In the past week, the visit to Moscow of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his first trip abroad since winning reelection and his first trip to Russia in five years, aroused the close interest and then the consternation of official Washington.

Modi’s presence in Moscow, his warm embrace with President Vladimir Putin, which was captured on video by major international broadcasters and disseminated globally, were a defiant response to American efforts at isolating Russia diplomatically as well as economically since the onset of the Ukraine war. Moreover, the agreements reached during the talks between the leaders on Russia’s participation in the Indian program to build further nuclear power generating stations ensure close economic ties between the countries for decades to come in a new vector.

My ten-minute interview with India’s premier English language global television company WION can be seen here:

Transcription below by a reader, followed by full translation into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 0:07
If so, we are just moments away from World War III. And they’re delusional. The diplomacy is of very poor professional quality, and the understanding of history is nil.

Shivan Chanana, WION:
Has US failed to break India-Russia’s friendship?

Doctorow:
And India at that time very, very capably pursued a policy between the two.

WION:
How helpless do you feel U.S. would be, seeing that hug between Mr. Putin and Mr. Modi?

Doctorow:
It is not going to change the way the war is conducted. India is not presenting itself as a point of leverage for the United States against Russia. On the contrary, it has already turned into a Russia-NATO war.
Putting lipstick on a pig.

WION: 0:52
Indian Prime Minister Modi visited Russia recently and visuals of Putin and Modi sharing a warm hug were seen across the world, especially in the US. The US immediately raised concerns with India over its Russia ties, but India-Russia ties go back several decades. And they actually started at a time when the US refused to even interact with India. Russia was always [there still]. Both nations have faced mounting pressure from the US. Russia faced sanctions, while India received repeated warnings against buying Russian oil. Have Russia-India ties broken American hegemony? I’m Shivan Chanana. Welcome to this special episode of “Game Plan”, as I’ll be discussing this with Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, an international affairs analyst, author and historian joining us from Brussels. Dr. Doctorow, thank you so much for joining in, right here on “Game Plan”.

Doctorow:
A pleasure.

WION: 1:42
Has US failed to break India-Russia’s friendship? And has Washington been attempting this all this while? Do you feel so?

Doctorow:
I think that the Washington policy towards Mr. Modi and towards this visit to Moscow is illustrative of a much broader issue in Washington. And that is the bubble in which the policymakers live, their immunity to the real world outside, and their delusional understanding of what can be done on the world stage. The diplomacy is of very poor professional quality, and the understanding of history is nil. You’ve said that Russian-Indian ties go back several decades. Well, if we take it to Soviet-Indian relations, it goes back– with respect to what is going on now, there’s a perfect continuity from the 1950s up to present, considering that Mr. Nehru and his followers were the leaders, along with Yugoslavia, in what was called the non-aligned bloc. And India at that time very capably pursued a policy between the two military and political blocs of East and West, of the Soviet Union and of the Washington-led West.

3:15
That remains the case. The Indians always tread a very delicate line to avoid antagonizing either of the parties. And they were always, going back to this period in the 1950s, looking to the Soviet Union and then later to Russia for military supplies and other critical supplies for their economy, while at the same time trying to maintain good relations with the United States. This takes a very fine sense of diplomacy and walking a narrow line.

WION:
Dr. Doctoorow, in his first visit overseas after coming to power again, Prime Minister Modi chose to visit Russia. Now initially US raised concerns with India over this. But soon after, I think within a day, the White House press secretary clarified that India is a strategic partner “with whom we engage in full and frank dialogue”, quote-unquote.

Press secretary:
With whom we engage in full and frank dialogue, including their relationship with Russia. And we’ve talked about this before.

WION: 4:13
How helpless do you feel U.S. would be, seeing that hug between Mr. Putin and Mr. Modi?

Doctorow:
…insane voices in Washington. I didn’t mean to leave the impression that the whole of Washington is living in a bubble. There are some people who understand what can be done and to try to keep American policy within the feasible. And, as you just mentioned, the day-after change of tack by the State Department is demonstrating that there are people in Washington to understand that they cannot separate Russia and India, that this goes back a long way and is a deliberate policy of India that is unchangeable.

Now, so they decided to put a pretty face on this fact and to try to extract some kind of advantage for the United States by saying that, “Ah, yes, we can– since India has such privileged relations with Russia, we can use India as an influence on Russia to stop the war.” Well, that is, as I said, putting lipstick on a pig. It is not going to change the way the war is conducted. India is not presenting itself as a point of leverage for the United States against Russia. On the contrary, I think it was outstanding that during the visit, early in the visit, Mr. Modi was taken to the exhibition grounds, the Veydenkha, in downtown Moscow and visited the pavilion on atomic power and atomic energy and said– when he heard the history of how the United States in the 1990s tried to reduce Russia’s nuclear programs to nil and how that has been reversed and how Russia is now the leading supplier of enriched uranium to power stations across the world, including the United States– Mr. Modi said very clearly, and this was shown on Russian television, “We support you.”

6:15
That is the present state of relations. India is deeply understanding the travails that Russia is experiencing as it is sanctioned by the United States. And Mr. Modi personally has an experience of this. Before he came to power, he was sanctioned by the United States, who denounced various policies and preferences of Mr. Modi. So this is not an abstract consideration for India’s leadership. They know very well what the back of the hand dealt by the United States can mean. They felt it personally on their own skin.

WION:
Dr. Doctorow, seeing the way Russia has risen in the face of US sanctions and most of it has happened in the last two years and no one expected Russia to come up the way it did in spite of all the sanctions that were imposed against it. India of course defied US at every step as well to go ahead for its own personal interests when it came to Russian oil. Do you feel the way Russia has come up and the way India has defied it, the two nations have a broken US hegemony?

7:19
It takes more than two nations to break that hegemony. And I think India is aware not only of the specific advantages it has from buying Russian oil at very advantageous prices. This is not transactional. This is a deep commitment to maintaining Russia as a counterforce to the United States and thereby breaking hegemony. But I think there’s something additional to mention here. And that is that within the relations with Russia, Russia’s rapprochement with Iran is particularly useful to India. Iran is potentially a major transit country for hydrocarbons to India, a safe delivery to India and at advantageous prices and conditions. So, in this respect, it is not just Russia, but Russia’s allied countries that are bringing and will bring considerable economic as well as political benefit to India in its own region.

Zelensky: 8:27
I don’t know very well him, you know? I don’t know, I had meetings with him.

WION:
Zelensky, of course, the Ukrainian president, has been extremely jittery over the upcoming US elections. And, of course, that is going to be having a major bearing on him, because there is a major chance that Donald Trump comes to power again. If that happens, what will that mean for Zelensky and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war? It’s just, we’re just months away from it now.

Doctorow:
The problem with the ongoing Ukraine-Russia war is that has already turned into a Russia-NATO war, in which Ukraine just happens to be the battlefield. The possibility of its escalating further in a very dangerous way, is now being discussed by the NATO allies in their meeting in Washington. We have heard conflicting reports about US intentions of stationing its Tomahawk medium-range missiles in Europe. The Russians are saying on their television that the intention is to give these to Ukraine. If so, we are just moments away from World War III. So, this situation is difficult, the situation is fraught with dangers all around. India’s attempts to maintain a balanced foreign policy and to assist Russia, within its possibilities, to maintain its balance and to offset American hegemony is a major contributing factor to stability, and to our not slipping into a fatal war.

WION: 10:01
All right, Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, thank you so much for joining in and sharing all your insights with me right here on “Game Plan”. That was Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, international affairs analyst, author and historian, joining us from Brussels. Always a pleasure speaking with you.

Russland-Indien: Die Partnerschaft, die die US-Hegemonie bricht? | WION Game Plan | Live-Diskussion

In der vergangenen Woche erregte der Besuch des indischen Premierministers Narendra Modi in Moskau, seine erste Auslandsreise seit seiner Wiederwahl und seine erste Reise nach Russland seit fünf Jahren, das große Interesse und dann die Bestürzung des offiziellen Washington.

Modis Anwesenheit in Moskau, seine herzliche Umarmung mit Präsident Wladimir Putin, die von großen internationalen Sendern auf Video aufgezeichnet und weltweit verbreitet wurde, waren eine trotzige Antwort auf die amerikanischen Bemühungen, Russland seit dem Ausbruch des Ukraine-Krieges diplomatisch und wirtschaftlich zu isolieren. Darüber hinaus sichern die bei den Gesprächen zwischen den beiden Führern getroffenen Vereinbarungen über die Beteiligung Russlands am indischen Programm zum Bau weiterer Kernkraftwerke die engen wirtschaftlichen Beziehungen zwischen den beiden Ländern für die nächsten Jahrzehnte in einem neuen Vektor.

Mein zehnminütiges Interview mit Indiens führendem englischsprachigen Fernsehsender WION können Sie hier sehen:

Transkript eines Lesers

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 0:07
Wenn dem so ist, stehen wir kurz vor dem Dritten Weltkrieg. Und sie haben Wahnvorstellungen. Die Diplomatie ist von sehr schlechter professioneller Qualität, und das Geschichtsverständnis ist gleich null.

Shivan Chanana, WION:
Ist es den USA nicht gelungen, die indisch-russische Freundschaft zu zerstören?

Doctorow:
Und Indien verfolgte damals sehr, sehr gekonnt eine Politik zwischen diesen beiden.

WION:
Wie hilflos müssen sich die USA fühlen, wenn sie die Umarmung zwischen Putin und Modi sehen?

Doctorow:
Es wird die Art und Weise, wie der Krieg geführt wird, nicht ändern. Indien bietet sich nicht als Druckmittel für die Vereinigten Staaten gegen Russland an. Im Gegenteil, es hat sich bereits zu einem Krieg zwischen Russland und der NATO entwickelt.

Ein Schwein mit Lippenstift verschönern.

WION: 0:52
Der indische Premierminister Modi besuchte kürzlich Russland, und Bilder von einer herzlichen Umarmung zwischen Putin und Modi gingen um die Welt, insbesondere in den USA. Die USA äußerten sofort Bedenken gegenüber Indien wegen seiner Beziehungen zu Russland, aber die Beziehungen zwischen Indien und Russland reichen mehrere Jahrzehnte zurück. Und sie begannen zu einer Zeit, als die USA sich weigerten, mit Indien zu verkehren. Russland war immer [noch] da. Beide Länder sahen sich zunehmendem Druck seitens der USA ausgesetzt. Russland sah sich mit Sanktionen konfrontiert, und Indien wurde wiederholt davor gewarnt, russisches Öl zu kaufen. Haben die Beziehungen zwischen Russland und Indien die amerikanische Hegemonie gebrochen? Ich bin Shivan Chanana. Willkommen zu dieser Sondersendung von “Game Plan”, in der ich mit Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, einem Analysten für internationale Angelegenheiten, Autor und Historiker, der aus Brüssel zugeschaltet ist, über dieses Thema sprechen werde. Dr. Doctorow, vielen Dank, dass Sie hier bei “Game Plan” mitmachen.

Doctorow:
Ein Vergnügen.

WION: 1:42
Ist es den USA nicht gelungen, die indisch-russische Freundschaft zu zerstören? Und hat Washington dies die ganze Zeit über versucht? Haben Sie das Gefühl?

Doctorow:
Ich denke, dass die Politik Washingtons gegenüber Herrn Modi und gegenüber diesem Besuch in Moskau ein viel breiteres Problem in Washington veranschaulicht. Und das ist die Blase, in der die politischen Entscheidungsträger leben, ihre Immunität gegenüber der realen Welt da draußen und ihr wahnhaftes Verständnis dessen, was auf der Weltbühne getan werden kann. Die Diplomatie ist von sehr geringer professioneller Qualität, und das Verständnis für die Geschichte ist gleich null. Sie haben gesagt, dass die russisch-indischen Beziehungen mehrere Jahrzehnte zurückreichen. Nun, wenn wir es mit den sowjetisch-indischen Beziehungen vergleichen, dann gibt es eine perfekte Kontinuität von den 1950er Jahren bis heute, wenn man bedenkt, dass Herr Nehru und seine Anhänger zusammen mit Jugoslawien den so genannten Block der Blockfreien anführten. Und Indien verfolgte damals sehr gekonnt eine Politik zwischen den beiden militärischen und politischen Blöcken von Ost und West, der Sowjetunion und dem von Washington geführten Westen.

3:15
Das ist nach wie vor der Fall. Die Inder bewegen sich immer auf einem sehr schmalen Grat, um keine der beiden Parteien zu verärgern. Schon in den 1950er Jahren suchten sie in der Sowjetunion und später in Russland nach Militärgütern und anderen wichtigen Gütern für ihre Wirtschaft, während sie gleichzeitig versuchten, gute Beziehungen zu den Vereinigten Staaten zu unterhalten. Das erfordert ein sehr feines Gespür für Diplomatie und dafür, sich auf einem schmalen Grat zu bewegen.

WION:
Herr Dr. Doctorow, bei seinem ersten Auslandsbesuch nach seiner erneuten Machtübernahme entschied sich Premierminister Modi für einen Besuch in Russland. Die USA äußerten zunächst Bedenken gegenüber Indien. Doch kurz darauf, ich glaube innerhalb eines Tages, stellte der Pressesprecher des Weißen Hauses klar, dass Indien ein strategischer Partner ist, “mit dem wir einen umfassenden und offenen Dialog führen”, Zitat Ende.

Pressesprecher:
Mit dem wir einen umfassenden und offenen Dialog führen, auch über ihre Beziehungen zu Russland. Und wir haben bereits darüber gesprochen.

