Transcription submitted by a reader

Nima R. Alkhorshid: 0:05
Hi everybody, today is Tuesday, December 24th, and our friend Gilbert Doctorow is back with us. Welcome back, Gilbert.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, thank you, Nima. I hope I have a few Christmas presents for all the listeners.

Alkhorshid:
Let’s get started with this type of rumor that it seems that Zelensky tried to bribe Fico. What’s the story behind this?

Doctorow:
Well, your listeners of this program certainly know that Fico has been in the news. Yesterday’s papers, today’s papers in the West are speaking about his two-hour meeting, tete-a-tete with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, a meeting that was called, according to Peskov, when he was asked by Pavel Zarubin, the journalist who is always two steps behind Putin, he was asked when the meeting was arranged, because usually meetings with Putin are arranged way in advance. And Peskov said off the cuff, “Well, a few days ago”. This was picked up by the “Financial Times” to suggest, well, it was arranged a few days ago, meaning that it had plenty of time for preparation.

1:29
It caught everyone by surprise, in fact. And he was coming precisely before the deadline expires on the pipeline that carries Russian gas across Ukraine and serves markets in three central European states, his own Slovakia, plus Hungary and Austria. That pipeline is going to be shut down on December 31st by Ukrainians as part of their their war on Russia, economic side of it, and also playing into the hands of the European institutions who want to shut off Russian hydrocarbons to the EU. Well, so this was an issue of very big importance to Mr. Fico, enough for him to fly in and discuss the consequences and what could be done about it with Vladimir Putin.

2:24
But preceding that, in the last week, he Fico was in public exchanges of what you can call insults, trading insults, with Vladimir Zelensky. And that was about this issue. And also as part of his payback to Zelensky, he mentioned in passing that Zelensky had offered him a $500 million, now I got the zeros correct, $500 million bribe for for he and Slovakia to change their position on Kiev’s application to join NATO, and instead of opposing it– which kills it in effect, because there has to be 100 percent unanimity on the admittance of any new country– instead of opposing it, to join with everybody else and greet Ukraine as a newest member. Well, he says he declined that. Now this may have been covered somewhere in page 20 of one of our newspapers, or maybe it wasn’t covered, but it was noted by the Russian news agencies and was mentioned on air.

3:40
So I take it for accurate. There’s no reason for a person who’s honest, who has come through as much threat in his public life as Mr. Fico, who narrowly survived an assassination attempt less than six months ago, for him to exaggerate or misstate his relations with Zelensky. Now, let’s just consider what this means, because even if they barely covered it or didn’t cover it, Western media, they should be considering what it means or what is gonna come out when Mr. Musk does his house cleaning job and starts to audit the monies that have been sent through Kiev without any controls.

4:29
What could be going on was suggested in a kind of cartoon fashion by Donald Trump in the last week when he showed that we ship money to Kiev and it goes to this and that and finally comes back to what? Comes back to Biden’s pocket. Well, that is a crude way of looking at it. But why just Biden’s pocket? There are a lot of senators, including some real loudmouths, who are demanding Russian blood and who want to fight Russia through Ukraine to the bitter end, the bitter end that they hope will be for all the parties who engage in the battle. Isn’t it reasonable to think maybe they have a material interest and are receiving a few deposits to celebrate the holidays better?

5:20
I’m on side. And Americans in general, just to take the case of American exceptionalism, our commentators who don’t subscribe, in the alternative media, who don’t subscribe to that notion in general, may be subscribing to it when they call out the Israeli lobby as as having unusual exercise of power over US Congress and therefore over US foreign policy. I haven’t heard anybody raise a peep about the possibility that American foreign policy on Ukraine is being bought with bribes coming from the funds that the US and the EU have extended to Kiev. And that is something which I expect will come out when Musk goes after the money, the money trail, to find out where it actually ended up. So there should be some interesting news in our papers in the months ahead when this activity gets going.

Alkhorshid: 6:26
How do they feel in Russia right now? Recently we’ve learned that Putin is talking about this is a war against Russian world. What does that mean in your opinion?

Doctorow:
I’m sorry, I didn’t catch it. What is he talking about?

Alkhorshid:
He’s talking about that the way that the West is treating Russia right now is a war against the Russian world. And it seems that he sees some sort of aggression in all dimensions.

Doctorow:
Well, yes, so this is a variation of the theme that he has been playing for some time now. He varies the narrative a little bit here and there, but that Russia is at war with the West, that has been part of his overarching view, as I say, expressed in one form or another, since the start of the special military operation. So I don’t see a great change in that respect.

7:21
What has changed in Mr. Putin’s narrative in the last week or two, has been this concession that he made on the 19th of December, when he had this combined annual press conference and direct line communication exchange with the whole Russian nation by a special call center. And at that meeting, he said that he regretted that he didn’t start moving on Ukraine earlier, and that he waited too long. This is a very debatable point, but it raises something that is in the background here in US alternative media and is championed by somebody as well known and widely followed as Paul Craig Roberts, that Putin has been too mild, has turned the cheek, has been too much of a good Christian and not enough of good statesmen to do what should have been done in time and not to allow Russia’s adversaries or enemies abroad to misinterpret his restraint as a sign of weakness, which could only encourage still greater provocations and encroachments on Russian national interests. That is an issue that he just barely touched upon when he said that he regretted it didn’t start earlier.

8:51
Nonetheless, he’s doing a pretty good job of catch-up, because what Russia’s been saying in the last, what Mr. Putin has been saying in the last couple of weeks is really reading the riot act to the United States and the West. The stress on the power of the Oreshnik middle-range hypersonic ballistic missile, that has been a large part of the change. And it makes me ask how serious he is in saying that everything should have been started earlier.

9:30
There wasn’t any Oreshnik two years ago. Russia’s stepping out on the stage and acting in its own self-defense at the risk of enraging the global hegemon, that has coincided with Russia’s ability to produce and to field new, decisive, strategic weapon systems. And that is all very current. As I’ve said in the past, the notion that all the problems could have been solved if Russia had been tough in 2014 is utter nonsense, because Russia was unprepared to withstand a US economic assault. I don’t mean a military assault, that’s a separate question, but an economic assault. All the sanctions from hell Russia would have gone under in 2014, if it had had a military victory over Ukraine, it would have been a Pyrrhic victory.

10:33
So going back to 2014, out of the question; going back a little bit, maybe, but not very far. 2018 is the year when he rolled out all these systems and rolling them out and showing them to the public because they had passed tests and were going into production. Going into production is not the same thing as having them in the field. And some of this equipment obviously takes time to produce.

The Oreshnik is said to have entered serial production and estimates coming from the States– because the Russian Ministry of Defense naturally says nothing about its production capabilities– but from the States, where I’ve heard estimates that 25 Oreshniks can be produced per month. That’s 300 per year. Well, you don’t start threatening to use the Oreshnik until you’ve got at least a few in your hands, because your bluff might be called. And so it is with the other weapons systems; not all of them have been put into production. I mean, there were six or seven different strategic weapons systems that Putin showed in March of 2018.

11:49
This was the last stage of the presidential election campaign at that time. Putin had foregone participation in the televised debates. And he made his presentation to the public in the form of the large segment, large section of his speech that we call the state of the nation speech, the annual speech that he makes to the bicameral legislature. And he rolled out these systems, and he had them shown, theoretical diagrams of how they work, on the screen. But that’s not the same thing as having them in hand and ready to use them if need be. So I don’t think he could have backed up very far to launch the special military operation.

12:38
What he could have done actually is to prepare the forces that were going to go and invade Kiev, Ukraine, better. Because all reports that I’ve seen, or that I heard, just to say accidentally, from a taxi driver who was a retired member of the military intelligence in Moscow, and who was complaining about what he heard from his former colleagues. This is two months into the special military operation, that the initial steps were disastrous because the troops weren’t prepared. They didn’t have all they needed. They were just rushed in, they were on military exercises and they were moved from exercises straight into an invasion.

13:29
So there things were rather sloppy, but how much better it would have been if the preparations were begun earlier? Well that’s a debatable, interesting question.

Alkhorshid: 13:43
I think at the end of the day, we have to consider how much this conflict in Ukraine was important for the Russian military-industrial complex. The army has totally changed during this conflict from a defensive army, right now an army that is prepared to fight any sort of war with the West. And the way that right now the nature of the relationship between Russia and China, Russia and Iran, Russia and North Korea, they’re going to sell a lot of arms to these countries.

This is a huge win for the Russian industry. And how do you see in that direction? Do you think that they’re going to continue with this mindset of selling? Before that, if you remember, even Turkiye is part of NATO, but they’re asking for weapons, they’re trying to buy weapons from Russia. And right now it seems that Russia feels much– it would be much easier for Russia to sell the arms to these countries.

Doctorow: 14:50
Well, I’m glad you put your question in the future case, because you said, will they be selling? They are not selling now, and they haven’t been selling to anyone exports of arms since the start of the special military operation. All of the production of the Russian military-industrial complex has gone to the Russian front. And so the immediate impact of the war on the Russian military complex was exactly the opposite of what you’re saying. The Russian exports, I think they were $35 billion a year, went to zero.

This kind of fact comes up in the “Financial Times” as if to say Russia can’t do it. They have– no, what would you do in a wartime when you’re facing the whole of NATO? And, and this is a war of attrition, which means you better, well, you better have what you need in the field the whole time, because your advantage is precisely that you have it, and the adversary doesn’t. So Russian sales abroad have collapsed, well collapsed, they simply stopped selling, and they stopped fulfilling pre-existing contracts. Now I’m not pulling this down from nowhere.

16:04
I was listening this morning to an interview, a very important interview, which maybe we have an opportunity to discuss a little bit later in this program. An interview that Russia Today’s managing director, Dmitry Kiselyov, took with the Azerbaijan Prime Minister, Aliyev. And Aliyev was at one point in this. Kiselyov asked him, well, how do you see military purchases from Russia going forward? And what he has said is what I’ve explained now, that pre-existing contracts are not being fulfilled and the Russians asked for and received from Azerbaijan permission to delay delivery.

16:53
So that’s the present situation. Of course, the evidence that Russian tanks are equal, superior to the best Western tanks, that Russian air defenses are superior to the best that the Americans have, whether it’s Patriot or this still more advanced system that arguably they’re taking to Israel and maybe also to Ukraine. Anyway, the point is that the Russian arms are demonstrated to be superior to the NATO arms against which they are sent. And that is watched closely by all of the world’s procurement officers. So yes, Russian sales of arms will spiral once the war is over.

Alkhorshid: 17:47
And right now, in your opinion, the way that they see in Russia, they see Donald Trump and his administration, do they really think that there has to be some sort of patience on their part until this government, this administration, the Biden administration leaving office in Washington, leaving office and Donald Trump takes power? How do they feel about it? Because we did drone attack on the part of Zelensky and on a city called Kazan, which was, she’s not of strategic importance in terms of military I’m talking about. But they did that out of desperation, in my opinion. How do they feel about it right now?

Doctorow: 18:37
This is discussed, what you are asking me now is discussed every day on these political talk shows, and I can tell you that the mood rocks back and forth between feeling it’s utterly useless to wait for Trump, because look at who he has appointed and what they’re saying, what Kellogg is saying, why would we wait a minute for Mr. Kellogg too? I’d say the latest mood seems to be, all right, let’s give them a break. Let’s see what Kellogg can do. Don’t take it too seriously that what he has said till now is what he’s going to bring to us when he comes to Moscow.

19:17
So I think that they are being cautious, prudent, responding, as Putin said, going back more than a month, they will, Russians are now reacting to the threats that they see from any given action by Ukraine, thought to be in line with their own exposure to these assaults from Ukraine. Now as for the wonderful, the executed 9-11 type attack on a high-rise residential building in Kazan, which was caught on video and became viral on social media. That was, let’s say, very representative of the way that the Kiev regime and military there has been conducting the war from the beginning. It has been big public relations and a small military kinetic warfare activity. As you say, the military value of the attack on Kazan was close to nil.

20:37
Certainly the attack on the residential building is by all classic measures pure terrorism. That is what terrorism is defined as, an attack on civilian targets for political leverage. So that was all very indicative of weakness on the part of Ukraine. And at the very same time that their troops are being battered on the ground, both in Kursk and on the front lines of Donbass, where day by day you see significant changes in the map of the line of confrontation in the favor of the Russians who are advancing. Pakrovsk, a city which is said to be a logistics hub of great importance, is about to fall.

Further afield to the west, the, let’s say, the historically important towns of Kramatorsk and Slavyansk, this is dead in the middle of the Donetsk People’s Republic, they are evacuating the archives, the personal records and so forth, from the city’s offices. The Ukrainians are doing that, which is a perfect indication they expect it to fall, to be besieged and to fall. What Putin has said about any ceasefire: that is unacceptable to the Russians because the Ukrainians are presently reeling. They don’t have the time to fall back and build defensive structures to an advance of the next wave of Russian advance. And for Russia to agree to a ceasefire would be to give them exactly that possibility, to actually form a line that they could hold.

