What is the value of the Opposition in the USA and Europe in preventing a looming nuclear war? A look at The National Press Club event organized by Scott Ritter yesterday provides some answers.
The ‘No Nuclear War’ proceedings in Washington, D.C. on 7 December (Pearl Harbor Day in the United States) will no doubt be put online by various internet platforms. I used the following channel hosted by Daniel Haiphong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh_Rckp1BXI
At the end of the first panel discussion of this event, organizer Scott Ritter asked panelists Ted Postol and Colonel Wilkerson what they might say to today’s key global decision makers who rule on war or peace, Tony Blinken (the stand-in for senile Joe Biden) and Vladimir Putin, to persuade them not to follow the present escalatory path and to spare us all a nuclear exchange that will end human life on Earth.
Tellingly, Ted Postol, said there was nothing to say to Blinken, because he doesn’t listen and pursues his insane policies with no regard for others’ views, including those of the vast majority of Americans who voted on 5 November against further wars. Tellingly, Colonel Wilkerson found words to deliver to Putin calling upon his forbearance.
And this, lady and gentlemen, brings us to the question of the value of the Opposition movement in the USA against the country’s aggressive foreign and military policy wherein senior officials are saying publicly that the country is ready to enter a nuclear war with Russia and to prevail. Answer: close to nil.
I say this not in a spirit of despair, because I believe there will be no such war, but to point to where our salvation, such as it will be, comes from: namely from Moscow and not from Washington or from any of the valiant anti-war gatherings such as took place at The National Press Club yesterday. Further remarks from the dais made it perfectly clear that there are no grounds to expect more reasonable and predictable decision making in Washington from the incoming Trump administration.
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Nonetheless, I salute the courage, intelligence and public-spirited patriotism of Ritter and of those whom he brought to speak at this event. What they said from the dais deserves the widest possible audience.
Regrettably, the audience numbers on Haiphong’s platform when I tuned in this morning were not especially encouraging: just 50,000 views 10 hours after posting on the internet, suggesting a final audience of perhaps 100,000 – very much in line with the sad audience numbers for the excellent CNN interview with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov, which I reviewed on these pages yesterday.
Readers of my published articles know well that I have had critical, even harsh things to say about Scott with respect to the impropriety of his past financial arrangements with Russian broadcaster RT. They will know that I have had more serious disagreements with Scott’s first panelist yesterday, MIT professor emeritus Ted Postol over his longstanding and present-day underappreciation of Russian achievements in defense, right down to the latest Oreshnik missile strike in Dnipro.
I make no apologies for challenging leading Opposition personalities when I think they are wrong or causing discredit to the movement. And I have no hesitation in saying ‘thank you’ to those same individuals when I see the outstanding contributions they can and do make to public education about the most critical issue of our times, namely the escalating war with Russia over Ukraine.
However, at the end of the day, our fate depends not on what the still insignificant peace movements in the USA and Europe can do.
Scott Ritter had initially planned to organized a peace demonstration in the streets of Washington, D.C. on 7 December. The reason he gave for redirecting his efforts to a National Press Club event was likely inclement weather that would depress attendance and so work against the visual impact that he is trying to achieve. I think that he was very wise to select The National Press Club, where the numbers of persons in the room are irrelevant to the informational impact of the event. And his selection of participants was brilliant. In this regard, I single out Colonel Wilkerson for recounting his experience as an insider at the highest levels of the U.S. government at critical moments in U.S. relations with Russia bearing on the possible onset nuclear war over the years.
At the end of the day, whether war comes, whether we will survive, is presently in the hands of Vladimir Putin. And up to now, he has shown that our fate is in good hands.
Eighteen months ago, the widely known Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov publicly called upon President Putin to stop the escalatory cycle that he claimed is encouraged by Russia’s turning the other cheek to provocations, and to deliver a demonstration nuclear strike somewhere in NATO-land to sober up the war mongers in the Collective West and make them understand that no further crossing of Russia’s red lines will be tolerated, that ‘nyet’ means ‘nyet.’ Karaganov repeated this refrain on 7 June this year at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, where he served as the moderator during the plenary session during which Putin delivered the keynote address and took questions.
Vladimir Putin rejected this challenge to his policy of restraint and bided his time till the moment to unleash ‘shock and awe’ arrived. That moment was on 21 November when Russia made an ‘experimental’ strike against the massive Yuzhmash military factory in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro (Dnepropetrovsk) using their newest hypersonic intermediate range ballistic missile Oreshnik.
Soon afterwards, the Russians claimed the attack had been entirely successful and that they had demolished the multi-story reinforced concrete facility which was designed in Soviet times to withstand a nuclear strike, thereby showing the destructive force of Oreshnik in its barest form, without a payload of conventional explosives, not to mention the nuclear warheads which it is also capable of carrying.
Apparently, these facts were not properly reported to the Pentagon, which in the days that followed staged two further ATACMS attacks on the Kursk province of the Russian Federation, defying the Russian will to put an end to these atrocities.
However, what Moscow did next seems to have penetrated the thick skulls in Washington and changed U.S. behavior with respect to facilitating Ukrainian missile attacks deep into Russian territory.
On27 November chief of the Russian General Staff Gerasimov phoned his American counterpart, Charles Brown, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ostensibly to carry out ‘deconflcting’ obligations and to forewarn the Americans about the about-to-start Russian naval exercises in the Eastern Mediterranean during which there would be test firings of various hypersonic missiles, perhaps to include the Oreshnik. The Americans were advised to clear their naval vessels from the area of the exercises. It is widely assumed that Gerasimov directly warned Brown against any further ATACMS going into Russian territory lest American military assets in the Middle East be destroyed by Russian missiles.
On the next day, 28 November, at his press conference in Astana concluding his two-day state visit to Kazakhstan, Vladimir Putin said that any further missile attacks on Russian territory coming from Ukraine would result in Russia’s unleashing its Oreshnik on the ‘decision making and command and control centers of Ukraine,’ meaning in essence decapitation of the Zelensky regime and death of the senior American and other NATO officers who are directing the Ukrainian military operations from their underground bunkers in Kiev, Lvov and elsewhere in the country.
It would appear that by this time the devastating destructive force of the Oreshnik for the stated applications was fully understood in Washington and since that time no further missile strikes have taken place, even if Ukrainian drones continue to deliver their pin-prick strikes on towns across Russia, nearly all of which are effectively frustrated by Russian air defenses.
For the above reasons, I remain fairly confident that in the closing days of the Biden administration and in the time in office of the incoming Trump administration whoever is in charge of military and foreign policy, whether Neocon in political persuasion or just ‘normal’ patriots, shall we say, Washington will do the right thing now because it has tried everything else till today and failed.
I wish my fellow speakers in the Opposition movement to warmongering from the US government well, but happily we do not have to count on their reining in the worst instincts of our leaders either through meetings with sympathetic Congressmen, as Scott Ritter is presently doing, or by street demonstrations. Reason will prevail because of the prevailing military superiority of the other side.
„No Nuclear War“: 7. Dezember im National Press Club
Welchen Wert hat die Opposition in den USA und Europa bei der Verhinderung eines drohenden Atomkriegs? Ein Blick auf die gestern von Scott Ritter organisierte Veranstaltung im National Press Club gibt einige Antworten.
Die „No Nuclear War“-Veranstaltung in Washington, D.C. am 7. Dezember (dem Pearl Harbor Day in den Vereinigten Staaten) wird zweifellos von verschiedenen Internetplattformen online gestellt werden. Ich habe den folgenden Kanal von Daniel Haiphong genutzt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh_Rckp1BXI
Am Ende der ersten Podiumsdiskussion dieser Veranstaltung fragte der Organisator Scott Ritter die Diskussionsteilnehmer Ted Postol und Oberst Wilkerson, was sie den heutigen globalen Entscheidungsträgern, die über Krieg oder Frieden entscheiden, Tony Blinken (der Stellvertreter des senilen Joe Biden) und Wladimir Putin, sagen könnten, um sie davon zu überzeugen, nicht den gegenwärtigen Eskalationspfad einzuschlagen und uns allen einen nuklearen Schlagabtausch zu ersparen, der das menschliche Leben auf der Erde beenden würde.
Bezeichnenderweise sagte Ted Postol, es gäbe Blinken nichts zu sagen, weil er nicht zuhöre und seine wahnsinnige Politik ohne Rücksicht auf die Ansichten anderer verfolge, einschließlich der Ansichten der überwiegenden Mehrheit der Amerikaner, die am 5. November gegen weitere Kriege gestimmt haben. Bezeichnenderweise fand Colonel Wilkerson Worte, um Putin zur Mäßigung aufzurufen.
Und damit, meine Damen und Herren, kommen wir zur Frage nach dem Wert der Oppositionsbewegung in den USA gegen die aggressive Außen- und Militärpolitik des Landes, in der hochrangige Beamte öffentlich sagen, dass das Land bereit sei, in einen Atomkrieg mit Russland einzutreten und ihn zu gewinnen. Antwort: fast null.
Ich sage dies nicht aus Verzweiflung, denn ich glaube, dass es keinen solchen Krieg geben wird, sondern um darauf hinzuweisen, woher unsere Rettung, so wie sie aussehen wird, kommt: nämlich aus Moskau und nicht aus Washington oder von einer der tapferen Antikriegsversammlungen, wie sie gestern im National Press Club stattfanden. Weitere Bemerkungen von der Rednerbühne machten deutlich, dass es keinen Grund gibt, von der neuen Trump-Regierung in Washington eine vernünftigere und vorhersehbarere Entscheidungsfindung zu erwarten.
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Dennoch bewundere ich den Mut, die Intelligenz und den staatsbürgerlichen Patriotismus von Ritter und denjenigen, die er als Redner zu dieser Veranstaltung eingeladen hat. Was sie vom Podium aus sagten, verdient ein möglichst breites Publikum.
Leider waren die Zuschauerzahlen auf der Plattform von Haiphong, als ich mich heute Morgen eingeschaltet habe, nicht besonders ermutigend: Nur 50.000 Aufrufe 10 Stunden nach der Veröffentlichung im Internet, was auf eine endgültige Zuschauerzahl von vielleicht 100.000 schließen lässt – was sehr im Einklang mit den traurigen Zuschauerzahlen für das hervorragende CNN-Interview mit dem stellvertretenden russischen Außenminister Ryabkov steht, das ich gestern auf diesen Seiten besprochen habe.
Die Leser meiner veröffentlichten Artikel wissen, dass ich mich kritisch, ja sogar harsch über Scott geäußert habe, was die Unangemessenheit seiner früheren finanziellen Vereinbarungen mit dem russischen Sender RT betrifft. Sie wissen auch, dass ich mit Scotts erstem Diskussionsteilnehmer, dem emeritierten MIT-Professor Ted Postol, ernsthaftere Meinungsverschiedenheiten hatte, und zwar über seine langjährige und auch aktuelle Unterschätzung der russischen Verteidigungsleistungen, bis hin zum jüngsten Raketenangriff von Oreschnik in Dnipro.
Ich entschuldige mich nicht dafür, dass ich führende Persönlichkeiten der Opposition herausfordere, wenn ich denke, dass sie falsch liegen oder die Bewegung in Verruf bringen. Und ich zögere nicht, denselben Personen zu danken, wenn ich sehe, welch herausragende Beiträge sie zur öffentlichen Aufklärung über das kritischste Thema unserer Zeit leisten können und leisten, nämlich den eskalierenden Krieg mit Russland um die Ukraine.
Letztlich hängt unser Schicksal jedoch nicht davon ab, was die noch unbedeutenden Friedensbewegungen in den USA und Europa tun können.
Scott Ritter hatte ursprünglich geplant, am 7. Dezember eine Friedensdemonstration in den Straßen von Washington, D.C., zu organisieren. Der Grund, den er für die Umleitung seiner Bemühungen auf eine Veranstaltung des National Press Club angab, war wahrscheinlich das schlechte Wetter, das die Besucherzahl drücken und somit der von ihm angestrebten visuellen Wirkung entgegenwirken würde. Ich denke, dass er sehr klug war, den National Press Club auszuwählen, wo die Anzahl der Personen im Raum für die Informationswirkung der Veranstaltung irrelevant ist. Und seine Auswahl der Teilnehmer war brillant. In diesem Zusammenhang möchte ich Colonel Wilkerson hervorheben, der von seinen Erfahrungen als Insider auf höchster Ebene der US-Regierung in kritischen Momenten der Beziehungen der USA zu Russland berichtete, die sich auf den möglichen Ausbruch eines Atomkriegs im Laufe der Jahre auswirkten.
Letztlich liegt es in den Händen von Wladimir Putin, ob es zum Krieg kommt und ob wir überleben werden. Und bisher hat er gezeigt, dass unser Schicksal in guten Händen ist.
Vor achtzehn Monaten forderte der weithin bekannte russische Politikwissenschaftler Sergei Karaganov Präsident Putin öffentlich dazu auf, den Eskalationskreislauf zu stoppen, der seiner Meinung nach dadurch gefördert wird, dass Russland bei Provokationen ein Auge zudrückt, und irgendwo im NATO-Gebiet einen atomaren Demonstrationsschlag durchzuführen, um die Kriegstreiber im kollektiven Westen zur Vernunft zu bringen und ihnen klarzumachen, dass ein weiteres Überschreiten der roten Linien Russlands nicht toleriert wird und dass „Njet“ auch „Njet“ bedeutet. Karaganov wiederholte diesen Refrain am 7. Juni dieses Jahres auf dem Internationalen Wirtschaftsforum in St. Petersburg, wo er als Moderator während der Plenarsitzung fungierte, in der Putin die Grundsatzrede hielt und Fragen beantwortete.
Wladimir Putin wies diese Herausforderung seiner Politik der Zurückhaltung zurück und wartete den richtigen Zeitpunkt ab, um „Schock und Ehrfurcht“ zu verbreiten. Dieser Moment kam am 21. November, als Russland einen „experimentellen“ Angriff auf die riesige Militärfabrik Yuzhmash in der ukrainischen Stadt Dnipro (Dnepropetrowsk) mit seiner neuesten ballistischen Hyperschall-Mittelstreckenrakete Oreschnik durchführte.
Bald darauf behaupteten die Russen, der Angriff sei ein voller Erfolg gewesen und sie hätten die mehrstöckige Stahlbetonanlage zerstört, die zu Sowjetzeiten so konzipiert worden war, dass sie einem Atomschlag standhalten würde. Damit hätten sie die Zerstörungskraft von Oreschnik in ihrer reinsten Form gezeigt, ohne eine Nutzlast konventioneller Sprengstoffe, ganz zu schweigen von den nuklearen Sprengköpfen, die sie ebenfalls tragen kann.
Offenbar wurden diese Fakten dem Pentagon nicht ordnungsgemäß gemeldet, das in den darauffolgenden Tagen zwei weitere ATACMS-Angriffe auf die Provinz Kursk in der Russischen Föderation durchführte und damit den russischen Willen herausforderte, diesen Gräueltaten ein Ende zu setzen.
Was Moskau jedoch als Nächstes tat, scheint die dicken Schädel in Washington durchdrungen zu haben und das Verhalten der USA in Bezug auf die Ermöglichung ukrainischer Raketenangriffe tief in russisches Gebiet verändert zu haben.
Am 27. November rief der Chef des russischen Generalstabs Gerasimov seinen amerikanischen Amtskollegen Charles Brown, den Chef der Joint Chiefs of Staff, an, angeblich um Verpflichtungen zur „Konfliktvermeidung“ zu erfüllen und die Amerikaner vor den bevorstehenden russischen Marineübungen im östlichen Mittelmeer zu warnen, bei denen verschiedene Hyperschallraketen getestet werden sollten, möglicherweise auch die Oreschnik. Den Amerikanern wurde geraten, ihre Marineschiffe aus dem Gebiet der Übungen abzuziehen. Es wird allgemein angenommen, dass Gerassimow Brown direkt davor warnte, weitere ATACMS-Raketen auf russisches Territorium abzufeuern, damit amerikanische Militäreinrichtungen im Nahen Osten nicht durch russische Raketen zerstört werden.
Am nächsten Tag, dem 28. November, sagte Wladimir Putin auf seiner Pressekonferenz in Astana zum Abschluss seines zweitägigen Staatsbesuchs in Kasachstan, dass jeder weitere Raketenangriff auf russisches Territorium aus der Ukraine dazu führen würde, dass Russland seine Oreschnik auf die “ Entscheidungs-, Kommando- und Kontrollzentren der Ukraine“ einsetzen würde, was im Wesentlichen die Enthauptung des Selensky-Regimes und den Tod der hochrangigen amerikanischen und anderen NATO-Offiziere bedeuten würde, die die ukrainischen Militäroperationen von ihren unterirdischen Bunkern in Kiew, Lwiw und anderswo im Land aus leiten.
Es scheint, dass man sich in Washington zu diesem Zeitpunkt der verheerenden Zerstörungskraft der Oreschnik für die genannten Anwendungen voll bewusst war, und seitdem hat es keine weiteren Raketenangriffe mehr gegeben, auch wenn ukrainische Drohnen weiterhin Nadelstiche gegen Städte in ganz Russland fliegen, die fast alle von der russischen Luftabwehr erfolgreich vereitelt werden.
Aus den oben genannten Gründen bin ich nach wie vor ziemlich zuversichtlich, dass in den letzten Tagen der Biden-Regierung und in der Amtszeit der neuen Trump-Regierung, wer auch immer für die Militär- und Außenpolitik zuständig sein wird, ob Neokonservative mit politischer Überzeugung oder einfach nur „normale“ Patrioten, Washington jetzt das Richtige tun wird, denn es hat bis heute alles andere versucht und ist gescheitert.
Ich wünsche meinen Mitrednern in der Oppositionsbewegung gegen die von der US-Regierung betriebene Kriegstreiberei alles Gute, aber glücklicherweise müssen wir uns nicht darauf verlassen, dass sie die schlimmsten Instinkte unserer Staats- und Regierungschefs zügeln, sei es durch Treffen mit wohlgesonnenen Kongressabgeordneten, wie es Scott Ritter derzeit tut, oder durch Straßendemonstrationen. Die Vernunft wird sich durchsetzen, weil die andere Seite militärisch überlegen ist.
My preference is to ‘stick with my knitting’ and limit my participation in on air news programs to what I know best, which is Russia. However, since Russia has long been a major player in the Middle East thanks to its close ties with Syria, Iraq and, more recently, with Iran, it is difficult to decline insistent invitations to comment on the Syrian crisis from broadcasters in need of talking heads to make sense of breaking news.