WION: 4:13
Wie hilflos fühlen sich die USA, wenn sie die Umarmung zwischen Putin und Modi sehen?

Doctorow:
…verrückte Stimmen in Washington. Ich wollte nicht den Eindruck erwecken, dass ganz Washington in einer Seifenblase lebt. Es gibt einige Leute, die verstehen, was getan werden kann und die versuchen, die amerikanische Politik im Rahmen des Machbaren zu halten. Und wie Sie gerade erwähnten, zeigt der Kurswechsel des Außenministeriums am Tag danach, dass es Leute in Washington gibt, die verstehen, dass sie Russland und Indien nicht trennen können, dass dies eine lange Tradition hat und eine bewusste Politik Indiens ist, die nicht zu ändern ist.

Nun hat man sich entschlossen, diese Tatsache schön zu reden und zu versuchen, den Vereinigten Staaten einen Vorteil zu verschaffen, indem man sagt: “Ah, ja, wir können – da Indien so privilegierte Beziehungen zu Russland unterhält – Indien als Einfluss auf Russland nutzen, um den Krieg zu beenden.” Nun, das ist, wie ich schon sagte, Lippenstift auf ein Schwein zu schmieren. Es wird die Art und Weise, wie der Krieg geführt wird, nicht ändern. Indien bietet sich nicht als Druckmittel für die Vereinigten Staaten gegenüber Russland an. Im Gegenteil, ich finde es hervorragend, dass Herr Modi zu Beginn seines Besuchs auf das Messegelände, die Veydenkha, in der Moskauer Innenstadt geführt wurde und den Pavillon über Atomkraft und Atomenergie besucht und gesagt hat – als er die Geschichte darüber hörte, wie die Vereinigten Staaten in den 1990er Jahren versuchten, Russlands Atomprogramme auf Null zu reduzieren und wie dies rückgängig gemacht wurde und wie Russland jetzt der führende Lieferant von angereichertem Uran an Kraftwerke in der ganzen Welt, einschließlich der Vereinigten Staaten, ist – sagte Herr Modi sehr deutlich, und dies wurde im russischen Fernsehen gezeigt: “Wir unterstützen Sie.”

6:15
Das ist der gegenwärtige Stand der Beziehungen. Indien hat großes Verständnis für die Schwierigkeiten, die Russland aufgrund der Sanktionen der Vereinigten Staaten durchmacht. Und Herr Modi hat diese Erfahrung selbst gemacht. Bevor er an die Macht kam, wurde er von den Vereinigten Staaten sanktioniert, die verschiedene Politiken und Vorlieben von Herrn Modi anprangerten. Dies ist also keine abstrakte Überlegung für Indiens Führung. Sie wissen sehr wohl, was die Rückhand der Vereinigten Staaten bedeuten kann. Sie haben es persönlich am eigenen Leib zu spüren bekommen.

WION:
Dr. Doctorow, wenn man sieht, wie Russland trotz der US-Sanktionen aufgestiegen ist, und das meiste davon in den letzten zwei Jahren, dann hat niemand erwartet, dass Russland trotz aller Sanktionen, die gegen das Land verhängt wurden, so aufsteigen würde. Indien hat sich natürlich auch den USA bei jedem Schritt widersetzt, um seine eigenen Interessen zu verfolgen, wenn es um russisches Öl geht. Sind Sie der Meinung, dass die Hegemonie der USA durch die Art und Weise, wie sich Russland entwickelt hat und wie sich Indien ihr widersetzt hat, gebrochen wurde?

7:19
Es braucht mehr als zwei Nationen, um diese Hegemonie zu brechen. Und ich denke, Indien ist sich nicht nur der spezifischen Vorteile bewusst, die es durch den Kauf von russischem Öl zu sehr günstigen Preisen hat. Es geht hier nicht um eine Transaktion. Es handelt sich um ein tiefes Engagement für die Aufrechterhaltung Russlands als Gegenkraft zu den Vereinigten Staaten und damit für das Brechen der Hegemonie. Aber ich denke, es gibt hier noch etwas zu erwähnen. Im Rahmen der Beziehungen zu Russland ist die Annäherung Russlands an den Iran für Indien besonders nützlich. Der Iran ist potenziell ein wichtiges Transitland für Kohlenwasserstoffe nach Indien, eine sichere Lieferung nach Indien und zu günstigen Preisen und Bedingungen. In dieser Hinsicht sind es also nicht nur Russland, sondern auch die mit Russland verbündeten Länder, die Indien in seiner eigenen Region beträchtlichen wirtschaftlichen und politischen Nutzen bringen und bringen werden.

Zelensky: 8:27
Ich kenne ihn nicht sehr gut, wissen Sie? Ich weiß nicht, ich habe mich mit ihm getroffen.

WION:
Zelensky, der ukrainische Präsident, ist natürlich extrem nervös wegen der bevorstehenden US-Wahlen. Und das wird natürlich einen großen Einfluss auf ihn haben, denn es besteht eine große Chance, dass Donald Trump wieder an die Macht kommt. Wenn das passiert, was bedeutet das für Zelensky und den laufenden Russland-Ukraine-Krieg? Wir sind jetzt nur noch wenige Monate davon entfernt.

Doctorow:
Das Problem mit dem laufenden Krieg zwischen der Ukraine und Russland ist, dass er sich bereits in einen Krieg zwischen Russland und der NATO verwandelt hat, in dem die Ukraine nur zufällig das Schlachtfeld ist. Die Möglichkeit einer weiteren, sehr gefährlichen Eskalation wird nun von den NATO-Verbündeten bei ihrem Treffen in Washington erörtert. Wir haben widersprüchliche Berichte über die Absichten der USA gehört, ihre Tomahawk-Mittelstreckenraketen in Europa zu stationieren. Die Russen sagen in ihrem Fernsehen, dass die Absicht besteht, diese Raketen an die Ukraine zu liefern. Wenn dies der Fall ist, stehen wir kurz vor dem Dritten Weltkrieg. Die Lage ist also schwierig, die Situation ist rundherum voller Gefahren. Indiens Versuche, eine ausgewogene Außenpolitik zu betreiben und Russland im Rahmen seiner Möglichkeiten dabei zu unterstützen, sein Gleichgewicht zu wahren und die amerikanische Hegemonie auszugleichen, sind ein wichtiger Beitrag zur Stabilität und dazu, dass wir nicht in einen tödlichen Krieg abgleiten.

WION: 10:01
Alles klar, Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, vielen Dank, dass Sie hier bei “Game Plan” dabei sind und Ihre Erkenntnisse mit mir teilen. Das war Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, Analyst für internationale Angelegenheiten, Autor und Historiker, der uns aus Brüssel zugeschaltet ist. Es ist immer ein Vergnügen, mit Ihnen zu sprechen.

Readers of these essays and viewers of my recent interviews on the internet will be aware that, under circumstances of reduced travel to Russia, I rely heavily on the leading Russian political talk shows to get insights into the thoughts and concerns of Russia’s chattering classes, including some Kremlin insiders.

The show that I have used most extensively and have cited most frequently in my writings and interviews is Evening with Vladimir Solovyov. The presenter is highly regarded within his profession, and has been the elected president of the Moscow Journalists’ Club. He has conducted exclusive lengthy interviews with Vladimir Putin, though he invites guests who often are highly critical of government policies, especially with regard to the Central Bank’s high interest rates and failure to bankroll industry sufficiently.

Until his death from Covid a couple of years ago, the arch nationalist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, founder and head of the Liberal Democratic party, was a frequent guest on the show and was allowed to take aim at the country’s foreign policy for being too polite and insufficiently muscular. Chairmen of committees in the State Duma from various parties including the Communists are regular visitors to the show today, as are a short list of academics, retired military officers who provide expert analysis of the war situation and other valuable informants on political life.

As I have said elsewhere, living outside Russia as I do, the Solovyov show is attractive because it is broadcast ‘live’ six nights a week on the widely accessible smotrim.ru internet platform. I put ‘live’ in quotation marks because all such shows with national distribution are necessarily taped, usually in mid-afternoon Moscow time, and shown locally at prime-time hours all across Russia’s nine time zones.  I receive it in Brussels at about 11pm. However, it must be explicitly said that there are no cuts, no editing of the taped shows, unlike post-production practices at CNN and other Western news providers. If you say something objectionable to the producers, you won’t be invited back, but what you said will be heard across the country. I know this for a fact, because I appeared on the Solovyov show back in 2016 and saw how it works from the inside, starting with the coffee and sandwiches shared with other panelists before show time, when the host will drop in for an informal chat, till the end of taping, when the panelists disappear into the Moscow metro to go home.

But the Solovyov show has its drawbacks. Far too much time is taken up with empty philosophical musings about the West’s civilizational decline or Russia’s place in the world. Then there is the host’s arrogance and tendency to dominate the conversation. He interrupts panelists incessantly, and picks fights with some, whom he then unceremoniously dismisses from his guest lists.

Allow me to explain that this objectionable side of the Solovyov show was not invented by the presenter. Russian talk shows became popular with television audiences decades ago for their entertainment value as much as or more than for their information value. They were considered a blood sport, in which the panelists vied to get and keep the live microphone, shouting one another down. For this purpose, the program managers typically invited to each show one or more ‘enemies’ on whom the presenter and other panelists could vent their sense of outrage.  To be sure, the enemies were allowed to accurately and fairly present the thinking of the other side, antagonistic to the Kremlin narratives. Russian talk show producers were confident that the audience could orient itself without being led by the hand. The enemies were demolished by true patriots on air, presumably taking comfort in the generous payments they were being given for their time and trouble. These shows were to Oxford Union debates as the 1960s televised American wrestling matches starring characters with outlandish names like ‘Haystack Calhoun’ and with overweight physiques matching their names were to Olympics wrestling.

Back in 2016, when I made my debut on all nationally broadcast talk shows and saw their mechanics from inside, the villain invited to liven the talks shows was the American journalist Michael Bohm. Before he became a star on Russian television, Bohm had spent some years living and working in the Russian capital as an editor at The Moscow Times. He positioned himself on air as the voice of the CIA on any given issue under discussion. He won the reluctant affection of the Russian audience because he had an excellent command of the Russian language and a rich store of Russian folk wisdom which he produced extemporaneously to spice up his talks.  For some time, Bohm spent his weekdays traveling from one talk show to another. It was rumored that he made a very handsome income, whereas the Russian panelists who sat next to him got sandwiches and a handshake.

With the start of the Special Military Operation in 2022, the role of villain on the talk shows was assumed by Ukrainian politicians and political scientists who defended the Kiev narrative.  Now that the war has become deadly serious, the Russian tolerance of Ukrainian buffoons has also dried up. The talk shows have dispensed with that kind of light entertainment and only present normal Russian experts and statesmen to take part today. For these reasons, Solovyov himself has to pick fights if he wants the temperature to rise during his show.

In passing, I have mentioned in my writings that from time to time I consult the other premier talk show presented on prime time in Russia, Большая игра, which translates as The Great Game, making reference to the 19^th century rivalry between the Russian and British empires for influence in Central Asia. It is aired in three segments. The key presenter is Vyacheslav Nikonov, member of the State Duma, long time director of Russia’s agency to support culture abroad among the Russian diaspora, and thanks to his family tree as grandson of the Bolshevik leader Molotov, a hereditary member of the Kremlin elite. The other main presenter who holds forth in a different segment is Dmitry Simes, former adviser and travel companion of Richard Nixon in his final years, director of the Nixon Center think tank in Washington following Nixon’s death, later renamed the Center for the National Interest. For several years, Simes worked with Nikonov in Moscow as the show’s anchor in Washington in what were ‘tele-bridge’ broadcasts. However, as the political atmosphere in the States became acrimonious and openly anti-Russian, Simes pulled up his tent at the outset of the SMO and moved back to Moscow, from where he operates today.

Both Nikonov and Simes have a high regard for decorum and run a very dignified program that gives all due respect to panelists. They also maintain a high intellectual level of discussion of the day’s main political and international events that is well researched by the production team. It is available online the morning after live broadcast on a web platform whose name illustrates the Russian sense of humor even in these bleak times:  rutube.  You can find the first segment of yesterday’s show here:

https://rutube.ru/video/f15066055e18ef26d63ca9f287198406/

In the weeks and months to come, I expect to rely more heavily on The Great Game for my insights into Russian political thinking of the day.

Finally, I call attention to two other talk shows worthy of note that I have experienced personally as a panelist back in my glory days of 2016. They were glory days because of the presidential electoral campaign in America and the keen interest of Russian audiences and show producers to put on air American political scientists living in or frequently visiting Moscow who could make some sense of Donald Trump’s campaign, which I tried to do.

The first of these is Время покажет, which translates as ‘Time will tell.’ Now, just as back in 2016, the show has several moderators, of whom the main one was and is Artyom Sheinin.  Like The Great Game, it can be watched on rutube. Yesterday’s program can be viewed here:

https://rutube.ru/video/21b76c838c9d472f88d8247d113125ab/

It opens with a retrospective look at the prehistory to today’s major conflict over Ukraine’s joining NATO. Sheinin puts up on screen an excerpt from the transcript of talks between Al Gore and Boris Yeltsin in 1994 on NATO expansion and an extract from the talks between Bill Clinton and Yeltsin on the same subject in 1997.  He discusses the internationalization of NATO as a major aspect of the meetings in Washington that is reflected in the Communique, particularly the first-time identification of China as a major support to Russia’s war economy.  Sheinin and his political scientist guests discuss the step by step escalation of the war that is anticipated when Blinken’s announcement that F16s will be flying in Ukrainian air space later this summer comes to pass. The issue is how Russia should respond to the provocation.