22:31
And Russia doesn’t want that to happen. It wants to take full advantage of the strength that it has in moving on, encircling the vastly weakened and demoralized Ukrainian frontlines. So the Russian enthusiasm for meeting with Trump is tempered by this fact. No, they will not, under any circumstances, accept a ceasefire as an immediate measure. A ceasefire would come when there is agreement on a global settlement.

Alkhorshid: 23:14
When they’re talking about freezing the battlefield in order to negotiate, it doesn’t make sense, because when you look at World War II, they were talking, they were negotiating while the war was continuing in those days. And right now that could be the case. They can start negotiating, but as war continues on the battlefield. Is that the case in the mind of Russians in your opinion right now?

Doctorow:
There is something of a similarity with the World War II case at the very, very end. The Russians will not pause now to negotiate, with whom? They do not accept the government of Zelensky to be legitimate. And so it is, they only will make a halt or enter in negotiations with the United States. That is– and that can happen only after after meetings. And preferably a summit meeting between Trump and Putin.

Alkhorshid: 24:30
Two cases, Gilbert. And if you remember in 2020, the race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Joe Biden was hammering Donald Trump with JCPOA, the nuclear agreement between the United States and Russia which Donald Trump decided to withdraw from. And he said that he’s going to revive the nuclear deal and all of that, and all of those rhetorics in those days. And right now, it seems to me that could be the same in the mind of Russians. They’re thinking, is Donald Trump going to negotiate, going to have a clear mind when it comes to Ukraine to understand the reality of the battleground, to find some sort of permanent solution for the conflict, or he’s going to be just like Joe Biden in terms of the way that he was bragging about, I’m going to revive the nuclear JCPOA between the United States and Iran, which he didn’t do that. And even beyond that, he started all of these conflicts and this dangerous world that we’re living in right now. How do you feel about Donald Trump?

Doctorow: 25:48
Well, what Donald Trump has been quoting for the casualty rates of Russia and Ukraine is utterly absurd. His statements about the disposition of forces is just reflecting the same rubbish that the Biden administration has been putting out. Now, what I’m waiting to see is what happens when Tulsi Gabbard is confirmed as the most senior intelligence officer of the United States, and she becomes a daily reporter to Trump on what is going on.

26:29
She doesn’t have any such position now. We don’t know that she meets him at all. And certainly she isn’t, as a private person still, she has no access to intelligence that only goes to the presidential candidate. And who’s providing that information to the candidate? The same people providing the rubbish to Joe Biden. Therefore, it’s not surprising that the script that we’ve heard coming from Trump is a very misinformed script, which does not promise much for his leading a way out of this crisis.

27:07
What the Russians are taking comfort from and the reason why they want to be cautious and to leave options open to meeting with Trump and to negotiating with him over this crisis, that is the remarks he’s made in the last week in which he called the use of these American-built medium– attack missiles, the ATACMS, the HIMARS, or with US permission, the British Storm Shadow, to penetrate deep into the Russian heartland. He has called this foolish and very dangerous.

The Russians took heart, because for the first time they’re listening to some normal observations of risks in this war, and not to the rubbish, as I say, that Trump has obviously been handed by the security personnel of the Biden administration in his capacity as the weight-in president. So that’s what gives them some hope and has tempered their remarks about Trump being a change without a difference, going back two or three weeks.

Alkhorshid: 28:40
And we are witnessing Medvedev in China, Shoigu in Iran, and Belosov in Pyongyang. What’s going on with the foreign policy of Russia right now? What are they trying to do with their friends?

Doctorrow:
Well, they’re trying to do exactly what America is worried about. They’re putting meat on the bones of this new axis, that is Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China. The meat is being put on the bones. And I think it’s forming in quite a solid way. The Biden administration has only added to the problem by its continued threats against China.

29:29
And Trump hasn’t yet made any moves or suggested any moves that would lessen the solidarity between these four countries in opposing the American hegemony. So they xxx traveling a lot, they’re meeting with their new friends. There may be, as you and I discussed before the show, a signature on a comprehensive cooperation agreement with Iran during January, which includes a large segment on mutual defense. And the Russian military position will be that much better consolidated. As for the North Korean presence, our Western media speak as if they’re out there fighting on the front lines in Donetsk, they’re not.

Any forces that have been made available by North Korea for use in Russia are being used in Russia. They’re being used in the cleanup operation of the Kursk oblast or region that is part of the Russian Federation. And it’s perfectly in line with the mutual defense pact. It is– they are not moving into the the front in Donbass.

Alkhorshid: 30:59
It seems to me that the way that– I have learned from the Iranian media that this agreement is beyond what we’ve seen so far. It’s not just economic. It’s some sort of advanced military agreement between Iran and Russia. It seems if something big happens in terms of any sort of world war, they’re going to be on the same side fighting the enemy. Do you think that right now in the European Union, and we’ve seen that Fico, Orban today said they’re going to reconsider their policy towards Russia. How do they feel, the Western European countries?

And I’m talking about Germany specifically, United Kingdom and France. How do they feel right now about the situation in Ukraine? Are they getting to the point that this is going to get, we know that Donald Trump at the end of the day, he knows, he has some sort of connection with the economy. His main concern is the economy of the United States, let’s put it that way. And the policy in Ukraine wouldn’t help that sort of mindset. How do they feel about it in the European Union right now?

Doctorow: 32:23
Well, as you were pointing out, the European Union is now sharply divided. You called attention to those two states, Slovakia and Hungary, who are the vanguard of resistance to the diktats coming from Ursula von der Leyen and the European Commission, telling everyone to “shut up and just follow my orders” in conducting, proceeding in relations or absence of relations with Russia. I doubt that these two states are the only ones. There will be more dissent made public as the crisis, political crisis, in the two traditional lead countries of the European Union, Germany and France, proceeds.

33:10
Germany now doesn’t have a government; it’s a caretaker government under Scholz, because the government lost its vote of no confidence. And France is reeling from crisis to crisis with a newly-installed government. And we count the days, how many days this one will last, before Macron is forced out, not by demonstrations in the streets, I don’t expect that, but by the people who put hiim into power, the bankers. The lack of government, the failure to take any measures to reduce the unacceptably high debt that’s being incurred annually in the existing budget, what, six percent or more of GDP, is untenable and in complete violation of the rules of the EU. These factors and the fact that the French government paper now is trading worse than Greek means that the finance people are going to be looking for his head.

34:18
And I think they’re the ones who drive him out of office. It’s, I mean, it is impossible to consider that he will stay in office if this latest government also falls. And there’s every interest in the socialists, in the Le Pen movement, to bring down this government as well, knowing what I just said, that the disturbance to financial markets will be such that he can’t hold onto power.

Alkhorshid: 34:52
Do they see any sort of future for their relationship with Russia, or they’re not considering that right now?

Doctorow:
I’m sure they’re considering it, but not talking about it. Because it would be in strict violation of everything they’ve agreed to up till now. I don’t think that Slovakia and Hungary are the only ones hurting from the shutdown of this pipeline or from the curtailment of their procurements of Russian oil in general, and of the trading relationship. And Slovakia is not the only country. Hungary also in this situation, where the attempt of Von der Leyen and her gang to include in future sanctions a ban on dealing with Rosatom and the Russian nuclear industry, that would be of enormous negative impact on the economies of these countries. And that, if it proceeds, will lead to a serious breakdown in dialogue within the European institutions.

36:06
I have to admit– I mean we all should be transparent, and I will be transparent now and say that– I’m a cheerleader for the deconstruction of the European Union into something resembling what it was in 1992, the European Economic Community, because this particular structure where the member states have voluntarily sacrificed a large part of their sovereignty to Brussels is working out very, very badly.

36:43
They have, the member states no longer have the competence nor the will to explore alternatives to their present foreign and military policies, which are convincingly failures. So, that’s a discussion for another day. The European Union is doing very badly. And I think it will be doing still worse when Mr. Musk’s audit takes place and we find out which European partisans have been on the take.

Alkhorshid: 37:22
Russia has revealed the list of nine countries to be BRICS partners on January 1, 2025. When you look at this list, it’s Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Thailand, and Uganda and Uzbekistan. You don’t see Turkiye being part, being among these countries. What’s going on with the case of Turkiye, in your opinion?

Doctorow:
Well, Turkey wasn’t, going back to the BRICS summit. Basically the BRICS summit in Kazan introduced the principle of a two-tier BRICS. Those that are core members for whom they have voting rights and a complete agreement is required of all of these members for any new policy to be adopted. Then there are the partners who are not in the inner core, don’t have voting rights, don’t determine the policies, but are eligible to profit from the infrastructures, financial and other infrastructures that BRICS creates. Turkey was named to be in that category. So you wouldn’t have seen them in any case on the list for membership beginning January, 2025.

38:52
I think it may be early to say that they are out completely because of their double-cross on the Astana agreements relating to managing the civil war, or the ended civil war, in Syria and their position of support for the Idlib rebels or insurgents, [whatever] you want to call them, who brought about the removal, the replacement of the Assad regime. I have said already that Russians are not going to turn their back on Turkey, because the two countries have very significant projects, of great financial, economic value to their respective countries. And it would be harming themselves to use their difference over Syria and to break off relations. At the same time, I’d like to point out that there is room for complex agreements, for complex relations. They don’t have to look for black and white. There are various grades in between.

40:16
And again, listening to this interview that I mentioned earlier, that Mr. Aliyev gave to Russia Today, and which was published yesterday, it’s a one-hour interview, he was discussing the relations between his country and Turkey, which have a military, well, semi-alliance, going back to 1991, 92 rather, after the fall of Sevigin, and that they have received extensive training and upgrading of his countries, of Azerbaijan’s military forces, thanks to Turkish participation, that they have 10 military exercises jointly and that his is the only country that has close relations with a NATO member state, as Turkey, and also has a comprehensive cooperation with Russia. So there you have it. Azerbaijan has a close military relationship with Turkey, which is a NATO member. And it also has a very close relationship with Russia, including a purchase a lot of military equipment from Russia.

41:38
In his latest, in this interview, as I’ve noted in an analysis of it, the language that Aliyev uses is precisely Putin’s language to discuss geopolitics. He speaks about the neo-colonialism of France and Western and European countries, about the need for independence, sovereignty and so forth. This is Putin’s language. And yet, he still has this relationship with Turkey. So I believe that some accommodation with Turkey and BRICS will come about. Not today, because of this unpleasantness over Syria. But in a year or two, yes, I think Turkey will be in the partner category.

Alkhorshid:
Yeah. Thank you so much Gilbert for being with us today. Great pleasure as always and Merry Christmas.

Doctorow:
And to you and to our listeners.

Alkhorshid: 42:37
Thank you.

Doctorow:
Bye bye.

Alkhorshid:
Bye bye.

‘Judging Freedom’ edition of 24 December: The New Sovereignty

On this day before Christmas, Judge Napolitano had a very full schedule of interviewees to compensate for his being off the air for a week starting tomorrow. Accordingly, I consider myself lucky to have been given time to review with him several of the key issues in Russian-US relations.

We spoke about the interview of Azerbaijan president Aliyev with RT released a day ago, about how Azerbaijan’s ability to remain a fast ally of both Russia and of NATO member Turkey over the course of 30 years suggests a future for Ankara in BRICS notwithstanding bad feelings in the Kremlin over Turkey’s assisting the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. We talked about Ron Paul’s failed effort in the Senate to introduce legislation establishing a watchdog in Kiev to monitor closely the disbursement of American funds by the Zelensky regime. And our chat moved further afield to topics I have not covered in my recent published essays, The Judge’s questions were probing and thought provoking

This chat with host Nima Alkhorshid covered several important developments in the past week with respect to Russia’s relations with Slovakia, Zelensky’s slush fund for bribing Western politicians and the latest thinking in Moscow about the chances for reaching some accommodation with Donald Trump.

As I mention in this discussion, Russian thinking about Trump has rocked back and forth over the past month. Trump’s list of nominees for the ‘power ministries’ in his new administration aroused consternation in Moscow, since they are nearly all Neocon in outlook. The chattering classes were all saying that there is no need to show restraint and wait patiently for the Trump inauguration, because nothing good will come out his administration.  Trump’s statements on the war, his insistence that Russian losses are six times greater than Ukrainian losses, confirmed the conviction in Moscow that Trump is receiving the same worthless intelligence reporting as Biden received and will reach the same conclusions about the need to continue to provide arms and money to Ukraine after he takes office. However, Trump’s most recent statements in the past week largely swept away skepticism about him. The key point was Trump’s declaring that the decision to authorize use of American ATACMS and HIMARS missiles by Ukraine to strike deep into the Russian heartland was ‘foolish and very dangerous.’ This persuaded Russian elites, and likely the Kremlin as well, that Trump may have a realistic understanding of the seriousness of Russian resolve and of its military capabilities, all of which augurs well for reaching some accommodation with the USA to end the war on acceptable terms.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaZjg5pvQ8U

Robert Fico and the $500 million bribe from Zelensky

In the past week, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has been in a public exchange of insults with the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. Their dispute centered on Ukraine’s decision not to renew its gas transit agreement with Russia that expires in one week’s time, leaving Slovakia, Hungary and Austria without this vitally important gas supply. In the midst of this fracas, Fico let it be known that Zelensky had offered him a bribe of 500 million dollars to change his position on Ukraine’s application to join NATO and give it his backing.