The news coming out of Syria suggests that the regime of Bashar al-Assad is in retreat and may lose the match. Today’s Daily Telegraph in the U.K. informs us that he has evacuated his family to Moscow. The BBC insists that the country’s third largest city, Homs, will be the next major city to fall to the rebels following closely on the loss of Aleppo and Hama. Now Damascus itself appears to be their next prey.
There are also reports that the Russians have moved their naval ships out to sea from their base in the port of Tartus. Sergei Lavrov was asked about this today by journalists who were following him during his visit to Qatar, and he confirmed the ships’ departure but said it was for participation in military exercises in the Mediterranean. That answer does not raise confidence that the Russians will try hard this time to prevail in Syria.
In the interview with WION, the toughest question was what exactly the Turks stand to gain from toppling the Assad regime and watching a radical Sunni regime take control of the country. The price Erdogan is paying for the satisfaction of seeing off the Assads, with whom he has sparred for decades is complete loss of trust by the Russians and Iranians. The gains he will make in stronger relations with Israel and the United States are unlikely to provide sufficient compensation.
Transcription submitted by a reader
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxWYM8hhGUI WION: 0:00 All right, so let’s start with the big story that we are tracking on WION at this hour. In a big blow to the Bashar al-Assad government, a war monitor has claimed that rebels have started to surround the government-held capital city of Damascus. The Syrian Defense Ministry has, of course, rubbished these reports of the army fleeing from its positions near the capital city. The Syrian government has lost control of the city of Daraa after the rebels wrested other key cities from its grip. Hezbollah claims they’ve sent about 2,000 of its fighters to Syria to defend its positions there, and the group has added that it has not participated in any of the battles with the Syrian rebels so far.
0:39 While Aleppo and Hama fell to the Islamist-led rebel alliance, Daraa reportedly has fallen to a local armed group, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Earlier this week, a rebellion group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was confined to northwest Idlib region, but it made a surprise and lightning attack backed by the Turks taking over Aleppo in the north and also Hama in central Syria to reach closer to Damascus. The rebel fighters and residents were seen celebrating in the streets of Hama after the forces took control of the city. A video published by a group affiliated with the Syrian rebels on Thursday is said to show detainees pulling out of the Hama prison after the rebels freed them. The Russian and the Syrian strikes have killed at least about 20 civilians in near Homs.
1:48 [Russian and Syrian strikes killed] about 20 civilians in and near Homs. Syria’s Defence Ministry has said that it is conducting attacks in the northern part of the city with cover from the joint Syrian and the Russian air force. Fearing rebels’ advance, tens of thousands of members of Assad’s Alawite minority are now fleeing from the city of Homs in central Syria. So as the rebel forces continue to gain more ground, the United Nations has said that at least about 370,000 Syrians have had to flee from their homes since the fighting began on the 27th of November. This includes 100,000 Syrians who have had to flee their home more than once. Meanwhile, Iran and Iraq have issued a joint statement with Syria warning that the sweeping rebel gains at the expense of the government forces poses a danger to the whole region.
2:40 During a visit to Baghdad, Iran’s top diplomat Abbas Araghkchi said that if Syria becomes a safe place for terrorists, then they should expect the return of the Islamic State group and other terrorist outfits. Meanwhile, what is interesting is that the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had said that he hopes that the Syrian rebels will continue in their advance against President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. But he has also voiced concerns about what he said were terrorist networks in their midst. Erdogan’s comments have outlined the complex structure of the rebel forces who are fighting against Assad.
3:15 To help make sense of what is happening at this moment in this very complex war theatre in Syria, we are joined in this broadcast by Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, who is an international affairs analyst and author and also a historian. Dr. Doctorow, you know, let me in fact start off by asking you this. Now looking at these spectacular gains that have been made by the rebels, are you surprised that the fact that Bashar al-Assad who is backed by Russia and also Iran has not been able to blunt the advances being made by the rebels?
Doctorow: 3:49 I think the problem is on the side of the government, Damascus, and I think the Russians were deeply disappointed by the lack of foresight in Bashar al-Assad’s entourage, that they did not prepare themselves for a resurgence such as we have just seen.
At the same time, I emphasize that we are all, all of us, reporting on this or trying to make sense of it, are acting in the midst of a fog of war. We have the Western media, mainstream media, in the first place. That is the BBC and the British media, in print as well, like The Telegraph, they are cheerleaders for the rebels. And they’re cheerleaders for good reason. It is clear that the British government and its intelligence agents are heavily involved in this operation.
4:46 They’re not the driving force, they’re not the originators of it, but they are contributors to it. And the reporting that we’re all seeing on the BBC reflects that fact. And if anyone who has a doubt about it will note that BBC’s latest reports have been quoting the so-called “White Helmets” to describe the civilian casualties that are alleged to take place in Syria due to bombing by the Syrian air force and the Russian airplanes that are based in Syria, in Latakia province. So the Brits are in this up to their necks. The Turks are in this, as you have just indicated.
5:26 That is to say, there are foreign elements, foreign forces that are driving this, although the group that is doing the liberation, as you say, of Aleppo and of Hama, they are based in Idlib under the terms of the end of the civil war, what we thought was the end of the civil war, negotiated in the Astana process.
WION: Right. Now, it is true, you know, there is a fog of war, and the reports that are now emerging, both in the Western media and media from other parts of the world, need to be taken with a pinch of salt. But the Syrians themselves have admitted that they have lost Aleppo, they have also lost Hama, and that the rebels are moving closer to the central strategic city of Homs. Now the Western media is alleging that a lot of the Syrian army is of course abandoning its positions. This has been denied by the Syrians. All of that is fine.
6:29 But the fact [is] that this kind of an offensive cannot happen in a vacuum, it cannot suddenly start out. Where do you think things actually went wrong? Was this a failure of intelligence on the part of the Syrians and also their backers, that is Russia and Iran? That this kind of a force and this kind of an offensive was made possible by Hayat Tehrir al-Sham, a group that is backed by the Turks. And the Americans and the Brits, as you say, also have a very major role to play in this.
Doctorow: 6:57 Well, we have to single out the Turks, and they have created very bad feeling with the Russians and with the Iranians because of their obvious support and involvement in the training of these rebels. With Turkish assistance, the Ukrainian forces have entered this game and are, were active in training the HTS people in what they know best, perhaps better than many military experts around the world, and that is drone warfare.
7:36 This is apparently being used in the current offensive, and the skills which the Ukrainians certainly have developed in their war with Russia have been put into play. All of this thanks to the logistical support and surely financial support that they are receiving from Turkey and additionally from the British and the Americans. The Israeli involvement is hard to pin down, though the single biggest beneficiaries of all this chaos tht we are now witnessing is, in fact, Israel, because that was their long-term objective: to disrupt logistics across Syria, insofar as Syrian territory was being used as a conduit for arms from Iran to Hezbollah.
WION: 8:27 Right, it’s interesting that you say that one of the biggest nations which of course gains is the state of Israel because it cuts off the conduit of weapons and other materials that was being supplied. But what does Turkiye gain out of all of this? Because it is Turkiye which seems to be driving this operation.
Doctorow: 8:44 Yes, The involvement of Turkey is complex, that’s to be sure. They have been the sponsors of the groups that we now recognize as HTS in Idlib province. That was the consequence of the resettlement of various Islamic extremists that were operating across Syria and which were pinned down, isolated, and threatened with destruction by the Russian and Iranian forces in this period of 2015 to 2017.
9:23 So the end result was that they, with their families, I stress, this was a notable aspect of the end of the civil war, we thought it was the end, in 2017 up to 2020, was the resettlement of various groups of Islamic terrorists from across Syria into Idlib. And there they had the support– this is bordering with Turkey, and they had Turkish support. The Turks’ involvement there is to find supporters in their attempt to contain the Kurdish population that is east of Idlib and borders also with Turkey.
WION: Interesting. Thank you very much indeed, Dr. Doctorow, for joining us and giving us that perspective there.
Doctorow: 10:09 Thanks for the invitation.
Post Script, 8 December: As we now know, the rebels have taken control of Damascus, Assad has fled the country and a new, unpredictable future has begun in Syria.
http://www.urmedium.net/c/presstv/131888 PressTV: 0:01 Iran’s foreign minister in a trilateral meeting with his Syrian and Iraqi counterparts says the situation in Syria is a threat to the whole region, which requires regional and international action to resolve it.
Abbas Araghchi: 0:16 The trilateral meeting of the foreign ministers of Iran, Iraq and Syria had three messages. First, a message of support to the nation and government of Syria in their fight against Takfiri terrorist groups, which are carrying out attacks in Syria as part of an American-Israeli conspiracy. Second message is that the threat of terrorism in Syria is a threat to the whole region and resurgence of terrorist groups like Daesh can endanger other regional countries.
Third message is that there should be no discrimination in fighting terrorism and fighting terrorists in Syria is an international obligation. Therefore, countries that are silent regarding the spread of terrorism in Syria are supported, are responsible and must answer why they only fight terrorists where it serves their interests and ignore them at other places.
PressTV: 1:07 Abu Sadaf said Iran believes that to safeguard its own security, it needs to help neighboring countries to safeguard their security. He said the Islamic Republic will provide whatever assistance it can to the Syrian government The three top diplomats emphasize that their countries will work together to fight the common threat of terrorism They said the armed groups opposing the Syrian government [enjoy] the support of some hostile countries and are part of a plot to reshape the map of the region.
For more insight on that story, we’re now joined by independent international affairs analyst Gilbert Doctorow, who’s joining us from Brussels. We also have journalist, author and activist, Fra Hughes, who’s with us from Belfast. Let’s start off with Mr. Doctorow in Brussels. Sir, give us your perspective on the violence that’s unfolding right now in Syria. And what has led to this point where we are right now?
Doctorow: 2:07 Well I don’t think my personal perspective is of particular value to your viewers, but I would like to tell you the perspective coming from Moscow, how they’re viewing it, and contrast it with mainstream Western media like the BBC or CNN. The Russians take this new challenge very seriously. They have great interests in Syria, not only to protect what they achieved between 2015 and 2017 when they were very active together with Iran in saving the government of [Bashar Assad] in Damascus.
2:53 What we have now is a great threat to those achievements. If you listen particularly to the BBC and CNN, who are cheerleaders, and they’re cheerleaders for good reason: because the United States and the British governments are both evidently heavily involved in this. When it first started, it was common to say among observers in American alternative media that this was an Israeli project because Israel has long had a desire to keep, to maintain chaos in Syria and to thereby interrupt supplies of munitions to Hezbollah that were coming from Iran via Syria. However, it’s apparent that there’s– from the Russian standpoint, this was an American project, an American project to weaken Russia and Iran. And Syria is an incidental factor.
3:49 The regime in Damascus is incidental. The fact is that the Russians have an important naval base in Syria, in Tartus. They have an important air base in Khmeimin, in Latakia province. And these are put in jeopardy when you have the cutoff of strategic routes leading to the interior of the country performed by these HTS rebels. So the Russians have their own interests, both to protect what they achieved at great expense in two years of fighting together with Iran to save the government, and they have a present concern that they not lose the naval base of great importance to them in Eastern Mediterranean, and that they not lose their regional presence in Northeast Africa as a result of the pressure that they’re experiencing from the rebels who are otherwise threatening Damascus.
4:55 The cheerleading in Britain is clear on today’s BBC. You would hear from them that Homs has virtually fallen. By your own reporting, this is inaccurate. And another factor, another straw in the wind that tells you about the big British presence is the reappearance of something we all should have thought– we forgot about. That is the white helmets. They’re back. The white helmets who were so active in the middle of the Syrian civil war and who were bringing false-flag charges against the Damascus government, saying that it was responsible for chemical attacks and so forth, which were all very nicely staged with British intelligence connivance. The white helmets are back; they are now being reported by BBC for what they’re saying about civilian casualties due to bombing in Syria.
5:58 Well, we know who’s doing the bombing. It’s the Russians and the Syrian air force. So this is anti-government propaganda being spread by the white helmets who are agents of British intelligence. These are the perspectives that I bring to your audience today.
6:15 All right, let’s bring in Fra Hughes from Belfast. Mr. Hughes, would you like to add anything to what Mr. Doctorow just mentioned in terms of who is involved with the resurgence of violence and who is to benefit here? And just looking At the trilateral meeting that was held in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, the three foreign ministers of Iran, Iraq, and Syria in a joint press conference said basically that the armed groups opposing the Syrian government, they do enjoy the support of some countries and they’re actually part of a plot to reshape the map of the region. Do you see it in that light as well?
Hughes: 6:54 Yes, a hundred percent. I’d like maybe to start off by saying I’ve actually been in Syria on five different occasions from 2010 up to 2019. And I had the honor to meet President Bashar al-Assad on two occasions. The first thing I maybe want to say is, well, I have to mention Turkey here. I mean, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood and everything that’s associated through British intelligence have had a long-standing relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood.
They’re being used in separate areas across the Levant at times when it suits the intelligence agencies to take someone off the shelf, bring a group onto the battlefield and help destabilise a country where they’re looking for regime change. What we’re witnessing now is American, British, I’ll say EU NATO as well as Israeli plot to destroy the Syrian Arab Republic because it’s the only real bulwark of the Arab countries that are standing against in this genocide in Gaza and against the neo-fascist regime in Tel Aviv.
8:05 And I was at a meeting when President Assad told the people in attendance that he was approached before 2011 by the American administration, asking him to basically toe the line to American foreign policy and how this would be in the interests of the Syrian government, the Syrian people, Syrian business and financial institutions. And because he refused to basically bow the knee to Zionism and to condemn and to abandon the people of Palestine and the wider West Asia region, that is why you had this undeclared war on Syria which started in 2011.
8:47 So you have Turkey. There are quite likely to be Turkish special forces involved in these attacks upon Syrian civilians and Syrian towns. It seems to be a pincer movement coming from the south, sorry, the east and the north of Syria. There are many, many disparate groups who may not be politically or ideologically aligned together, but they’re fighting in the one cause which is the destruction of the Syrian Arab Republic.
9:18 The reason why Iran and Iraq want to defend Syria, apart from an international obligation, perhaps, to come to the aid of a country suffering from external terrorism that has been imported into the country. They know, as indeed a retired general of the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] tweeted about six weeks ago, basically that if they’re allowed to destroy Gaza on the West Bank and then they’re allowed to intimidate and destroy Lebanon, They will then go on to Syria, and then go on to Iraq, and then go on to Iran.
9:52 So you can see that this is an attack on the axis of resistance. This is moving from one faction to another. Israel de facto has a ceasefire with Hezbollah, which means no Hezbollah rockets going into northern occupied Palestine, even though the Israelis continue to break their ceasefire day and day, murdering Lebanese civilians. So the Turks and Erdogan have stuck a knife in the back of the Syrian people.
10:20 And personally, I always believed that the Russians went into Syria apart from the longstanding relationship between the Arab Republic and the Soviet Union. This was to prevent ISIS winning in Syria and then going into Georgia, where we witnessed today another regime change sponsored by the Americans.
PressTV: 10:39 Thanks a lot, gentlemen. We’re going to leave it there. Independent international affairs analyst Gilbert Doctorow joining us from Brussels. Thanks to journalist, author and activist, Fra Hughes, speaking to us from Belfast.
This ten-minute segment from last night’s Press TV news round-up at a little after midnight Iranian time opens with statements from the Iranian Foreign Minister at the end of consultations with his counterparts from Iraq and Syria on how to deal with the HTS rebel advances in the northwest of Syria these past several days.
I was kindly given the microphone to present the Russian perspective on the military and geopolitical situation in Syria amidst a surprise rapid attack that has already captured Aleppo and Hama and is threatening Homs. The Islamic extremists of HTS are being encouraged and assisted by the US, Israel and Turkey.
Later today I will be with the Indian broadcaster WION in a televised discussion of the most recent developments on the ground in Syria, and of reports in the UK press that Bashar al-Assad’s family has fled to Moscow now that Damascus itself may be threatened.
According to TASS, Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov released a couple of days ago has already been seen by more than 2 million viewers on the social network X alone, with presumably a great many more who watched it on Carlson’s own TCN network and on other media outlets.
That was, by Tucker Carlson standards, an important media exercise. For Carlson, it refreshed his seeming relevance to international developments that he established ten months ago by his interview with Vladimir Putin (21 million views on Youtube), still earlier by his interview with Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban (884,000 views on Youtube), an interview that also dealt largely with the Ukraine war and how to manage relations with Putin.
For Vladimir Vladimirovich, the Carlson interview was a rare opportunity to make his views on the Ukraine war and other key issues known directly to the American and global public. It was also a missed opportunity as I wrote at the time, because he was evidently very nervous, was uncertain how to deal with the intellectual lightweight Carlson, and wasted audience time with historical narrative, getting around to the present and future only towards the end of their hour-long chat when he surely had lost most of his audience.
I mention this shortcoming of the Putin interview, because it is also somewhat relevant to the new Carlson interview with Sergei Lavrov. Too much of it is backward looking. We come away impressed by Lavrov’s vast command of the subject matter, by his intellectual acuity and diplomatic skills, all of which one would expect from the world’s doyen among foreign ministers. But it is less effective than it might be in providing a glimpse into what may come next in Russian-American relations. In that sense it is also a missed opportunity in the ongoing multi-layered Russian information offensive directed at shaping expectations of the Americans and Europeans in particular over what may be achieved to bring an end to the Ukraine war at the start of the incoming Trump administration.
As another example of this ‘multi-layered information offensive,’ I call out the public statements by a leading nationalist Russian businessman and media personality, owner of the Tsargrad internet platform, Konstantin Malofeyev, in which he trashes the salient points in the published peace plans of General Kellogg, Trump’s nominee emissary to Ukraine and Russia. Malofeyev may be said to be close to the Putin entourage via his marriage to the official who oversaw the removal to Russia of orphaned Ukrainian children from war zones that brought indictments against her and Putin by the ICC. Malofeyev’s views on how the war may end were set out in a feature article of The Financial Times in the past week.
Within the context of Russia’s ongoing information offensive, we now have the 30-minute CNN interview with Russia’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Ryabkov which came out a day ago in its full version.