Finally, I wish to mention the Sixty Minutes program that goes out live on smotrim.ru in mornings and late afternoons. Brussels time. It is co-hosted by Duma member Yevgeny Popov and his wife Olga Skabeyeva. They show and comment upon a lot of video footage from Western mainstream broadcasters. Much of this is high value content, though, regrettably, they fill the entertainment niche with too much trivia reporting on LGBTQ excesses in the West or on the foibles of Biden in his senility.

Skabeyeva may be abrasive, but Popov is a gentleman with a drole sense of humor. Before becoming a presenter in Moscow, he had been the New York bureau chief of Russian state television. I have a kindly memory of him, since in 2016 he was the one who brought me to the Moscow talk show circuit following a fortuitous meeting we had in Brussels.  We were both present in an auditorium of the European Parliament building to attend the screening of a film expose of William Browder, campaigner for the first anti-Russian sanctions promulgated as the Magnitsky Act. When the bosses in the Parliament cancelled the screening at the very last moment following protests by an outraged Browder, Popov invited me to join his show, then called Special Correspondent on my next visit to Russia.

Popov and Skabeyeva invite onto their show many of the same military experts and political scientists who appear on the Solovyov show. However, they do not have the same drawing power as Solovyov to attract powerful Russian legislators.

For those of you interested in reading the NATO communique or declaration issued at the closing of the Summit in Brussels that was being dissected on the Time Will Tell show, here is the link:  https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_227678.htm

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

“Das große Spiel” versus “Abend mit Wladimir Solowjow”: Russische Talkshows heute

Die Leser dieser Aufsätze und die Zuschauer meiner jüngsten Interviews im Internet werden wissen, dass ich aufgrund der eingeschränkten Reisemöglichkeiten nach Russland stark auf die führenden russischen politischen Talkshows angewiesen bin, um Einblicke in die Gedanken und Sorgen der russischen „chattering classes“, einschließlich einiger Kreml-Insider, zu erhalten.

Die Sendung, die ich am ausführlichsten genutzt und in meinen Schriften und Interviews am häufigsten zitiert habe, ist Der Abend mit Vladimir Solovyov. Der Moderator ist in seiner Branche hoch angesehen und wurde zum Präsidenten des Moskauer Journalistenclubs gewählt. Er hat exklusiv lange Interviews mit Wladimir Putin geführt, lädt aber auch Gäste ein, die der Politik der Regierung oft sehr kritisch gegenüberstehen, insbesondere im Hinblick auf die hohen Zinssätze der Zentralbank und das Versäumnis, die Industrie ausreichend zu finanzieren.

Der erznationalistische Politiker Wladimir Schirinowski, Gründer und Vorsitzender der Liberaldemokratischen Partei, war bis zu seinem Tod an Covid vor einigen Jahren ein häufiger Gast in der Sendung und durfte die Außenpolitik des Landes als zu höflich und zu wenig muskulös aufs Korn nehmen. Die Vorsitzenden der Ausschüsse der Staatsduma aus verschiedenen Parteien, einschließlich der Kommunisten, sind heute regelmäßige Gäste in der Sendung, ebenso wie eine kurze Liste von Akademikern, pensionierten Militärs, die die Kriegssituation fachkundig analysieren, und andere wertvolle Informanten des politischen Lebens.

Wie ich bereits an anderer Stelle gesagt habe, ist die Solovyov-Show für mich, der ich außerhalb Russlands lebe, attraktiv, weil sie sechs Abende pro Woche “live” auf der weithin zugänglichen Internetplattform smotrim.ru ausgestrahlt wird. Ich setze ‘live’ in Anführungszeichen, weil alle Sendungen dieser Art, die landesweit ausgestrahlt werden, notwendigerweise aufgezeichnet werden, in der Regel am Nachmittag Moskauer Zeit, und lokal zur Hauptsendezeit in allen neun Zeitzonen Russlands gezeigt werden. Ich empfange die Sendung in Brüssel um etwa 23 Uhr. Es muss jedoch ausdrücklich darauf hingewiesen werden, dass die aufgezeichneten Sendungen im Gegensatz zu den Nachbearbeitungspraktiken bei CNN und anderen westlichen Nachrichtenanbietern weder geschnitten noch bearbeitet werden. Wenn Sie den Produzenten etwas Unangenehmes sagen, werden Sie nicht wieder eingeladen, aber das, was Sie gesagt haben, wird im ganzen Land zu hören sein. Ich weiß das mit Sicherheit, denn ich war 2016 in der Solowjow-Sendung und habe gesehen, wie sie von innen heraus funktioniert, angefangen bei Kaffee und Sandwiches, die vor der Sendung mit anderen Diskussionsteilnehmern geteilt werden, wenn der Moderator zu einem informellen Gespräch vorbeischaut, bis hin zum Ende der Aufzeichnung, wenn die Diskussionsteilnehmer in der Moskauer Metro verschwinden, um nach Hause zu fahren.

Doch die Solovyov-Show hat auch ihre Schattenseiten. Viel zu viel Zeit wird mit leeren philosophischen Betrachtungen über den zivilisatorischen Niedergang des Westens oder den Platz Russlands in der Welt vergeudet. Hinzu kommen die Arroganz des Gastgebers und seine Tendenz, das Gespräch zu dominieren. Er unterbricht die Diskussionsteilnehmer ununterbrochen und legt sich mit einigen an, die er dann kurzerhand von der Gästeliste streicht.

Erlauben Sie mir zu erklären, dass diese anstößige Seite der Solovyov-Show nicht von dem Moderator erfunden wurde. Russische Talkshows wurden vor Jahrzehnten beim Fernsehpublikum wegen ihres Unterhaltungswerts ebenso beliebt wie oder sogar noch mehr als wegen ihres Informationswerts. Sie galten als ein blutiger Sport, bei dem die Diskussionsteilnehmer darum wetteiferten, das Live-Mikrofon zu bekommen und zu behalten, indem sie sich gegenseitig niederschrieen. Zu diesem Zweck luden die Programmverantwortlichen in der Regel zu jeder Sendung einen oder mehrere “Gegner” ein, an denen der Moderator und die anderen Diskussionsteilnehmer ihre Empörung auslassen konnten. Dabei durften die “Gegner” aber ihre Denkweise, die im Gegensatz zu den Kreml-Narrativen stand, der anderen Seite genau und fair darstellen. Die russischen Talkshow-Produzenten waren zuversichtlich, dass sich das Publikum selbst ein Bild machen konnte, ohne an der Hand geführt zu werden. Die “Gegner” wurden von echten Patrioten in der Sendung demontiert, die sich vermutlich damit trösteten, dass sie für ihre Zeit und Mühe großzügig bezahlt wurden. Diese Sendungen waren für die Debatten der Oxford Union wie die in den 1960er Jahren im Fernsehen übertragenen amerikanischen Ringkämpfe mit Charakteren mit ausgefallenen Namen wie “Haystack Calhoun” und einer übergewichtigen Statur, die zu ihren Namen passte, so etwas wie olympisches Ringen.

Als ich 2016 mein Debüt in allen landesweit ausgestrahlten Talkshows gab und ihre Mechanismen von innen sah, war der amerikanische Journalist Michael Bohm der Bösewicht, der die Talkshows beleben sollte. Bevor er ein Star im russischen Fernsehen wurde, hatte Bohm einige Jahre in der russischen Hauptstadt gelebt und als Redakteur bei der Moscow Times gearbeitet . Er positionierte sich in der Sendung als die Stimme der CIA zu einem bestimmten Thema, das gerade diskutiert wurde. Er gewann die widerstrebende Zuneigung des russischen Publikums, weil er die russische Sprache hervorragend beherrschte und über einen reichen Fundus an russischen Volksweisheiten verfügte, die er aus dem Stegreif vortrug, um seine Vorträge aufzupeppen. Eine Zeit lang verbrachte Bohm seine Wochentage damit, von einer Talkshow zur nächsten zu reisen. Man munkelte, er verdiene sehr gut, während die russischen Diskussionsteilnehmer, die neben ihm saßen, Sandwiches und einen Händedruck bekamen.

Mit dem Beginn der militärischen Sonderoperation im Jahr 2022 wurde die Rolle des Bösewichts in den Talkshows von ukrainischen Politikern und Politologen übernommen, die das Kiewer Narrativ verteidigten. Jetzt, da der Krieg todernst geworden ist, ist auch die russische Toleranz gegenüber ukrainischen Possenreißern versiegt. Die Talkshows haben auf diese Art der leichten Unterhaltung verzichtet und lassen heute nur noch normale russische Experten und Staatsmänner zu Wort kommen. Aus diesen Gründen muss Solowjow selbst Kämpfe austragen, wenn er will, dass die Temperatur in seiner Sendung steigt.

Ich habe in meinen Essays bereits erwähnt, dass ich von Zeit zu Zeit die andere führende Talkshow zur besten Sendezeit in Russland konsultiere, Большая игра, was übersetzt ” Das große Spiel” heißt und sich auf die Rivalität zwischen dem russischen und dem britischen Imperium um Einfluss in Zentralasien im 19. Jahrhundert bezieht. Sie wird in drei Teilen ausgestrahlt. Der Hauptmoderator ist Wjatscheslaw Nikonow, Mitglied der Staatsduma, langjähriger Leiter der russischen Agentur zur Förderung der Kultur im Ausland in der russischen Diaspora und dank seines Stammbaums als Enkel des bolschewistischen Führers Molotow ein erbliches Mitglied der Kreml-Elite. Der andere Hauptredner, der in einem anderen Segment zu Wort kommt, ist Dmitry Simes, ehemaliger Berater und Reisebegleiter von Richard Nixon in seinen letzten Lebensjahren und nach Nixons Tod Direktor der Denkfabrik Nixon Center in Washington, die später in Center for the National Interest umbenannt wurde. Mehrere Jahre lang arbeitete Simes mit Nikonov in Moskau zusammen und moderierte die Sendung in Washington im Rahmen von so genannten “Telebridge”-Sendungen. Als sich jedoch die politische Atmosphäre in den USA zuspitzte und offen antirussisch wurde, brach Simes seine Zelte zu Beginn der Militärischen Sonderoperation ab und zog zurück nach Moskau, von wo aus er heute tätig ist.

Sowohl Nikonov als auch Simes legen großen Wert auf Anstand und führen ein sehr würdevolles Programm durch, das den Diskussionsteilnehmern den gebührenden Respekt zollt. Sie halten auch ein hohes intellektuelles Niveau bei der Diskussion der wichtigsten politischen und internationalen Ereignisse des Tages aufrecht, das vom Produktionsteam gut recherchiert wird. Die Sendung ist am Morgen nach der Live-Übertragung online auf einer Webplattform verfügbar, deren Name den russischen Sinn für Humor selbst in diesen düsteren Zeiten illustriert: rutube. Das erste Segment der gestrigen Sendung finden Sie hier:

https://rutube.ru/video/f15066055e18ef26d63ca9f287198406/

Ich gehe davon aus, dass ich mich in den kommenden Wochen und Monaten verstärkt auf Das große Spiel stützen werde, um meine Einblicke in das aktuelle politische Denken in Russland zu erhalten.

Abschließend möchte ich noch auf zwei weitere Talkshows hinweisen, die ich in meinen glorreichen Tagen im Jahr 2016 persönlich als Diskussionsteilnehmer erlebt habe. Es waren glorreiche Zeiten, weil der Präsidentschaftswahlkampf in Amerika stattfand und das russische Publikum und die Produzenten der Sendungen großes Interesse daran hatten, amerikanische Politikwissenschaftler, die in Moskau leben oder dort häufig zu Besuch sind, auf Sendung zu schicken, die Donald Trumps Wahlkampf einordnen konnten, was ich auch versucht habe zu tun.

Die erste dieser Sendungen ist Время покажет, was übersetzt so viel heißt wie “Die Zeit wird es zeigen”. Jetzt, wie auch schon 2016, hat die Sendung mehrere Moderatoren, von denen der wichtigste Artyom Sheinin war und ist. Wie The Great Game kann auch diese Sendung auf rutube angesehen werden. Die gestrige Sendung kann hier angesehen werden:

https://rutube.ru/video/21b76c838c9d472f88d8247d113125ab/

Sie beginnt mit einem Rückblick auf die Vorgeschichte des heutigen großen Konflikts um den NATO-Beitritt der Ukraine. Sheinin zeigt auf dem Bildschirm einen Auszug aus der Niederschrift der Gespräche zwischen Al Gore und Boris Jelzin im Jahr 1994 über die NATO-Erweiterung sowie einen Auszug aus den Gesprächen zwischen Bill Clinton und Jelzin zum selben Thema im Jahr 1997. Er erörtert die Internationalisierung der NATO als einen wichtigen Aspekt der Treffen in Washington, der sich im Kommuniqué widerspiegelt, insbesondere die erstmalige Benennung Chinas als wichtige Stütze der russischen Kriegswirtschaft. Sheinin und seine politikwissenschaftlichen Gäste erörtern die schrittweise Eskalation des Krieges, die zu erwarten ist, wenn Blinkens Ankündigung, dass F16 im Laufe des Sommers in den ukrainischen Luftraum einfliegen werden, in die Tat umgesetzt wird. Es geht um die Frage, wie Russland auf die Provokation reagieren soll.