Information about the bribe has reached to mainstream. But, so far, I do not see any consideration of whom else Zelensky has been attempting to bribe to ensure support …and with greater success.

Surely among the NATO member states in Europe there are prime ministers who are less principled than Fico and have taken the bait from Kiev.  But why limit our consideration to NATO. Surely among the Members of the European Parliament there are party officials who have been on the take from Mr. Zelensky. After all, there is plenty of unaudited U.S. and EU money in the Zelensky coffers available for corruption. And there are plenty of our elected officials who would gladly pocket bribes if given the offer.

You doubt my words?  Then open any daily issue of Belgium’s leading French language newspaper Le Soir and you will find the latest entries on the pending charges against Didier Reynders. Reynders is known as, ‘smiley’ in our family in recognition of his traditionally dapper disposition. And why should he not have been smiling while walking on all our faces for 20 years when he served as a permanent fixture of Belgian coalition governments, as Finance Minister, as Foreign Minister, holding whatever portfolio the coalition partners dealt out to his MR (Reform Movement) party.  Then, when the Flemish politicians in charge of the Belgian parliament rolled up the carpet, Reynders, like the last prime minister he served under – MR party boss Charles Michel moved up and out into the European Institutions. Michel took the post of president of the European Council in the same time frame as Ursula von der Leyen’s first term as President of the European Commission. Reynders took the position of Commissioner of Justice, all of which doubles the irony of his present predicament.

Reynders’ service in the Commission ended on 1 December, the start date of the new Commissioners in von der Leyen’s second term. The next day, the Belgian prosecutors published their charges against him: money laundering on a large scale over a number of years, for which Reynders’ bank and other authoritative witnesses have provided essential evidence.  And what money could he possibly have been laundering? Bribes of one kind or another are very likely the starting point of his crimes. Perhaps we will never know who was paying him off. But he will be nailed on the money laundering charges and should be prepared to do prison time.

Reynders first came under suspicion three years ago, when his bankers asked him how he came to make frequent deposits of large amounts of cash into his bank accounts.  Those cash deposits ended immediately thereafter. But, as records, he then starting buying enormous quantities of lottery tickets in the Belgian state lottery – the mechanism for money laundering as we all now understand thanks to the Le Soir exposé.

It all looks fairly tawdry.  I submit that Reynders had the misfortune to leave his invulnerable position as a Commissioner for the axe to fall. Otherwise, he could have enjoyed his ill-gotten gains up to the graveyard.

Would the likes of Reynders, serving at the apex of the European Institutions not exist lower down in the shadows of the European Institutions, or in the cabinets of ministers in states across the EU?

It is a peculiarity of the thinking of American political commentators that they believe that the misbehavior of the Israeli lobby, its illegal influence on U.S. foreign policy is something exceptional.

Perhaps when the Musk committee for clean-up of the U.S. government gets underway and begins to audit the books on the cash handed over to Zelensky there will be more bribery scandals for the faits divers sections of our European newspapers to entertain us with.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Transcript submitted by a reader

NewsX Anchor, Joshua Barnes: 1:57
Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed a swift retaliation following a Ukrainian drone strike in Kazan, Tatarstan, that damaged, attacked residential buildings and an industrial facility. Though officials reported no casualties, Putin warned that attempts to destroy Russia would be met with multiple times more destruction. In Moscow, Putin met with Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico to discuss gas transit as their contract with Ukraine nears expiry. Fico criticised Kiev’s opposition to the deal and shifted Slovakia’s stance towards Russia. Meanwhile, South Korea claimed that over 1,100 North Korean troops fighting in Russia have been killed or wounded.

2:36
Kyiv revealed that these soldiers were issued fake documents to hide their origin. North Korea continues to provide weapons and manpower to Russia, escalating tensions in the region. We’re first going to go to our correspondent Aditya Wadhawan. Aditya, I’d like to speak to you about these comments from Vladimir Putin and go into some more specifics, because there was strong language used in rebuttal and response to the attacks that his country has seen over the past couple of days.

Aditya Wadhawan, Correspondent: 3:02
Well, absolutely, Josh. It is a very tit-for-tat situation. You know, this, the war has been going, you know, for the last two years, this Russia-Ukraine war is nowhere, it is, there is nowhere it is seen ending, you know. Because recently, you know, if Ukraine attacks, then Russia retaliates. If Russia attacks, which is usually does– Russia is actually aggressor in this case– then Ukraine responds. So it is a very complex situation when we talk about Russia-Ukraine war. Recently, this is sort of a hypocritical thing. On one side, Vladimir Putin says that he is ready to compromise on war with Ukraine, and he will hold talks with the newly-elected US President Donald Trump. But on the other hand, he is warning of a retaliation [for] a missile attack on the Russian city. So it is a very complex situation that needs to be monitored. Josh. Back to you in the studios.

NewsX: 4:02
Yes, and we are now joined by two guests, firstly Gilbert Doctorow, international relations and Russian affairs expert. And we also have Glen Grant, who was a former advisor to the Defense minister of Ukraine. Glen, I’d like to come to you first.

We’re looking at a situation here where a retaliation has been promised. In terms of the reaction in Ukraine and the feeling within Ukraine, is there fear amongst people that the attacks could be on a level that we’ve seen previously in terms of large amounts of drones, missiles and potentially the use of an intercontinental or ballistic missile?

Glen Grant: 4:35
No, not at all. The general– and I was there last week, so I can talk with a certain degree of certainty– the people have accepted that what Putin says and what Putin does are two different things. Everybody’s expecting attacks. They’ve been expecting attacks since the war started, and they’re getting them, but they don’t think there’s going to be anything worse than what they’re getting at the moment. So it’s just bad. The disappointment is not a worry about Putin, but disappointment is with the West not being quicker in providing support.

NewsX: 5:10
Looking at the feeling within Ukraine, I want to come back to you on that point. Is there no sort of fear amongst the people or is it something that, like you say, they’ve come to terms with, in terms of the fact that these attacks are going to happen. But surely a threat is still a threat, and there must be some concern amongst people.

Grant: 5:28
Yeah, well, the threat is adjusted for in people’s minds. If they know that, if they hear from the air defence people that a rocket is coming their way, then they go downstairs into the metro or wherever they can hide, into the cellars. So there is common sense on that side. But it’s no worse now than it was five or six months ago, for example. What is Putin going to do differently? If he throws more missiles, then there’s going to be a gap between those missiles coming, because he hasn’t got a bottomless pit of missiles to throw at Ukraine.

NewsX: 6:07
Gilbert Doctorow, I’m going to come to you. In terms of the response from Putin and the threats that have been made for– “destruction” is a word that has been used. Do you think that the response will be proportionate in regards to the amount of drones that were sent over from Ukraine?

And also do you think that the impact on the front lines will be seen as well? Of course the North Korean soldiers are there fighting on the front line. How do you think both of these fronts, a front from the air but also a front on the ground, may step up now because of Putin’s comments?

Doctorow: 6:42
Is this directed to me?

NewsX:
Yes, please, Gilbert. Thank you.

Doctorow: 6:45
All right, please. I disagree with the comments of the first participant, that there’s no difference. The Russians have now destroyed over 80 percent of the power generation capacity of Ukraine. They have forced massive cutbacks in supply of energy across the country. Yesterday was the largest flow of Ukrainians across the border leaving the country that we have seen since the war began. So don’t say they’re hiding in the metro. You can’t live in the metro. You can avoid a single attack, yes, but you can’t live there and you certainly can’t live on the 10th floor of your apartment house if you have no water and no electricity and no heat. People are getting the message; they’re leaving.

7:35
To compare what the Ukrainians have done in their strike on Kazan with what the Russians are doing is to demonstrate perfectly how this war has been pursued. The Russians have basically gone after the Ukrainian military. They have killed, perhaps killed or wounded seriously, perhaps as many as one million in the last two years, of whom 560,000 were wounded or killed in the last year, of whom 45,000 were killed in the gambit of Mr. Zelensky in the Kursk province of Russia. This is devastating for the country in every sense, demographically, in terms of the economy.

The Russian attacks that may come will depend, in each case, on the seriousness of the threat that Russia perceives from every tit-for-tat response from Ukraine. What the Ukrainians did, as I said, their attack on Kazan was perfectly in line with their whole strategy of public relations war rather than kinetic war. They have attacked residential buildings. They attacked a high-rise house in Kazan to provide for viral social media pictures of their striking that building, similar to the 9-11 attack on the World Towers. We watched their drone explode in the midst of that building.

9:09
The net result, which the social media did not post, was what happened to that building. No one was killed, and it was a rather small damage. However, it made a wonderful show, and it seems as though the Ukrainian military goes for big shows and not for big actions, because they don’t have the wherewithal to do big actions. Their attacks on the Russian military using ATACMS, using HIMARS have been negligible, because they simply don’t have the wherewithal.

When you say, when my colleague says that the Russians are running out of missiles, I’m sorry, I disagree entirely. The latest estimate coming out of the States is that the Russians have a production capacity of 25 of their Oreshniks per month, 300 a year. Or as they said with some humour on Russian television, enough for each European capital.

NewsX: 10:00
Thank you, Gilbert Doctorow. We’re going to have to move on, but thank you very much for joining us. Also thank you very much for joining us, Glen Grant.

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Transkript von NewsX ‘debate’ mit Team Zelensky

NewsX Anchor, Joshua Barnes: 1:57
Der russische Präsident Wladimir Putin hat nach einem ukrainischen Drohnenangriff in Kasan, Tatarstan, bei dem Wohngebäude und eine Industrieanlage beschädigt und angegriffen wurden, eine rasche Vergeltung angekündigt. Obwohl die Behörden keine Opfer meldeten, warnte Putin, dass Versuche, Russland zu zerstören, mit einer mehrfach höheren Zerstörung beantwortet würden. In Moskau traf Putin mit dem slowakischen Ministerpräsidenten Robert Fico zusammen, um über den Gastransit zu sprechen, da der Vertrag mit der Ukraine bald ausläuft. Fico kritisierte Kiews Widerstand gegen das Abkommen und änderte die Haltung der Slowakei gegenüber Russland. Unterdessen gab Südkorea an, dass über 1.100 nordkoreanische Soldaten, die in Russland kämpften, getötet oder verwundet wurden.

2:36
Kiew gab bekannt, dass diese Soldaten gefälschte Dokumente erhalten hatten, um ihre Herkunft zu verschleiern. Nordkorea liefert weiterhin Waffen und Arbeitskräfte nach Russland, was die Spannungen in der Region verschärft. Wir wenden uns zunächst an unsere Korrespondentin Aditya Wadhawan. Aditya, ich möchte mit Ihnen über diese Äußerungen von Wladimir Putin sprechen und näher auf einige Einzelheiten eingehen, denn die Gegenargumente und Reaktionen auf die Angriffe, die sein Land in den letzten Tagen erlebt hat, waren sehr deutlich.

Aditya Wadhawan, Correspondent: 3:02
Absolut, Josh. Es ist eine klassische „Wie du mir, so ich dir“-Situation. Der Krieg dauert nun schon seit zwei Jahren an, und es ist nirgendwo ein Ende dieses Russland-Ukraine-Krieges in Sicht. Denn in letzter Zeit gilt: Greift die Ukraine an, dann schlägt Russland zurück. Greift Russland an, was normalerweise der Fall ist – Russland ist in diesem Fall tatsächlich der Aggressor –, dann reagiert die Ukraine. Es ist also eine sehr komplexe Situation, wenn wir über den Krieg zwischen Russland und der Ukraine sprechen. In letzter Zeit ist das eine Art Heuchelei. Einerseits sagt Wladimir Putin, dass er bereit ist, im Krieg mit der Ukraine Kompromisse einzugehen, und er wird Gespräche mit dem neu gewählten US-Präsidenten Donald Trump führen. Andererseits warnt er vor Vergeltungsmaßnahmen für einen Raketenangriff auf die russische Stadt. Es ist also eine sehr komplexe Situation, die beobachtet werden muss. Josh. Ich gebe zurück ins Studio.

NewsX: 4:02
Ja, und wir haben jetzt zwei Gäste bei uns, zunächst Gilbert Doctorow, Experte für internationale Beziehungen und Russlandfragen. Und wir haben auch Glen Grant, der früher Berater des Verteidigungsministers der Ukraine war. Glen, ich möchte zuerst mit Ihnen sprechen.

Wir haben es hier mit einer Situation zu tun, in der Vergeltungsmaßnahmen angedroht wurden. Befürchten die Menschen in der Ukraine, dass die Angriffe ein Ausmaß annehmen könnten, wie wir es bereits zuvor erlebt haben, mit einer großen Anzahl von Drohnen, Raketen und möglicherweise dem Einsatz einer Interkontinental- oder ballistischen Rakete?