This interview is outstanding in every way. It is especially valuable for explaining Russia’s disparagement of what we know of Trump’s plans for ending the war very quickly by use of threats and blandishments to the leaders of Russia and Ukraine. Per this official Russian position, a settlement is possible only if the core security concerns of Russia are addressed, meaning a settlement addressing the European security architecture and not merely a ceasefire, a frozen conflict, and other nonsense contained so far in what the Trump entourage is touting.
In what follows, I will not reconstruct Ryabkov’s talking points. I leave that to my readers to do for themselves. The interview is short and merits your time. Instead, I use this space to bring out some relevant facts about who is who in the interview, about how it has fared so far in viewer numbers and why you should spread the word to raise its public impact around you.
First, let me remind you that Sergei Ryabkov is a fluent English speaker who spent more than three years in Washington as an advisor to the Russian ambassador (2003-2005). As his career progressed, he served as director of the ministry’s department on cooperation with Europe. Later as Deputy Minister from 2008, Ryabkov has had responsibility for arms control and non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. This is to say that his long-time work experience is directly relevant to the present crisis situation between Russia and the Collective West that is being played out in Ukraine.
Ryabkov is the official who crafted and presented the ultimatum to NATO in December 2021 over the need to roll back the NATO European presence to what it was at the end of the Cold War, before the alliance expanded eastward under Bill Clinton. The refusal early in the new year by Washington and Brussels to enter into negotiations over the Russian demands led directly to the launch of the Special Military Operation and invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with Russia determined to win by force of arms what it could not achieve by diplomacy.
It is also relevant to mention that the CNN interviewer was not some gal or guy from Atlanta who was put on the case thanks to good looks and readiness to read out some aggressive questions prepared for her/him by the CNN editorial board. No, it was the German jouralist Frederik Pleitgen, who is based in Berlin, who by education and work experience in Europe clearly knew what to ask and how to ask it to get meaningful and relevant answers.
So far, this full version of the show has been seen by 105,000 viewers and has generated 2,295 Comments.
Let me say without hesitation that the audience numbers are pitiful! When I appeared on ‘Judging Freedom’ a week ago, I gathered 120,000 viewers. When John Mearsheimer opens his mouth before any of the leading interview channels on youtube, he gets half a million views without difficulty even if he has nothing much to say. The same is true of Jeffrey Sachs. And NONE of us is an original formulator and implementer of state policy for the country most deeply involved in the existential struggle between East and West that is going on before our eyes. We are just commentators. Ryabkov is the source and I urge you to take the time to listen to him.
Do note that at 2,295 the number of Comments generated by his interview are a relatively high 3 percent of total views. From my experience, 1 percent is the norm.
I quote below the first two, which should be all you need to be persuaded that this show is extraordinary:
For the first time in years , respect to CNN. I’m impressed to see no hate from Rusian side. Compare that to USA officials whose blood is boiling when they talk Russia
I rarely seen a CNN interview being so respectful in this kind of situation ! Congratulations.
Please ignore the spelling and grammatical errors of these comments which obviously came from viewers from outside the USA. Hopefully native Americans will share this enthusiasm for the Ryabkov interview.
CNN-Interview mit dem stellvertretenden russischen Außenminister Sergei Ryabkov: fesselnd für alle, die selbst denken wollen
Laut TASS wurde das vor einigen Tagen veröffentlichte Interview von Tucker Carlson mit dem russischen Außenminister Sergei Lavrov bereits von mehr als 2 Millionen Zuschauern allein im sozialen Netzwerk X gesehen, wobei vermutlich noch viel mehr es auf Carlsons eigenem TCN-Netzwerk und in anderen Medien gesehen haben.
Für Tucker Carlsons Verhältnisse war dies eine wichtige Medienübung. Für Carlson hat dies seine scheinbare Relevanz für internationale Entwicklungen aufgefrischt, die er vor zehn Monaten durch sein Interview mit Wladimir Putin (21 Millionen Aufrufe auf YouTube) und noch früher durch sein Interview mit dem ungarischen Ministerpräsidenten Viktor Orban (884.000 Aufrufe auf YouTube) etabliert hat, ein Interview, das sich ebenfalls hauptsächlich mit dem Ukraine-Krieg und dem Umgang mit den Beziehungen zu Putin befasste.
Für Wladimir Wladimirowitsch war das Carlson-Interview eine seltene Gelegenheit, seine Ansichten zum Ukraine-Krieg und zu anderen wichtigen Themen direkt der amerikanischen und globalen Öffentlichkeit mitzuteilen. Wie ich damals schrieb, war es auch eine verpasste Gelegenheit, denn er war offensichtlich sehr nervös, wusste nicht, wie er mit dem intellektuellen Leichtgewicht Carlson umgehen sollte, und vergeudete die Zeit des Publikums mit historischen Erzählungen, um erst gegen Ende ihres einstündigen Gesprächs, als er sicherlich den Großteil seines Publikums verloren hatte, auf die Gegenwart und Zukunft zu sprechen zu kommen.
Ich erwähne diesen Mangel des Putin-Interviews, weil er auch für das neue Carlson-Interview mit Sergej Lawrow von gewisser Relevanz ist. Es ist zu sehr rückwärtsgewandt. Wir sind beeindruckt von Lawrows umfassender Beherrschung des Themas, von seiner intellektuellen Schärfe und seinen diplomatischen Fähigkeiten, die man von dem Doyen unter den Außenministern der Welt erwarten würde. Aber es ist weniger effektiv, als es sein könnte, um einen Einblick in die möglichen nächsten Schritte in den russisch-amerikanischen Beziehungen zu geben. In diesem Sinne ist es auch eine verpasste Gelegenheit in der laufenden vielschichtigen russischen Informationsoffensive, die darauf abzielt, die Erwartungen der Amerikaner und Europäer insbesondere darüber zu formen, was zu Beginn der neuen Trump-Regierung erreicht werden kann, um den Ukraine-Krieg zu beenden.
Als weiteres Beispiel für diese „vielschichtige Informationsoffensive“ möchte ich die öffentlichen Äußerungen eines führenden nationalistischen russischen Geschäftsmanns und Medienpersönlichkeit, des Eigentümers der Internetplattform Tsargrad, Konstantin Malofeyev, anführen, in denen er die wichtigsten Punkte der veröffentlichten Friedenspläne von General Kellogg, Trumps nominiertem Gesandten für die Ukraine und Russland, niedermacht. Man kann sagen, dass Malofeyev dem Putin-Gefolge nahe steht, da er mit der Beamtin verheiratet ist, die die Verlegung verwaister ukrainischer Kinder aus Kriegsgebieten nach Russland beaufsichtigte, was zu einer Anklage gegen sie und Putin durch den IStGH führte. Malofeyevs Ansichten darüber, wie der Krieg enden könnte, wurden in der vergangenen Woche in einem Artikel der Financial Times dargelegt.
Im Rahmen der laufenden Informationsoffensive Russlands haben wir nun das 30-minütige CNN-Interview mit dem stellvertretenden Außenminister Russlands, Sergei Ryabkov, das vor einem Tag in voller Länge ausgestrahlt wurde.
Dieses Interview ist in jeder Hinsicht hervorragend. Es ist besonders wertvoll, um zu erklären, wie Russland Trumps Pläne zur schnellen Beendigung des Krieges herabsetzt, die darin bestehen, dass die Staats- und Regierungschefs Russlands und der Ukraine bedroht und umschmeichelt werden. Laut dieser offiziellen russischen Position ist eine Einigung nur möglich, wenn die zentralen Sicherheitsbedenken Russlands berücksichtigt werden, d.h. eine Einigung, die die europäische Sicherheitsarchitektur berücksichtigt, und nicht nur ein Waffenstillstand, ein eingefrorener Konflikt und anderer Unsinn, der bisher in den Ankündigungen des Trump-Gefolges enthalten ist.
Im Folgenden werde ich Ryabkovs Argumente nicht rekonstruieren. Das überlasse ich meinen Lesern. Das Interview ist kurz und es lohnt sich, es sich anzusehen. Stattdessen möchte ich diesen Platz nutzen, um einige relevante Fakten darüber zu vermitteln, wer im Interview wer ist, wie es bisher bei den Zuschauerzahlen abgeschnitten hat und warum Sie die Botschaft verbreiten sollten, um die öffentliche Wirkung in Ihrer Umgebung zu erhöhen.
Zunächst möchte ich daran erinnern, dass Sergei Ryabkov fließend Englisch spricht und mehr als drei Jahre in Washington als Berater des russischen Botschafters (2003–2005) verbracht hat. Im Laufe seiner Karriere war er als Direktor der Abteilung für die Zusammenarbeit mit Europa im Ministerium tätig. Später, ab 2008, war Ryabkov als stellvertretender Minister für Rüstungskontrolle und die Nichtverbreitung von Massenvernichtungswaffen zuständig. Das heißt, dass seine langjährige Berufserfahrung direkt mit der aktuellen Krisensituation zwischen Russland und dem kollektiven Westen, die sich in der Ukraine abspielt, zusammenhängt.
Ryabkov ist der Beamte, der das Ultimatum an die NATO im Dezember 2021 ausgearbeitet und präsentiert hat, in dem gefordert wurde, die europäische Präsenz der NATO auf den Stand vom Ende des Kalten Krieges zurückzufahren, bevor sich das Bündnis unter Bill Clinton nach Osten ausdehnte. Die Weigerung Washingtons und Brüssels zu Beginn des neuen Jahres, Verhandlungen über die russischen Forderungen aufzunehmen, führte direkt zur Einleitung der militärischen Spezialoperation und der Invasion der Ukraine im Februar 2022, wobei Russland entschlossen war, mit Waffengewalt zu erreichen, was es auf diplomatischem Wege nicht erreichen konnte.
Es ist auch wichtig zu erwähnen, dass der CNN-Interviewer nicht irgendein Mädchen oder ein Junge aus Atlanta war, der aufgrund seines guten Aussehens und seiner Bereitschaft, einige aggressive Fragen vorzulesen, die von der CNN-Redaktion für ihn/sie vorbereitet wurden, für den Fall ausgewählt wurde. Nein, es war der deutsche Journalist Frederik Pleitgen, der in Berlin lebt und aufgrund seiner Ausbildung und Berufserfahrung in Europa genau wusste, was er fragen musste und wie er es fragen musste, um aussagekräftige und relevante Antworten zu erhalten.
Bisher wurde diese vollständige Version der Sendung von 105.000 Zuschauern gesehen und hat 2.295 Kommentare generiert.
Ich kann ohne zu zögern sagen, dass die Zuschauerzahlen erbärmlich sind! Als ich vor einer Woche in „Judging Freedom“ auftrat, hatte ich 120.000 Zuschauer. Wenn John Mearsheimer den Mund aufmacht, bevor er auf einem der führenden Interviewkanäle auf YouTube zu sehen ist, erreicht er ohne Schwierigkeiten eine halbe Million Zuschauer, auch wenn er nicht viel zu sagen hat. Dasselbe gilt für Jeffrey Sachs. Und NIEMAND von uns ist ein ursprünglicher Formulierer und Umsetzer staatlicher Politik für das Land, das am tiefsten in den existenziellen Kampf zwischen Ost und West verwickelt ist, der sich vor unseren Augen abspielt. Wir sind nur Kommentatoren. Ryabkov ist die Quelle, und ich bitte Sie, sich die Zeit zu nehmen, ihm zuzuhören.
Beachten Sie, dass die Anzahl der Kommentare, die durch sein Interview generiert wurden, mit 2.295 relativ hohe 3 Prozent der Gesamtaufrufe ausmachen. Meiner Erfahrung nach ist 1 Prozent die Norm.
Ich zitiere im Folgenden die ersten beiden, die ausreichen sollten, um Sie davon zu überzeugen, dass diese Show außergewöhnlich ist:
Zum ersten Mal seit Jahren, Respekt an CNN. Ich bin beeindruckt, dass es von russischer Seite keinen Hass gibt. Vergleichen Sie das mit US-Beamten, denen das Blut in den Adern gefriert, wenn sie über Russland sprechen.
Ich habe selten ein CNN-Interview gesehen, das in einer solchen Situation so respektvoll war! Herzlichen Glückwunsch.
Bitte ignorieren Sie die Rechtschreib- und Grammatikfehler in diesen Kommentaren, die offensichtlich von Zuschauern außerhalb der USA stammen. Hoffentlich teilen die amerikanischen Ureinwohner diese Begeisterung für das Ryabkov-Interview.
The ongoing political crises in each of these major countries have purely domestic causes, to be sure. But they also have a common foreign dimension due to the contradictory positions in the broad population of each country and in their political parties inside and outside of government with respect to relations with Russia and to the war in Ukraine.
Translation into German below of the foregoing introduction and of the Sputnik article (Andreas Mylaeus)
Sputnik International: Fokus auf die aktuellen politischen Turbulenzen in Frankreich, Südkorea und Deutschland
Die anhaltenden politischen Krisen in jedem dieser großen Länder haben zwar rein innenpolitische Ursachen. Sie haben aber auch eine gemeinsame außenpolitische Dimension, da die breite Bevölkerung jedes Landes und die politischen Parteien innerhalb und außerhalb der Regierung in Bezug auf die Beziehungen zu Russland und den Krieg in der Ukraine widersprüchliche Positionen vertreten.
Wie die Hardliner-Pro-US-Politik politische Erdbeben in Südkorea, Frankreich und Deutschland schüren
Ekaterina Blinova
Eine Reihe politischer Erdbeben hat Frankreich, Südkorea und Deutschland erschüttert. Obwohl jede Krise ihre eigene Dynamik hat, liegt ihr gemeinsamer Nenner in ihrer pro-amerikanischen Ausrichtung und ihrer anti-russischen Politik, so Experten gegenüber Sputnik.
Die Instabilität, die Frankreich, Südkorea und Deutschland erfasst hat, ist als Reaktion auf die Entwicklungen in den Vereinigten Staaten entstanden, so Dr. George Szamuely, Senior Research Fellow am Global Policy Institute, gegenüber Sputnik.
„Es gibt interventionistische Kräfte in Washington, und zwar viele, auch in der neuen Trump-Regierung. Wenn sich diese interventionistischen Kräfte durchsetzen und die Vereinigten Staaten eskalieren, würde das Engagement der USA in der Ukraine sogar über das hinausgehen, was die Biden-Regierung tut“, warnte Szamuely.
Dem Experten zufolge wird der Stellvertreterkrieg des Westens in der Ukraine in ganz Europa immer unbeliebter. Viele europäische Länder haben erkannt, dass er ihren wirtschaftlichen Interessen schadet. Der Forscher glaubt, dass der Konflikt, wenn er in den nächsten fünf Jahren nicht gelöst wird, eine Volksbewegung innerhalb der EU auslösen könnte.
Der erfahrene Außenpolitikexperte Gilbert Doctorow äußert in einem Interview mit Sputnik ähnliche Bedenken:
Frankreich: Die „enorme Unbeliebtheit“ von Präsident Emmanuel Macron wurde durch seine entschiedene Pro-US-Politik im Ukraine-Konflikt noch verstärkt, einschließlich der Pläne, französische Truppen in den Kampf gegen Russland zu schicken. Marine Le Pen und ihre Partei, der Rassemblement National, die sich gegen die Militarisierung der Ukraine ausspricht, haben kürzlich Macrons Regierung herausgefordert, was laut dem Experten zum Sturz seines Premierministers Michel Barnier geführt hat.
Südkorea: Präsident Yoon Suk-yeol hat sich eng mit Washington abgestimmt, um die Abschreckung zu stärken und Druck auf Pjöngjang auszuüben, in Übereinstimmung mit dem Team Biden. Der gegenseitige Verteidigungsvertrag zwischen Russland und Nordkorea hat jedoch die Perspektiven verschoben. Yoons gescheiterter Versuch, das Kriegsrecht zu verhängen, war eine Reaktion auf die Bemühungen der Opposition, das Land von „seinen Kolonialherren in Washington“ zu befreien, so Doctorow.
Deutschland: Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz steht wegen seiner Ukraine-Politik, die sich an den Vereinigten Staaten orientiert, sowohl vom Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht als auch von der Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) unter Beschuss, die sich für normalisierte Beziehungen zu Moskau einsetzen. Ironischerweise wird er auch von den Grünen und den Christdemokraten dafür kritisiert, dass er zögert, Taurus-Langstreckenraketen an das Regime in Kiew zu liefern.
Auf die Frage nach möglichen Auswirkungen auf die USA antwortete Doctorow: „Es ist viel zu früh, um darüber zu spekulieren. Wir müssen erst die praktischen Folgen der gegenwärtigen Turbulenzen in jedem Land abwarten.“
Doctorow geht davon aus, dass Südkorea sich möglicherweise von der von den USA vorangetriebenen Militarisierung abwenden wird, falls Yoon seines Amtes enthoben wird.
Was Frankreich betrifft, so wird Macron wahrscheinlich versuchen, bis zum Ende seiner Amtszeit im Jahr 2027 zu lavieren, sagte Professor Edouard Husson, französischer Historiker, Mitbegründer und Direktor des Brennus Anticipation Institute, gegenüber Sputnik.
„Immer mehr Franzosen wünschen sich den Rücktritt von [Frankreichs Präsident] Emmanuel Macron. Aber er hält sich an den Wortlaut der Verfassung, und es gibt keinen Artikel, der ihn zum Rücktritt verpflichtet … Die Krise wird also weitergehen“, so Husson.
Mehrere einschneidende Ereignisse könnten die Herausforderungen, mit denen Macron konfrontiert ist, noch verschärfen, so der Professor. Dazu gehören ein möglicher Vertrauensverlust bei globalen Investoren, das Aufkommen einer sozialen Bewegung ähnlich der Gelbwesten, Donald Trumps Ankündigung neuer politischer Maßnahmen in Bezug auf die EU und die Ergebnisse der bevorstehenden vorgezogenen Bundestagswahlen in Deutschland.
„Eine Änderung der Außenpolitik ist nicht zu erwarten, da Emmanuel Macron der Ansicht ist, dass seine Zugehörigkeit zur NATO ihn auch vor dem Misstrauen der Investoren schützt“, so der Experte abschließend.
Napolitano: 0:32 Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for “Judging Freedom”. Today is Thursday, December 5th, 2024. Professor Gilbert Doctorow joins us now. Professor Doctorow, always a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you very much for your time and for your thoughts. The last time you and I spoke, the Russians had recently fired and were overjoyed at the results of the Oreshnik missile. We understood it to be of nuclear quality without the nuclear fallout. Have the Russians been, or is there an argument out there that they have been exaggerating its strength, its efficiency, and its effects?
Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 1:25 Well, the question is very relevant, because the conduct of Russian policy on the further responses to any provocations from the British, the French, or the United States, their firing additional missiles into Bryansk or Kursk.
The Russian response to that is predicated on their shock and awe developed from the test firing, the test attack on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. They believe it was effective and that it should have put the fear of God into Mr. Zelensky and into the Americans, so that they would refrain from further provocations. This was a decision taken after Mr. Putin had already made clear days earlier when he spoke at a press conference in Astana at the end of a two-day state visit, he spoke then about possibly using these missiles against Western targets.
And of course, the “Western targets” raises a lot of fear, justified fear, in all of us, whether we’re mainstream or we’re alternative media: are we on the way to World War III? Mr. Putin had clearly turned the other way. He’d gone down the road of putting all possible pressure on the Ukrainians and not responding to the, their “curators”, as the Russians like to say, to their sponsors in the West who are supplying them with these missiles that the Russians find so unacceptable.
3:19 Well, so that leaves us with the question, what did really happen at Dnipro? And there have been several authorities, several experts who have come forward to address that question. I was tipped off on this two ways. One was a letter, a comments letter on one of my websites, which informed me that I and almost all other commentators on the Oreshnik issue are inexpert, don’t know our ass from our elbow, and should more or less shut up, because the Oreshnik, according to laws of physics, is a nothing rocket, a nothing missile.
It doesn’t pack an explosion greater than would be the case with a standard two-ton bomb, which as the author also indicated, is only a slight fraction of the strength of some American super bombs. Well, that caught my attention, particularly since the author of that rather vicious comment made reference to recent articles and video appearances by Ted Postol, who is a well-known authority on missiles, explosives and related issues.
4:45 Then there was a second point of contact that caught my attention. This was on the Russian news, the Russian talk show, I think it was “The Great Game” a day ago, in which they called attention to an article in “Forbes” magazine, an article I have in front of me, “Oreshnik Threat, Rods from God, Are Not as Dangerous as Putin Thinks”. And this was by a journalist, technical affairs journalist, in London.
5:08 I’d call attention to this last one first, because it explains very much what Ted Postol explained, that the laws of physics tell you that the actual impact value of the munitions– or not munitions, of the metal on board the nose cone in these 36 sub munitions that were sprayed across Dnipro– that the net impact of these munitions, sub munitions, would be equivalent to a two-ton bomb, which isn’t a great deal. However, in the middle of that article, he mentions, “Ah, and the Oreshnik, you know, it doesn’t have much lateral damage. It just goes straight down.” Well, straight down is what Mr. Putin had in mind. The Russians were saying that the unarmed version of the Oreshnik, which is what they used in Dnipro, is a bunker buster, that it can do damage to 200 meters down by shock waves equivalent to an earthquake.
6:24 I don’t think– Mr. Putin likened it to meteorites. And for every Russian, now this doesn’t say much to the American or global audience, but Russians all know about the Tunguska, it’s in Eastern Siberia, meteorite, it was called meteorite, that struck there and was seen, the impact was seen 20 kilometers away. Very bizarre impact which knocked down trees in circular pattern for several hundred meters.
Anyway, there were peculiarities about the strike. It created a big crater and so forth. Well, that Tunguska affair is very much on the mind of Russians, well-read Russians of whom Mr. Putin is one, although he may be wrong about its cause. Later, researchers are saying that it was a comet, not a meteorite, but that’s not important.
7:23 The point is that this is the language he used, and he assumed that Mr. Zelensky would be scared out of his wits because his refuge under a possible Russian attack is a deep bunker. And American and other NATO generals operating in Lvov and in Kiev to direct the military operations are in similar bunkers. So Mr. Putin, did he have something real or not? From this article in “Forbes”, you wouldn’t know.
From the article or the interview of Mr. Postol, you would assume that this missile doesn’t have an impact greater than two or three meters, in which case really what are we talking about? So the–
Napolitano: 8:07 Aren’t we talking about a missile that is faster than anything created by man and that effectively cannot be shot down, disabled or neutralized?
Doctorow: That is all true. And the value of that is clear if it is nuclear-armed. And the Oreshnik can be nuclear-armed, so that if it is carrying nuclear warheads it would be a game-changer all by itself. But that’s in a different game. What the Russians would say, it’s from a different scene, from a different opera. The opera–
Napolitano: 8:44 Here’s President Putin talking about it. So Chris, cut number 13, and you can cut it off, Chris, if it’s a little too long and if President Putin goes into other subjects. But he begins by talking about the Oreshnik.
Putin: [English voice over] The Oreshnik missile system isn’t simply an efficient hypersonic weapon system. Thanks to its power, particularly in the case of its massive use, in combination with other precision long-range weapons that Russia has, the results of its use against enemy targets would be comparable in effect and its power to strategic weapons. Although, in fact, the Oreshnik system is not a strategic weapon. In any case, it is not an intercontinental ballistic missile.
No one in the world has such weapons yet, as we know, as you know. Sooner or later other leading countries will also get them. We are aware that they are already under development. But this will not happen tomorrow, or in a year, or even two years, while we have this system now. I will add that there are no means of counteracting such a missile, no means of intercepting it in the world today. They don’t exist.
And I will emphasize once again, we will continue testing the latest system. Considering the special strength of this weapon, its power, it will be put into service in the Strategic Missile Forces. In addition to the Oreshnik system, several similar systems are currently being developed in Russia for further testing.
Napolitano: 10:31 Is any of that inaccurate?
Doctorow: Yes, there are bits and pieces here that are probably inaccurate. For one thing, it actually is an intercontinental ballistic missile. It all depends on where you launch it from. If you launch it from Astrakhan, well, then it just is within the Eurasian land mass. But if you launch it from Kamchatka, it is down in the South of Montana.
Napolitano: 10:55 Aside from his terminology, is there anything inaccurate in there about its strength and invincibility?
Doctorow: We don’t know. Frankly speaking, I have seen nothing to suggest that anyone knows what the real power of that missile is on impact.
Napolitano: Why is the West attempting to discredit this weapon? And why are the Americans and the British continuing to assist the Ukrainians in using ATACMS and Storm Shadows to reach into Russia?
Doctorow: Because–
Napolitano: Those are different questions. I apologize.
Doctorow: 11:31 No, no. They refuse to accept that the Russians, on a budget 10 times less than theirs in the States, could achieve a technical breakthrough that is not in the grasp of the United States today. That is, a hypersonic missile that cannot be shot down. And so they look for reasons to say that Russia is basically weak, that this is misleading, that it just creates a little crater, like a 2,000-pound bomb of TNT would create, and they don’t want to accept that there could be something very, very serious here. Nobody has shown what the real destruction there was or wasn’t inside the underground factory that the Russians were aiming to destroy.
12:20 Nor has anybody concentrated on the level of precision of this. This is a very critical issue. When you come in at Mach 10 or Mach 20, it should be extremely difficult to keep that missile and the payload onto a precise target. And Mr. Putin was saying that this is a precision striking missile. They hit that factory, after all. The question is what did they do to it? And we don’t know. Nobody seems to know.
Napolitano: 12:57 What will the Russians do, Professor Doctorow, to prevent, retaliate, or punish for the persistent use of ATACMS and Storm Shadows landing inside Russian territory?
Doctorow: Well, because of the premises in Mr. Putin’s appreciation of this missile– that it is precise, that it is devastating on impact at great depths, and that it does no collateral damage in a city. That is, it’s not a great threat to civilians or to valued cultural city infrastructure– we can expect he’ll do what he said he would do. The next step is to use the Oreshnik against decision-making centers and command and control centers in Kiev and elsewhere. So that’s the next step.
Napolitano: 14:01 Well, command and control centers for the United States would be Langley, Virginia or Washington, D.C. Or, are we talking something more modest like the new American air base in Poland and a more traditional-style American storehouse of weapons in Romania?
Doctorow: No, Judge, none of the above. He’s limiting himself to Ukraine, and there are two reasons. I gave one of them, that this missile is most threatening to Mr. Zelensky and the people in his regime, because if it does what Putin says, it will kill them wherever they’re hiding, at whatever depth. There’s a second reason, which is probably as important or more important. The second reason is that Putin has no trust in Trump’s ability or willingness to aid the resolution of the war with Ukraine. He believes that the peace plans that Kellogg has put forward are irrelevant to the present situation, and therefore there is nothing to expect in waiting to January 20th, and there’s nothing to expect by responding directly to the States and destroying any possibility of dialogue with the Trump administration when it comes in.
Napolitano: 15:30 Is, to your knowledge, Professor Doctorow, General Kellogg talking to people in the Kremlin?
Doctorow: No, he isn’t. According to the Russians, officially speaking, they have had no contact.
Napolitano: What kind of peace proposals has General Kellogg even proffered, whether directly to the Kremlin or indirectly through the media?
Doctorow: Well, it goes back to June, when he was in charge of this America First think tank, and he then put out ideas for how the war could be ended quickly. These ideas apparently have not been altered since then, although the Russians say they’re not relevant to the present situation, nor are they germane to what the Russians seek to justify ending this war. And those terms were set out earlier this week in an interview or in a feature article in the “Financial Times” about a certain Malofeyev who is close to the Kremlin, close to Putin, who runs an ultra-nationalist news journal online called “Tsargrad”. “Tsargrad” is the old Russian term for Istanbul pre-revolution.
Napolitano: And who speaks to General Kallog.
Doctorow: 16:51 And who critiqued the terms of Kellogg’s settlement, the basic idea being, let’s do this quickly. We will cut off arms to Ukraine if they don’t agree to sit down and talk to the Russians about a peace treaty.
We will raise the level of support to Ukraine if the Russians refuse to sit down and negotiate a settlement. We want to have an immediate ceasefire before anything happens. Those terms– oh yes, and the outcome would be, Ukraine would not be eligible for admittance to NATO for 10 years, and we will lift our sanctions, for example, on oil, gas, and so forth– these terms, they’re the only terms that have been published relating to General Kellogg, they are, according to Malofeyev, utterly unacceptable to the Russians. And although Kellogg will be admitted to Moscow and they will sit down and talk, the result will be zero. What are their basic reasons for going to war to be addressed?
Napolitano: 18:07 Right, right. Here’s President Zelensky just six days ago expressing a willingness quote “to stop the hot stage of the war”. You’ve got to tell me if this is rational or not. Chris, cut number one.
Zelensky: [English voice over] If we want to stop the hot stage of the war, we should take under NATO umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control. That’s what we need to do fast. And then Ukraine can get back the other part of its territory diplomatically.
Napolitano: That’s delusional, isn’t it?
Doctorow: Completely. He is losing the war badly, and his army may be overrun and forced to capitulate in a matter of weeks. And he’s talking as if he’s winning the war, or as if the United States can step in and freeze the conflict so that he can then at his leisure negotiate away what the Russians have gained on the ground. This is delusional.
Napolitano: 19:11 Here’s someone else whose comments are delusional, even though he will soon no longer be in office. Secretary of State Blinken earlier today at a meeting at which apparently, as you’ll hear from the Secretary, Russian defense minister Lavrov was there and left before Secretary Blinken began to speak. Cut number 12.
Blinken: I regret that our colleague, Mr. Lavrov, has left the room, not giving the courtesy to listen to us as we listened to him. And of course, our Russian colleague is very adept at drowning listeners in a tsunami of misinformation. So I won’t parse everything that he said, but I will just note two things.
19:55 First, he speaks of the indivisibility of security. That’s right, but it cannot be and must not be a one-way street, good for Russia, but not Ukraine. But let’s not fool ourselves and let’s not allow him or anyone else to fool us. This is not about and has never been about Russia’s security. This is about Mr. Putin’s imperial project to erase Ukraine from the map.
Napolitano: 20:20 I mean, he sounds like Senator Graham, “imperial project to erase Ukraine from the map”. There’s never been that articulated nor has there been behavior from which that can rationally be drawn, but I’ll let you take it from there.
Doctorow: No, I agree with you completely. This man cannot leave office soon enough. He is a danger to everyone around him. And by that I mean to every American, by his totally irresponsible propaganda.
Napolitano: 20:51 Before we go, what are the Russians doing in [Syria]? Are there land ground troops– excuse me, in Syria? Are there ground troops in Syria?
Doctorow: There are ground troops in Syria. The Russians, again, they take this very seriously, although there are many commentators among the alternative media, including some very responsible ones, who are saying that this is an Israeli project, that the Israelis have long had their objective to create [chaos in] Syria because it thereby disrupts the main channel of supply of Iranian weapons to Hamas and to Hezbollah. All of it transits in Syria. And this is why the Israelis have been attacking by air for the last several years, attacking what they say were arms caches in Syria. But the Russian perspective is this is an American project. And here we come back to this old question that you and I have discussed in the past: which is the head and which is the tail of a dog?
21:54 The Russians are saying clearly that the head of this dog is in Washington, DC. And the ambition of this project is to make Russians pay a price for their absorption in the Ukrainian war and for their winning the Ukrainian war.
And the price would be to jeopardize and perhaps to force out the Russian base, naval and air bases on the coast of Syria, thereby depriving Russia of its naval support in the Eastern Mediterranean and of its influence in greater Africa.
So this is what’s in play for the Russians, say, “Don’t kid yourselves, we have the means, we have the men, and we will fight to keep the Assad government in place.”
Napolitano: 22:43 Well, you read my mind. Will Russian troops be fighting IDF, Israeli Defense Forces and others financed by the US, aligned against President Assad?
Doctorow: I believe they will. But I wouldn’t put the emphasis on boots on the ground. Participation was, from 2015 on, primarily air power. And the air power is there and is being used today. I’d like to point out that, listening to the BBC, they assume that their audience is mindless and has no recollection whatsoever, because they’re reporting on the “white helmets”, daily reports on deaths of civilians from bombing in this area of Idlib and northwestern Syria. Sounds familiar, “white helmets”, hmm. They’re all British intelligence people. So the Brits are in it up to their necks, not just the Israelis and the Turks and a few other opportunists.
Napolitano; 23:52 What conceivable threat to national security of the United States of America or the United Kingdom is the presidency of Bashar al-Assad in Syria?
Doctorow: This is big geopolitics. It’s like asking what was the threat to American security of Vietnam. Nil. But it was the old domino theory which explained the presence. And we have a new version coming from the likes of Blinken and Sullivan. They don’t call it a domino theory, but if you follow their words carefully, that’s what they’re talking about.
“If we let Russia win in Ukraine, then Poland comes under threat, then the Baltics disappear and so forth.” This is a new version of the domino theory, without those little pieces of wood.
Napolitano; 24:41 You know, Senator Graham has made this argument. I don’t know if Senator Rubio, the incoming Secretary of State, has made the argument. Representative Congressman Walz, who is the incoming national security advisor, has made this argument. Will these insane domino arguments be whispered into the ears of and resonate with President Trump? You can’t answer that, but you must be fearful of it, as am I.
Doctorow: 25:11 Yes, he is a loose cannon on the deck, and that characterization will not go away. Exactly how he will come down on any given issue is unpredictable. And some of your other guests are saying very much the same thing. We’re hopeful that reason will prevail and he will not fall for these cheap tricks like the domino theory. But time will tell.
Napolitano: Here’s Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Rabkov mentioning Oreshnik.
Rabkov: Oreshnik is not a strategic ballistic missile. It’s an intermediate-range missile which was tested in combat, and the results are known for people in Kiev, for people in Washington, in Brussels, and of course in Moscow. We use this as not just a messenger [in] a sense, But we use this to test what we really have in terms of our growing and additional capabilities in this very crucial area. Let me tell you that if not for the Trump-1 administration that simply destroyed the INF Treaty, which served well interests of both the US and Russia for several decades, then there would be no Oreshnik in our hands.
26:40 We would still be restrained from our capability to develop such weapons. But okay, it’s gone, and now we have what we have. We do not complain about missed opportunities. We look forward. We’re very sure that we will reach all our goals and objectives through our action on the ground, and all the objectives of the Special Military Operation will be achieved.
Napolitano: 27:09 One thing that he said is absolutely true, and that is: President Trump abrogated a treaty which had succeeded in restraining the development of this kind of weapon while the treaty was being enforced. Your thoughts on what the Deputy Foreign Minister said?
Doctorow: Well, let’s consider who he is. He is surely the most strong-willed and most free in expressing his thoughts of any of Lavrov’s deputies. This is the man– “We will achieve all of our objectives.” Let’s remember who he is. He is the man who rolled out in December of 2021 the demands on NATO, that it roll back its presence to where it was at the end of the Cold War. That is before all the NATO expansion. So which of the objectives he expects to achieve remains to be determined. I found his language was done in this video to be quite moderate, considering, as I say, that he is a tough, very tough guy. He’s certainly the toughest senior representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Napolitano: 28:29 Where do you see all this going? How is Ukraine going to come to an end? The government will collapse, Zelensky will flee, either alive or dead. The military will probably collapse before Trump becomes president of the United States, no?
Doctorow: I agree with that scenario. There are those of my colleagues were speaking as if this can happen tomorrow. Well, maybe it won’t happen tomorrow, but it can certainly happen in the coming weeks. The Russians have shown on the latest television, finally, some diagrams, moving diagrams, showing what they’ve achieved in the last month, or six weeks. Because you listen to the daily news accounts, and this town is under fire, and that, and you can’t make any sense of it, frankly speaking. But they made sense of it. Their role, their move westward towards the Dnieper is dramatic, and the likelihood [is] a collapse of the Ukrainian forces when the Russians bring in 150,000 or more men that they have waiting and prepared for a major offensive, I don’t see how the Ukrainians could withstand that.
Napolitano: 29:45 Professor Doctorow, it’s a pleasure to chat with you, my dear friend. Thank you very much for your time and for your thoughts. And of course, I hope you’ll come back again and visit with us next week.
Doctorow: Very kind of you, and I appreciate the offer.
Napolitano: Thank you. Coming up later today at two o’clock this afternoon, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. At three o’clock this afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer.
In this session our discussion focused on two of the most important questions of the day:
what damage can the Oreshnik hypersonic missile do to justify its description as a game-changer in the Ukraine war and
whether the proposals to end the war in Ukraine put forward by Trump’s designated emissary, General Kellogg, will be accepted by the Russians and lead to an early cease-fire once Trump is inaugurated in January
The first question is so important because Vladimir Putin’s plans for responding to any further U.S., British and French provocations is now to concentrate his firepower on Ukraine, threatening to destroy its decision-making centers, meaning to kill Zelensky and his confederates by Oreshkin strikes, rather than to attack military installations in the United States or other NATO countries. We should assume that he knows the capability of his weapons when he takes such strategic decisions, but some of our experts, including MIT Professor emeritus Ted Postol are saying that Putin does not know what he is talking about, has been misled by his advisers.