Abschließend möchte ich noch auf die Sendung Sechzig Minuten hinweisen, die morgens und am späten Nachmittag live auf smotrim.ru ausgestrahlt wird. Brüsseler Zeit. Sie wird gemeinsam von dem Duma-Mitglied Jewgeni Popow und seiner Frau Olga Skabejewa moderiert. Sie zeigen und kommentieren eine Menge Videomaterial von westlichen Mainstream-Sendern. Vieles davon ist von hohem Wert, doch leider füllen sie die Unterhaltungsnische mit zu vielen belanglosen Berichten über LGBTQ-Exzesse im Westen oder über die Marotten des senilen Biden.

Skabejewa mag ruppig sein, aber Popow ist ein Gentleman mit einem feinen Sinn für Humor. Bevor er Moderator in Moskau wurde, war er der New Yorker Büroleiter des russischen Staatsfernsehens. Ich habe ihn in guter Erinnerung, denn 2016 war er derjenige, der mich nach einer zufälligen Begegnung in Brüssel in die Moskauer Talkshow-Runde brachte. Wir waren beide in einem Saal des Europäischen Parlaments anwesend, um der Vorführung eines Enthüllungsfilms über William Browder beizuwohnen, der sich für die ersten antirussischen Sanktionen eingesetzt hatte, die als Magnitsky-Gesetz verkündet wurden. Als die Chefs des Parlaments die Vorführung im letzten Moment absagten, nachdem ein empörter Browder protestiert hatte, lud mich Popov ein, an seiner Sendung teilzunehmen, die dann bei meinem nächsten Besuch in Russland als Sonderkorrespondent bezeichnet wurde.

Popow und Skabejewa laden in ihre Sendung viele der gleichen Militärexperten und Politologen ein, die auch in der Solowjow-Sendung auftreten. Allerdings haben sie nicht die gleiche Anziehungskraft wie Solowjow, um einflussreiche russische Parlamentarier anzuziehen.

Für diejenigen unter Ihnen, die das NATO-Kommuniqué oder die Erklärung zum Abschluss des Gipfels in Brüssel lesen möchten, das in der Sendung “Die Zeit wird es zeigen” analysiert wurde, hier der Link:

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_227678.htm

Some two years ago, I was interviewed by The Hampton Institute for its “Different Lens” program to talk about the Russia-Ukraine war.   A few days ago, they invited me back for an update. That interview has just been posted on the internet. 

See  https://adifferentlens.libsyn.com/episode-187-destruction-and-diplomacy-with-dr-gilbert-doctorow

For those who may never have heard of this think tank dedicated to the memory of a Black Panther member, I refer you to their website: https://www.hamptonthink.org/our-organization-1

Full transcript submitted by a reader followed by a translation into German (Andreas Mylaeus) 

Transcript below by a reader

Hampton: 0:24
It is July 11th, 2024. You’re listening to “A Different Lens”, a podcast produced by the Hampton Institute. Today, we are chatting with international affairs specialist Dr. Gilbert Doctorow to discuss the recent battlefield events in the Ukraine-Russia war, the possibility of a diplomatic completion to that war and current delving into Russia-China and Russia-Korean relations.

There are going to be a number of links in the show notes. I would encourage everyone to look into. And there’s also going to be a link to a previous interview he did about two years ago now on the Russia-Ukraine war on this podcast. Listen in.

All right, Dr. Doctorow, it’s good to have you back on the show. I hope you’ve been doing well.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 1:23
Well, thanks for the invitation.

Hampton:
Of course. So as you know, we’re here xxxxx want to discuss the Russia-Ukraine situation and the surrounding issues of that. And so I want to ask first and foremost, right, what does the current battlefield situation look like?

Doctorow:
The situation in the field, the situation in politics, which do you want to start with?

Hampton:
The situation in the field.

Doctorow:
In the field, the Ukrainians are being pushed back. They’re losing, oh, one or two kilometers a day at each of the various points in the line of confrontation that the Russians are engaging them in. It’s not a very fast or strategic change in positions by the choice of the Russians, because when you are on the offense, you have casualties of a higher rate than when you’re on the defense. And the Russian general staff, in agreement with their president, is trying to reduce the losses of Russian soldiers to the bare minimum. In general, according to Russian figures, their rate of loss is one to five. That is, they lose one man, either seriously wounded or killed, to every five Ukrainians that are seriously wounded or killed.

2:49
Nonetheless, if you have several hundred thousand Ukrainians who are killed, then you have [a hundred thousand] Russians who are killed. The latest figures are said to be 60,000 Russians and probably 300,000 Ukrainians killed in the war so far. That is a very large number of people, and you can take pleasure in having a favorable kill ratio, but it doesn’t give much comfort to the widows and the orphans. So the Russians are going slow in their offensive to reduce to the greatest extent possible their loss of men as they proceed in pushing the Ukrainians out of the Donbas, because that is what’s going on.

Also as they proceed in eliminating the threat of attack on their residential areas just across the border from Ukraine in the area surrounding Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkov, in the Northeast. So the Russians have been operating a cleanup operation to make it impossible for the Ukrainians to use artillery or short missiles to reach into the cities of the Belgorod province that is on the Russian side of the border. There were many such attacks. There were losses of civilians, and the Russians had enough of it.

So that is the basic situation. There’s nothing dramatic. And there’s nothing dramatic because that’s the way the Russians want it. They are slowly decimating the Ukrainian military in a way that Ukraine cannot fill its ranks. And yet there are several elite battalions left in reserve, and the Russians are hoping that Mr. Zelensky, in his appeal to President Biden and to his American backers, will stage some kind of a counteroffensive, which the Russians would use to finish off what elite reserves Ukraine has. That’s the overall situation.

Hampton: 5:03
It’s interesting how this whole thing has shifted, because for the longest, we were hearing Ukraine is winning, Ukraine is winning, and then we hear about this offensive they’re going on. “Oh, this big counter-offensive, it’s happening”, this, that and the other, and then it amounts to not seemingly much. And so, yeah, now it seems that, as you said, the Russians are effectively, in many ways, in control of the battlefield.

Doctorow:
Yes, but there has been a lot of cheerleading on all sides. All the American media were simply repeating, without any, exercising any critical faculty, what they were receiving from the State Department, which was receiving the propaganda from Kiev. That means that there was a lot of hubris, a lot of overconfidence on the American side that the war was going well for Ukraine. And, of course, the loss of several major positions in the fall of 2022 due to the Russians not having enough men in the field to hold onto territory they quickly captured, that was interpreted as showing the Ukrainians were winning. It was nothing of the sort.

6:30
The Russians gave up territory, they retreated in an orderly fashion, which was not the easiest thing to do, and they had minimal losses when ceding territory to which they did not have the men to hold. That interpretation of a Ukrainian victory held on for a good long time. But, of course, the reality is that the Russians always were stronger. The Russians had a 10-to-1 advantage in artillery shells from the very start of the war. It’s not something that just happened in the last few months because the United States Congress withheld funding. It’s simply Russia has the world’s biggest production of artillery shells, period. It has more than all the United States and all of its allies put together. And this, you know, what has become very quickly a war of attrition, is a decisive factor in Russia’s favor and working against Ukraine and its Western backers. The possibility has always existed for Russia to stage a strategic attack and knock out the Ukrainian army. But, as I said, that would come at enormous cost in lost men, and for that reason, and also might be considered extremely provocative and a factor in an escalation by the U.S. side towards a nuclear war.

8:00
So the Russians have decided to go slow, to get what they need done with minimal losses and with minimal provocation to the enemy, meaning not just Ukraine, but its American and West European backers.

Hampton:
This is the second question I wanted to ask. Last month, [Putin] stated that in order to end the war, Ukraine would have to not join NATO and give up the four regions that have been taken by Russia. So why is this kind of, these positions being dismissed by Zelensky, being dismissed by the West? It seems that Russia’s, correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t seem that Russia’s terms for ending the war have changed even when you compare it to two years ago.

Doctorow: 8:45
Well, the terms have changed, and they changed because of the way the West imposed a battle on the Russians. When Mr. Josep Borrell, the foreign policy and military spokesman for, or commissioner, for the European Union, said that this war would be resolved on the battlefield, it was said at a time when Europe and the United States felt confident that they could have the upper hand against the Russians. That was mistaken. They underestimated the Russians badly. They judged the Russians strictly by American military doctrine, assuming that the whole world works from the same rulebook.

Well, the Russians have their own rulebook, how to conduct wars, very different from the United States. And the way they conducted the war was misinterpreted by American analysts as being weakness and inability to deliver. That wasn’t the case at all. It was dictated on the Russian side by various assumptions about their future dealings with what would remain of Ukraine, whom they considered to be brothers of a sort. But from the Russian view, this was a kind of civil war between themselves and Kiev. And they did not want this to be so devastating that they would be unable for generations to come to have any kind of good neighborly relations with Ukraine.

10:17
So the war was being fought by the Russians in a different way. It was misjudged by the Americans and the West, and so they thought that they had the upper hand, and they very glibly said it will be solved on the battlefield. Well, it is being solved on the battlefield. And the Russians, considering their losses and considering the determination and the patriotic upsurge throughout the country, the Russians have no intention of ceding at the negotiating table what they have won at the cost of blood and treasure on the battlefield.

10:52
So, the idea of going back to the offers of March in 2022, when an agreement was signed, yes, that is put up again by Mr. Putin, but not in exactly the same specifics, because the additional note is: take into account the situation on the ground. Meaning that the resolution of this is no longer to be decided only by Ukraine being neutral and not joining NATO. It will lose most, if not all, of the ground that it has lost on the battlefield to Russian forces. And the Russians are intent on taking control of the entirety of the Donetsk province, oblast, which they even today only control part of and not all of, and of the Luhansk oblast.

12:00
These are the core provinces that are called Donbass, where the majority population is Russian-speaking, and where the Russian state felt that it had been betrayed by the Soviets, by Lenin, who gave this Russian-speaking industrial territory to what was the Ukrainian republic within the Soviet Union, or became the Soviet Union. So, what I’m saying is that the terms, the specifics of the terms of an agreement that Mr. Putin is laying out today are different from what they were in March of 2022, even if the fundamental notion of a neutral Ukraine and a Ukraine that enjoys certain security guarantees remains the same.

Hampton: 12:53
So in fact, it seems that Ukraine does want a diplomatic end to this war as was reported late last month. So would they not most likely end up agreeing at least to some major concessions? And it seems that both sides do at least want some concessions, like how realistic is this in terms of like both sides getting?

Doctorow: 13:18
The latest terms coming out of Kiev which were repeated to journalists by Viktor Orban following his meeting with Zelensky yesterday, indicate that the Kiev regime– because it’s not a government, it doesn’t enjoy legitimacy, since Mr. Zelensky’s mandate ended more than a month ago– that the Kiev regime is not ready for genuine peace negotiations, and is still working on a propaganda peace plan called the Ten Points of Zelensky, which is essentially imposing on the victor the terms of the loser.

That is to say, they’re looking for a Russian surrender when it has the upper hand on the battlefield and every other measure of military standing. That won’t fly. So, the only thing that will fly is Prime Minister Zelensky and his team. They will fly out of Kiev. And then there can be some peace.

Hampton: 14:27
So, it seems that the majority of European nations think the war is going to end in a negotiated settlement. And so, how does this view contradict what some European leaders, such as Macron, who wants to, and may even possibly send military trainers to Ukraine, and even said that sending Western troops wasn’t off the table. He didn’t discuss in what capacity. What do you make of this disconnect between some European leaders with the majority of the European populace?

Doctorow: 15:08
But Mr. Macron, who was running to the front of the band, as usual, to present himself as a leader of European foreign policy and some of the most important voices in Europe, he has just been trampled by his own marching band within France. First it was the June 6th Europe-wide elections to the European Parliament, in which his party, or it’s a movement, was defeated by the other contenders. The first and foremost, his most vicious enemy in French politics, Marine Le Pen and her RN, Rassemblement National, so-called extreme right.

15:58
But it really is, “extreme right” is a pejorative that’s applied by mainstream press. What it is, is a national sovereignty party. That is, they want to assert France’s identity and its control over its own future, as opposed to its future being determined by unelected people sitting in the European Commission in Brussels.

Well, anyway, she trampled him two to one, and he then called a snap election, which– the first of two procedures took place less than a week ago, and again he was trampled. So that his movement of the parliamentarians who are allied with Macron will be less than 15 percent, maybe less than 10 percent, of the new lower house following the electoral procedure. This is a man who has zero political power going forward for the rest of his presidency. And his remarks about the tough position for Ukraine, now you can discount 100 percent.

17:10
What that means is a big breach has been opened within Europe, because France is the second biggest economy in Europe and one of the biggest arms manufacturers in Europe. And France, I think I can say, will no longer be a big factor in the Ukraine war. In the meantime, other winners in the European elections are the Netherlands, where an extreme right coalition also has taken power, and we can expect the Netherlands to be less supportive of Europe, Europe’s assistance to Ukraine, than it was under the government of the outgoing Mr. Rutte, who is now the new head of NATO.

18:00
So within Europe there have been very big breaches of this conformist position that’s held sway over the last couple of years. And Europe’s ability to support Ukraine will of course be completely undermined if Mr. Trump is elected in November.

Hampton: 18:26
Indeed. I think there are going to be some major changes if he gets elected this November. So there’s a lot of talk being made of the deal that Russia and North Korea made regarding standing up to aggression, right?, aggression from the West. But how big of a deal is this really? Like, even if North Korea does supply munitions to Russia, how much of a deal is this relationship?