Glen Grant: 4:35
Nein, überhaupt nicht. Allgemein – und ich war letzte Woche dort, sodass ich mit einer gewissen Sicherheit sprechen kann – haben die Menschen akzeptiert, dass das, was Putin sagt, und das, was Putin tut, zwei verschiedene Dinge sind. Alle erwarten Angriffe. Sie erwarten Angriffe seit Beginn des Krieges, und sie bekommen sie, aber sie glauben nicht, dass es noch schlimmer kommen wird als das, was sie im Moment erleben. Es ist also einfach nur schlimm. Die Enttäuschung gilt nicht Putin, sondern dem Westen, der nicht schneller Unterstützung leistet.

NewsX: 5:10
Wenn ich mir die Stimmung in der Ukraine ansehe, möchte ich auf diesen Punkt zurückkommen. Gibt es unter den Menschen keinerlei Angst oder haben sie sich, wie Sie sagen, damit abgefunden, dass diese Angriffe stattfinden werden? Aber eine Bedrohung ist doch immer noch eine Bedrohung, und es muss doch eine gewisse Besorgnis unter den Menschen herrschen.

Grant: 5:28
Ja, nun, die Bedrohung wird in den Köpfen der Menschen angepasst. Wenn sie von den Luftverteidigungsleuten hören, dass eine Rakete auf sie zukommt, dann gehen sie nach unten in die U-Bahn oder wo auch immer sie sich verstecken können, in die Keller. Es gibt also gesunden Menschenverstand auf dieser Seite. Aber es ist jetzt nicht schlimmer als vor fünf oder sechs Monaten, zum Beispiel. Was wird Putin anders machen? Wenn er mehr Raketen abfeuert, wird es eine Lücke zwischen den eintreffenden Raketen geben, weil er nicht über einen Raketenvorrat ohne Ende verfügt, den er auf die Ukraine abfeuern kann.

NewsX: 6:07
Gilbert Doctorow, ich möchte Ihnen eine Frage stellen. Was die Reaktion Putins und die Drohungen betrifft, die ausgesprochen wurden – „Zerstörung“ ist ein Wort, das gefallen ist. Glauben Sie, dass die Reaktion in einem angemessenen Verhältnis zur Anzahl der Drohnen stehen wird, die aus der Ukraine geschickt wurden?

Und glauben Sie auch, dass die Auswirkungen an der Front zu spüren sein werden? Natürlich kämpfen die nordkoreanischen Soldaten an vorderster Front. Wie denken Sie, dass sich diese beiden Fronten, eine Front aus der Luft, aber auch eine Front am Boden, jetzt aufgrund von Putins Äußerungen verschärfen könnten?

Doctorow: 6:42
Ist das an mich gerichtet?

NewsX:
Ja, bitte, Gilbert. Danke.

Doctorow: 6:45
In Ordnung, bitte. Ich stimme den Äußerungen des ersten Teilnehmers nicht zu, dass es keinen Unterschied gibt. Die Russen haben inzwischen über 80 Prozent der Stromerzeugungskapazität der Ukraine zerstört. Sie haben massive Kürzungen bei der Energieversorgung im ganzen Land erzwungen. Gestern haben so viele Ukrainer wie noch nie seit Beginn des Krieges das Land über die Grenze verlassen. Also sagen Sie nicht, dass sie sich in der U-Bahn verstecken. Man kann nicht in der U-Bahn leben. Man kann einem einzelnen Angriff ausweichen, ja, aber man kann dort nicht leben, und man kann schon gar nicht im 10. Stock eines Wohnhauses leben, wenn man kein Wasser, keinen Strom und keine Heizung hat. Die Menschen haben es verstanden, sie gehen.

7:35
Wenn man vergleicht, was die Ukrainer bei ihrem Angriff auf Kasan getan haben, mit dem, was die Russen tun, wird deutlich, wie dieser Krieg geführt wurde. Die Russen haben es im Grunde genommen auf das ukrainische Militär abgesehen. Sie haben in den letzten zwei Jahren vielleicht bis zu eine Million Menschen getötet oder schwer verwundet, davon 560.000 im letzten Jahr, von denen 45.000 im Zuge des Schachzugs von Herrn Selensky in der russischen Provinz Kursk getötet wurden. Dies ist in jeder Hinsicht verheerend für das Land, demografisch und wirtschaftlich.

Die russischen Angriffe, die möglicherweise erfolgen werden, hängen in jedem Fall davon ab, wie ernst die Bedrohung ist, die Russland in jeder Vergeltungsmaßnahme der Ukraine wahrnimmt. Wie ich bereits sagte, entsprach der Angriff der Ukrainer auf Kasan vollkommen ihrer gesamten Strategie eines PR-Krieges und nicht eines Bewegungskrieges. Sie haben Wohngebäude angegriffen. Sie haben ein Hochhaus in Kasan angegriffen, um virale Bilder ihres Angriffs auf dieses Gebäude in den sozialen Medien zu verbreiten, ähnlich wie beim Angriff auf die World Trade Center am 11. September. Wir haben gesehen, wie ihre Drohne mitten in diesem Gebäude explodierte.

9:09
Das Endergebnis, das in den sozialen Medien nicht veröffentlicht wurde, war, was mit diesem Gebäude passiert ist. Es gab keine Toten und der Schaden war relativ gering. Es war jedoch eine großartige Show und es scheint, als ob das ukrainische Militär auf große Shows und nicht auf große Aktionen setzt, weil sie nicht über die Mittel für große Aktionen verfügen. Ihre Angriffe auf das russische Militär mit ATACMS und HIMARS waren vernachlässigbar, weil sie einfach nicht über die Mittel verfügen.

Wenn Sie sagen, wenn mein Kollege sagt, dass die Russen keine Raketen mehr haben, dann muss ich leider sagen, dass ich da ganz anderer Meinung bin. Die neueste Schätzung aus den USA besagt, dass die Russen eine Produktionskapazität von 25 ihrer Oreschniks pro Monat haben, also 300 pro Jahr. Oder wie es im russischen Fernsehen mit einem gewissen Humor ausgedrückt wurde: genug für jede europäische Hauptstadt.

NewsX: 10:00
Vielen Dank, Gilbert Doctorow. Wir müssen leider zum nächsten Punkt übergehen, aber vielen Dank, dass Sie bei uns waren. Vielen Dank auch für Ihren Besuch, Glen Grant.

Word of the Year: “Sovereignty”

A week ago, the BBC and other major Western media announced the ‘Word of the Year’ chosen by the Oxford University Press.  It is ‘brain rot.’

Why was this term chosen?  I quote the Oxford website:

“Our experts noticed that ‘brain rot’ gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024.”

They have condemned “low-quality online content” in social media. But they ignore still lower quality mainstream content, which is not ‘disinformation’ but blatant propaganda if one follows the BBC newscasts or Financial Times front pages.

Oxford University identified a trendy term used among people like themselves, who obviously enjoy Scrabble, doing crossword puzzles and other innocent pastimes to take their minds off the real world outside their ivy-covered walls.

However, in that real world, I would suggest that the most widely used “new” word among the movers and shakers of geopolitics has been ‘sovereignty.’ This is an old word that is presently being used in a new way, as a shorthand reference for a new, multipolar world order. It was put into currency in this form several years ago by Russia’s president. Now ‘sovereignty’ is increasingly used as the battering ram against U.S. global hegemony and the culture of bending the knee before Washington that has shaped our world since the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. It does double duty as the antonym to colonial subjugation. In its efficiency, it has overtaken and left behind the word ‘BRICS.’

In what follows, I will direct attention to two current events which illustrate perfectly what I am saying about the linguistic load of ‘sovereignty’ for geopolitics. The first event is mentioned in most mainstream news outlets today: it is the visit of Slovak prime minister Fico to Moscow and his talks with Vladimir Putin yesterday. The second is less likely to be known by readers of these pages: it is the interview that Azerbaijan president Ilhem Aliyev gave to Russia Today general director Dimitri Kiselyov. 

                                                                            *****

Slovak prime minister Robert Fico was in Moscow yesterday for talks centered on energy matters. Although the Kremlin has not divulged the precise content of his tête-à-tête with Vladimir Putin, we may be sure that one was Fico’s rejection of the EU Commission’s wish to add to existing sanctions on Russia a prohibition on Member States dealing with Rosatom and the Russian nuclear industry. A second topic was, no doubt, the Ukrainian shutdown of gas pipelines that traverse their country and deliver Russian gas to Slovakia and Hungary. The latter issue has been the subject of a direct public sparring contest between Fico and Zelensky in recent days, with Fico threatening unspecified retaliation if the Ukrainians do not renew their transit contracts with Gazprom before they expire in a week’s time.

We may also safely assume that the two leaders discussed an issue that Fico placed before world media a couple of days earlier: namely that Zelensky had secretly offered him a $500 million bribe if he changed course on Ukraine’s application to join NATO and becomes supportive.  I will deal with the bribe issue in a separate article today because its ramifications go well outside the limits of this piece.

Let me point out that Robert Fico’s public stand on all of these matters is based on his policy of defending Slovakia’s national sovereignty. These are precisely the words that Vladimir Putin has been using almost daily since the start of the Special Military Operation in February 2022.

Allow me to remind readers that a foreign policy based on national sovereignty is interests based rather than values based and is known in political science as Realpolitik. Until fairly recently, until Vladimir Putin highlighted the issue, Realpolitik was the avowed policy of only Russia and China in the community of nations. North America and Europe officially stand wholly behind values-based policies. However, sovereignty of nation states is a view that in modern European history can be traced back to 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War. Values-based policies of principalities back then meant promotion of Catholicism versus Protestantism or vice versa through armed interventions to save souls. And it is that which the 1648 Peace proscribed. It advanced the cause of individual nation states which were treated with equal respect regardless of their size and might, and which did not intervene in the internal affairs of each other. Sounds rather like today’s concept of a multipolar world, n’est-ce-pas?

If one wonders what is exceptional about the president of Slovakia, a Member State of the European Union, today defending the notion of national sovereignty and national interests, we must contend with the issue that the creation of the European Union from the European Economic Community in 1992 entailed the decision of those states entering the Union to give up to European Institutions in Brussels a large part of their national identities and prerogatives.

Foreign policy and defense policy were the first to be foregone in what was ultimately the neutering of these nation states. The sacrifice was borne without serious complaint for the sake of promoting the launch of a common currency and freedom of movement of the citizens of these states across all internal borders.

These were worthy objectives. But there was also an ideological dimension: the sacrifices of prerogatives were claimed for the sake of Europe’s ‘peace mission.’ That is to say, the notion that nation states and their accompanying nationalism were the spawning grounds of Europe’s two self-destructive civil wars in the 20^th century called today WWI and WWII. Hence, the gradual snuffing out of nation-states within an ever more cohesive supranational state called the EU was taken for granted as being a progressive development for humanity. 

Looking at the idiotic pursuit by the 27 Member States of the growing disaster in Ukraine that threatens to evolve into a nuclear WWIII, looking at how the sanctions they have applied to Russia produced economic hardship in Europe, in particular the growing deindustrialization of the Union’s locomotive, Germany as a consequence of the EU’s sanctioning Russia, we are obliged to rethink the logic of the sacrifice of sovereignty in 1992 and later. This is a mental exercise that so far only Hungary and Slovakia have performed.  Others are sure to follow as the debacle of the present Western war on Russia via Ukraine becomes more evident in the weeks to come.

                                                                          *****

The second recent event in which national sovereignty is promoted in a manner that directly demonstrates the influence of Vladimir Putin’s vocabulary on global trend-setters is the just published hour long interview that Azerbaijan president Ilhan Aliyev gave to Dimitri Kiselyov of Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today).

See https://yandex.ru/video/preview/11457259627298407705 (so far only available in Russian)

In a substantial part of this interview, we hear Aliyev’s caustic remarks directed at French president Emanuel Macron. He describes Macron’s latest visit to the cyclone-devastated French overseas territory of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Mozambique as condescending in the extreme. Macron offered to spend the night on the island to show solidarity but made no serious offer of material assistance. This was in line, said Aliyev, with the way that under French rule 75% of the native population lives under the line of poverty. From this starting point, Aliyev proceeded to tick off all of the defeats that France’s neocolonialist policies have cost it in Africa, where in the past year it has been ordered out of one country after another. And he moved on to describe point for point, Macron’s anti-democratic rule in Metropolitan France itself.

In the more general parts of the interview, we hear Aliyev speak of state sovereignty as essential to the well-being of peoples, and his castigation of Western neocolonialism.

Let us just remember who is now employing this very Putin-like rhetoric.