The second question is in the news because a Kremlin insider, Konstantin Malofeyev, was featured this week in a Financial Times article, saying that Moscow finds the terms of the settlement drafted by General Kellogg to be utterly unacceptable. And then Kellogg responded publicly challenging Malofeyev’s credibility as a voice of the Russian President.
Of course, in our 30 minutes we covered several other key issues in the international news of the past week, in particular, what Russia is saying about who is the mastermind behind the Islamic ‘rebels’ storming of Aleppo and threatening the Assad regime; and whether Moscow will fight to save Bashar al-Assad as it did during 2015-2017.
In dieser Sitzung hat sich unsere Diskussion auf zwei der wichtigsten Fragen des Tages konzentriert:
Welchen Schaden kann die Oreschnik-Hyperschallrakete anrichten, um ihre Beschreibung als „Spielveränderer“ im Ukraine-Krieg zu rechtfertigen, und
ob die Vorschläge zur Beendigung des Krieges in der Ukraine, die von Trumps designiertem Abgesandten, General Kellogg, vorgelegt wurden, von den Russen akzeptiert werden und zu einem baldigen Waffenstillstand führen, sobald Trump im Januar sein Amt antritt.
Die erste Frage ist deshalb so wichtig, weil Wladimir Putins Pläne für die Reaktion auf weitere Provokationen der USA, Großbritanniens und Frankreichs nun darin bestehen, seine Feuerkraft auf die Ukraine zu konzentrieren und damit zu drohen, ihre Entscheidungszentren zu zerstören, d.h. Selensky und seine Verbündeten durch Oreschkin-Angriffe zu töten, anstatt militärische Einrichtungen in den Vereinigten Staaten oder anderen NATO-Ländern anzugreifen. Wir sollten davon ausgehen, dass er die Leistungsfähigkeit seiner Waffen kennt, wenn er solche strategischen Entscheidungen trifft, aber einige unserer Experten, darunter der emeritierte MIT-Professor Ted Postol, sagen, dass Putin nicht weiß, wovon er spricht, und von seinen Beratern in die Irre geführt wurde.
Die zweite Frage ist in den Nachrichten, weil ein Kreml-Insider, Konstantin Malofejew, diese Woche in einem Artikel der Financial Times zu Wort gekommen ist und gesagt hat, dass Moskau die von General Kellogg entworfenen Bedingungen des Vergleichs für völlig inakzeptabel hält. Daraufhin reagierte Kellogg öffentlich und stellte Malofejews Glaubwürdigkeit als Sprachrohr des russischen Präsidenten in Frage.
Natürlich haben wir in unseren 30 Minuten auch über einige andere wichtige Themen der internationalen Nachrichten der vergangenen Woche gesprochen, insbesondere darüber, was Russland über den Drahtzieher hinter den islamischen „Rebellen“ sagt, die Aleppo stürmen und das Assad-Regime bedrohen, und ob Moskau wie in den Jahren 2015–2017 für die Rettung von Baschar al-Assad kämpfen wird.
Nima R. Alkhorshid: 0:06 Hi everybody, today is Tuesday, December 3rd and Dr. Gilbert Doctorow is here with us. Welcome back, Gilbert.
Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: Good to be with you.
Alkhorshid: Let’s get started with what’s going on in Georgia and in Syria. What are the repercussions of these two major events that are happening right now in the Russian media, and how do they feel about it in terms of what’s going on in Ukraine?
Doctorow: 0:33 Well, I’m glad that you asked me to direct attention to the Russian media, because their take on these developments is rather different from what we hear in major media here in the West, or in the alternative media. I’ve heard some very interesting and well-informed statements by people like Scott Ritter, with regard to Syria, who knows vastly more than I do about it. But that is reflecting his insider’s knowledge of politics on the ground in that part of the world. And the Russian, what I’m bringing to this discussion is what the Russians are saying about it.
1:09 Because the Russians are a big player in one of these two crises. They’re a big player in Syria. They were when they came in and saved Assad’s regime or government, as you wish to call it, in 2015, 2017, by very well conducted air strikes coordinated with Iranian forces on the ground to knock out what the extremist terrorists, which the Americans like to call moderate terrorists and which now the Americans are calling rebels. Rebels, my foot. These are terrorists, and they have been financed by the United States.
1:54 However, let’s come back to the difference in interpretation. From the Russian perspective, what is happening in Syria is an American operation. Some of my peers, like I said, Scott Ritter, have good reason to put the finger on Israel as the driving force. And of course, Israel is a beneficiary of chaos in Syria, because it interrupts supply lines from Iran, which is a source of munitions, missiles, and all sorts of good things, to Hezbollah. It all crosses Syrian territory. This is the reason why there have been these Israeli strikes over the last several years, air strikes on arms caches in various places of Syria.
2:38 It was all about that movement of arms across Iraq and Syria into Lebanon. So then the beneficiaries of chaos that interrupts that neat logistical solution, keeping Hizballah armed. The Russian perspective on this is that it’s driven by the United States. For the United States, it is a concept that they have two areas of conflict in which Russia is a participant or can be named as a participant, and which can distract public attention away from the disastrous situation for America’s Kievan allies. The war is being won on the ground day by day with a thousand Ukrainian soldiers here and there killed every day with 30 or 40 Americans killed manning various weapons systems on Ukrainian territory with French soldiers being killed.
3:47 All of this bad news crawls into the front page even of the “New York Times”. It was yesterday they had an article on the front page, on the online edition, about the real military setbacks. And they spoke about these two towns or cities, which are now under contention, that is in the middle of the Donetsk region. The the important logistical hub Pokrovsk, which is now being renamed by the Russians to its original name before the Ukrainians got hold of it. It is Krasnoarmiisk, and that’s the name under which it will appear in Russian military bulletins; and Kharkovka, which is mostly captured already by the Russians. Both towns will fall completely in the next week or two.
4:40 The Russians claim to have about 50% or 60% of Kharkovka and a substantial portion of Pokrovsk. These are enormous blows to the supply of arms to the Ukrainian front. The loss of these towns opens the way for a Russian offensive straight across to the Dnieper. The next major cities would be the ones that were most famous in the period of 2014, so- called Russia Spring, when the rebellious Donetsk militias held on to Slaviansk was the name of the town, which is yet to be reached by the Russian offensive. They held on to it for 85 days in a kind of saga that for them is like the Americans talking about the Alamo. It’s holding on to a fortified area against the overwhelming enemy forces.
5:45 So the Russians are moving very nicely; and the Americans, the Brits, would particularly like to get this off the front page of the news. And it’s so much more convenient to have what’s going on in Syria, which as the “Financial Times” very nicely put it, “Well, the Assad forces are doing badly because the Russians and Iranians are so weak.” They love to say the Russians are weak.
It takes your mind off the fact that the Ukrainians are being crushed, ground down. And that the Russians have demonstrated their military might 10 days ago or whatever by their blow using the hypersonic, a Oreshnik ballistic missile to destroy a multi-story fortified concrete multi-story factory making– it’s an old factory that was always involved in production of missiles and other military gear. So they demonstrated their military might and the “Financial Times” would rather have us forget it.
6:49 The second area that is in the news, that for the purposes of American propaganda is another front, another point where the Russians are losing is Georgia. The Russians are losing what they don’t have. The Russians were, after the 2008 war, the Russians have had very poor relations with Georgia.
For a brief time, they had restored air transport between Russia and Moscow and Tbilisi, but that was taken down. There was a lot of protests in Georgia over that. And in point of fact, they have no diplomatic relations. Russian leverage on Georgia today is zero. But that doesn’t stop our media, our mass media, from saying what Washington would like them to say, that at least the election in September of the new parliament and prime minister in Georgia was Russia-influenced, Russia- controlled, and is trying to put Georgia back in the Russian sphere of influence.
7:58 And it does, we have now a revolt, something like the start of a civil war going on in the streets of Tbilisi, very much according to the Ukrainian Maidan scenario, down to little details like handing out cakes to the street demonstrators, handing out 40 euros equivalent to everybody who appears on the streets to try to overthrow the government. The only thing they haven’t had yet, which would be in line with the whole Maidan scenario dash catastrophe is the use of snipers to pretend to present the government as being murderous. When in fact, the snipers in the case of Maidan were … Georgian, by the way, snipers who were brought in precisely to facilitate the overthrow of the government, since the murder of people on the streets of Maidan would be laid at the door of the president Yanukovych. This is coming, because there are Georgian fighters in Ukraine who are now heading back to Tbilisi. So they can fulfill the rest of the scenario and try to kill people on the streets and blame it on the government.
9:33 The point is that in our newspapers, this whole saga, the whole adventure in Georgia is presented as pro-Russian, anti-Russian. It’s nothing of the sort. As I said, the Russians have no boots on the ground, they have no presence, they have no diplomatic mission, which could be coordinating the efforts of the young prime minister to hold on to power and to kick out the president, whose term expires within this month, but who’s refusing to leave her office, claiming that the elections that put in place the parliament were fraudulent. Well, these are two trouble spots, and the Russians have their view, which I’ve just expressed, on who is behind it. And who’s behind it is a country that has an abbreviated three letters starting with U, the USA. That is the present situation.
Alkhorshid: 10:44 I think the main question right now is: what would be the policy of the United States under Donald Trump in Georgia? And to what extent Europe would be involved when Donald Trump comes to power in Georgia, in order to facilitate some sort of color revolution in your opinion?
Doctorow: Well, the color revolution is underway. The question is, there’s a very big difference between 2013 and 2024. The difference is who’s the top of the government. Yanukovych was a very weak man. If he had shown the courage and the determination that Lukashenko showed three years ago when his rule was threatened, or two years ago, when his rule was threatened by a pretender, a false king, or the queen, who was backed by the Lithuanians and by the Poles. And he showed his teeth and he came out with his son, both of them armed with Kalashnikovs, saying, “You’re going to have to take me.”
11:52 Well, Yanukovych was not such a fighter. He was a very weak man. And he did not do what common sense would have dictated, which is to beat to hell those violent street demonstrators. He didn’t do it. I think this government in Georgia is prepared to do it as a young, vigorous and very smart Prime Minister, they’re very lucky to have him in this Georgia dream team.
12:18 So that scenario won’t go. But to answer your question about the United States, I think the United States doesn’t have to do very much, because the work for the color revolution is being led by the French on behalf of the United States. And why do I say that? It’s quite extraordinary that in at least two countries, the head of state of democratic sovereign states is a person who’s a dual national, which should be a no-no. You should not have a dual national as your head of state. It’s a contradiction in terms.
12:53 And she, the sitting president, is a French national. And as I said on Russian television last night, she’s not only a French national, but she’s working and has been working for a long time with French intelligence. Therefore, she would not take the position that she has taken, which is directly challenging the elected parliament and the elected prime minister, by refusing to step down and calling them illegitimate. She would not dare to do that if she didn’t have the full power of France behind her. And I assume that’s via the French diplomatic mission and whatever.
13:44 So the Americans don’t have to do very much. Trump can just rest easy and find something else to busy himself with. Mr. Macron’s people have got the rebel cause, the traitorous cause in Georgia well in hand. I think they’re going to lose.
Alkhorshid: 14:02 How do they talk about, in Russia they’re talking about– because we know in 2020 there was an agreement between Iran, Russia and Turkiye considering Idlib and Aleppo being a demilitarized zone. What do they talk about the situation right now between these three countries? I’m talking about Turkiye, as you’ve mentioned, being totally in the hand of the United States, playing on their part in Syria.
Doctorow: 14:32 Yeah. Well, the Russians are deeply disappointed by the behavior of Erdogan. And I think his chances of getting into BRICS even as a partner have been reduced to close to zero. I think the Chinese are also furious at him. So with these two core members of BRICS on the committee deciding who’s going to enter the association, I think Mr. Erdogan is no longer on the list.
But the Russians explained that this is a very– the first day, the day when Aleppo was seized, Russian news said nothing about it. You would have no idea that there was a crisis going on there. Yesterday, Russian news and Russian talk shows, the two most serious analytic programs that I watch– both “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov”, and the earlier in the day program, “The Great Game” with Vyacheslav Nikonov– they both had segments of their program devoted to the crisis in Syria.
15:41 And what I heard was, this is from, of course they’re not just people from the street. They’re not just talking heads. These are leading scholars from Moscow University and from other very authoritative research institutes who are specialized in the Middle East. What they had to say is that first of all, they believe that Mr. Bashar Assad is largely responsible for this catastrophic loss of Aleppo.
16:21 He was not doing the job properly. He was not taking into account that you snuff out rebellions as they did between 2015 and 2017, 2018, with Russian and Iranian help. And it dies down, but then it flares up again at some point in the future. And he was totally unprepared for a flare-up, which he had no right to be. So the Russians are quite unhappy with Bashar Assad. They’re trying to put heads together with the Iranians, who were the people on the ground today and people in this axis of resistance as the cat’s paws of Iran, they were the people on the ground mostly who saved the Assad regime in that period, critical period, starting with 2015 when the vast majority of the territory was in the hands of various rebels.
17:27 So the situation today is bad but not terrible. The loss of Aleppo is very important. It is the second- largest city in Syria. And it was before 2011, I think it was the largest city in Syria. Also the sortie, the advance that these rebels made, oh I’m calling them rebels, I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.
In fact, in the past we would have called them Islamic extremists, Sunni extremists and terrorists. All these people moved south from Idlib into Hama. It’s another province which has apparently some important military infrastructure that they are in the process of seizing. They said they seized weapons caches there.
18:24 So there’s a threat. They’ve been turned back, or at least the line has been held in this province, South Lidlib, Hamas. But the Russians are at a disadvantage. Their logistical supplies between the center of the country and their airfield and naval base on the coast are in jeopardy. So the Russians are looking in an anxious way in trying to save the situation with the forces they have on hand there, which are primarily air force. They are making attacks in the first day of action– again, this is very sketchy news that came out on Russian television– that killed 350 of these insurgents or terrorists by their bombing campaign.
19:16 There will be a lot more of them. They have their airplanes there and they also have some ground forces, but marginal. The expectation of the United States is that this, from the Russian perspective, is that the whole Syrian crisis would be an important distraction for the Russians and would take the pressure off the front in Donetsk, giving some relief to Mr. Zelensky. That is a false hope. I think the Russians are quite prepared to see Syria collapse if at the same time they finish off Ukraine.
Alkhorshid: 19:55 It seems that there was a phone call between Putin and the President of Iran Pezeshkian. They are talking about they are going to meet soon in the near future, personally. But do you see that these two countries are trying to manage the situation with Turkiye, or they’re just, they don’t know what to do with Turkiye right now.
Doctorow: Well, I think Pezeshkian has a better feel for Turkey right now than Putin does because Putin refused to take a phone call yesterday from Erdogan. That’s the state of their present relations, whereas Iran had sent their foreign minister into both Damascus to meet with Bashar Assad and to meet with Erdogan in Ankara, I believe.
20:52 So the initiative for finding a great-power or regional-power solution to the crisis in Syria is really with the Iranians. At the same time, the Russians point to something that you will not find mentioned anywhere in our major media, which [is] the situation is not as bad for Assad as it was in 2015. He has gotten the support of Saudi Arabia, of Egypt and of the United Arab Emirates in this present fight against the Sunni terrorists. Back in 2015 he was public enemy number one among the Arab countries. So in this sense, the situation is considerably more favorable, at least the regional situation, is more favorable to Assad than it was back then.
Alkhorshid: 21:53 In your opinion, right now in Russia, if you remember, Keith Kellogg is talking about the Biden administration preparing everything for Donald Trump to put him in a better position. Is what’s going on in Georgia, in Syria, and Jake Sullivan talking about sending more weapons by mid-January to Ukraine. Is part of that grand plan on the part of the deep state in the United States?
Doctorow: Well, the Russian position of Mr. Trump has become very clear in the last week or two. And out of this, there are a number of things I want to share with viewers to give them some comfort that the world is not going to hell and that a nuclear war is most improbable given what the Russians have learned and how they intend to continue their their activities against the Ukrainian and NATO forces. What they learned is that Mr. Trump is worthless, from their standpoint. They have discounted him completely as a factor in the end game of the Ukraine war.
23:15 If they pretend– well, Mr. Putin is never an insulting person, he never would show his disdain, except if you happen to be Angela Merkel and he knows that you are afraid of dogs. In that case, he might show his disdain for you in a way that people will know. But as regards Donald Trump, of course, he will be given all respect. Mr. Kellogg, General Kellogg will be given all respect if and when he makes a visit to Moscow.
But the outcome of those talks will be zero. From the Russian perspective– they discussed precisely Kellogg’s outline back in June, published, on what the solution to the war could look like. And this was presumably what he was feeding to Donald Trump back then. And it’s presumably what Trump had in mind when he spoke, said that he could solve the war at once. From the Russian perspective, what is coming to the public domain, the public news about the Kellogg Plan back from June, dates from June and has no relevance to November, December 2024.
24:31 The battle has moved on. The Russians have achieved sweeping victories and conquered additional territory, more territory in the last month than the preceding 12 months. They have shown on their television for the first time in a way that you can make sense out of it, they showed exactly how the battle, the line of confrontation, the battle lines in Donetsk have moved in the last month. It’s dramatic.
And they’re comfortable that they have a winning hand and that time is on their side. And they have something else. And that is their present reading of the meaning of Oresznik and what to do with it. Many of our commentators, both in mainstream and in alternative media, have considered that Mr. Putin will use this weapon to strike against a NATO country.
25:39 I myself put Poland at the top of the list of potential targets for a Russian strike if they were further subjected to ATACMS, SCALP and Storm Shadow firings from Ukraine into their territory. However, I think on the basis of their dismissing Trump’s possible contribution to a solution, considering the desperation and the recklessness of the Biden administration, considering the utter recklessness and stupidity of the British Prime Minister Starmer, and how he is conducting himself in British policy…
I think the Russians have stepped back and said, “Why are we going to play into the hands of these people who are hoping to incite us to do something that will raise the escalatory level? And why would we wait a minute for the arrival of Mr. Trump when he showed himself by appointing these hopeless loud mouths and Waltz and Gortcan who are insulting us, why would we wait for Trump to come to power? No reason at all.”