Doctorow: 18:56
Well, there are several dimensions to this that are– Yes, they’ve been supplying maybe three million artillery rounds to Russia in the war so far, which is quite a considerable amount. Let’s keep in mind that Europe made pledges in this year to deliver one million rounds to Ukraine, and they can’t fulfill that. So the fact that North Korea would supply three million, rumored three, maybe as much as five million, artillery shells is one of the 155 millimeter caliber artillery, that is important. But that existed before this agreement.

19:36
What this agreement brings in is the readiness of North Korea to provide all kinds of assistance. Now, what does that mean, all kinds? On the civilian side, North Korea is prepared to send workers to Russia to fill in positions that are otherwise vacant because men are off fighting in the war. So, having guest workers from North Korea, which existed before sanctions were imposed on Korea, that could be helpful to the war effort in Russia.

However, the North Koreans also stand ready to send maybe 50,000 soldiers to fight in the war if Europe sends in its soldiers. And North Korea will probably be invited by Russia to match those numbers so that Russia will be at no disadvantage if there are increased numbers of soldiers coming to Ukraine from the West. That’s a very important factor.

20:43
These are two dimensions. Let’s look at another dimension. Let’s look at what Mr. Putin said about asymmetrical response to Western U.S. and West European escalation in the war in Ukraine. Well, there’s a pressure point on the United States in Korea. North Korea can make trouble. They can make trouble. North Korea can receive missiles from Russia to sink any aircraft carriers that the United States may be stupid enough to send its way, as Mr. Trump did in his presidency, to send lots of gunboat diplomacy to intimidate the North Koreans.

So the North Koreans can make trouble in their neighborhood to distract attention of the United States from the Ukraine war. This is the– these dimensions are worth mentioning when we consider the value of that comprehensive partnership that Mr. Putin concluded with his opposite number in North Korea.

Hampton: 21:57
Definitely a lot of factors that you brought in that people probably, myself included, not particularly privy to. So just a couple days ago actually, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, he did an interview with Bloomberg, and he argues that due to Russian dependence on China, and this is a direct quote for him, I’m about to say: “One phone call from President Xi Jinping would solve this crisis.” Like, how accurate is that? Like, how close really are Russia and China?

Doctorow: 22:31
Well, this text statement shows complete ignorance or willful ignorance of reality. It is precisely the kind of delusional thinking that is so much dominating Washington and the European allies of Washington. The Russians and the Chinese have been both under threat from the United States and from Europe, first of all, militarily, as regards the United States, by its readiness to threaten the Chinese control of Taiwan and to make and provide arms to Taiwan that would make a forced merger between the People’s Republic and Taiwan, very, very costly in men and in weaponry.

23:22
There’s a military threat to China from the United States. That’s undeniable and is growing. There is the economic threat to China, which has been going on since Mr. Trump’s administration, and has been accelerated by Biden in these various prohibitions on providing chip-making equipment or advanced chips that are so essential in all kinds of manufacturing, and sanctioning China in this way.

So China, they see the handwriting on the wall, that the United States is intending to do to it what it has been doing to Russia. So the United States, by every action, has driven these two countries into an ever-deeper and ever-more-significant cooperation. Alliance is the wrong word, because China, by its own doctrine, does not make alliances. But deep cooperation is there. And it’s military cooperation, it is financial cooperation, it is cooperation in every domain. So, to think that you can drive a wedge between China and Russia today is foolhardy.

24:39
To look at the relationship as big brother, small brother is also absolutely ignorant. The Chinese are at least as dependent on Russia as Russia is dependent on China. If the United States uses its navy and its alliances with various countries in the Pacific to squeeze the supply lines to China of much-needed raw materials, starting with hydrocarbons coming from Arabia, then Russia is the most reliable supplier of those needed materials. It already has that capacity in terms of existing and planned pipelines, and also in the case of gas, of liquefied natural gas deliveries to China.

25:38
This dependency, which is only partly realized now, but would be essential if the hostility between China and the United States were to continue, which is highly likely. It means that China has to have good relations with Russia. So the quotation you gave, I said, is by a totally, willfully ignorant person.

Hampton: 26:04
So just before we end, where can people find you and support your work, and where can people find more information about Russia, Ukraine, China, like what are some of the news sources that you utilize personally?

Doctorow:
Well, I have the pleasure and the honor to have become a regular visitor to a program called “Judging Freedom” by Judge Andrew Napolitano. It now has 400,000 subscribers. I would– subscription is just a formality. To view that, you just go to YouTube and type in “Judge Napolitano”, and you will be taken straight to any of his programs, including– these are 20-minute, 25-minute interviews. The man spends the whole day having interviews and discussions with some outstanding, non-mainstream, but highly professional and well-regarded experts.

I say, I’m delighted to be among those whom he interviews each week, but at any given day you find many such interviews, and I would– which go over the facts. He has a very good research team obviously. He’s up to the minute. His questions are highly topical, and you can get a very good understanding that you can juxtapose with what you read in the New York Times or any other mainstream newspaper to see how little they are giving you and how much there is to know if you want to understand the world that surrounds us. So that’s a good place to start.

27:55
As for me personally, I have a web platform on Substack. There’s gilbertdoctorow.substack.com and as you would find I publish maybe five, six essays per week, either essays or links to interviews that I give, because I’m also on India’s biggest English-language global broadcaster, WION, The World Is One [News]. Also, it’s unlikely that your listeners would be aware of it, but the world is changing, and we speak about the global South and how important they’re becoming and how sophisticated they’re becoming, because I’m also interviewed fairly regularly by Press TV, which is, again, an English-language international broadcaster of Iran. And you can find links to that on my Substack platform, and I think you’ll find it quite surprising at the sophistication and moderate positions of their professional journalists.

29:21
So the world is becoming more interesting. There are relatively few lunatics who are on the world stage happily, and there’s a lot you can learn from countries that you could never have imagined would have this level of sophistication and would be as informative as they are.

Hampton:
Thank you so much for coming on the show, Doctor. I really appreciate it.

Doctorow:
Thanks again. Thanks for having me. Good luck to you.

Hampton: 29:51
Thank you.

“Eine andere Sichtweise” vom Hampton Institute: Ein Audio-Podcast, der der Arbeiterklasse die Wahrheit bringt

Vor etwa zwei Jahren wurde ich vom Hampton Institute für sein Programm “Different Lens” interviewt, um über den Krieg zwischen Russland und der Ukraine zu sprechen. Vor ein paar Tagen luden sie mich erneut ein, um ein Update zu geben. Dieses Interview wurde soeben ins Internet gestellt.

Siehe https://adifferentlens.libsyn.com/episode-187-destruction-and-diplomacy-with-dr-gilbert-doctorow

Für diejenigen, die vielleicht noch nie von dieser Denkfabrik gehört haben, die dem Andenken eines Black-Panther-Mitglieds gewidmet ist, verweise ich auf ihre Website: https://www.hamptonthink.org/our-organization-1

In today’s edition of Judging Freedom with Judge Andrew Napolitano, we had a far-reaching discussion of the contradictory signals in and around the ongoing NATO summit in Washington.

On the one hand, a couple of days ago the alternative media were reporting President Zelensky’s latest statements suggesting that the end of the war is nigh based on a negotiated settlement in line with Russian demands. He was said to be ready to invite Russia to the next Peace Conference he is promoting. He was said to accept the need to recognize Russian rule over the territories they captured in the war.

On the other hand, in the proceedings in Washington Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Tony Blinken have spoken publicly in the most belligerent manner about delivery of F16s and of a variety of air defense systems for the sake of Ukraine’s continuing the fight and preventing Putin’s march on Europe which, they say, would follow should Ukraine lose the war.

Meanwhile, there is confusion over the intention of the United States to send ground-to-ground versions of the nuclear capable medium range (1800 km) Tomahawk missiles to Europe. Is the timetable for such deliveries 2026 or is it in the immediate weeks ahead? Are they to be shipped only to Germany or are they going to Ukraine, as Russian talk shows last night discussed? If the latter is the case, then they could reach to Moscow and well beyond, posing the kind of threat that Mr. Putin has said would prompt a preemptive nuclear attack from Russia.

Finally, we discussed the latest news posted on the Zero Hedge portal a day ago that China’s People’s Liberation Army is presently conducting 11 days of military exercises near Brest in Belarus, close to both the Ukrainian and the Polish borders.  If true, this would be a very quick implementation of the mutual security provisions of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization which Belarus formally joined at the SCO Summit in Astana, Kazakhstan two weeks ago. It would also give Poland, in particular, and NATO more generally good reason to reflect on the wisdom of NATO’s becoming a global alliance by building a presence in East Asia, which is the subject of today’s deliberations of the Alliance members in Washington, D.C.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puIOb1wyZF0

Full transcript below, followed by a translation into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Transcript by a reader

Judge Andrew Napolitano: 0:32
Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for “Judging Freedom”. Today is Thursday, July 11th, 2024. Professor Gilbert Doctorow joins us now. Professor Doctorow, a pleasure, of course, my friend. Thank you for all the time that you spend with us. As we speak– maybe it’s a little early in Washington, D.C., but certainly yesterday and probably later on today– we have heard a lot of saber rattling from NATO. I’m going to play you one or two of the more extreme rattlers, and that happens to be the President of the United States. So here is President Biden on Tuesday saying that, did you know there are 100,000 U.S. troops in Europe and they’re ready to go? Cut number six.

President Joe Biden: 1:29
Even before Russian bombs were falling in Ukraine, the alliance acted. I ordered the U.S. reinforcements at NATO’s eastern flank, more troops, more aircraft, more capabilities. And now the United States has more than 100,000 troops on the continent of Europe.

Napolitano: 1:50
For what purpose do you think the United States have 100,000 troops on the continent of Europe, given what’s happening in Ukraine? Is this a tripwire?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
I think it’s to intimidate the Russians. And the Russians are looking at these numbers with increased frequency on their television broadcasts, exactly going over what they see in American academic papers and government releases regarding NATO’s full capabilities in number of tanks and number of servicemen and so forth. So this particular American number will be followed very closely by them. What– is it a tripwire? Well, it’s a rather big tripwire, you can stumble on that all right. How prepared these people are, these servicemen are to engage in combat, that is an interesting subject to investigate, but I don’t have any data in front of me.

Napolitano: 2:56
Surely, the Russians know exactly where these troops are, Poland, Romania, Germany, I don’t know where else they would be, but I would imagine the Russians know exactly where they are. And the Russians know exactly what offensive weaponry is available to them.

Doctorow: 3:15
Yes, that’s probably true. The real issue– and this is something that’s debated within Russia, it’s been discussed in the States on programs like your own– that is, the readiness of the Russians to respond in a forceful way to these mounting pressures and threats from the United States and others. And this is a critical issue. Is Mr. Putin the right man? Is the horses for courses at this particular moment of existential threat? Is his diplomatic, civilized, religiously motivated conduct of Russian military and foreign policy appropriate to the threat? That’s an open question.

Napolitano: 4:17
Is he under pressure from those on the right of him, and I don’t even know if “right and left” means what it used to mean when you and I first began studying this, but you know what I’m talking about, from hardliners, from hawks, to [be] more aggressive? You heard what Dmitry Medvedev said yesterday. I think Medvedev is sometimes the bad guy to Putin’s good guy. I don’t know. What is your analysis?

Doctorow:
There’s more than one bad guy to Putin’s good guy. And to put in proper context your remarks about what is right and what is left, certainly among the most forthright spokespeople for a hard line on the West is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. You want to call them the right or the left, that’s optional. But the point is: there are nationalists who are very dissatisfied with Mr. Putin’s conduct and who are genuinely fearful that it is being misread and can lead to tragedy, misread in the West that is, as weakness and indecisiveness and inability to act in a proactive way to prevent escalation.

5:31
We hear– on American television, we hear from the State Department that the Russians are escalating, but what you have just described in all of the presentations at the NATO summit here in Washington, indicates that the real escalation is coming out of Washington. The discussion of the F-16s, it sounds like this summer. We are in the summer. So it means that Holland and Denmark have already dispatched F-16s somewhere. It also is clear that there are not enough Ukrainian- trained pilots to fly those planes, which means they will be NATO pilots wearing Ukrainian uniforms. So we are headed into a very dangerous conflict between Russia and NATO.

Napolitano: 6:26
Would any of those NATO pilots wearing Ukrainian uniforms be Americans?

Doctorow:
It’s reasonable to assume so, but not necessarily.

Napolitano:
American Air Force officers trained to fly and use F-16s– and that training is very expensive and it takes at least a year beyond their regular training– would don the uniform of a foreign country?

Doctorow:
Well, I am not prepared to confirm that. Who exactly will be in those cockpits, we don’t know. But that they will be reporting to NATO in one way or another, and if they are not Ukrainians, that is a high probability. However, the F-16 issue is not the only very troublesome point to have come out of the discussions going on in Washington. I understand that either yesterday or today, there will be discussion of America’s dispatch of Tomahawk medium-range cruise missiles. Now, these missiles have an 1800- kilometer range. That is on the– I can tell you that Russian television, the Solovyov program that’s widely watched, that’s a panel show, a talk show, last night was suggesting that the United States is shipping these Tomahawks to Ukraine.

7:56
They put up on the screen maps showing the range of Tomahawks, assuming they were launched from Ukraine and going well past Moscow. That’s to say, the whole of European Russia would be subject to attack and potentially to nuclear attack in these missiles. I don’t know how correct the information that reached Solovyov was. I have my doubts about it. The United States– the reports that I’ve seen coming out of Western news suggest that the delivery of Tomahawks is scheduled for 2026, not for the immediate days. And one of the factors is the adaptation of the Tomahawks to land-based use since they are, normally they are ship-based.