Ilham Aliyev is the son of Heydar Aliyev, founder and long-time ruler of the modern Azerbaijan state who in the late 1990s entered into co-production agreements with British Petroleum for exploitation of its Shah Deniz gas field in the Caspian Sea and of oil reserves also in the Caspian. Knowing the way that BP dominated the market in Former Soviet Union republics back then and how they negotiated their contracts, we would be safe in saying that the deal was very generous to the foreign investor at the expense of Azerbaijan.

In 1998, his father signed agreements with British Petroleum and other project partners for construction of the BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan) oil pipeline that would carry Azerbaijani oil to Turkey for further sale on global markets. The project which was completed in 2005, two years into the presidency of the son.

Let us not be deceived by the lead role of the British company in this pioneering oil pipeline project. It had been encouraged from the very inception by the Clinton administration in Washington, D.C., where it was promoted by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as a model for other gas and oil pipelines that would bring Eurasian hydrocarbons to Europe bypassing Russia in a policy of reducing Russia to abject poverty. As a detail, I mention that Albright employed her one-time mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski as consultant to the BTC project.

Consequent to these arrangements, for a good long time it was safe to say that Azerbaijan was solidly in the pocket of the United States and its allies, all working against the economic interests of the Russian Federation.  And yet there was a fly in this ointment. Aliyev had a certain empathy if not sympathy for Russia. He had spent the years 1977 to 1982 studying at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) which then mostly graduated the crème de la crème of Russian diplomats. He then took a Ph.D. in history there and remained in Moscow until 1990 as a lecturer. Needless to say, he is a fluent Russian speaker.

It would be accurate to say that until the SMO, Aliyev was a fence-sitter in East-West relations. However, his interview with Dmitry Kiselyov makes it crystal clear that he is now firmly in Vladimir Putin’s camp. As I have said elsewhere, people and states flock to the side of winners, and Putin’s Russia has been demonstrating its claims to be the world’s most powerful military on the battlefields of Ukraine.

This is the context for Aliyev’s adoption of the sovereignty lexicon.

It bears mention, that another graduate of MGIMO, Kassym-Jomart Kemeluly Tokayev, President of Kazakhstan, also has in the past year ceased to sit on two stools and is firmly in the Putin camp. He, too, has acquired the sovereignty lexicon.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Wort des Jahres: „Souveränität“

Vor einer Woche verkündeten die BBC und andere große westliche Medien das von der Oxford University Press gewählte „Wort des Jahres“. Es lautet “brain rot” [Gehirnfäule].

Warum wurde dieser Begriff gewählt? Ich zitiere die Oxford-Website:

„Unsere Experten haben festgestellt, dass der Begriff ‚brain rot‘ in diesem Jahr neue Bedeutung erlangt hat, da er verwendet wird, um Bedenken hinsichtlich der Auswirkungen des Konsums übermäßiger Mengen minderwertiger Online-Inhalte, insbesondere in den sozialen Medien, zu erfassen. Die Verwendungshäufigkeit des Begriffs ist zwischen 2023 und 2024 um 230 % gestiegen.“

Sie haben „minderwertige Online-Inhalte“ in den sozialen Medien verurteilt. Aber sie ignorieren die noch minderwertigeren Mainstream-Inhalte, die keine „Desinformation“, sondern unverhohlene Propaganda sind, wenn man die BBC-Nachrichtensendungen oder die Titelseiten der Financial Times verfolgt.

Die Universität Oxford hat einen Trendbegriff identifiziert, der von Menschen wie ihnen verwendet wird, die offensichtlich gerne Scrabble spielen, Kreuzworträtsel lösen und anderen harmlosen Freizeitbeschäftigungen nachgehen, um sich von der realen Welt außerhalb ihrer efeubewachsenen Mauern abzulenken.

In dieser realen Welt würde ich jedoch behaupten, dass das am häufigsten verwendete „neue“ Wort unter den Machern und Entscheidern der Geopolitik „Souveränität“ ist. Dies ist ein altes Wort, das derzeit auf neue Weise verwendet wird, als Kurzform für eine neue, multipolare Weltordnung. Es wurde vor einigen Jahren vom russischen Präsidenten in dieser Form in Umlauf gebracht. Inzwischen wird „Souveränität“ immer häufiger als Rammbock gegen die globale Hegemonie der USA und die Kultur der Unterwürfigkeit gegenüber Washington eingesetzt, die unsere Welt seit dem Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion Ende 1991 prägt. Es dient auch als Antonym für koloniale Unterwerfung. In seiner Effizienz hat es das Wort „BRICS“ überholt und hinter sich gelassen.

Im Folgenden möchte ich die Aufmerksamkeit auf zwei aktuelle Ereignisse lenken, die perfekt veranschaulichen, was ich über die sprachliche Last des Begriffs „Souveränität“ für die Geopolitik sage. Das erste Ereignis wird heute in den meisten Mainstream-Nachrichtenagenturen erwähnt: Es handelt sich um den Besuch des slowakischen Premierministers Fico in Moskau und seine gestrigen Gespräche mit Wladimir Putin. Das zweite Ereignis ist den Lesern dieser Seiten wahrscheinlich weniger bekannt: Es handelt sich um das Interview, das der aserbaidschanische Präsident Ilham Aliyev dem Generaldirektor von Russia Today, Dimitri Kiselyov, gegeben hat.

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Der slowakische Premierminister Robert Fico war gestern in Moskau zu Gesprächen über Energiefragen. Obwohl der Kreml den genauen Inhalt seines Tête-à-Têtes mit Wladimir Putin nicht preisgegeben hat, können wir davon ausgehen, dass Fico den Wunsch der EU-Kommission abgelehnt hat, die bestehenden Sanktionen gegen Russland um ein Verbot für Mitgliedstaaten zu ergänzen, mit Rosatom und der russischen Atomindustrie Geschäfte zu machen. Ein zweites Thema war zweifellos die Schließung der ukrainischen Gaspipelines, die durch das Land verlaufen und russisches Gas in die Slowakei und nach Ungarn liefern. Letzteres war in den letzten Tagen Gegenstand eines direkten öffentlichen Schlagabtauschs zwischen Fico und Selensky, bei dem Fico mit nicht näher bezeichneten Vergeltungsmaßnahmen drohte, falls die Ukrainer ihre Transitverträge mit Gazprom nicht vor Ablauf in einer Woche verlängern.

Wir können auch davon ausgehen, dass die beiden Staats- und Regierungschefs ein Thema besprochen haben, das Fico einige Tage zuvor den Weltmedien vorgelegt hatte: nämlich, dass Selensky ihm heimlich eine Bestechungssumme von 500 Millionen Dollar angeboten hatte, wenn er seinen Kurs in Bezug auf den Antrag der Ukraine auf NATO-Beitritt ändern und ihn unterstützen würde. Ich werde mich heute in einem separaten Artikel mit der Bestechungsaffäre befassen, da ihre Auswirkungen weit über den Rahmen dieses Artikels hinausgehen.

Ich möchte darauf hinweisen, dass Robert Ficos öffentliche Haltung in all diesen Angelegenheiten auf seiner Politik der Verteidigung der nationalen Souveränität der Slowakei beruht. Dies sind genau die Worte, die Wladimir Putin seit Beginn der militärischen Sonderoperation im Februar 2022 fast täglich verwendet.

Ich möchte die Leser daran erinnern, dass eine auf nationaler Souveränität basierende Außenpolitik eher interessenbasiert als wertbasiert ist und in der Politikwissenschaft als Realpolitik bekannt ist. Bis vor relativ kurzer Zeit, bis Wladimir Putin das Thema zur Sprache brachte, war Realpolitik die erklärte Politik nur Russlands und Chinas in der Gemeinschaft der Nationen. Nordamerika und Europa stehen offiziell voll und ganz hinter einer wertebasierten Politik. Die Souveränität der Nationalstaaten ist jedoch eine Ansicht, die in der modernen europäischen Geschichte bis ins Jahr 1648 und den Westfälischen Frieden zurückverfolgt werden kann, der den Dreißigjährigen Krieg beendete. Eine auf Werten basierende Politik der Fürstentümer bedeutete damals die Förderung des Katholizismus gegenüber dem Protestantismus oder umgekehrt durch bewaffnete Interventionen zur Rettung der Seelen. Und genau das wurde durch den Frieden von 1648 verboten. Er förderte die Sache der einzelnen Nationalstaaten, die unabhängig von ihrer Größe und Macht mit gleichem Respekt behandelt wurden und nicht in die inneren Angelegenheiten der jeweils anderen eingriffen. Das klingt doch ganz nach dem heutigen Konzept einer multipolaren Welt, n’est-ce-pas?

Wenn man sich fragt, was an dem Präsidenten der Slowakei, einem Mitgliedstaat der Europäischen Union, der heute den Begriff der nationalen Souveränität und der nationalen Interessen verteidigt, außergewöhnlich ist, müssen wir uns mit der Tatsache auseinandersetzen, dass die Gründung der Europäischen Union aus der Europäischen Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft im Jahr 1992 die Entscheidung der beitretenden Staaten mit sich brachte, einen großen Teil ihrer nationalen Identität und ihrer Vorrechte an die europäischen Institutionen in Brüssel abzutreten.

Außen- und Verteidigungspolitik waren die ersten Bereiche, auf die im Rahmen der endgültigen Entmachtung dieser Nationalstaaten verzichtet wurde. Dieses Opfer wurde ohne ernsthafte Beschwerden erbracht, um die Einführung einer gemeinsamen Währung und die Freizügigkeit der Bürger dieser Staaten über alle Binnengrenzen hinweg zu fördern.

Dies waren ehrenwerte Ziele. Aber es gab auch eine ideologische Dimension: Die Aufgabe von Vorrechten wurde im Namen der „Friedensmission“ Europas gefordert. Das heißt, die Vorstellung, dass Nationalstaaten und der damit einhergehende Nationalismus die Brutstätten der beiden selbstzerstörerischen Bürgerkriege Europas im 20. Jahrhundert waren, die heute als Erster und Zweiter Weltkrieg bezeichnet werden. Daher wurde die allmähliche Auslöschung der Nationalstaaten innerhalb eines immer stärker zusammenhängenden supranationalen Staates namens EU als eine fortschrittliche Entwicklung für die Menschheit angesehen.

Wenn man sich das idiotische Vorgehen der 27 Mitgliedstaaten in der wachsenden Katastrophe in der Ukraine ansieht, die sich zu einem nuklearen Dritten Weltkrieg zu entwickeln droht, und wenn man sich ansieht, wie die von ihnen gegen Russland verhängten Sanktionen zu wirtschaftlichen Schwierigkeiten in Europa geführt haben, insbesondere zur zunehmenden Deindustrialisierung der Lokomotive der Union, Deutschland, als Folge der EU-Sanktionen gegen Russland, sind wir gezwungen, die Logik der Opferung der Souveränität im Jahr 1992 und später zu überdenken. Dies ist eine mentale Übung, die bisher nur Ungarn und die Slowakei durchgeführt haben. Andere werden sicherlich folgen, da das Debakel des gegenwärtigen westlichen Krieges gegen Russland über die Ukraine in den kommenden Wochen immer deutlicher wird.

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Das zweite Ereignis aus jüngster Zeit, bei dem die nationale Souveränität auf eine Weise gefördert wird, die den Einfluss des Vokabulars von Wladimir Putin auf globale Trendsetter direkt veranschaulicht, ist das gerade veröffentlichte einstündige Interview, das der aserbaidschanische Präsident Ilham Alijew Dimitri Kisseljow von Rossija Segodnja (Russia Today) gegeben hat.

Siehe https://yandex.ru/video/preview/11457259627298407705 (bisher nur auf Russisch verfügbar)

In einem wesentlichen Teil dieses Interviews hören wir Aliyevs ätzende Bemerkungen, die sich an den französischen Präsidenten Emanuel Macron richten. Er beschreibt Macrons jüngsten Besuch im vom Zyklon verwüsteten französischen Überseegebiet Mayotte im Indischen Ozean vor der Küste Mosambiks als äußerst herablassend. Macron bot an, die Nacht auf der Insel zu verbringen, um Solidarität zu zeigen, machte aber kein ernsthaftes Angebot für materielle Hilfe. Dies entspreche, so Aliyev, der Tatsache, dass unter französischer Herrschaft 75 % der einheimischen Bevölkerung unterhalb der Armutsgrenze leben. Von diesem Ausgangspunkt aus zählte Aliyev alle Niederlagen auf, die Frankreichs neokolonialistische Politik dem Land in Afrika eingebracht hat, wo es im vergangenen Jahr aus einem Land nach dem anderen vertrieben wurde. Und er fuhr fort, Punkt für Punkt Macrons antidemokratische Herrschaft in Frankreich selbst zu beschreiben.

In den allgemeineren Teilen des Interviews spricht Aliyev von der staatlichen Souveränität als wesentlich für das Wohlergehen der Völker und kritisiert den westlichen Neokolonialismus.

Erinnern wir uns nur daran, wer jetzt diese Putin-ähnliche Rhetorik verwendet.