27:07 So, in this context, what is the leverage that they enjoy from the power of the Oreshnik? Well, in Ukraine, it’s not Mr. Trump who’s sitting in a bunker 200 meters below the earth. It’s Mr. Zelensky, who now realizes he’s totally vulnerable. And all the American and NATO generals who are in similar bunkers around, either around Xxxx or within the Kiev area, they all can be killed in a moment’s notice by the Russians. So the real pressure, the point of leverage, is not in Washington where you’ve got dummies with Yale degrees on their office walls, who don’t get it and who are only making these sounds for the sake of getting a better university position on January 21st.
28:10 No, leave them alone. Let them talk to themselves. Let them talk to their journalists. The Russians are applying pressure where it can move things on the Ukrainians. It’s the Ukrainians who are now about to lose five million refugees to Europe because all heating and electricity is being reduced to close to nil. And they are, and Mr. Zelensky is rattled, as he should be, by the strength of Russia’s new arms.
Alkhorshid: 28:46 In your opinion right now, with what we’ve seen considering Oreshnik and the power it has in terms of any sort of escalation between the West and Russia, do you think that– we have two conflicts in the West Asia, in Georgia, and with escalation in Ukraine– do you think what would be the next step on the part of the policymakers in the United States? Because they want to escalate the situation, in my opinion. They don’t give up on escalation, that any possibility, they can take any possibility to escalate the situation. But at the end of the day, we have the fear of having a nuclear interaction between the West and Russia. Russia doesn’t need to go nuclear because they have a new, as you’ve mentioned, hypersonic missile that is so capable of hitting any target in the West. But the West doesn’t have it. This is the problem that you’re facing right now.
Doctorow: 29:53 Well, as I’ve written a couple of days ago, when this situation was discussed on the Sunday “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov” show, one of the regular political-scientist commentators said that they were delighted with Mr. Putin’s speeches in Astana on Wednesday and Thursday, both sitting at the session of their treaty organization of defense.
And he was talking tough. He was talking very tough. They were very happy finally that their president had moved from what they called Soviet- era diplomatic language to the kind of very straightforward in-your-face language that he was using in Astana. And to sum it up, what’s the best way to for Russia to conduct itself in front of the West now? it’s just to say, “Hands up! Time for you to surrender, because we got you covered.” And let’s just say something about the Oreshnik, which again, is not much discussed.
31:10 Yes, it’s an intermediate range ballistic, but it’s at the top end of intermediate and the bottom end of intercontinental. It is intercontinental, it depends where you fire it from. If you fire it from Kamchatka, from the Russian far east, it can reach Montana and maybe farther down the US West Coast. So of course it is intercontinental in that sense. It’s where you position it.
It also can wipe out any or all of American military assets in the Middle East. You fire it from Astrakhan and that’s it. You’ve got the whole US military establishment in West Asia covered and ripe for destruction. Now, I think the only limitation in this is first of all, how many of these Oreshniks do they have? And it’s clear that when they say they’re going into serial production, they mean three-shift production.
32:06 They have a few of them, clearly, but they decided not to waste them on a further attack on Ukraine until and unless Mr. Zelensky fires another one or two or more ATACMS or Storm Shadows into Russian territory. Then they will start spending some of their stock of this missile, their hypersonic missile. In the meantime, they’re doing quite well, thank you, destroyed the energy infrastructure and various arms caches and concentrations of foreign mercenaries using simpler, much less expensive short-range missiles. The Iskandar in particular, which has a 500-kilometer range, quite sufficient to wreak havoc across Ukraine, which is what they are doing.
Alkhorshid: 33:04 We’ve seen, if you remember in the Trump’s presidency, his first term, he wanted to withdraw the US troops from Syria and later on he said, we’re there, I didn’t do it because we have a lot of oil there and we have to take care of that. Don’t you think that would be the case in Ukraine in the future? That would bring some sort of– because Lindsey Graham was talking about the resources in Ukraine, and they may go in that direction. That would be problematic for Russia. Don’t you think that would be the case?
Doctorow: 33:44 Look, Ukraine was an important country for population. It had 45 million. It’s down now to 28 million and soon it’ll be down to 22 million or less across all the refugees who headed either to Russia or to Europe. It was important because of the skills of the population and the manufacturing infrastructure in Donbass, which was among the most advanced and important contributors to the Soviet economy.
34:13 The wealth that Russia has received in terms of population and manufacturing capabilities in the Donbass, which it now possesses, I think more than offsets the $350 billion in frozen assets and so forth. So that aspect, manufacturing in both the equipment and the skills, the manufacturing skills and the mining skills of population in Donbass, were an important contributor. The agricultural component also was very important. Oil and gas, much less important. There was discussion of fracking and how that would open up all kinds of possibilities for energy sufficiency or as you’re suggesting for energy exports from Ukraine but that was never really exploited.
35:13 There was considerable resistance within Ukraine to fracking. I said nothing much came of it But they have their metal, they have a lot of things. Mr. Zelensky has opened up shop to sell off his country as if he has a right to sell it. He has no legitimacy. And I think any contracts he makes will be overturned in international lawsuits because he has no legitimacy. I don’t think that the United States is motivated in its policy towards Ukraine by this kind of mercantilism and resource capture. That is no doubt an additional bonus, but it’s not what’s driving American policy there. It’s all geopolitics. It’s trying to deprive Russia of its rightful place in the world by having it under continual pressure by an existential enemy that they are supplying.
Alkhorshid: 36:21 What were the repercussions of Donald Trump’s comment on the countries who are not willing to use dollar any more? Because he’s just trying to intimidate them by putting more sanctions on these countries. How do they talk about it in the Russian media?
Doctorow: 36:41 They laugh at it. I think he’s making a fool of himself, because he’s carrying to a still further extreme all of the self-destructive practices of the Biden administration in its sanctions policy. It is utterly impossible for the United States to sanction the BRICS countries. That is more than half of the world’s population, a very substantial part of global GDP. Whom are they going to sell to, after all? Whom are they going to buy from? It is showing utter ignorance of the real economic power of the United States today in the present configuration of nations. It’s assuming that the United States has the preeminent place in the global economic pecking order that it had in 1947. It doesn’t.
37:42 The only thing that he can achieve is self-isolation of the United States and harm to the American economy. So the Russians take this as showing rank stupidity. They don’t say that openly, but they laugh. They laugh.
I think that it also misses the point. I think Trump was very badly advised. He was following all of the promotional hype about what BRICS would do and not following what they actually said and concluded in their declaration of the BRICS summit, which is not attacking the dollar. They made it plain that their efforts will be of a constructive rather than a destructive nature, constructive in that they’re building parallel institutions for global governance that they expect will take over eventually from the existing institutions but for some time will be parallel. And they did not, they pointedly did not make de-dollarization an objective or the creation of a BRICS currency the objective, knowing that this will alienate many prospective new members of BRICS who do not want to risk their ongoing, their substantial commercial relations with the United States for the sake of an unproven new currency.
39:33 So the whole BRICS exercise is assuming a gradual replacement of the dollar with bilateral currency exchanges or by trading in national currencies. The biggest factor in de-dollarization is not what Trump was talking about. “Ah, who’s going to stand against it?” No, The biggest factor is what the Saudis are doing. And he doesn’t dare touch that.
The fact that the Saudis did not renew the petrodollar agreements with the United States, that they are now doing substantial sales to China in Yuan and not in dollars, that’s the single biggest threat to the American financial hegemony, not any declarations coming out of BRICS.
Alkhorshid: 40:30 Do you think in Donald Trump’s view right now, is he saying these conflicts are helping him or just solidifying the relationship between Iran, China, Russia and other countries within BRICS?
Doctorow: Well, the Russians view Trump’s plans for foreign policy as having the notion that he can make some kind of a pragmatic solution to relations with the Russians and then can try to split off the Russians from the Chinese.
41:05 The people around Trump have been rightfully alarmed that the Biden administration did so much to solidify a Russian-Chinese high-level alliance, practically speaking, an alliance. And they would like to take one or the other country aside to break this up. Well, they can’t take China aside, because they’ve already declared China as enemy number one and the biggest threat to Americans global position. So what’s left is to take the “junior” partner, as they like to see it. The concept of junior partners is also nonsense. It shows ignorance of the real strength of the Russian negotiating position within their relation with China. But that’s a separate issue, for a separate discussion.
42:03 Gilbert, what’s so interesting right now is the United States, Washington, right now is talking about that the next battlefield between the United States on one side and Russia and China and BRICS on the other side wouldn’t be in Africa. It means that it would be in Africa because it seems– do you see the war expanding under Donald Trump, in a new front in Africa?
42:37 I’m not aware of his policy plans. I am aware of what Mr. Biden is doing at the very end of his four-year term. He’s finally made it over to Africa, one last hurrah. And as the BBC is describing it today, his trip there is a step towards addressing the concerns in Africa, that America is not interested in their continent, whereas the Chinese have invested so very much.
43:05 And the suggestion is the Americans will invest in Africa. That’s an assumption that doesn’t have much foundation under it. As for the Russians, they’re busy in Africa, but doing different things, not so much commerce of supplying security and arms sales, not, I said, not commerce, not civilian commerce, not consumer-goods type of commerce, but services they’re selling, namely security, military assistance and military supplies. So that is the Russian presence in Africa is rather small footprint. The Chinese have an enormous footprint, because they’re so dependent on raw material supplies, minerals and other things for their industry as a global manufacturer and exporter that Africa to them has, like Latin America, has very great meaning and importance and is worth investing in.
44:11 For the United States, it’s hard to see that, because the United States is no longer the world’s factory. It’s a consumer, not a producer of manufactured goods. Therefore, I find it hard to imagine that the American investment in Africa can become a serious rival to China’s.
Alkhorshid: 44:35 We had all of Sholz within Kiev. And is this one of the final attempts on the part of the Biden administration to keep things calm in Kiev. And what do we know about what’s going on in Ukraine politically between these political parties, between these different factions?
Doctorow: 45:03 Well, on the latter, I cannot claim an expertise to add to this discussion. I don’t follow the political factions within Ukraine. But as to Mr. Scholz’s visit, that was shown on Russian television. They again had a good laugh of his stepping out of the train and holding onto an aluminum suitcase. And they were asking, what have they got in there? Is it loaded with banknotes? Is it loaded with gold ingots? Well, gold ingots, because you know, that would, Scholz may do his exercises in the morning, but he’s not going to carry a suitcase like that full of ingots. So it was something rather that he didn’t want anyone else to have a chance to see. His visit there was– I don’t think provided a great deal of comfort to Zelensky.
45:55 The Russians call it “political tourism”. They don’t take this seriously. He didn’t give Zelensky what he wanted most, which is permission to use a Taurus missile. He specifically denied that this was something that Germany will accept for the reasons that we’ve heard in the past, because it would have to be German personnel manning and guiding those missiles. Instead, he offered various types of military aid and kept on beating the drum how Germany is the largest supplier of military goods to Ukraine after the United States.
46:40 Mr. Zelensky looks uncomfortable, And as well he might, because really his days are numbered, and if he’s not careful, his days on earth are numbered.
Alkhorshid: 46:54 How about Europe, the European countries right now? Is the conflict in Ukraine, or would this conflict in Ukraine be a dividing issue for the Western European countries or they were still united in their policies?
Doctorow: Well, I have something, kind of challenge, to the audience to think about on this very question, something that’s crossed my mind. Why is it that we have 27 leaders of whom 25 are just licking the boots of the United States and are not doing anything to look after the interests of their own people and are submitting to the American dictates on how to conduct a war against Russia by way of Ukraine? Why is that the case? And as you say, is it split? Yes, it’s split, but not dramatically split in any way. You have Mr. Orban all there by himself as the one brain in the whole operation, and the rest of them presenting themselves as dummies.
47:58 Now why is that true? Are these people genuinely dummies, or is there something else going on? I believe there’s something else going on, which no one is talking about. And that is: all of the states, the 27 states, they have sacrificed, going back to 1992, when the European Economic space, the Community, became the European Union, when what was an economic grouping became a supranational state, they all gave up their sovereignty, large amounts of their sovereignty, to the point where a head of state or head of government has the power of a city mayor and not of a traditional head of state.
48:48 They gave up foreign policy. Even Germany, pretend to do policy. You’ve got that complete idiot, Baerbock, who was busy getting herself censored by the Chinese for making insulting remarks about Xi. They pretend to do something like diplomacy, even if they have such very poor, very poorly educated personalities speaking on behalf of their diplomacy. But this is an accident, because there is nothing there. The diplomatic function is concentrated in Brussels.
49:29 And so all of these countries are not countries any more in the traditional sense of understanding. And this is precisely what Putin has revolted against. That type of denial of sovereignty is unacceptable to the Chinese, to the Russians, to the Iranians, and to a few other countries who stand out. Europeans– and why did they do this? Why did they give up their sovereignty?
50:00 Because they believed, falsely, wrongly, that national sovereignty is the basis for wars. Countries are aggressive. If they have full sovereignty, they make wars on one another. And since the European Union is supposed to be a peace project, we do away with sovereignty. Well, this other factor: they wanted to integrate for the sake of freedom of travel within the borders of the EU, which ultimately took the form of the Schengen, and to simplify economic life, financial life within this whole space by creating a common currency, the euro.
50:50 And you can’t, if you are not willing to tie the currency to gold, then you have a fiat currency. And a fiat currency requires that all members using that currency have a coordinated tax system, budgetary system, deficit agreements, and all the rest of it. And that’s what they’ve done. They have a fiat currency which works fine, but the result of that fiat currency is that European leaders are nobodies. And we can afford to have complete idiots bearing the title of prime minister or head of state. That’s what we have.
51:25 No, I don’t mean to say everyone’s an idiot, of course not. But they have been stripped, they have stripped themselves of the responsibilities and the powers that would give them a voice in the present conflict over Ukraine. They don’t have a voice. And into this void– it was a void before she took power five years ago, she being Von der Leyen– you had a drunkard who was the head of the Commission, the drunkard prime minister, former prime minister of Luxembourg, who didn’t do very much. And she came around and she understood, “My goodness, I can seize all this.”
52:23 And she did. And nobody said no. Nobody said that the European Union constitution doesn’t give you these powers. So they’ve all been silenced, and she has seized the power. She’s very ambitious, she’s not stupid, she’s vicious and she has concentrated all the power in her own hands. So you ask her, is Europe divided? Who cares if it’s divided? So long as Von der Leyen has all of the cards in her hand, it doesn’t make any difference.
Alkhorshid: 52:58 What’s tragic, Gilbert, about what’s going on in the European countries is those people who are largely corrupted are getting to the power. This is the tragedy of what’s going on in Europe. And they’re having everything in their hands to change the future of Europe. And it doesn’t seem that they’re representing the people who are, as we’ve seen so far, the people in Europe want some sort of change. But do you see that coming to Europe, even under Donald Trump?
Doctorow: 53:31 He may be the disruptive force. He doesn’t have any respect for the European leaders for all the reasons I just outlined above. And I’m sure he may not think of it conceptually as I’ve just outlined it, but the net result of these people are nobodies: he’s right. So why should he respect them? Why should he care what they think of him? What they think of the ambassador who’s delivered to France, the convicted felon who’s a jailbird, and he’s now, because of his relationship with the Trump family, is now going to be the ambassador to France.
54:11 It fits in with his estimate of what France counts for, which is to say close to nothing. And ultimately in foreign affairs, he’s right, it counts for nothing. What will change this? I’m afraid nothing short of breaking up the European Union and turning it back to where it was before 1992 as an economic community.
And it can have a common currency. Why not? Only it would be tied to the gold. It can be done if somebody realizes what you sacrificed to achieve a common currency that is based on fiat, you will realize that it’s time to undo some of these crazy things that were done by very smart, very progressive intellectuals in 1992 with the best interests. There were no villains in the piece, but what we see now [is] a Europe that’s descended to lower depths and has people who are an embarrassment. And they’ve had a whole succession– looking at foreign policies, a whole succession of embarrassments in what preceded Mr. Borrell.
55:26 Borrell is an embarrassment. He’ll never live down “This Europe as a garden, and outside our gates is a jungle”, said two years ago. It’s an embarrassment for anyone with any self-worth to consider this. And before him, what did they start with? Lady Ashton, this British Dame. I mean by title, not by sex, from Britain. She was the first nitwit to head European foreign policy. She didn’t know her ass from her elbow. And then she was followed by this Italian, name escapes me right now, who was a mental case.
56:10 She couldn’t bear the pressure of the office. And you saw the anguish in her face every time she appeared in public. And she was speaking for the European Union. There is something seriously wrong, just as it’s utterly unacceptable that this buffoon, insulting buffoon, Baerbock, is sent on missions abroad to represent Germany and to deal with complex issues like separating China from Russia.
So I know that the party, the bloc in the parliament that was created and is headed by Viktor Orban, is to reform the European Union and not to deconstruct it. But I dare say he’s going to have to rethink this, because I don’t see a way that you can reform the European Union under conditions when the constituent member states are not states, they’re not nation states. They are, they’ve been deprived of powers of diplomacy and of powers to think for themselves, which is a disaster for an entity that represents 500 million people.
Alkhorshid: Thank you so much, Gilbert, for being with us today. Great pleasure as always.
Yesterday I had the pleasure to have a lengthy chat with a brave Canadian who defies the Trudeau government’s intolerance for free speech and public debate on relations with Russia.
Our chat covered the waterfront of issues in current international affairs and I leave it to the community to watch part or all of the video as it sees fit. A written transcript will likely be available within the coming 24 hours and I will post it then.
A 90-second video capturing the essential point of this interview may be found here:
Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)
Ein langes Gespräch mit Free Canada: Dimitri Lascaris in Montreal
Gestern hatte ich das Vergnügen, mich ausführlich mit einem mutigen Kanadier zu unterhalten, der sich der Intoleranz der Trudeau-Regierung gegenüber der freien Meinungsäußerung und der öffentlichen Debatte über die Beziehungen zu Russland widersetzt.
Unser Gespräch deckte eine Vielzahl von Themen der aktuellen internationalen Politik ab, und ich überlasse es der Community, das Video ganz oder teilweise anzusehen, wie sie es für richtig hält. Eine schriftliche Abschrift wird wahrscheinlich innerhalb der nächsten 24 Stunden verfügbar sein und ich werde sie dann veröffentlichen.