8:44
It is also an issue that’s closely related to another topic that has been in the Russian news for several years now. And that is the convertibility of the supposedly defensive anti-ballistic missile bases that the United States has built in Poland and Romania, that they are convertible to use by exactly by Tomahawks. So these questions are interrelated, but they are very, very troubling. And I can tell you, I put it on the table as an unresolved issue. Was Mr. Solovyov well informed last night? Is this really something to worry about? Because it’s just a hair’s breadth away from World War III.

Napolitano: 9:25
Refresh my memory, please, on who Solovyov is.

Doctorow:
Solovyov? He is the dean of Russian journalists, at least of the Moscow Journalist Society. I’m not sure if it’s a national society. He is in the very close circle at the top of news presenters at Russian state television, very close to the head of news, Mr. Kiselyov. and he has interviewed Putin. He’s close to the Kremlin inside.

Napolitano: 10:04
So he’s a credible source.

Doctorow:
He’s a credible source, and he has been a promoter of strong nationalist positions within Russia, going back more than a decade. He frequently invited Mr. Zhirinovsky onto his program. He shared many of Zhirinovsky’s positions in their anti-Western nature. And so, his position on this — are they pushing Mr. Putin from the right? — he is one of those people who is pushing from the right.

Napolitano: 10:44
Here’s President Biden also on Tuesday, not mentioning Tomahawks, not mentioning F-16s, but saying, probably to the dismay of Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, Ukraine goes to the head of the line. Cut number eight.

Biden:
In the coming months, the United States and our partners intend to provide Ukraine with dozens of additional tactical air defense systems. The United States will make sure that when we export critical air defense interceptors, Ukraine goes to the front of the line. So [they’ll] get this assistance before anyone else gets it.

Napolitano: 11:24
This was at the opening session of NATO’s 75th birthday celebration, which, as you mentioned a few minutes ago, is going on in Washington, D.C., even as we speak. How do you assess the Kremlin’s assessment of the saber-rattling going on in Washington? And we’ll play, before you even answer that, we’ll play an example of one of them. He doesn’t use the word “irreversible” or “inevitable”, but those two words are in draft documents that have been leaked to the press, referring to Ukraine joining NATO, but he does say that it will happen. Here’s the Secretary of State of the United States, whom we haven’t heard in two weeks, but here he is yesterday at the summit in NATO. Cut number 18.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken: 12:22
We have an incredibly robust package that will be unveiled over the next couple of days at NATO that builds a very clear, strong, robust, well-lit bridge to NATO membership for Ukraine, including, as you mentioned, the first time NATO’s dedicated a command to helping an aspiring country join the alliance. This in and of itself is extraordinary.

Napolitano: 12:44
He didn’t actually use the word “irreversible”, but as I indicated, it appears in one of those drafts that his people leaked. How does the Kremlin react to all that?

Doctorow:
Well, not being a Kremlin insider, I have a hard time answering it in their name. The best that I do is I deal with very responsible people who are from Kremlin inside, and Mr. Solovyov is one of them. Vyacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Molotov, who has a program of his own, “The Great Game”, together with Dmitri Simes, formerly head of the Nixon Center and now well established in Moscow.

These people are the ones whom I listen to. And still in all, let’s be open about it, the signals that Moscow is receiving must be as confusing to them as they are to us. My good friend Ray McGovern was saying, just a few days ago, how things are looking better, because we have received news that Zelensky is ready to have the Russians present at the next round of his peace summit. We’ve heard that he is ready to accept the inevitability that Ukraine will have to acknowledge the loss of territories that Russia has already captured.

14:17
All of this sounds like Mr. Zelensky was listening to realist, sane advice among his advisors, to make peace with Russia. Now, it may well be that this stepping up, this very energetic speech-making by the administration in Washington is to overturn a decision that Zelensky has made in the realization that the game is up and he’s losing too many of his people. That could be an explanation. But certainly, the signals between what Zelensky has said to have acknowledged as reality a few days ago and what we see now in Washington, that is they are in sharp contradiction. Which is the real way that things are going, it’s very hard to say. And if we have a hard time, I think the Kremlin also has a hard time.

Napolitano: 1513
I’d like your thoughts on what you think the Kremlin’s reaction will be to this kind of a message also from President Biden on Tuesday. Cut number seven.

President Biden: 15:30
In Europe, Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine continues. And Putin wants nothing less, nothing less than Ukraine’s total subjugation, to end Ukraine’s democracy, destroy Ukraine’s culture and to wipe Ukraine off the map. And we know Putin won’t stop at Ukraine. But make no mistake: Ukraine can and will stop Putin.

Napolitano: 16:02
How bitterly ironic and harshly inappropriate is his language that suggests that Putin, President Putin, wants to destroy democracy in Ukraine, when Joe Biden and his buddies in 2014 did exactly that.

Doctorow: 16:20
I completely agree with you, and they’ve been on that same path ever since. If there’s any shred of democracy left in Ukraine, it’s only dumb luck; because the United States has done its best to serve those elements in and around the presidency, mainly neo-Nazi elements that have been controlling the presidency ever since 2014 and leading it as far away from democracy and all freedoms. There’s no freedom of the press, there’s no freedom of politics in Ukraine. To speak about today’s Ukraine as a democracy is an insult to anybody’s intelligence.

Napolitano: 17:06
Is there any evidence of which you’re aware, of Putin’s desire to attack Europe or to reassemble the old Soviet Union? Or is Joe Biden’s mentality– now I know you’re a doctor, but you’re not a shrink– stuck in the Cold-War era?

Doctorow: 17:29
Well, he never left the Cold-War era, and this was patently clear from articles in the “Foreign Affairs” magazine that were issued early in his 2020 campaign. These were all based on premises of a Cold War. So, he didn’t move very far from where he’d been during his whole political life. It’s just that he lost touch with and had no interest in objective reality. These are wonderful political speeches to make to rally the troops, but they have little to do with objective reality. So, he hasn’t changed. The circumstances of Mr. Putin — you have to look at what Russians have been saying about the Soviet past, among themselves, without any attempt to influence thinking outside the country.

18:35
Mr. Zhirinovsky was one of the biggest realists and the one who said on Russian state television repeatedly, that the Soviet Empire had been parasitical, and had drained the Russian core of assets. Since the allegiance of these allies was being bought at every turn.

The Russian foreign policy that Russian nationalists have been trying– these are the people you assume would be the ones pressing for empire– they’re exactly the opposite. They don’t want an empire, because they know Russia can’t afford it. They would like to look after their own people, and not look after subservient people who are subservient only because they’re being bought off at Russia’s expense.

Napolitano: 19:29
One last question about NATO before we move on to another subject. President Zelensky is apparently fearful, I guess he thinks he’ll still be in office, that Donald Trump may be elected president and may try to remove the United States from NATO. I was quite surprised to hear him say this, but here he is in Washington on Tuesday, cut number 16.

Zelensky: 20:00
I hope that the United States will never seriously think to go out from NATO. I think so. But it’s not my decision, I’m just sharing with you my thoughts. And I hope that if people of America will vote for President Trump I hope that his policy with Ukraine will not change.

Napolitano:
Very interesting, I thought, that he said that. And of course, as we speak, literally, at their breakfast meeting this morning, the NATO leaders are trying to– have you heard this phrase before?– Trump-proof NATO. What they can do, something that will commit the United States and NATO to something in a way that couldn’t be undone if Donald Trump becomes president. But Professor, it must be of concern to them, the potential that Trump would re-enter the picture and his attitude about NATO is hardly that of Joe Biden.

Doctorow: 21:15
I don’t think that Mr. Trump would try to dismantle NATO. That would embroil him in enormous fights on Capitol Hill that would deplete his political capital without any notable gain in his position with respect to the war in Ukraine and American foreign policy generally.

All he has to do is not support. That is, not provide additional funds, not go begging Congress to raise monies for Ukraine and to ship military hardware from our stock or to back orders, to place orders with American arms manufacturers for shipment to Ukraine. He would– by doing nothing, he would be doing everything. And that they cannot proof, proof, proof, Trump proof.

Napolitano 22:12
And that number, the last count of what, Joe Biden’s administration with congressional, overwhelming congressional support has sent to Ukraine thus far, 175 billion dollars worth. It’s extraordinary. And what kind of shape is the Ukraine military in? On its last legs, don’t you agree?

Doctorow: 22:38
Not entirely. It’s a big country, even though it’s been reduced from 40 million population to maybe 25 million population. But when you look at the day-to-day fighting, even if, as some of my peers have said correctly, the daily kill ratio or maiming ratio of the Ukrainian forces suggests 2,000 men are taken out of action a day. Still there are bodies to fill those slots.

The Russians, when you look at what is happening– you have to remember this war has changed all of our thinking. This war has introduced technologies and tactics on the ground that influence greatly how you measure the strength of one side or the other. I have in mind particularly the drones. The Russian forces, artillery, and these glider bombs, they are wonderful against massed troops. Those of my colleagues who remark that there is no room for training Ukrainian recruits because you can’t find barracks for them, you can’t find fields for them to practice in without their being bombed by the Russians. That’s fine and I’m sure it’s true.

24:06
But it’s ignoring the fact that just a few people who are well trained in the use of drones are creating havoc in the battlefield and also that influences Russia. Russia is also subject to Ukrainian drone attack, everywhere in the battlefield. So, the situation is more complicated than it looks. It’s not just numbers of men.

Napolitano:
Surely, Professor, you don’t agree with Joe Biden when he said, “Make no mistake, Ukraine can and will stop Putin.”

Doctorow:
Oh, it’s not going to stop Putin. That is clear. The Russians are determined. The Russians have vast numbers of volunteers. Go back in history a little bit. This is not the first war that Russia’s been engaged in. They have been in enormous engagements of a military nature for several hundred years. I have compared Mr. Putin to Peter the Great, also about 24, 25 years in power. Also in the Great Northern War, he waged battles enormously costly in every way that placed Russia among the foremost European powers.

25:25
Mr. Putin is doing something similar. But the nature of warfare, as I say, has changed. And vast numbers of men are no longer a decisive factor when you have these technical devices. Now, can you stop the Russians? No, you can’t. And they are advancing in 1, 2, 3 kilometers a day, almost all across the front, but not 5 kilometers and not 10 kilometers. And they’re doing it slow, precisely to avoid catastrophic losses that can accompany the offensive side, as opposed to the defensive side.

Napolitano: 26:08
Switching gears: as we speak, Professor Doctorow, are there Chinese troops in Belarus engaged in war games?

Doctorow:
This has been reported in the alternate media, and it may well be true. But let’s put this in a context. It would be entirely logical, considering what happened in Astana two weeks ago. Remember that Belarus became– Astana was the host, Astana is the capital of Kazakhstan, it was the host to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit at which Belarus was made the 10th member. Now this is an extraordinary change in the composition of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which going back to its founding around 2001, was to shore up security in Central Asia that was under threat from the extremist Islamists in Afghanistan.

27:20
And that shoring up was done by their neighbors, on one side China, the other side Russia, and also as a means of steadying the ambitions of both those two big powers for control of this territory between them. From that, it has moved on, expanded. It has India, has Pakistan, it has Iran in it. And now they added Belarus. So the Chinese would be going to Belarus, has to be put in that context: that they are going to a country that is now a member of the security arrangements that are enshrined in the founding documents of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

It, of course, is remarkable for sending a message to Europe– and of course to the immediate neighbors, Poland and Ukraine– that if you think that you are going to overrun the Belarus borders– and this is entirely thinkable, since the Poles have have drawn a lot of troops close to the Ukrainian border, and they are supporting the failed alternative to Lukashenko as head of state in Belarus.

28:37
So they would try to carry this pretender across the border, that they would try to stage attacks, which the Russians would call terrorist attacks, across the border as the Ukrainians have done in the Belgorod province near Kharkov — this is entirely thinkable. The presence of these Chinese troops suggests, “Gentlemen, you don’t have to wait for the North Koreans to come. We’re here.”

Napolitano:
Well, you never fail to give us a thought-provoking analysis, Professor Doctorow. Very, very much appreciated. I’m going to be away for two weeks, but I hope you can come back and resume your regular weekly time with us at the end of July. Thank you so much, my dear friend.

Doctorow:
It’s a great pleasure.

Napolitano:
Thank you. Just to go over who’s coming up the rest of today, which is a very interesting day for all of us. At 3 o’clock this afternoon, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. At four o’clock this afternoon, Professor John Mearsheimer. And at the end of the day at five o’clock, the always worth waiting for, Max Blumenthal,

29:53
Judge Napolitano for “Judging Freedom”.

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Judging Freedom, 11. Juli 2024:  “Putin’s nächste Züge”

In der heutigen Ausgabe von ” Judging Freedom ” mit Judge Andrew Napolitano haben wir die widersprüchlichen Signale rund um den laufenden NATO-Gipfel in Washington eingehend diskutiert.

Einerseits berichteten die alternativen Medien vor ein paar Tagen über die jüngsten Äußerungen von Präsident Zelensky, wonach das Ende des Krieges auf der Grundlage einer Verhandlungslösung im Einklang mit den russischen Forderungen nahe sei. Es hieß, er sei bereit, Russland zur nächsten Friedenskonferenz einzuladen, für die er wirbt. Er akzeptiere die Notwendigkeit, die russische Herrschaft über die von Russland im Krieg eroberten Gebiete anzuerkennen.