Ilham Aliyev ist der Sohn von Heydar Aliyev, dem Gründer und langjährigen Herrscher des modernen aserbaidschanischen Staates, der Ende der 1990er Jahre Koproduktionsvereinbarungen mit British Petroleum über die Ausbeutung des Shah-Deniz-Gasfeldes im Kaspischen Meer und der Ölreserven im Kaspischen Meer abschloss. Da wir wissen, wie BP damals den Markt in den Republiken der ehemaligen Sowjetunion beherrschte und wie sie ihre Verträge aushandelten, können wir mit Sicherheit sagen, dass der Deal für den ausländischen Investor sehr großzügig war, auf Kosten Aserbaidschans.

1998 unterzeichnete sein Vater mit British Petroleum und anderen Projektpartnern Vereinbarungen über den Bau der BTC-Ölpipeline (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan), die aserbaidschanisches Öl in die Türkei transportieren sollte, um es auf den Weltmärkten zu verkaufen. Das Projekt wurde 2005 abgeschlossen, zwei Jahre nach Beginn der Präsidentschaft des Sohnes.

Lassen wir uns nicht von der führenden Rolle des britischen Unternehmens bei diesem bahnbrechenden Ölpipeline-Projekt täuschen. Es wurde von Anfang an von der Clinton-Regierung in Washington, D.C., ermutigt, wo es von Außenministerin Madeleine Albright als Modell für andere Gas- und Ölpipelines beworben wurde, die eurasische Kohlenwasserstoffe unter Umgehung Russlands nach Europa bringen sollten, um Russland in die bittere Armut zu stürzen. Als Detail erwähne ich, dass Albright ihren ehemaligen Mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski als Berater für das BTC-Projekt einsetzte.

Aufgrund dieser Vereinbarungen konnte man lange Zeit mit Sicherheit sagen, dass Aserbaidschan fest in der Tasche der Vereinigten Staaten und ihrer Verbündeten steckte und alle gegen die wirtschaftlichen Interessen der Russischen Föderation arbeiteten. Und doch gab es einen Haken an der Sache. Aliyev hatte ein gewisses Einfühlungsvermögen, wenn nicht sogar Sympathie für Russland. Er hatte von 1977 bis 1982 am renommierten Moskauer Staatlichen Institut für Internationale Beziehungen (MGIMO) studiert, das damals hauptsächlich die Crème de la Crème der russischen Diplomaten hervorbrachte. Anschließend promovierte er dort in Geschichte und blieb bis 1990 als Dozent in Moskau. Es versteht sich von selbst, dass er fließend Russisch spricht.

Man kann durchaus sagen, dass Aliyev bis zur militärischen Sonderoperation in den Ost-West-Beziehungen unentschlossen war. Sein Interview mit Dmitry Kiselyov macht jedoch glasklar, dass er nun fest im Lager von Wladimir Putin steht. Wie ich bereits an anderer Stelle gesagt habe, schließen sich Menschen und Staaten den Gewinnern an, und Putins Russland hat auf den Schlachtfeldern der Ukraine seinen Anspruch unter Beweis gestellt, das mächtigste Militär der Welt zu sein.

Vor diesem Hintergrund ist Alijews Übernahme des Lexikons der Souveränität zu verstehen.

Es sollte erwähnt werden, dass ein weiterer Absolvent des MGIMO, Kassym-Schomart Toqajew, Präsident von Kasachstan, im vergangenen Jahr ebenfalls aufgehört hat, auf zwei Stühlen zu sitzen, und fest im Putin-Lager verankert ist. Auch er hat sich das Lexikon der Souveränität angeeignet.

Today was my third television appearance on a new-to-me Indian broadcaster in the English language, NewsX, which is part of the ITV media group. ITV in India, please note, is independent of a broadcasting group with the same name in the United Kingdom.

I posted the link here to my first appearance with NewsX on 17 December. That was a very well edited and polished looking 12-minute interview dealing largely with the Russia-Ukraine war which was recorded a week earlier.  

My second occasion with them, this time live on air, took place on Saturday, 21 December. Th format now was a panel discussion shared with a lady Member of the Ukrainian Rada, or parliament, who is a bold supporter of the Zelensky regime. I was given the microphone first and set out my view of how the Russians are pulverizing the Ukrainian forces on the field of battle in Donbas and why the war will end on Russia’s terms.  Then the microphone was turned over to the pro-Zelensky panelist, who was sputtering from fury over my words, and responded in the manner with which Team Zelensky is most comfortable: pure venom. She denounced me as an agent of Putin who must be paid handsomely to say on air what the Kremlin wants. That went on for a bit before the anchor turned the microphone back to me for the last word. I remarked that for lack of proper counter-arguments my opponent had resorted to ad hominem argumentation and vicious slander, and that I stood by my words.

After the show, the NewsX producer informed me on WhatsApp that the Ukrainian MP was ‘pissed off’.  Perhaps to avoid further complications with this representative of the Ukrainian government, NewsX did not post our show on the internet following its live broadcast and later told me they could not send a link ‘for technical reasons.’ 

But I have to acknowledge that the production folks at NewsX do not give up easily.  I was invited back today for a return match with Team Zelensky, this time represented by British Army Lt. Colonel (retired) Glen Grant, who has been a consultant to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and seems to be providing further services there since he most recently was down in Kiev a week or so ago, and no one goes there for tourism.

See https://youtu.be/r-z9sZgTb2o

The sequence on Ukraine is introduced at minute 3.00.  Grant comes on at minute 4.30. I appear from minute 6.40 to 7.30

Apparently, Grant also complained to the producers after the show about what I was saying on air. They told me that he too ‘was pissed off.’  

Well, friends, you can’t please everyone.

I close this essay with a general observation on life in the public arena: be ready for vitriol.  A couple of weeks ago, I was denounced by John Helmer of Dancing with Bears fame. He insinuated that I am a CIA asset.  Now Team Zelensky denounces me as a Putin asset. Clearly the commonality is the inability of these folks to engage in fact-based discussion.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

„World Report“ von ITV (Indien) NewsX: eine „Debatte“ heute mit Team Zelensky

Heute war mein dritter Fernsehauftritt bei einem mir neuen indischen Sender in englischer Sprache, NewsX, der zur ITV-Mediengruppe gehört. ITV in Indien ist unabhängig von einer gleichnamigen Sendergruppe im Vereinigten Königreich.

Ich habe hier den Link zu meinem ersten Auftritt bei NewsX am 17. Dezember gepostet. Das war ein sehr gut geschnittenes und ausgefeiltes 12-minütiges Interview, das sich hauptsächlich mit dem Russland-Ukraine-Krieg befasste und eine Woche zuvor aufgezeichnet wurde.

Meine zweite Begegnung mit ihnen, diesmal live auf Sendung, fand am Samstag, dem 21. Dezember, statt. Das Format war nun eine Podiumsdiskussion, an der auch eine Abgeordnete der ukrainischen Rada, des Parlaments, teilnahm, die eine mutige Unterstützerin des Zelensky-Regimes ist. Ich erhielt als Erster das Mikrofon und legte meine Sichtweise dar, wie die Russen die ukrainischen Streitkräfte auf dem Schlachtfeld in Donbas vernichten und warum der Krieg zu Russlands Bedingungen enden wird. Dann wurde das Mikrofon an die Pro-Selensky-Panelistin übergeben, die vor Wut über meine Worte nur so sprudelte und in der Art und Weise antwortete, in der sich das Team Selensky am wohlsten fühlt: mit purem Gift. Sie denunzierte mich als eine Agentin Putins, die gut dafür bezahlt werden müsse, um in der Sendung zu sagen, was der Kreml wolle. Das ging eine Weile so weiter, bevor der Moderator mir das Mikrofon für das letzte Wort zurückgab. Ich bemerkte, dass meine Gegnerin mangels stichhaltiger Gegenargumente auf eine persönliche Herabwürdigung und bösartige Verleumdung zurückgegriffen habe und dass ich zu meinen Worten stehe.

Nach der Sendung informierte mich der NewsX-Produzent über WhatsApp, dass die ukrainische Abgeordnete „stinksauer“ sei. Um weitere Komplikationen mit dieser Vertreterin der ukrainischen Regierung zu vermeiden, hat NewsX unsere Sendung nach der Live-Übertragung nicht im Internet veröffentlicht und mir später mitgeteilt, dass sie aus „technischen Gründen“ keinen Link senden könnten.

Aber ich muss zugeben, dass die Produktionsleute von NewsX nicht so leicht aufgeben. Ich wurde heute zu einem Rückspiel mit Team Zelensky eingeladen, diesmal vertreten durch Oberstleutnant der britischen Armee (a.D.) Glen Grant, der als Berater für das ukrainische Verteidigungsministerium tätig war und dort offenbar weiterhin Dienste leistet, da er vor etwa einer Woche in Kiew war, und niemand reist dorthin, um Urlaub zu machen.

Siehe https://youtu.be/r-z9sZgTb2o

Die Sequenz über die Ukraine wird in Minute 3:00 eingeführt. Grant kommt in Minute 4:30 dazu. Ich bin von Minute 6:40 bis 7:30 zu sehen.

Anscheinend hat sich Grant nach der Sendung auch bei den Produzenten über das beschwert, was ich auf Sendung gesagt habe. Sie sagten mir, dass auch er „stinksauer“ war.

Nun, Freunde, man kann es nicht jedem recht machen.

Ich schließe diesen Aufsatz mit einer allgemeinen Beobachtung über das Leben in der Öffentlichkeit: Man muss auf jede Menge Gift und Galle gefasst sein. Vor ein paar Wochen wurde ich von John Helmer, der durch Dancing with Bears bekannt wurde, denunziert. Er unterstellte mir, ein CIA-Agent zu sein. Jetzt denunziert mich Team Zelensky als Putin-Agent. Die Gemeinsamkeit besteht eindeutig darin, dass diese Leute nicht in der Lage sind, eine faktenbasierte Diskussion zu führen.

Transcript submitted by a reader

PressTV: 0:21
Hello and welcome to Spotlight. The Israeli regime continues to carry out attacks on different parts of Syria after Israelis seized and occupied even more land in the Arab country. On Friday protests against Israel’s occupation in Daraa turned violent after the regime’s troops opened fire on Syrian demonstrators. Meanwhile the US has confirmed that it has doubled the number of its troops in Syria in recent weeks. The move raises questions about the US’s illegal oil extraction practices and the true motives behind America’s sustained military engagement in Syria.

PressTV (Ebrahimi, Hamidi): 0:56
The United States has confirmed that it has doubled its military forces in Syria. A Pentagon spokesperson announced the news, saying the additional US forces have been in Syria since before the fall of former President Bashar Assad.

Pentagon (Ryder):
I learned today that in fact there are approximately 2,000 US troops in Syria. As I understand it, and as it was explained to me, these additional forces are considered temporary rotational forces that deploy to meet shifting mission requirements, whereas the core 900 deployers [sic] are on longer-term deployments.

Hamidi: 1:34
This significant increase comes as tensions in the Arab country continue to rise with the occupation of more of Syrian lands by the Israeli regime and the renewed fighting between militants and Kurdish forces in the country’s northeast. But why are the US forces present in Syria at all? The US began sending troops to Syria in 2015, with the excuse of combating terrorism and Daesh. However, Washington has mainly deployed these forces in the oil fields in the Arab country. The stated excuse is to protect these resources from falling into the hands of terrorists. Despite the territorial defeat of Daesh in 2017, American forces have remained in Syria. According to a report by The Cradle, Washington is stealing over 80 percent of Syria’s oil output each day.

2:25
The Syrian oil ministry released a statement back in 2022 accusing US forces occupying Syria of being responsible for the theft of most of the country’s oil. US President Donald Trump has even confessed that Washington is stealing Syria’s oil.

Trump: 2:42
And then they say, “He left troops in Syria.” You know what I did? I left troops to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have are taking the oil. They’re protecting the oil.

Hamidi:
With the recent doubling of American troops in Syria, a pressing question now lingers. Is Washington planning to hold onto Syria’s oil and continue its extraction?

There’s also the matter of anti-US sentiment in Syria, which has been on the rise due to the prolonged military presence of American troops in the country. Many Syrians believe that the US’s continued involvement may worsen the already complicated situation in the Arab country, as it was the case in 2014 when the US first began attacking Syria amid opposition from the government in Damascus.

PressTV: 3:29
Joining us on tonight’s “Spotlight”, we have independent international affairs analyst Gilbert Doctorow, joining us from Brussels. And we also have journalist, activist and political analyst, John Bosnitch, joining us from Fredericton, Canada.

Well gentlemen, welcome to the program. Let’s start off with Mr. Doctorow in Brussels. Israel is expanding its occupation in Syria, obviously seizing more strategic areas. The regime is also continuing with its massive air strikes all over Syria. According to various accounts, there have been around 800 attacks so far. We also know that the Israeli forces are set for a long presence in Syria. These are very alarming developments, because we know Israel is not in the habit of giving back land that it illegally seizes.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 4:28
Yes, of course this is very troubling. And it’s a continuation of the wars of aggression and the genocide Israel has practiced in Gaza, that it expanded into Lebanon, and now it is moving into Syria. I noted that you have carried in your news during the day, reports of demonstrations against the Israeli presence, against the occupiers in the Daraa province in the south of Syria. That’s very interesting for me because I understand Daraa has a long history of political activism and was one of the cradles of the opposition to the regime in Damascus, to the Assad regime in 2011, touching off the civil war that lasted until 2017.