Transcript
Good day, this is Dimitri Laskaris coming to you from Montreal, Canada for Reason to Resist on December 2nd, 2024. About two weeks ago, Ukrainian forces attacked military targets in the Russian city of Bryansk using US-supplied ATACMS missiles. According to Russia’s Ministry of Defense, this attack caused some casualties in Russia. Ukraine carried out this attack despite prior warnings from Russia’s government that the use of such weapons on Russian territory could be deemed by the Russian Federation to be an attack by the United States on Russia. About 10 days ago, Russia responded to the attack on Bryansk by striking the Ukrainian city of Dnipro with a new hypersonic weapon called the Ureshnik.
Shortly after that retaliatory attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a speech which caused some observers, including yours truly, to believe that if Ukraine attacked Russian territory again with Western supplied weapons, Russia might attack a Western military base outside of Ukraine. Well, Ukraine attacked Russia again with ATACMS. This time, however, the targets were in or around the Russian city of Kursk. Russia did not retaliate thankfully by striking a Western military base outside of Ukraine. Rather, it launched a massive attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure or what remains of it. So the question remains under what circumstances might Russia attack a Western military base or other Western military target outside of Ukraine. Now here to discuss this and other related matters with us is Dr.Gilbert Doctorow.
Dr. Doctorow is a student of Russian affairs going back to 1965. He’s a graduate of Harvard College, a past Fulbright scholar, and a holder of a PhD in history from Columbia University. After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. He is an American citizen and a long-time resident of Brussels. And I thank you, Gilbert, for joining us today.
Doctorow:
Well, very good to receive this invitation.
Lascaris:
So based on your examination of the evidence, in light of the brief history that I’ve just recounted, what is your best sense of where the next step on the escalation ladder lies?
And by that I mean, do you think based upon statements coming out of the Russian Federation, that Russia will strike a Western military asset outside of Ukraine in response to a Ukrainian attack on Russia with Western supplied missiles. And if so, what kind of damage would such a Ukrainian attack have to inflict on Russia for Russia to respond in that manner? I think that in the last couple of weeks, Mr. Putin and his associates had some time to reflect on what is the best way to proceed. And they stepped back from this threat of striking a target in a NATO country as an early measure.
Doctorow:
I think that may not be a measure that they entertain at all, considering what now seems to be their strategy. The strategy is to destroy the regime in Kiev. It is Mr. Zelensky, who is shaken thoroughly by the power of the Oreshnik hypersonic missile to destroy bunkers up to 200 meters deep. The sort of bunker that he finds refuge in, the sort of bunker that the American and West European generals are sitting in while they do the planning of the actions for the Ukrainian army.
In other words, he is the one who is amazingly vulnerable and he is not a member of NATO and he can be destroyed at will by the Russians. Therefore, the pressure point is really on Kiev right now and not on Berlin or London or Washington. This is much safer, it’s much less likely to lead us to a nuclear war, and it is the most efficient way of getting what the Russians want, which is regime change in Ukraine.
Another factor in this new strategy that I see is that they are not interested in waiting one minute for Mr. Trump to come to power. They are, by all of his recent appointments, by the outrageous statements of some of these appointments, they understand that nothing good will come with the inauguration of Mr. Trump. It is outlandish claims to be able to resolve the war by knocking heads together, by threatening the Russians. That is unacceptable.
It is not feasible, as the Russians understand, and there’s no reason to coddle him. So the pressure point is now on Kiev, And I think it will be felt. We will see. The Russians have not only destroyed some of the 20% of power generating facilities still standing in Ukraine in the last two weeks. But they’ve also attacked various bases where there were foreigners.
And when they knew there were foreigners, they killed a number of Frenchmen. They killed 40 Americans, they say, in another attack at another location in Ukraine. And they are showing their strength right now using missiles that are less capable but very efficient. The Iskander, this is a 500 kilometer range missile that is not hypersonic, but that gets the job done at rather low cost. And they’re saving their still rather few are Oreshniks for some contingency where they might be needed to take out Berlin or could take out some facility in Western Europe.
When I say take out, I want to be clear about it. Destroying cities is not the ambition of the Russians and the missile they’re about to use, should such an attack be needed, is not capable of destroying cities. It’s capable of pulverizing a given exact site, whether it’s an infrastructure site, whether it’s a factory that’s deeply underground and protected by reinforced concrete levels, such as happened in the Dnipro bombing. The force of the Oreshnik missile is comparable to a nuclear bomb, but without the radiation and without the extensive collateral damage. It utterly pulverizes and burns to ash the immediate target and leaves cities intact.
Lascaris:
Now I had intended to ask you today, Gilbert, about the pressure growing within Russia for a more forceful response by the Russian Federation to these US missile attacks conducted by the Ukrainian military. This morning, when I woke up, I found in my inbox a comment that you had just published relating to your review of an important political talk show in Russia, the most widely watched one last night. And it sheds some light on this whole question of whether there’s pressure growing within Russia on Vladimir Putin to be more forceful. Could you share with us what you learned last night by watching this program?
Doctorow:
Well, it’s not only Paul Craig Roberts in the USA who writes about or thinks about the risks inherent in the cautious approach of Mr. Putin to all of the provocations that he has received from the West in the course of this war as it’s going up an escalatory ladder. There are those among Russian political scientists who carry a lot of weight, who have spoken about the need to be demonstrative and not just to jawbone.
I go back to July of 2023, when Sergei Karaganov, who is widely known in the West, he was very frequently a guest of the Social Democratic Party think tank in Germany. And this man, who has substantial influence within Russia, had written that the country should stage a strike, a nuclear strike, with tactical nuclear weapons, somewhere in NATO land, in order to put an end to all of the senseless, foolish denigration of Russia and of its president that has persisted into 2024 from the decade of the 90s, where it all started when Russia was indeed on its knees or on its back because of all the economic disruption of the years under Yeltsin. Karaganov was calling for a strike.
It raised a great controversy in the West and within Russia itself, where he was disowned by other professionals in the security domain of Russia. While Mr. Putin held his calm, his sang-froid, he knew better than anyone else what was in the pipeline And what would meet the requirements of a shock and awe strike that would impress the world media and some politicians, hopefully, about Russia’s true might and its ability to use that might and determination to use that might if it were further provoked and if it felt that it was liable to suffer substantial damage to not just reputation but in terms of infrastructure and loss of life. That was the Oreshnik. That the Oreshnik was such a revelation and such a talking point in the last couple of weeks is our fault.
It’s not that the Russians were holding back. It was what we were not looking at or willing to entertain. And what I mean is that from 2018, in March of that year, just three weeks before the presidential election, for which Mr. Putin was standing for another term in office. He made a speech, which we call the State of the Nation speech, to the bicameral legislature and many invited guests, in which he rolled out the various new strategic weapons that Russia had been developing ever since the United States pulled out of the the anti-ballistic missile treaty, this is going back to to President Bush Jr. in 2002. Thenit became clear that America had as its plans to become capable of a first strike, a decapitating strike on Russia, for which there would be no response in the Americans’ view. So the Russians had been developing weapons, and as these weapons were rolled out in 2018, Mr. Putin spent an hour of his two-hour speech on show and tell, using animated illustrations of how these various systems would work. But he was not taken seriously by Western media and presumably by Western politicians. He wasn’t taken seriously because how could it be that Russia with a military budget ten times less than the United States could do what Mr. Putin had just said aloud, that it had moved for the first time in its history, including the history of the Soviet Union going back 70 years. This was the first time Russia claimed to have moved a generation ahead of the United States in strategic weapons. By a generation ahead, I mean 10 years. They had developed these hypersonic missiles. The one that he rolled out and described in 2018 was a forerunner of what we saw in the last two weeks.
A forerunner in the sense that the flight characteristics, the potential damage of such a hypersonic missile were there in the forerunner, which was an ICBM, an intercontinental ballistic missile. Whereas the Oreshnik, which was just demonstrated in the bombing and destruction of Dnipro, was at the upper limit of an intermediate range ballistic missile. The upper range is 5, 000 kilometers. Above that one speaks about the missiles as being intercontinental.
In any case, this new weapon, which Mr. Putin has described as being unstoppable, if the Western air defenses cannot even track it, let alone intercept it. This was a game changer.
Now you asked me about the Vladimir Solovyov program, his evening program of last night. And this was quite interesting because the Russians have been, of course, under great pressure. I think a week before I’d noticed that the host of another authoritative and widely watched news and analysis program, Vyacheslav Nikonov of The Great Game, was ashen-faced when he mentioned on air that the Ministry of Defense had just announced what you spoke about a few minutes ago, these two missile strikes that took place on Russian territory in Bryansk and Kursk, this coming week after what should have been the showstopper, the Russian attack on Dnipro.
Well, he was ashen faced then a week or 10 days ago. This week, the Russian chattering classes already had time to absorb all the news and they felt quite comfortable with a speech and a press conference that Mr. Putin made during his two-day state visit in the middle of this past week in the city of Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, where there was one of these periodic meetings of the Collective Security Defense Treaty Organization. This is the Russian equivalent to NATO, the idea is similar. It is a defense alliance of former Soviet republics, of which Russia is the most important member, of course.
And at that meeting and the press conference that followed, Mr. Putin spoke in a very militant way, a very self-confident way about how Russia has these weapons, is ready to use them wherever is needed, and that all threats that are being talked about in NATO and outside of NATO, how the West will respond to Russia’s advances on the battlegrounds in the Donbass and recovery of its partly occupied territory in Kursk region. This was all quite open, frank and undiplomatic. The Americans like to say that everything is still on the table, meaning that all options are open. And Mr. Putin in his speech used the Russian equivalent, saying that about measuring the weather forecast for a day, that anything is possible. So he was giving a rather open threat to the West. Don’t even think about it. We have the means to be victorious in any exchange with you. As regards the rumors that you in the West, you in the States are thinking of supplying nuclear weapons to Ukraine, please understand that we will not tolerate this and we will use everything in our arsenal to ensure this doesn’t happen, which is a not very well-disguised statement that we will bomb the hell out of Ukraine with nuclear weapons to ensure that they do not take possession of nuclear weapons that they can use against us.
So this talk really impressed these representatives of the chattering classes, those are the sophisticated watchers of politics in Moscow. And the result in what they were saying on air what I’ve called it Black humor. They were saying that Mr. Putin is no longer using Soviet-age, Soviet-vintage diplomatic talk. He is speaking directly, frontal assault language, which they liked very much and which they wished he had done earlier.
But they’re quite happy to see it now. And that essentially what Putin is saying is, to the West, is Hands Up!. The game is over, hands up. And we put that into concrete terms, since so many people in the West are talking about what the conditions of an end to the war in Ukraine can look like with or with Mr. Trump’s intervention, how Mr.Zarensky is supposedly ready to concede territorial loss in exchange for Russia’s acquiescence in his country becoming a NATO member. Mr. Trump is talking up a storm about how he’s going to end this war in a matter of days. All of that you can put in the rubbish bin. This is the essence of what the panelists were saying, because Russia is proceeding very well on the battlefield, is pushing back the Ukrainians.
To be sure, there are counter-offensives, there is great caution being exercised by the Russians in their advance because of the ever-present Ukrainian drones and strike drones. Nonetheless, they are advancing several kilometers a day. They are forming what they call cauldrons or surrounding units of the Ukrainian army for destruction, either surrender or destruction. They expect that with the offensive that they’re now preparing, they have several hundred thousand men ready to strike within the Donbas area. Within the Donbas area, they will push back the Ukrainians to the extent that the Ukrainian army will collapse and they will have to be forced to accept a capitulation.
I think that these Russians are the talking classes. They’re very close to the Kremlin. And I think that what I was hearing last night is the same conversation within the walls of the Kremlin. That they have no interest in waiting for Mr. Trump. They expect to win the war on the ground handily, to the extent that if there will be no peace treaty, there will be a capitulation act.
Lascaris:
Now, in the course of answering my question, you mentioned the relative size of the Russian military budget and the military budget of the United States, approximately 10 to one at the time that the special military operation began. By my calculations, and I’ve written about this a fair bit, NATO military spending at that time in early 2022, the official figures was collectively in the range of $1.2 trillion US. So this would have been closer to 15 times the military budget of the Russian Federation.
Those are based on official figures. There was an interesting analysis done a while ago by the Tri-Continental Institute, which said that US military spending was closer to $1.6 trillion a year, rather than a little less than a trillion. So that would put collective NATO military spending in the range of two trillion dollars a year. And of course, there have been these incessant calls over the past couple of years in Europe, in Canada, the United States for increasing the military spending of NATO member states. I would have thought that rational people here in the West who are paying taxes to fund our militaries would be very upset about the value we’re obtaining for our expenditures Because as we can see on the battlefield, as you described, it seems quite clear that the Russian Federation is going to win this war, despite the fact that the West has poured a truly stunning amount of weaponry and other forms of aid and assistance to the Ukrainians in this war.
And I would have thought that this should be precipitating a debate in the West about how is it that we are not able to compete effectively in this battlefield against the Russian Federation when our countries collectively are spending so much more money on their militaries. And I’m interested in your views on why this is the case. Why does it seem that the Russians are getting so much more value for their military expenditures than we are? And is it related to the structure of the military industrial complex in the West in Russia. I understand that in Russia, arms manufacturers, military contractors are for the most part state controlled.
Whereas in the West, of course, they’re extraordinarily profitable, privately owned corporations. What’s your view about this? Why are the Russians able to achieve so much more with such a smaller military budget?
Doctorow:
Well, it’s a very complicated question you’re asking, and I hope you’ll bear with me as I take a bit of time to respond to it because of several dimensions to this here.
One is the effectiveness of Russian spending, and the other is the total inefficiency of American and European spending, which is not goal-oriented, but is a political machine within the countries to serve interests that have nothing to do with defense. The first thing that has to be said, of course, you have to look at the value, the dollar value put on these budgets in Russia. And the real value of rubles compared to the nominal value compared to the dollar… But At what point are we comparing the numbers that make sense? That’s a small issue.
The big issue is elsewhere. It is to what extent are the Russians pragmatic and whether they sensible in setting goals for what they wanted to achieve? Let us note that the American military expenditure is very heavily on offensive weapons. The Russian military budget was very heavy on defensive weapons for defending its own territory and a few other odd pieces of land around the globe.
But the American military budget is very largely spent as none other than Vladimir Zhirnovsky, this rabid nationalist as they liked to call him in the 90s, but a very strong nationalist and a very strong mind, who said on this very same Solovyov program, going back four or five years ago, explaining just the question that we’re talking about: how could the Russians pretend with such a limited economy, with a limited GDP compared to the States, and a limited budget available for spending on military compared to the States. How could they pretend or even imagine that they could be competitors, not to say victors in a contest with the United States. Well, because the United States spends, as Mr. Zhirinovsky colorfully put it, a lot of money on toilet paper. The United States has, what is it, 800 military bases around the world, and a very large part of the American military budget is either for waging wars in the forever wars that we’ve had since the 1990s, which consume vast amounts of money, of armaments that are destroyed, and to maintain its global hegemony by all these bases, which really don’t defend the United States in a military sense.
They are means of subordinating and controlling countries all around the world. These are different objectives. The political objective of the United States stands out. I’m speaking about outside the country. Inside the country, we all know that America, there’s a lot of pork barrel, they call it in American political language.
It is the exchange of favors among the congressmen: who gets what part of the military budget for bases and for production facilities on the territory that sends that given congressman to Washington. So, it’s not just that money is going into the pockets of the major suppliers, to the major components of the military industrial complex that are in private hands, and these funds are being transferred through dividends to their shareholders. But the problem is bigger than that. It’s the whole concept of what is needed to defend the United States. I said that the weapons systems that they built have been largely for maintaining power abroad rather than defending the United States in a narrow sense.
At the same time, a vast amount of money has been spent on what the Russians call a 21st century Maginot Line. That is all the money spent on the anti-ballistic missile defense. The notion that the United States could have some kind of iron dome, could have some kind of protection against incoming missiles. Money is spent on this, a vast amount of it. The Russians, long ago, going back to 2002, understood this is almost an impossible task.
And it’s also a very expensive task. And they didn’t even want to get into it deeply. So they have some they have systems and some very advanced systems like the S-400 or now the S-500, which are anti-aircraft, anti-missile missiles. But they have not spent a vast amount deploying that. Most of their money went elsewhere into things like we saw, the Oreshnik and its forerunner, the Sarmat, which is a very heavy, ultra heavy, intercontinental missile, which carries in its nose cone, I think, a dozen Avangard hypersonic coasting missiles that hit the ground at not 10 mark, which is the speed velocity of the Oreshnik, which did its vast damage in Dnipro, but twice that, at 20 Mach.
So going back to 2018, the Russians already brought this out, and they brought out a whole range of other very impressive strategic weapons. They also redid, remade their whole nuclear arsenal, something that the United States is still talking about doing. The Russians did it, achieved it. This was all within this limited budget. There’s something that people don’t talk about. Until rather recently, it was common to say, oh yes, Mr. Putin’s a thug, and this is a kleptocracy, and the wealth of Russia is being put into the pockets of Putin and his friends. This sort of rubbish was part of the Russophobe line that we’ve heard now for more than a dozen years. I think that the demonstration that all these accusations were just vicious propaganda has been witnessed in the last two weeks when we saw the Oreshnik. You can extrapolate out from that to understand that the other weapons systems with which Mr. Putin described in 2018 also have been mostly, if not completely, realized and deployed.
All of this takes vast wealth and vast management of the highest quality physicists and engineers. So this is a tremendous investment. And if you were to believe all the stories of our rotten propagandists who have their PhDs from Yale and Columbia on the walls of their university offices, If you were to believe them, there would have been no money left for the purposes that I just described. As for Europe, Europe is a total mess.
The United States has a problem with pork barrel and with a lot of its funds for the military being utterly wasted because what is of interest to the congressman is not the effectiveness of the weapons systems that will come out of this spending, but how their voters in their districts will be beneficiaries of the defense industry and of the government’s defense spending.
Well, in Europe, you’ve got a lot of money spent, as you described, but to no effect, because there is no European vision of its defense needs. The Spanish don’t believe for a minute the threat of Russia to European security. The Baltic states don’t believe for a minute the risks posed to the southern European countries, France and Spain, by North Africa. So what kind of defenses are needed in Europe, that is not agreed.
And the spending is almost pointless because it does not bring any real unified military capability to the European Union or European members of NATO. If you take out the American military component, NATO is a deck of cards or a house of cards. It is incapable of defending itself. The European leadership, or so-called leadership, is a travesty because these high officials in the European institutions are not creative folks. They are really quite lame individuals who believe that there is strength in unity.