Andererseits haben Joe Biden und sein Außenminister Tony Blinken bei den Beratungen in Washington öffentlich in äußerst kämpferischer Weise über die Lieferung von F16 und einer Reihe von Luftabwehrsystemen gesprochen, damit die Ukraine den Kampf fortsetzen und Putins Marsch auf Europa verhindern kann, der ihrer Meinung nach folgen würde, wenn die Ukraine den Krieg verliert.

Inzwischen herrscht Verwirrung über die Absicht der Vereinigten Staaten, Boden-Boden-Versionen der atomwaffenfähigen Tomahawk-Raketen mittlerer Reichweite (1.800 km) nach Europa zu schicken. Ist der Zeitplan für solche Lieferungen 2026 oder in den nächsten Wochen? Sollen sie nur nach Deutschland geliefert werden oder auch in die Ukraine, wie gestern Abend in russischen Talkshows diskutiert wurde? Wenn Letzteres der Fall ist, könnten sie bis nach Moskau und weit darüber hinaus reichen und die Art von Bedrohung darstellen, von der Herr Putin sagte, dass sie einen präventiven Atomangriff Russlands auslösen würde.

Schließlich wurde vor einem Tag auf dem Portal Zero Hedge die jüngste Nachricht erörtert, dass die chinesische Volksbefreiungsarmee derzeit 11 Tage lang Militärübungen in der Nähe von Brest in Weißrussland durchführt, das sowohl an der ukrainischen als auch an der polnischen Grenze liegt. Sollte dies zutreffen, wäre dies eine sehr schnelle Umsetzung der gegenseitigen Sicherheitsbestimmungen der Shanghai Organisation für Zusammenarbeit, der Weißrussland vor zwei Wochen auf dem SCO-Gipfel in Astana (Kasachstan) offiziell beigetreten ist. Es würde auch Polen im Besonderen und der NATO im Allgemeinen einen guten Grund geben, darüber nachzudenken, ob es klug ist, die NATO durch den Aufbau einer Präsenz in Ostasien zu einem globalen Bündnis zu machen, was Gegenstand der heutigen Beratungen der Bündnismitglieder in Washington, D.C., ist.

Siehe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puIOb1wyZF0

Transkript eines Lesers

Judge Andrew Napolitano: 0:32

Hallo, zusammen. Judge Andrew Napolitano hier für “Judging Freedom”. Heute ist Donnerstag, der 11. Juli 2024. Professor Gilbert Doctorow ist jetzt bei uns. Professor Doctorow, es ist mir natürlich ein Vergnügen, mein Freund. Ich danke Ihnen für die Zeit, die Sie mit uns verbringen. Während wir hier sprechen – vielleicht ist es in Washington, D.C., noch etwas früh, aber gestern und wahrscheinlich auch später am Tag – haben wir viel Säbelrasseln von der NATO gehört. Ich werde Ihnen ein oder zwei der extremsten Säbelrassler vorspielen, und das ist zufällig der Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten. Hier ist also Präsident Biden, der am Dienstag sagte: “Wussten Sie, dass 100.000 US-Soldaten in Europa stationiert sind und bereit sind loszuschlagen?” Schnitt Nummer sechs.

President Joe Biden: 1:29

Noch bevor russische Bomben auf die Ukraine fielen, hat das Bündnis gehandelt. Ich habe die Verstärkung der US-Streitkräfte an der Ostflanke der NATO angeordnet, mehr Truppen, mehr Flugzeuge, mehr Fähigkeiten. Und jetzt haben die Vereinigten Staaten mehr als 100.000 Soldaten auf dem europäischen Kontinent.

Napolitano: 1:50

Was glauben Sie, wozu die Vereinigten Staaten 100.000 Soldaten auf dem europäischen Kontinent haben, wenn man bedenkt, was in der Ukraine passiert? Ist das ein Stolperdraht?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:

Ich denke, es geht darum, die Russen einzuschüchtern. Und die Russen sehen sich diese Zahlen in ihren Fernsehsendungen immer häufiger an, indem sie sich genau ansehen, was sie in amerikanischen akademischen Abhandlungen und Regierungsveröffentlichungen über die vollen Fähigkeiten der NATO in Bezug auf die Anzahl der Panzer und die Anzahl der Soldaten und so weiter lesen. Diese spezielle amerikanische Zahl wird also von ihnen sehr genau verfolgt werden. Ist das ein Stolperdraht? Nun, es ist ein ziemlich großer Stolperdraht, über den man durchaus stolpern kann. Wie bereit diese Menschen, diese Soldaten sind, in den Kampf zu ziehen, das ist ein interessantes Thema, das man untersuchen könnte, aber ich habe keine Daten darüber.

Napolitano: 2:56

Sicherlich wissen die Russen genau, wo sich diese Truppen befinden, Polen, Rumänien, Deutschland, ich weiß nicht, wo sie sonst noch sein könnten, aber ich könnte mir vorstellen, dass die Russen genau wissen, wo sie sind. Und die Russen wissen genau, welche Angriffswaffen denen zur Verfügung stehen.

Doctorow: 3:15

Ja, das ist wahrscheinlich richtig. Die eigentliche Frage – und das ist etwas, das in Russland diskutiert wird und in den USA in Programmen wie dem Ihren erörtert wurde – ist die Bereitschaft der Russen, auf den zunehmenden Druck und die Drohungen der Vereinigten Staaten und anderer Länder energisch zu reagieren. Und das ist eine entscheidende Frage. Ist Mr. Putin der richtige Mann? Ist er in diesem besonderen Moment der existenziellen Bedrohung das richtige Pferd für den Kurs? Ist seine diplomatische, zivilisierte, religiös motivierte Führung der russischen Militär- und Außenpolitik der Bedrohung angemessen? Das ist eine offene Frage.

Napolitano: 4:17

Steht er unter dem Druck derer, die rechts von ihm stehen – und ich weiß nicht einmal, ob “rechts und links” noch die Bedeutung hat, die es hatte, als Sie und ich anfingen, uns damit zu beschäftigen, aber Sie wissen, wovon ich spreche –, von den Hardlinern, den Falken, aggressiver zu sein? Sie haben gehört, was Dmitri Medwedew gestern gesagt hat. Ich denke, Medwedew ist manchmal der Bösewicht im Vergleich zu Putins Gutem. Ich weiß es nicht. Wie lautet Ihre Analyse?

Doctorow:

Es gibt mehr als einen Bösewicht als Gegenstück zu Putin als Gutmensch. Und um Ihre Bemerkungen darüber, was rechts und was links ist, in den richtigen Kontext zu stellen: Zu den unverblümtesten Verfechtern einer harten Linie gegenüber dem Westen gehört sicherlich die Kommunistische Partei der Russischen Föderation. Ob Sie sie nun als rechts oder links bezeichnen wollen, ist Ihnen überlassen. Aber der Punkt ist: Es gibt Nationalisten, die mit dem Verhalten von Herrn Putin sehr unzufrieden sind und die wirklich Angst haben, dass es missverstanden wird und zu einer Tragödie führen kann, missverstanden im Westen nämlich als Schwäche und Unentschlossenheit und Unfähigkeit, proaktiv zu handeln, um eine Eskalation zu verhindern.

5:31

Im amerikanischen Fernsehen hören wir vom Außenministerium, dass die Russen eskalieren, aber das, was Sie gerade über alle Vorträge auf dem NATO-Gipfel hier in Washington beschrieben haben, deutet darauf hin, dass die wirkliche Eskalation von Washington ausgeht. Die Diskussion über die F-16, das klingt nach diesem Sommer. Wir befinden uns im Sommer. Das bedeutet also, dass Holland und Dänemark bereits F-16 irgendwo hingeschickt haben. Es ist auch klar, dass es nicht genügend ukrainisch ausgebildete Piloten gibt, um diese Flugzeuge zu fliegen, was bedeutet, dass es sich um NATO-Piloten in ukrainischen Uniformen handeln wird. Wir bewegen uns also auf einen sehr gefährlichen Konflikt zwischen Russland und der NATO zu.

Napolitano: 6:26

Wären einige von diesen NATO-Piloten in ukrainischen Uniformen Amerikaner?

Doctorow:

Das kann man annehmen, muss es aber nicht.

Napolitano:

Amerikanische Luftwaffenoffiziere, die für das Fliegen und den Einsatz von F-16 ausgebildet sind – und diese Ausbildung ist sehr teuer und dauert mindestens ein Jahr über ihre reguläre Ausbildung hinaus – würden die Uniform eines fremden Landes tragen?

Doctorow:

Nun, ich bin nicht in der Lage, das zu bestätigen. Wer genau in diesen Cockpits sitzen wird, wissen wir nicht. Aber dass sie auf die eine oder andere Weise der NATO Bericht erstatten werden, und wenn es keine Ukrainer sind, ist das sehr wahrscheinlich. Die F-16-Frage ist jedoch nicht der einzige sehr problematische Punkt, der sich aus den Diskussionen in Washington ergeben hat. Soweit ich weiß, wird entweder gestern oder heute über die Entsendung von Tomahawk-Mittelstreckenraketen durch die USA diskutiert werden. Diese Raketen haben eine Reichweite von 1.800 Kilometern. Ich kann Ihnen sagen, dass das russische Fernsehen, die Solovyov-Sendung, die weithin gesehen wird, eine Talkshow, gestern Abend andeutete, dass die Vereinigten Staaten diese Tomahawks in die Ukraine schicken.

7:56

Auf dem Bildschirm wurden Karten eingeblendet, die die Reichweite der Tomahawks zeigen, unter der Annahme, dass sie von der Ukraine aus gestartet werden und weit an Moskau vorbeifliegen. Das bedeutet, dass das gesamte europäische Russland mit diesen Raketen angegriffen und möglicherweise nuklear angegriffen würde. Ich weiß nicht, wie korrekt die Informationen waren, die Solowjow erreicht haben. Ich habe da meine Zweifel. Die Vereinigten Staaten – die Berichte, die ich in den westlichen Nachrichten gesehen habe, deuten darauf hin, dass die Lieferung der Tomahawks für 2026 geplant ist, nicht für die nächsten Tage. Und einer der Faktoren ist die Anpassung der Tomahawks an den landgestützten Einsatz, da sie normalerweise schiffsgestützt sind.

8:44

Es ist auch ein Thema, das eng mit einem anderen Thema zusammenhängt, das seit mehreren Jahren in den russischen Nachrichten auftaucht. Es geht um die Konvertierbarkeit der angeblich defensiven Basen zur Abwehr ballistischer Raketen, die die Vereinigten Staaten in Polen und Rumänien errichtet haben und die sie für den Einsatz von Tomahawks umrüsten können. Diese Fragen sind also miteinander verknüpft, aber sie sind sehr, sehr beunruhigend. Und ich kann Ihnen sagen, dass ich sie als ungelöstes Problem auf den Tisch gelegt habe. War Herr Solowjow gestern Abend gut informiert? Ist das wirklich etwas, worüber man sich Sorgen machen muss? Denn es ist nur eine Haaresbreite vom Dritten Weltkrieg entfernt.

Napolitano: 9:25

Helfen Sie mir bitte auf die Sprünge, wer Solovyov ist.

Doctorow:

Solowjow? Er ist der Dekan der russischen Journalisten, zumindest der Moskauer Journalistengesellschaft. Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob es eine nationale Gesellschaft ist. Er gehört zum engsten Kreis der Nachrichtensprecher des russischen Staatsfernsehens, er steht dem Nachrichtenchef Kisseljow sehr nahe, und er hat Putin interviewt. Er steht dem Kreml intern sehr nahe.

Napolitano: 10:04

Er ist also eine glaubwürdige Quelle.

Doctorow:

Er ist eine glaubwürdige Quelle und seit mehr als einem Jahrzehnt ein Verfechter starker nationalistischer Positionen in Russland. Er hat Herrn Schirinowski häufig in sein Programm eingeladen. Er teilte viele von Schirinowskis Positionen in ihrer antiwestlichen Natur. Und so ist seine Position in dieser Sache – drängen sie Herrn Putin von rechts? – Er ist einer derjenigen, die ihn von rechts drängen.

Napolitano: 10:44

Hier ist Präsident Biden auch am Dienstag, ohne Tomahawks oder F-16 zu erwähnen, aber er sagt, wahrscheinlich zum Entsetzen des israelischen Premierministers Netanjahu, dass die Ukraine ganz oben auf der Liste steht. Schnitt Nummer acht.

Biden:

In den kommenden Monaten beabsichtigen die Vereinigten Staaten und unsere Partner, der Ukraine Dutzende weiterer taktischer Luftabwehrsysteme zu liefern. Die Vereinigten Staaten werden dafür sorgen, dass die Ukraine bei der Ausfuhr kritischer Luftabwehrsysteme ganz vorne mit dabei ist. Sie wird diese Unterstützung also vor allen anderen erhalten.

Napolitano: 11:24

Dies geschah auf der Eröffnungssitzung der Feierlichkeiten zum 75. Geburtstag der NATO, die, wie Sie vor ein paar Minuten erwähnten, in diesem Moment in Washington, D.C., stattfindet. Wie beurteilen Sie die Einschätzung des Kremls in Bezug auf das Säbelrasseln, das in Washington stattfindet? Und bevor Sie diese Frage beantworten, spielen wir Ihnen ein Beispiel aus einem der Kommentare vor. Er benutzt nicht das Wort “unumkehrbar” oder “unvermeidlich”, aber diese beiden Worte sind in Dokumentenentwürfen enthalten, die der Presse zugespielt wurden und sich auf den NATO-Beitritt der Ukraine beziehen, aber er sagt, dass dies geschehen wird. Hier ist der Außenminister der Vereinigten Staaten, den wir seit zwei Wochen nicht mehr gehört haben, aber hier ist er gestern auf dem NATO-Gipfel. Schnitt Nummer 18.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken: 12:22

Wir haben ein unglaublich solides Paket geschnürt, das in den nächsten Tagen auf der NATO-Tagung vorgestellt wird und das eine sehr klare, starke, solide und gut beleuchtete Brücke zur NATO-Mitgliedschaft für die Ukraine baut, einschließlich, wie Sie erwähnten, das erste Mal, dass die NATO einem aufstrebenden Land ein Kommando widmet, um es beim Beitritt zum Bündnis zu unterstützen. Das ist an und für sich schon außergewöhnlich.

