumänien und Bulgarien zurückgedrängt hatten. Auf dieser Konferenz wurde die Aufteilung der Einfluss- und Kontrollbereiche im Nachkriegseuropa beschlossen … und nicht nur in Europa, da zu diesem Zeitpunkt auch der Kriegseintritt der UdSSR gegen das kaiserliche Japan beschlossen wurde, zusammen mit den territorialen Zugeständnissen, die Moskau im Fernen Osten für seine Teilnahme erhalten würde. Für diejenigen, die Ironie zu schätzen wissen, sei angemerkt, dass die Krim zu dieser Zeit noch ein integraler Bestandteil der Russischen Sozialistischen Sowjetrepublik war; ihre Übertragung an die Ukraine erfolgte später unter Stalins Nachfolger Chruschtschow.
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Der Wikipedia-Eintrag zur Konferenz von Jalta besagt in seiner Zusammenfassung der Punkte in der „Erklärung des befreiten Europas“, dem von Churchill, Roosevelt und Stalin unterzeichneten Abschlussdokument, dass „Deutschland entmilitarisiert und entnazifiziert werden würde“.
Meine Lektüre der Erklärung zeigt, dass diese genauen Worte dort nicht vorkommen, obwohl die übergreifenden Prinzipien, die sie repräsentieren, sicherlich in den Bedingungen für die Zerstückelung Deutschlands, für die Zahlung von Reparationen und für die Verfolgung von NS-Kriegsverbrechern enthalten sind. Warum ist das wichtig? Weil es völlig klar ist, dass Wladimir Putin den Zeitpunkt von Jalta in den letzten Tagen des bis dahin tödlichsten Krieges Europas im Sinn hatte; wer an Jalta teilnahm, nämlich die Führer der wichtigsten Militärmächte der damaligen Zeit; und worauf sie sich einigten, nämlich eine geopolitische Lösung, die auf den nationalen Interessen des Siegers (der Sieger) basierte.
Was ich damit sagen will, ist, dass Wladimir Putin eindeutig eine Konferenz vom Typ Jalta als gewünschtes Ergebnis im Sinn hatte, als er im Dezember 2021 den Vereinigten Staaten und der NATO seine Forderungen nach einer Überarbeitung der Sicherheitsarchitektur in Europa vorlegte. Es ist auch sehr wahrscheinlich, dass er noch weiter gehende Verhandlungen mit Washington im Sinn hatte, um Eurasien als Ganzes einzubeziehen, bis hin zum pazifischen Raum.
„Entmilitarisierung und Entnazifizierung.“ Dies waren die erklärten Ziele der militärischen Spezialoperation, die Wladimir Putin in seiner Fernsehansprache an seine Nation kurz vor Beginn seiner Invasion der Ukraine am 24. Februar 2022 ankündigte.
Warum sind die obigen Beobachtungen wichtig? Wegen ihrer Relevanz für die bevorstehenden Gespräche zwischen Wladimir Putin und Donald Trump über das Ende des Ukraine-Krieges. Aus der Sicht des Kremls ist der Krieg mit der Ukraine bereits vorbei, genauso wie der Krieg in Europa bereits im Februar 1945 vorbei war. Die Russen haben gewonnen. Worüber sie mit Trump sprechen wollen, ist genau die Sicherheitsarchitektur Eurasiens, und dies gibt dem amerikanischen Präsidenten die Möglichkeit, die Trümmer des katastrophalen, gescheiterten Feldzugs der Biden-Administration mit dem Ziel, Russland eine strategische Niederlage zuzufügen, im Rahmen eines neuen globalen Zeitalters des Friedens zu begraben unter den Bedingungen eines Jalta-2.0-Abkommens, bei dem alle gewinnen.
Logischerweise sollte dieses Abkommen von Jalta 2.0 über die Zuweisung von Einflussbereichen hinausgehen, so wie es Jalta 1.0 tat, als es Richtlinien für die Umsetzung von Plänen zur Gründung der Vereinten Nationen festlegte. Die zusätzlichen Dimensionen sollten heute die noch offenen Fragen zur globalen strategischen Stabilität abdecken, die das Verbot des Einsatzes ballistischer Mittelstreckenraketen wiederherstellen und sicherstellen, dass kein Land die Illusion hat, über die Fähigkeit zum Erstschlag gegen Konkurrenten oder Gegner zu verfügen. Für diese Gespräche, ebenso wie für die Gespräche über Einflussbereiche im Fernen Osten, ist es offensichtlich, dass die Volksrepublik China an den Gesprächen teilnehmen sollte.
Es versteht sich von selbst, dass all diese Probleme nicht in einem einzigen Gipfeltreffen gelöst werden können, so wie Jalta nicht das erste oder letzte Treffen war, bei dem die Konturen der Nachkriegswelt unter den Siegern festgelegt wurden. Aber das bevorstehende Treffen zwischen Putin und Trump kann die Grundsätze für den weiteren Weg festlegen und Arbeitsgruppen einrichten, die sich mit den Einzelheiten befassen.
Die Frage des Augenblicks ist, wer dem Bewohner des Oval Office diesen Weg zum Friedensnobelpreis beschreiben wird.
Gilbert Doctorow 