Unfortunately, they can’t see the folly of the policies that they are collectively following for the sake of unity and strength. And this question, for example, of Europe now spending a vast amount of money to create an iron dome over itself. I mean, these people don’t open their eyes. The Oreshnik, which I said, is not really a surprise because it’s this technology the Russians have explained to anyone with ears to hear going back to 2018. The fact is that hypersonic missiles cannot be intercepted and will not be intercepted for years to come.
And by the time that capability is arrived at, adversaries like Russia will have a new generation of assault weapons that are unstoppable. So this is a fool’s game and the European collective leadership is playing that fool’s game and throwing away the money of taxpayers.
Lascaris:
I just want to mention one specific element of that fool’s game, which is of particular interest to me because I am also a citizen of Greece and I spend a good bit of time there. And that’s reports that came out recently that both in the Israeli press and the Greek press that Greece is negotiating the purchase of a 2 billion euro iron dome system from Israel. And of course, Greece has one of the highest debt to GDP ratios in the world, is heavily indebted, barely escaped the financial crisis a few years ago, and it’s negotiating to purchase this system after the Iranians and Hezbollah have demonstrated that they’re perfectly capable of penetrating the Iron Dome system.
Quite apart from all of that, who is going to threaten Greece with a missile strike? The word is that the Turks are going to do it. I would have thought that being members of a military alliance, Greece and Turkey, should at least provide assurance to the Greeks that they’re not going to get attacked by Turkey. None of this makes any sense. It just seems like another boondoggle of the Greek military.
In any event, since we’re on the subject of rubbish propaganda, I wanted to ask you about a matter related to this missile strike in Russia by the Ukrainians. There’s been a lot of chatter in the West about North Korean troops in Kursk. And now we’re also seeing reports that the Russian Federation is recruiting mercenaries from Yemen. I’m not aware, Gilbert, of any evidence whatsoever that There are North Korean soldiers fighting in Kursk or anywhere in the battlefield in this war. What do you make of this claim that North Koreans and now Yemenis have been recruited into the Russian military effort in Ukraine?
Doctorow:
Well, I don’t know that they are fighting. Nobody knows. The Russians do not comment on this, whether yay or nay. And it really is a distraction. The Western media are looking, driven under the guidance of Mr. Blinken’s minions at the US State Department, they are looking to find any news that can distract the reading public and the viewing public from the daily disasters on the battlefield that the Ukrainians are experiencing. Nonetheless, even in a Russia-hating journal, newspaper like New York Times, even in today’s edition you find the very open statement that the Russians are advancing, are about to take several key cities in Donetsk. And these are logistical centers of considerable importance. After the seizure of which will come in the next several weeks, the Russians will be able to take almost the entire Donetsk region, meaning bringing them to the Dnieper River. So, this bad news, the Western media, under the guidance of the United States propaganda officials would like to move to the back pages and they give space on the front pages to news that demonstrates the weakness, the essential weakness of Russia.
That is the message that comes out of today’s Financial Tomes with respect to what’s going on in Syria, that the loss of Aleppo to insurgent rebels demonstrates the weakness, and this is a direct quotation from today’s Financial Times, the weakness of Iran and Russia, weakness of Russia. That’s the kind of text that the editors of this publication approve of highly. So it’s a distraction, important as it may be to other people in other regions like Western Asia, what is happening in Syria, for the purposes of the Financial Times, it’s terrific to have that news to blast all over their newspaper and hopefully just keep you from reading the bad news about how the Ukraine war is going adversely to the interests of Kiev. Let’s see, is there something that I missed in your question?
Lascaris:
No, I think you’ve… The main point of my question was to ascertain whether there was any evidence to back up disclaimer.
Doctorow: Oh, yes. There’s no evidence. But I think it is reasonable to assume that there are North Korean soldiers in Kursk, And they’re there for training purposes. They’re there because North Korea hasn’t been in an active military conflict for decades. And to speak only about the size of an army as having some meaning without it having any hardened troops, any troops experienced in battle is not very realistic or meaningful.
So for the purposes of Pyongyang, it is very helpful that some of its soldiers who otherwise back in the homeland are almost only busy with construction projects because they’re used not as a force for war, but they’re used for civil and other infrastructure construction. So have them see and perhaps even try their hand at using some of this new military hardware that the Russians have developed and are using so effectively in the battlefield. Very few countries have the kind of experience with drone warfare, that the Russians do now. So I think it’s edifying.
There’s another aspect to this, completely different aspect to this, which is hardly spoken of in Western media. By having these people come ostensibly to help the Russians on the Ukraine front, Mr. Putin is making a point. The point is, hey, we Russians, we’re ready to come and help the North Koreans if they need any assistance on the Korean Peninsula. This is a two-way defense treaty that Russia has with North Korea. The existence of that treaty changes dramatically the power balance in East Asia.
Russia is reminding the world that it has a common land boundary with North Korea, that Russia is a major player in the Far East and the North Pacific. This is an aspect to this presence of North Koreans in Ukrainian territory from 1991, otherwise now considered Russian territory. And this is a side to it that nobody’s talking about in our newspapers. But it’s certain people in the Pentagon are well aware. Anybody in Tokyo, anyone in Seoul, is well aware of the significance of the North Koreans being on the Western front, because it means the Russians will be on the Eastern front.
Lascaris:
Since we’re talking about that part of the world, I wanted to ask you about the BRICS Summit, which concluded in Kazan, Russia in late October.
At that summit, which was chaired by the Russian Federation, there was much discussion about creating an alternative international payment system that could prevent the United States from using the dollar as a political weapon. Shortly after the BRICS Summit, I think it was actually within the last few days, Donald Trump came out swinging against the movement to replace the US dollar as the global reserve currency, and in a post on social media he stated, quote, we require a commitment from these countries, and he’s referring here to the BRICS members, that they will neither create a new BRICS currency nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US dollar, or they will face 100% tariffs and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful US economy.”
Before I invite you to offer your views about this threat, I just want to mention that Trump just employed a similar tactic with respect to border security. He threatened both the Canadians and the Mexicans with substantial tariffs if they did not police their borders more vigorously. The Canadian response was for Justin Trudeau to get in a plane and fly to Mar-a-Lago and provide to Trump the assurances that he was looking for.
I think also the Mexican president did more from Mexico. She provided those assurances. Something tells me, however, that the BRICS member states are not likely to respond quite as cooperatively to this threat. What do you make of this threat? And what, to the extent there’s been a reaction within Russia, either at the level of the political commentators or at the governmental level, what has that reaction been? And what do you think they’re likely to do in response to this threat?
Doctorow:
Well, the Russians systematically take their time to respond to things like this. They have not made an official response. And I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. Look, I think anyone who has followed my other appearances on videos, or more importantly what I write and publish on my Substack platform.
The situation is pretty clear. I have been a supporter of Donald Trump’s electoral campaign as being the only one of the candidates, of the two candidates. I don’t speak about Jill Stein and others like the RFK candidacy, which I supported briefly. I don’t speak about these others who were marginal candidates, but among the two main parties, the only one who had held out any hope of a change from the disastrous policies of the Biden administration leading us on the path to nuclear exchange was Donald Trump. And the likelihood, as I saw it, was that he would resolve the war simply by stopping shipment of further armaments and funds to Ukraine.
The simplest thing to do would be to step back and just say, just let the Ukrainians fight as long as they could and do the inevitable, which is to capitulate. Nonetheless, I have been deeply disappointed with most of the appointments that Donald has made, his candidates for the power ministries, for people who will have an important say in the implementation, if not in the formulation of US defense policy, as with respect to Russia and to the rest of the world. There have been several loudmouths who have said the most outrageous things, that violate completely any sense that Donald Trump was seeking accommodation with Russia. The Russians, as I said, also take note of all of these shenanigans of all of these utterly irresponsible people who speak in the name of Donald at this period of transition. And they have, as I said some moments ago, they decided not to wait for Donald’s inauguration because they don’t expect anything good from it and just to proceed in carrying out the war, winning it and ending the fighting on their own terms.
So with respect to what you just described, the policies on the dollar and BRICS, they’re outrageous. His remarks show that if given a chance, his inclination is to continue the self-destruction and the self-isolation that has been the mark of the Biden administration through his policy of sanctions. The net loser in the sanctions has been the United States and its allies, mostly the allies, of course. But this additional plan this additional plan to deny BRICS members trading relationships with the United States because they are seeking to establish a non-dollar means of exchange – that can only isolate the United States and harm the American economy. The BRICS meeting in Kazan was very careful by its body language, by some of its official language in concluding documents, to make it clear that the destruction of the dollar, the destruction of the existing global management structures, institutions is not their objective.
The objective is to build parallel institutions for global governance that will fulfill some of the tasks that the existing institutions, like the IMF and the World Bank, perform, but perform very badly. And so it is with the currency. It was when we went into this meeting of BRICS, there were many commentators in the alternative media who were expecting that there will be the rollout of a new BRICS payment system. Well, they did so, for the sake of buying a hot chocolate, not for the sake of major international trade and commerce. For that, the BRICS has nothing at this time, and it’s not rushing to fill that need.
Instead, the BRIC’s economic financial plans are presently focusing on something else which is not threatening to the United States or to the present world order. That is the incremental growth of the New Development Bank that has its seat in Beijing and which I think has $30 billion of projects that signed off, 100 projects, with some of the BRICS member states. And to use this as a Soft Power, as a point of attraction to the Global South to invite them into the BRICS community in this two-tier community of full BRICS members, of which there’ll be a very slow expansion because they have to have some kind of cohesiveness among themselves since all of the decisions are made on the basis of unanimity and consensus. And the second tier, what they call partners, who will not be insiders, but will benefit from the infrastructure that BRICS represents as it grows. So that is my answer to your question about Mr. Trump and his extremely foolish statement that you recited.
Lascaris:
Yeah. I just, as a footnote to that, you mentioned some of the other commentary coming out of his key members of his team. I’m sure you’re familiar with the statement by Sebastian Gorka, his pick, I believe, for national security advisor that Mr. President Putin is a thug.
It was interesting to me that I think it was just in the last couple of days, Vladimir Putin was quoted as saying that Donald Trump is an intelligent and experienced candidate, whether he was serious or not. There was quite a striking difference in the level of decorum that he continues to employ when he talks about Western leaders compared to the kinds of statements we’re seeing coming out of Sebastian Gorka, where they use this gutter language, which is not going to, I think we can say, safely promote a dialogue between the two governments. At the outset, when we talked about the language that the Russian government is employing around these attacks, and you indicated that the commentators in Russia are, shall we say, reassured by the fact that the Russian Federation is now using more forceful language, particularly in talking about how they’ll respond to US missile attacks on Russian territory. But they still cling to this decorum. It’s quite interesting to me.
There’s a whole culture of diplomacy in Russia, which seems to be much more mature and sophisticated than you find in the Western halls of power nowadays. Do you think that there’s any kind of capacity left for true diplomacy amongst Western governments? It almost seems like amateur hour. When you see people like Sebastian Gorka, whatever he may think of Russia’s president, referring to him publicly as a thug, is simply not going to promote dialogue between the two governments, and one would have thought that that’s obvious. I have the overall impression that diplomacy is a lost art in the West. I’m interested in your thoughts on that subject.
Doctorow:
Diplomacy is practiced between states. And here we come to the rub. The 27 member states of the European Union are for all practical purposes non-sovereign entities. They have ceded a lot of their sovereignty to Brussels.
As one head of state said a couple of years ago, the real power of a head of government in our country is equivalent to the power of a city mayor. So how much diplomacy do you expect to find practiced among city mayors? Not much. And so it’s not surprising. And why is this so?
It’s not accidental. It’s not just because of a power grab by this monstrous woman, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission. It is an ideological persuasion here in Europe that state sovereignty yields war. And if the European peace project is furthered, as the national boundaries and national cultures of Europe fade away, that’s a dead-set proposition. It weakened, condemned Europe to lose all of its or any of its residual prestige in the world as a geopolitical force. But it’s a reality. They deny the value of sovereignty and they see it only as a force for confrontation and war.
Now, I’ve said a number of times in the last six months that the Russians are not bunny rabbits. And I wouldn’t overdo my estimate of the civilized nature and the kindness and the Christian disposition of Mr. Putin, which is real, but I wouldn’t overdo it.
I was thinking of this very point in the past week when Western journalists were trying to find something to say about Angela Merkel’s newly published memoirs. It seems, they couldn’t find anything of particular interest in those memoirs, which is not surprising because she was as chancellor, as dull as they come. And what they found was her story about how Mr. Putin threatened her with his dogs. And when he was in Astana, and he had this press conference before leaving the capital, before heading back to Moscow, there were maybe five, six minutes spent with his answering the questions of one journalist. Why did he threaten Merkel with dogs, knowing that she is afraid of dogs. Mr. Putin said: please, I apologize to Angela Merkel. I didn’t know that she’s afraid of dogs.
Don’t believe it for a minute. Do you mean to say that a man with the intelligence, gathering, interests and capabilities of Vladimir Putin, who certainly knows everything about all of his guests, so he can treat them accordingly. This man did treat Angela Merkel accordingly by exposing her to dogs, knowing that she’s frightened out of her wits.
Lascaris:
Interesting. So you’ve been very generous with your time, Gilbert. I have one more question if I might on the economic front. Do you have time for one more question? Yes, yes. You wrote recently about the decline in the ruble. I believe it was during the past week or perhaps it was the prior week.
There was something in the range of a 7% decline in the ruble against the US dollar. The last I checked, it was trading at about 115 to the dollar, which would be the lowest point since the early days of the special military operation in 2022. To the extent you’re able to say, why do you think this is happening? But more importantly, what do you think it says about the direction of the Russian economy? I’ve heard some, I don’t know how reliable they are. I’ve seen some reports that there may be trouble brewing in the Russian economy, even though it has fared very well in the face of these sanctions. It has experienced, for example, significantly higher growth than the major European economies, than the United States economy. But is this a sign of trouble ahead and how is the Russian intelligentsia reacting to this rather significant decline in the ruble?
Doctorow:
Well, the ruble, I think you meant the 115 is to the euro. I think it rose to about 105 against the dollar, maybe a little bit higher.
In any case, this is looking at a month. This is more like a 10% or 12% drop in the ruble. Now, Mr. Putin was asked about this, again, at the press conference that he held in Astana in the middle of this past week. And he didn’t give a very satisfactory answer, certainly not a definitive answer as to why the ruble has tumbled, except to say that there’s no need for panic, that the Central Bank is monitoring all of this very carefully and has it under control.
That point is a bit misleading because the Central Bank is working very hard to control inflation, but it’s not targeting the exchange rate. The Russians let the exchange rate float. They do not try to bolster the ruble by selling dollars, by selling other Western currencies in their stockpile they have available to them. So support for the ruble is minimal in the sense of the usual props. The main support should have, would have been the very high prime rate.
Russia has a prime rate now of 21 percent. It’s been going up steadily in the last several months. It is rumored to rise to 23% during this month of December. That sounds quite amazing. It’s a very high rate, considering that by all indications, the rate of inflation is only 8%.
I say only inflation would be higher if it weren’t for this very high prime rate. The high prime rate has a number of elements to it. Not only does it cut off sources of credit to commerce and industry, but it provides in the form of very high spot interest rates on savings accounts or on current accounts that are interest bearing for the population.
Now you asked about the reaction of the intelligentsia or the public at large. Intelligentsia often are ragtag people in terms of finance. But the chattering classes are not ragtag. They are very much upper middle class by Western standards. And of course, they can be unnerved by the depressed exchange rate because they’re the ones who travel abroad. Now, before the COVID and before the sanctions on Russian travel, the lower middle classes also traveled abroad.
I mean, more than 10 million Russians were traveling abroad before COVID. Now, the numbers are lower, or the travel abroad is in different parts of the world, not in Western Europe as it was before, not in the Americas. They are traveling to places where the dollar is the mark of value and they are concerned that their travel will be much more expensive, that their imported cars will be more expensive, And so that is all painful. The pains of this inherent inflation for certain types of goods and services that are imported will be compensated for by getting 21% or 22% on your current account with your bank. And practically anyone who has the money to invest or to take advantage of the possibilities of protection against inflation, it’s the wealthier people as usual.
They can open accounts that are denominated in precious metals, being gold, silver, platinum, or they can take physical property of gold ingots or gold bars starting from about a quarter of an ounce. You can take it, put it into safe deposit boxes. They have safe deposit boxes in major urban banks. And you can protect yourself against the falling domestic currency.
So there are protections for wealthier people. For the people who live hand-to-mouth, which is always a fairly large part of the population, they don’t have appreciable savings to protect since they spend the money on daily consumption. They are beneficiaries of the 8% inflation rate as opposed to a much higher rate. They were beneficiaries of the doubling of take-home pay for the average Russian worker over the last year because of the labor shortages and their ability as workers to quit and take new jobs where they are better paid. They are the beneficiaries of the reopening of factories in the middle of Russia in the Urals, factories that have been closed going back to 1990s and the economic catastrophe of that time. And they reopened, largely serving the military industry, but not only.
So all levels of Russian society have some kind of protection against the drop in the value of the ruble against the dollar. The average man was living hand to mouth in the sense of he or she lives off of the monthly paycheck. They also are beneficiaries of numerous subventions from the government, whether it’s for pensioners getting free or nearly-free tickets to cultural events, free transport, many such features, all of which are linked to the inflation rate. So the inflationary costs are compensated periodically in adjustments. So that part of the population also is protected and there’s really no reason for there to be popular discontent.
Here in Europe, we have something similar. I was quite surprised that there weren’t any big demonstrations or street marches, strikes here in Belgium when the effects of the economic downturn related to the fantastically high energy costs that Europe experienced after the first months of the Russian-Ukraine war. Well, it was all quiet here. And why was it quiet? Because salaries are all linked to inflation adjustments.
Linked to inflation adjustments. And so a large part of the out-of-pocket costs to the whole economy and to the general population was covered by the state mandated inflation adjustments in salaries and other benefits. So it is in Russia.
Lascaris:
Right. Well, I thank you very much again for you being so generous with your time, Gilbert, and I hope we’ll be able to continue the conversation in future.
Doctorow:
Well, thanks for the invitation.
Lascaris:
And this is Dimitris Laskaris coming to you for Reason to Resist on December 2nd, 2024.
Gilbert Doctorow 