5:24
Daraa is not mentioned anywhere in Western media, neither in the print or the electronic media. And so you’re doing a very valuable service, Press TV, in bringing this to world attention. I have to say, overall, the events like what we’re seeing presently in Israeli aggression, have compelled me to change my thinking about collective responsibility. As a young man, I found this notion repugnant. It has come up again in American political life in “woke”, where people today are being held responsible for the sins of the grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

6:07
That type of collective responsibility I reject to this day. However, the responsibility of the broad nation in the United States for all of the atrocities that Israel is committing in its region, and now as you are explaining, in Syria, are all enabled by American military supplies. If you take out the American factor in the equation, Israel could never do what it’s doing today.

PressTV:
Absolutely.

Doctorow: 6:38
It could never defy international law and the morality that one expects in a community of nations. So sadly, the majority of Americans who are acquiescent in, who are silent about what their government is doing in supplying Israel the means to carry out these horrible deeds, that responsibility cannot be put aside. It belongs to the American nation today.

PressTV:
OK.

Doctorow:
And that is a very sad fact.

PressTV: 7:14
John Bosnich, dozens of countries and a number of UN experts have said the strikes on Syria following the ouster of the country’s government in the Arab country is a violation of international law and a violation of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, let alone the 1974 agreement on disengagement. But we know international institutions like the UN, they weren’t able to stop the Israelis from murdering women and children for over a year in Gaza. And they most likely won’t and can’t do anything as the regime exploits Syria and runs wild there.

John Bosnitch: 7:50
Well, I think that’s because those institutions have been kidnapped. Effectively, the so-called world institutions, international institutions, have been taken over by the Anglo-American Zionist war empire. And it’s very difficult to spot the head, which is active on this three-headed hydra at the moment of an offense. Is it the US government? Is it their English trainers and English advisors? Or is it the Zionist war machine that’s on the ground?

And so they continuously move the pea under the cup and say, “It’s not me, it’s them.” And at the same time each of the cups is operated by the same hand, the shyster who is ripping off the public, who is watching and trying to guess where the pea is. The Israel lobby pulls the strings on the US government. The US government follows their indoctrination by their English-schooling chums, from their Rhodes scholarships who taught them how to run the empire.

The empire runs on donations and support from the Israeli lobby, which works with the banksters. It is a net sum-zero opportunity for the rest of the world, and it’s a 100 percent stealing and theft organization. When Trump says– and I personally am a supporter of Trump– but when Trump says that he is protecting the oil of Syria, that’s like a bank robber telling the bank manager, “We’re going to protect the money in the safe. Just give it to us. We’ll protect it.”

PressTV: 9:30
Right. And Mr. Doctorow, you mentioned the United States just a moment ago. The US has announced a significant increase in its military presence in Syria, doubling the number of troops deployed there. Why are US forces present in Syria at all?

Doctorow:
Well, as you have already pointed out, and as you’ve quoted Mr. Trump, of course they are supervising the theft of Syrian oil, hydrocarbons. This has, to my knowledge, for some time this was being fed into Turkey, and from Turkey, obviously, it was being resold to Israel. So it comes full circle. It is, again, another manifestation of the American government enabling Israel to commit atrocities, including theft of the resources of its neighbor. The move of Israel to take over the buffer zone and to extend its control over Golan Heights up to Mount Hermon also is anticipation of theft of water resources and deprivation of essential supplies to the Syrian population.

10:38
This is all unconscionable. And as I say, it is time for Americans to express their indignation if they have any conscience, and I think they do, and say that this is unacceptable behavior of their government.

PressTV: 10:54
Right. And Mr. Bosnitch, you were just talking about Donald Trump. He did confess that Washington in a slip was quote-unquote taking Syria’s oil. With the doubling of American troops in Syria, is Washington, just planning to hold on to that oil and continue with its extraction? I think “extraction” would not be the correct word; it’s exploitation.

Bosnitch: 11:21
Well, it’s worse than that. It’s expropriation, illegal expropriation of the national assets of the Syrian people in violation of international law, in violation of Syrian law, and in violation of international law on the state-to-state level. So everything is being violated here, and very few people are speaking out about it in America, because the lying mainstream media of America is owned by the military-industrial complex, which works for the Israel lobby.

So what you’ve got is the lying mainstream media is not there to only propagate a pro-war, pro-empire message. It is also there to operate as a prophylactic stopping the American people from having contact with fair and truthful information. The American people are not listening to PressTV. They are listening to lying CNN. They are listening to lying MSNBC and lying ABC [who] tell them lies that keep them from becoming active and fighting what’s going on. That’s how the system works.

PressTV: 12:32
Right. And Mr. Doctorow, there’s clear hypocrisy and double standard regarding the term “terrorist”, specifically from the US and some of its key Western allies as to who is categorized as a terrorist and how they should be dealt with. If you can unpack that for us please, in the context of Syria, because we know that the Israeli regime, they supported militant groups, terrorist groups for years in Syria working behind the scenes to destabilize Bashar Assad’s government in Damascus. And let’s not forget Operation Timber Sycamore, which was planned and funded by the Obama administration, devised for the overthrow of the Assad government.

Doctorow: 13:17
Terms like “terrorist”, terms like “authoritarian”, “dictatorial”, “autocratic”, all of these terms are in the vocabulary of American public policy, foreign policy, And they serve only as justification to those who are lazy, who don’t want to understand the news, and who want to accept the good faith of their government when it is lying, cheating, and stealing all the time.

And so I don’t take with particular concern the application by the United States government of “terrorist” to one or another organization. That is variable to the moments when a given state, the given organization does or does not kneel before the United States and accept the dictate of Washington to do its bidding.

14:06
Whoever they are, if they are perceived to be doing Washington’s bidding, they are clean as the driven snow. If they refuse to do so, then they become terrorists or they are autocrats or whatever else you want to use at the moment to denigrate them and to drive them from civilized society. The problem is that Washington uses these terms to justify its policy of exclusion, its policy of sanctions, its policy of driving countries into such isolation that they can be called pariahs.

14:41
That, unfortunately, is the basic motif of American foreign policy for more than a decade. And I contrast that with what Russia is doing, for example, in Afghanistan or other states which the United States has designated as pariahs and [has] excluded from civilized society, all to the detriment of the peoples in those countries and to peace in the region.

An extension of a hand of cooperation is the best possible way of moderating countries and making them constructive members of the world community. Unfortunately, that vision is outside the understanding of America’s foreign policy makers.

PressTV: 15:24
John Bosnitch, how come the current militant commanders in Syria, who claim they want to rebuild the country, aren’t opposing the destruction and occupation of Syria by the Israelis? Should they be primarily concerned with preserving their country’s borders?

Bosnitch: 15:41
Well, I’m not going to try and set moral and political or geopolitical objectives for these groups, because we know that these groups have been financed via Israel, armed via Israel and we have this same… actually, it looks like an insane scenario in which designated US terrorist organizations, in other words the United States government the State Department of the United States, has designated the organizations that have taken power in Syria as terrorist organizations because they previously engaged in terrorist attacks on the United States.

16:20
They have not yet recategorized them as allies, now that they are prepared to directly exercise state power in Syria. So there’s going to be a transitional phase when everybody’s supposed to put their hands over their eyes and pretend they see nothing, know nothing, and remember nothing. And that’s what America is counting on.

And that’s why it’s so important for people who know what’s going on to say, these are the people who are accused in the United States of being the terrorists who attacked the Twin Towers. These are the actual descendants of al-Qaeda, of ISIS, and of Daesh, the organization set up by Israel and the United States via the CIA to take this region into war, to depose governments all around Israel, and effectively create a new state which would be best known as Greater Israel.

PressTV: 17:17
Gilbert Doctorow, speaking about developments in Syria a few days ago, the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei [english.khamenei.ir], said that the US Senate’s allies are quote-unquote completely wrong to presume that the resistance has ended. Do you see it in that light as well?

Doctorow:
Well, it is much too early to draw conclusions about where Syria is going. As I have been saying, he laughs best who laughs last. And there was a lot of laughter in London, in Washington, in Brussels over the overthrow of al-Assad. Very premature. As regards the organization presently controlling Damascus, it is unclear whether its leader who has spoken out– in interviews on the BBC this morning which show him to be a very civilized and sophisticated man– it’s unclear whether he can maintain the moderate policies that he is telling before the microphones of Western reporters, upon his followers. That is not clear.

18:30
And again, the very big ethnic and religious divides in Syria make it impossible to forecast what will happen next. Will they find some reconciliation? Will they find some path to a new constitution, which has been set as a task for the next several months? Or will they collapse into a new civil war and new fighting as has happened in Libya? So I agree with the notion that Syria has potential, but the present is no indication of the near future.

PressTV: 19:13
Mr. Bosnitch, on that note, many Syrians believe that the US’s continued presence may worsen the already complicated situation there. Are Syrians right to be concerned about that? Because that was the case when we look back in 2014 when the US increased its involvement and also began attacking Syria.

Bosnitch:
Well, now what we’re doing here is Iraq War III, effectively. The United States has through its puppet organizations and terror organizations, I call them terror agents. They’re not terrorists. They are terror agents paid and armed by the United States and its allies, England and Israel to create a terror situation, which they then themselves offer a solution to. So they create the crisis, they manage the crisis, they use it to remove a government that they disapprove of, and then they solve the crisis. It is in effect a tempest created in Washington and in Tel Aviv to create war for profit. And the blood with which this bill is being paid is so far Syrian blood.

20:29
But if the American forces stay there, it will soon once again be American blood being shed as it was in Iraq and as it was in Afghanistan, because the people will not accept colonization by enemy states through a veneer of fake organizations.

PressTV:
Gilbert Doctorow, John Bosnitch called it Iraq War III. I would even call it Iraq War 4.0. What kind of repercussions do you think could there be for stability in the broader West Asia region? How will this impact other surrounding countries if the crisis in Syria does actually take a turn for the worse?

Doctorow: 21:12
Again, these are imponderables. The lack of stability in Syria has been promoted for more than 20 years by Israel. The principle of provoking chaos has been a guiding principle of American policy for more than 20 years. The fishing in muddy waters is a basic mechanism of American foreign policy in the region. So if Syria moves from stability to total chaos, it would suit very well Israel and Israel’s backers in the United States.

21:59
The situation in Libya, unfortunately, is a scenario that is recent, that is relevant to the situation in Syria. And we have to consider that as a worst-case scenario. But there always are ways out. There always are forces that are constructive that come in at an opportune moment to save the situation. Right now, the situation in Libya may well become more governable if, as would seem to be the case by early straws in the wind, Russia takes a greater presence in Libya.

22:40
As I said, there are so many things in action across the region that it’s rather difficult to speak with any confidence about outcomes. We can speak about influences, we can speak about the American and Israeli interest in chaos for their own purposes. But whether they will succeed or whether forces that are national, unifying, will prevail, too early to say.

PressTV: 23:12
John Bosnitch, one last question before we wrap up the show. How has the silence of some Islamic nations and some Arab regimes emboldened Israel to press ahead with its illegal activities that we’re seeing right now in Syria?

Bosnitch: 23:29
Well, I’d like to say that very, very few of these events that are taking place are not predictable. Israel made sure, and America made sure in advance, that there would be silence from other Arab countries. They are trying to isolate Iran from other Muslim countries in the region, and they are trying to basically neuter and turn all Arab countries in the region into eunuchs: that they do what they’re told, take their share of the money (and it’ll be a smaller and smaller share as Israel’s share increases), and stay out of the way.

I don’t think that the people of Syria can stay out of the way of their own lives. I don’t think Iran can stay out of the way of Israel’s growing military power. And I don’t think that the rest of the world can stay out of the way of what could be a growing conflict.

PressTV: 24:22
All right, thanks a lot gentlemen. Independent international affairs analyst Gilbert Doctorow, joining us from Brussels; and thanks to Journalist, activist and political analyst John Bosnitch, joining us from Fredericton, Canada. And a special thanks to you, our viewers, for staying with us on tonight’s edition of Spotlight.

24:39
It’s good night for now, and see you next time.

I hope that readers of these pages will find yesterday evening’s ‘Spotlight’ discussion program of Press TV to be as thought provoking as I did in my capacity as participant.  My debating partner, journalist John Bosnitch in Canada, was well prepared with an analysis of current developments in Syria under stage management from the United States and Israel.  I used the occasion to set out my epiphany moment as regards collective responsibility of peoples, in this case, the American people, for the obscene support of their government to Israel in its genocidal and colonial expansionist policies that are wrecking the West Asian region. All of this leaves us with the unposed, unanswered question always on the mind of Russia specialists:  What is to be done?

See  http://www.urmedium.net/c/presstv/132041

Transcript submitted by a reader

Napolitano: 0:33
Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for “Judging Freedom”. Today is Thursday, December 19th, 2024. Our dear friend Professor Gilbert Doctorow joins us now. Professor Doctorow, a pleasure. Thank you very much for your time and your thoughts to come. Was President Assad’s departure from Syria a strategic defeat for Russia?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Not if you listen to President Putin in his question and answer session today in Moscow, in which he addressed that very issue, what happened in Syria, and what Russia tried to achieve back in 2015, which has been widely distorted by all of our recent news in Western media. What he tried to achieve is precisely what I was saying he tried to achieve when I wrote about this a couple of days ago. It was to ensure that the Islamic State would not establish a durable enclave in Syria.

1:35
And he did that, because if you look at the map, you understand that the Middle East is rather close to the southern fringes of Russia, to the Caucasus, where it would be like an incendiary if there were these radicals based in Syria and within reach of Russia’s southern borders. So they achieved that. He said that “we did it without having boots on the ground”. The only troops that Russia had in Syria during this period, from 2015 and later, were those who were guarding its naval base and its air base on the Syrian coast, where these bases are today. That all the fighting was done by Arab units. He meant precisely– he didn’t say this precisely, but he meant– the proxy forces of Iran and the then Syrian army.

2:32
The Russians had nothing to do with the fighting. They achieved what they wanted [by their aerial bombing]. Now, in the recent months, they understood that the recent events that brought about the collapse and departure of Assad’s regime, they understood that his troops melted away. And whatever support there should have been from friendly Arab units also melted away. And so the situation was untenable.

3:03
As regards the present, Putin said that “we have contacts with everyone inside and outside Syria” and that “most everyone is asking us to keep our bases in Syria, Khmeimim for the the air base and Tartus for the naval base, and we are considering that. But all these things will depend on what arrangements we agree or don’t agree with the government in Damascus.”

Napolitano: 3:31
The government in Damascus is a successor to ISIS, which is a terrorist organization, according to the British and the Americans, which collectively have put a bounty of 10 million dollars on the head of Al-Jassani, who now appears in a Western business suit and claims he’s changed. Is it realistic for the Russians to claim that the danger of Islamic fanatics on their border has dissipated, whereas some would say it has been exacerbated?

4:06
Why shouldn’t that be the case? The Russians are virtually the only ones, well, together with the Chinese, who have established working relations with Afghanistan, a country which has had more than its share of Islamic extremism. Yes, I also watched the BBC interview in this morning’s news wrap-up, and he was very impressive. Very impressive. Quite, quite unimaginable that it’s not just putting on a business suit, it’s what’s inside his mind and what he was saying. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. The question is, does this one man have real sway, not only over his own followers, but over the others–

Napolitano:
Right, right. His followers are as maniacal as he used to be. How are Russian commentators, “The Great Game” and those other programs with which you’re so familiar, explaining the sudden summary collapse of Assad?

Doctorow:
Well, these experts, and I’m speaking now of the Orientalists, who are the most serious voices on these programs, not general political commentators, but those who are professionals, academics, and long experience in the Middle East, not as outside observers, but actually as having been there on the ground. They are saying very much the same thing that you see in the most authoritative analyses in the West on programs like yours. That this was untenable, that the Syrian state was starved for funds, and therefore, they were unable to pay salaries or living wage to their army, which made it very likely that under pressure and under fear of an attack, they would disappear. They would melt away. There’s no real difference in the understanding of how impossible it was to save Assad on the Russian observer side as what you have around you.

Napolitano: 6:19
Does the– Is the report in The Guardian of London that Russia is moving its air defense missiles from Syria to Libya, is that report credible?

Doctorow:
I’m not aware of this.

Napolitano:
Are you aware of any reports that Russia is making this move? Because that would undermine any desire to stay in Syria. They can’t stay there without air defenses.

Doctorow: 6:45
Yes. The Russians– the only news that I’ve seen in Russian media pertains to the evacuation of equipment, unnamed equipment, without any specification where it was being evacuated to. So I don’t have an answer using open sources. But I’d like to make just a little explanation here, because this comes into play. Exactly what is the value of the news, either the official news wrap-ups or of these talk shows?

This is the same value as the paper press always was for studies that we call now Kremlinology. This was using open sources. Open sources always in studying the then Soviet Union were the dominant factor in understanding what was going on. And they are, they play the same role today. Now there are many other sources, of course. And I don’t claim to have them all in my hands or to be trying to chase them all, but I am giving you on these programs what is known from open sources inside Russia.

Napolitano: 7:58
Got it. Got it. Got it. How close do you think the Kremlin believes the Ukrainian military is to collapse?

Doctorow:
They think it’s quite close to it. I can’t give you a number of days or weeks. They’re very cautious about this. But from the behavior, from the demeanor of the war correspondents in the field, of the soldiers they interview, they’re very satisfied that they are moving quickly. And now they show maps every day on the Russian news, which you don’t need a microscope to see where they’ve moved to or from.

8:39
You see genuine pincer movements. You see genuine besieging of cities like Pokrovsk. You see their readiness to change the name to its original Krasnoarmeisk, which is what it was known as before the Kiev regime put new names on places. So they are expecting a quick victory.

Napolitano: 9:05
Who killed General Kirillov?

Doctorow:
This is a very interesting question. We know precisely who, I don’t think he’s been named, but it’s a 29-year-old Uzbek citizen who has been a resident in Russia for some years. He was– the Russian television showed the restaurant, the Uzbek restaurant where he was working. He is what, you can understand that he’s what they would call a sleeper. He was recruited by Ukrainian intelligence. He said that himself when he was interviewed. I wouldn’t say interrogated, because it was really just a very open question and answer that he was not under any obvious duress.

9:52
In fact, he didn’t have a scratch on him, which is a marked distinction from what happened to the Crocus gang, the terrorists who ran amok in the Crocus entertainment center some months ago, who were missing a part of an ear and looked like they’d been pretty well worked over. He was not in that case. He was very forthcoming with why he was recruited.

10:18
But the Russians made it clear almost immediately after they were satisfied that they had nailed the man who did the job. They made it clear in the briefing that Maria Zakharova gave yesterday that that is not where the trail ends. And she said publicly that the Russians believe that the masterminds of this were the Anglo-Saxons and the chief beneficiary of this were the Anglo-Saxons.

Napolitano;
An interesting phrase, Anglo-Saxons. I mean, it could refer to anybody in the West, but probably means Great Britain.

Doctorow: 10:57
Exactly. In the State Department, they got very excited. They thought that she was pointing an accusatory finger at the US. No, no. As it was clear from her following remarks, Great Britain was the country in the West that had placed sanctions on the head of General Kirillov. Great Britain perhaps had its nose out of joint because of the very effective work he did in knocking out the false-flag operations of MI6 and of the White Helmets in Syria for the staged and photographed and filmed chemical attacks that were laid at the door of Al-Assad; and behind the Syrians, laid at the door of the Russians, which were completely phony. He was the one who debunked the whole British story of the killing of the Skripals, the poisoning of the Skripals with Novichok, he was the one who publicized exactly why this could not have been. So the Brits really were quite annoyed with the general for having exposed their deceit, their terrorist activities and the like.

12:23
But in the talk show, we’ve got a more direct nailing of the Brits. This was the day before yesterday on the evening show of Solovyov, he and his panelists were aligned in the notion that the killing of Kirillov had all the marks of an MI6 operation. And yesterday’s edition of “The Great Game”, was more specific, that the British were the only ones among Western journalists, Western press, who didn’t just ignore, failed to make a statement of regret that this tragedy had happened, but went out to celebrate it.

13:14
The passage from the editorial, the lead story, as they call it in Britain, of the “Times” of London, said specifically that the murder of the General Kirillov was justified as an act of war by the Ukrainians in their desperate situation. So that from the standpoint of the Russian elites, this was a statement linked to the knowledge that their own intelligence operatives were behind it.

Napolitano: 13:49
Great Britain is not at war with Russia, even though Storm Shadow missiles supplied by Britain, used and aimed by British technicians, have landed in Russia. And now Britain is almost celebrating the assassination of a senior Russian general who also happens to have been a scientist, a very valuable scientist to the Kremlin. What is the Kremlin likely to do? This strikes me as an insane move by Prime Minister Starmer’s government.

Doctorow:
Well, one would expect, and if you look at the kind of headlines that appear in various YouTube entries from the “Times of India” or a few other world broadcasters, you would expect the Russians would do something really drastic. And of course, Washington must be hoping for that. This is exactly the kind of provocation that Biden and company have been trying to bring about. so that they could make it impossible for Trump to proceed with peace plans.

15:02
But I don’t see anything of that sort happening. The Russians’ attention is elsewhere, and with good reason. It is not to carry out vengeance, although they certainly would like to. They enjoy saying on television how exactly one Sarmat rocket could raze the entire United Kingdom to the ground. So they enjoy that among themselves. But when you look at the action side, what they’re about to do, they have greater concerns.

What happened to the General could happen to almost any of the leading military and industrial figures in Russia. By industrial I mean military industrial, not private industrial. Private industrial, of course, these fellows look after themselves very nicely, thank you, for security. But the Russian generals, like the general Kirillov, who was killed, they live modestly. He had no security detachment.

15:54
He just had an aide, who was killed with him. The apartment house, which they showed, it’s a modest, ordinary, middle-class apartment house. It’s not something extravagant. There’s no concierge. There’s no security there. And that is a situation for many of their officers, which is puzzling, frankly. And I think there are a lot of people scratching their heads now in Moscow, what to do about this.

Napolitano: 16:20
I watched a little bit, I suspect you watched more than I did, of President Putin’s now eagerly anticipated year-end, two-, three-, sometimes four-hour press conference. I saw a clip from an NBC reporter with a British accent. I don’t know his name, but they show him a lot, and Putin always lets him ask whatever he wants, who basically put a question to President Putin. [It] was, and I’ll paraphrase it, “You just lost Syria, you haven’t yet succeeded in your Special Military Operation, and one of your chief generals was just assassinated. When you meet with President Trump, aren’t you the weaker of the two?

17:12
He responded by quoting Mark Twain, saying, “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” He also of course went on to argue, and I’ll ask you about this Professor, that Russia is actually stronger economically, culturally, socially, politically and militarily today than it was three years ago when the Special Military Operation began and provoked the sanctions from the US. But I’m sure you watched more of this than the one short clip I did. Take it from there.

Doctorow: 17:43
Well, your short clip was a very good one. It comes– I watched this for two hours, which was about as long as I could take, and I felt quite satisfied that I left at the right time, because the Russians prepared this particular edition of his annual presser and direct-line conversation with the whole of Russia who sent in their questions to him.

This was prepared in a way that was much more effective and interesting for an international audience than any of the preceding events of this variety, combined press conference and public letters and emails to him. That was combined four years ago before COVID and stays that way. And they put it together in a very, very impressive manner. The most important thing I want to say is that all the trivial questions, which took a lot of the time in the past, were now taken aside and sent to the governors of the areas where the questioner lives to be solved locally without taking the time of the whole nation to hear Mr. Putin step in like the good Tsar and save somebody from the mean local officials.

19:06
So that already took away a lot of the fluffy questions. As for the serious questions, yes, Mr. Putin made the point of giving the microphone to this Kier Brennan, he has a hyphenated last name, leave it at that, Kier Brennan from NBC. Yes, he obviously is British. And his questions were already what you said complex, but that was only [the first] question that he was allowed to deliver.

But as regards Putin’s answer, it was very solid. It was very self-confident. And it was comprehensive, I’d say. Russia is doing better, and not just Russia is doing better, and that Russia is producing, this military industrial complex has ramped up and is producing more material relevant to the war of attrition that’s going on now than all of NATO and the US combined can do. But in fact, Russia is doing it effectively, efficiently, and watching its costs.

20:15
Whereas NATO, as he said, in the two years since the start of the war, the cost of each 155-millimeter artillery shell has quadrupled. As he said, the net result of the soaring costs of military production in the West is that the NATO countries would now have to put up three percent of their GDP just to stand in place, to cover their contributions to NATO’s overall expenses.

Napollitano:
They’ll never be able to afford that. That’s an extraordinary number.

Professor Doctorow, I must run. Thank you for your time. Thank you for all you did for us in 2024. Merry Christmas and happy New Year to you and your family. I hope and trust you’ll be back with us in the new year just two weeks from now.

Doctorow:
Okay, I look forward to it as well. And a Merry Christmas to you and viewers of the show and a good 2025.

Napolitano:
Thank you, my dear friend. All the best to you. Coming up later today: at one o’clock this afternoon, the former British diplomat who has a lot to say about what Professor Doctorow was just discussing, Ian Proud. At two o’clock, Colonel Larry Wilkerson. At three o’clock, Professor John Mearsheimer.

21:34
Judge Napolitano for “Judging Freedom”.