Napolitano: 12:44

Er hat das Wort “unumkehrbar” wirklich nicht benutzt, aber wie ich schon sagte, taucht es in einem der Entwürfe auf, die seine Leute haben durchsickern lassen. Wie reagiert der Kreml auf all das?

Doctorow:

Nun, da ich kein Kreml-Insider bin, fällt es mir schwer, in deren Namen zu antworten. Das Beste, was ich tun kann, ist, dass ich mit sehr verantwortungsbewussten Leuten zu tun habe, die Kreml-Insider sind, und Herr Solovyov ist einer von ihnen. Wjatscheslaw Nikonow, der Enkel von Molotow, der ein eigenes Programm hat, “The Great Game”, zusammen mit Dmitri Simes Sr., ehemals Leiter des Nixon-Zentrums und jetzt in Moskau gut etabliert.

Das sind die Leute, denen ich zuhöre. Und alles in allem, seien wir ehrlich, müssen die Signale, die Moskau empfängt, für sie ebenso verwirrend sein wie für uns. Mein guter Freund Ray McGovern sagte vor ein paar Tagen, dass sich die Dinge zum Besseren wenden, denn wir haben die Nachricht erhalten, dass Zelensky bereit ist, die Russen bei der nächsten Runde seines Friedensgipfels dabei zu haben. Wir haben gehört, dass er bereit ist, die Unvermeidlichkeit zu akzeptieren, dass die Ukraine den Verlust von Gebieten, die Russland bereits erobert hat, anerkennen muss.

14:17

All dies klingt so, als ob Herr Zelensky auf den realistischen, vernünftigen Rat seiner Berater gehört hat, mit Russland Frieden zu schließen. Es kann gut sein, dass die Regierung in Washington mit ihren energischen Reden eine Entscheidung rückgängig machen will, die Zelensky getroffen hat, weil er erkannt hat, dass das Spiel vorbei ist und er zu viele seiner Leute verliert. Das könnte eine Erklärung sein. Auf jeden Fall stehen die Signale zwischen dem, was Zelensky vor ein paar Tagen als Realität anerkannt hat, und dem, was wir jetzt in Washington sehen, in krassem Widerspruch zueinander. Es ist sehr schwer zu sagen, wie die Dinge wirklich laufen. Und wenn es uns schwer fällt, dann fällt es, glaube ich, auch dem Kreml schwer.

Napolitano: 15:13

Ich würde gerne wissen, wie Sie die Reaktion des Kremls auf diese Art von Botschaft von Präsident Biden am Dienstag einschätzen. Schnitt Nummer sieben.

President Biden: 15:30

In Europa geht Putins Angriffskrieg gegen die Ukraine weiter. Und Putin will nichts Geringeres, nichts Geringeres als die totale Unterwerfung der Ukraine, die Beendigung der ukrainischen Demokratie, die Zerstörung der ukrainischen Kultur und die Auslöschung der Ukraine von der Landkarte. Und wir wissen, dass Putin auch nach der Ukraine nicht Halt machen wird. Aber täuschen Sie sich nicht: Die Ukraine kann und wird Putin aufhalten.

Napolitano: 16:02

Wie bitter ironisch und unangemessen seine Sprache ist, die suggeriert, dass Putin, Präsident Putin, die Demokratie in der Ukraine zerstören will, wo doch Joe Biden und seine Kumpels 2014 genau das getan haben.

Doctorow: 16:20

Ich stimme Ihnen voll und ganz zu, und seither sind sie auf demselben Weg. Wenn in der Ukraine auch nur ein Fünkchen Demokratie übrig ist, ist das nur Glück; denn die Vereinigten Staaten haben ihr Bestes getan, um den Elementen im und um den Präsidenten herum zu dienen, vor allem Neonazi-Elementen, die den Präsidenten seit 2014 kontrollieren und das Land so weit wie möglich von der Demokratie und allen Freiheiten wegführen. Es gibt keine Pressefreiheit und keine politische Freiheit in der Ukraine. Von der heutigen Ukraine als einer Demokratie zu sprechen, ist eine Beleidigung für jedermanns Intelligenz.

Napolitano: 17:06

Gibt es irgendwelche Ihnen bekannten Beweise für Putins Wunsch, Europa anzugreifen oder die alte Sowjetunion wiederaufzubauen? Oder ist die Mentalität von Joe Biden – ich weiß, Sie haben zwar einen Doktortitel, sind aber kein Psychiater – in der Zeit des Kalten Krieges stecken geblieben?

Doctorow: 17:29

Nun, er hat die Ära des Kalten Krieges nie hinter sich gelassen, was aus den Artikeln in der Zeitschrift “Foreign Affairs”, die zu Beginn seiner Kampagne für 2020 erschienen, deutlich hervorging. Sie basierten alle auf den Prämissen eines Kalten Krieges. Er hat sich also nicht sehr weit von dem entfernt, wo er sein ganzes politisches Leben lang gestanden hat. Er hat nur den Kontakt zur objektiven Realität verloren und kein Interesse an ihr gehabt. Das sind wunderbare politische Reden, um die Truppen zu versammeln, aber sie haben wenig mit der objektiven Realität zu tun. Er hat sich also nicht geändert. Die Umstände von Herrn Putin – man muss sich anschauen, was die Russen über die sowjetische Vergangenheit gesagt haben, unter sich, ohne jeden Versuch, das Denken außerhalb des Landes zu beeinflussen.

18:35

Herr Schirinowski war einer der größten Realisten und derjenige, der im russischen Staatsfernsehen wiederholt sagte, dass das Sowjetimperium parasitär gewesen sei und das russische Kernland ausgeplündert habe. Denn die Treue dieser Verbündeten wurde auf Schritt und Tritt erkauft.

Die russische Außenpolitik, die die russischen Nationalisten versuchen – das sind die Leute, von denen man annimmt, dass sie angeblich auf ein Imperium drängen – ist genau das Gegenteil. Sie wollen kein Imperium, weil sie wissen, dass Russland es sich nicht leisten kann. Sie möchten sich um ihr eigenes Volk kümmern und nicht um unterwürfige Völker, die nur deshalb unterwürfig sind, weil sie auf Russlands Kosten gekauft werden.

Napolitano: 19:29

Eine letzte Frage zur NATO, bevor wir zu einem anderen Thema übergehen. Präsident Zelensky hat offenbar Angst – ich nehme an, er glaubt, dass er noch im Amt sein wird –, dass Donald Trump zum Präsidenten gewählt werden und versuchen könnte, die Vereinigten Staaten aus der NATO zu entfernen. Ich war ziemlich überrascht, dass er das gesagt hat, aber hier ist er am Dienstag in Washington, Schnittnummer 16.

Zelensky: 20:00

Ich hoffe, dass die Vereinigten Staaten niemals ernsthaft daran denken werden, aus der NATO auszutreten. Ich denke schon. Aber das ist nicht meine Entscheidung, ich teile Ihnen nur meine Gedanken mit. Und ich hoffe, dass, wenn die Menschen in Amerika für Präsident Trump stimmen werden, ich hoffe, dass sich seine Politik gegenüber der Ukraine nicht ändern wird.

Napolitano:

Ich fand es sehr interessant, dass er das gesagt hat. Und natürlich versuchen die NATO-Staats- und Regierungschefs heute Morgen bei ihrem Frühstückstreffen – haben Sie diesen Ausdruck schon einmal gehört – die NATO Trump-sicher zu machen. Was sie tun können, um die Vereinigten Staaten und die NATO auf eine Weise zu verpflichten, die nicht rückgängig gemacht werden kann, wenn Donald Trump Präsident wird. Aber, Herr Professor, die Möglichkeit, dass Trump wieder ins Spiel kommt, muss sie beunruhigen, und seine Haltung zur NATO entspricht kaum der von Joe Biden.

Doctorow: 21:15

Ich glaube nicht, dass Mr. Trump versuchen würde, die NATO aufzulösen. Das würde ihn in enorme Kämpfe auf dem Capitol Hill verwickeln, die sein politisches Kapital aufzehren würden, ohne dass sich seine Position in Bezug auf den Krieg in der Ukraine und die amerikanische Außenpolitik im Allgemeinen nennenswert verbessern würde.

Alles, was er tun muss, ist, nicht zu unterstützen. Das heißt, keine zusätzlichen Mittel bereitzustellen, den Kongress nicht anzuflehen, Gelder für die Ukraine zu beschaffen und militärische Ausrüstung aus unseren Beständen zu liefern oder Aufträge an amerikanische Waffenhersteller für die Lieferung in die Ukraine zu erteilen. Er würde – indem er nichts tut – alles tun. Und das können sie nicht verhindern, Trump-sicher machen.

Napolitano 22:12

Und diese Zahl, die letzte Zählung dessen, was die Regierung von Joe Biden mit der überwältigenden Unterstützung des Kongresses bisher in die Ukraine geschickt hat, beläuft sich auf 175 Milliarden Dollar. Das ist außergewöhnlich. Und in welchem Zustand befindet sich das ukrainische Militär? In den letzten Zügen, meinen Sie nicht auch?

Doctorow: 22:38

Nicht ganz. Es ist ein großes Land, auch wenn es von früher 40 Millionen Einwohnern auf vielleicht 25 Millionen Einwohner geschrumpft ist. Aber wenn man sich die täglichen Kämpfe ansieht, selbst wenn, wie einige meiner Kollegen richtig sagten, die tägliche Tötungs- oder Verwundeten-Rate der ukrainischen Streitkräfte 2.000 Männer pro Tag aus dem Verkehr zieht. Es gibt immer noch genug Leute, die diese Lücken füllen.

Wenn man sich ansieht, was auf russischer Seite geschieht, muss man bedenken, dass dieser Krieg unser aller Denken verändert hat. Dieser Krieg hat vor Ort Technologien und Taktiken eingeführt, die einen großen Einfluss darauf haben, wie man die Stärke der einen oder anderen Seite misst. Ich denke da vor allem an die Drohnen. Die russischen Streitkräfte, die Artillerie und diese Gleitflugbomben sind wunderbar gegen massierte Truppen. Diejenigen meiner Kollegen, die anmerken, dass es keinen Platz für die Ausbildung ukrainischer Rekruten gibt, weil man keine Kasernen für sie finden kann, keine Felder, auf denen sie üben können, ohne von den Russen bombardiert zu werden. Das ist in Ordnung und ich bin sicher, dass es stimmt.

24:06

Dabei wird jedoch die Tatsache ignoriert, dass nur einige wenige Personen, die im Umgang mit Drohnen gut geschult sind, auf dem Schlachtfeld Chaos anrichten, was auch Russland beeinflusst. Auch Russland wird von ukrainischen Drohnen angegriffen, und zwar überall auf dem Schlachtfeld. Die Situation ist also komplizierter, als sie aussieht. Es geht nicht nur um die Anzahl der Männer.

Napolitano:

Sicherlich stimmen Sie, Herr Professor, nicht mit Joe Biden überein, wenn er sagt: “Machen Sie keinen Fehler, die Ukraine kann und wird Putin aufhalten.”

Doctorow:

Oh, das wird Putin nicht aufhalten. Das ist klar. Die Russen sind entschlossen. Die Russen haben eine große Zahl von Freiwilligen. Gehen Sie in der Geschichte ein wenig zurück. Dies ist nicht der erste Krieg, an dem Russland beteiligt ist. Seit mehreren hundert Jahren sind die Russen in gewaltige militärische Auseinandersetzungen verwickelt. Ich habe Herrn Putin mit Peter dem Großen verglichen, der ebenfalls 24, 25 Jahre an der Macht war. Auch er führte im Großen Nordischen Krieg Schlachten, die in jeder Hinsicht enorm kostspielig waren und Russland in die erste Reihe der europäischen Mächte stellten.

25:25

Herr Putin tut etwas Ähnliches. Aber die Art der Kriegsführung hat sich, wie ich sagte, geändert. Und eine große Anzahl von Männern ist nicht mehr entscheidend, wenn man diese technischen Geräte hat. Kann man die Russen aufhalten? Nein, das kann man nicht. Und sie rücken in 1, 2, 3 Kilometern pro Tag vor, fast auf der ganzen Front, aber nicht 5 Kilometer und nicht 10 Kilometer. Und sie tun es langsam, gerade um katastrophale Verluste zu vermeiden, die auf der offensiven Seite im Gegensatz zur defensiven Seite auftreten können.

Napolitano: 26:08

Wechseln wir das Thema: Professor Doctorow, befinden sich in diesem Moment chinesische Truppen in Weißrussland und führen Kriegsspiele durch?

Doctorow:

Dies wurde in den alternativen Medien berichtet, und es könnte durchaus wahr sein. Aber lassen Sie uns dies in einen Kontext stellen. Es wäre völlig logisch, wenn man bedenkt, was vor zwei Wochen in Astana geschehen ist. Erinnern Sie sich daran, dass Weißrussland Gastgeber des Gipfeltreffens der Shanghaier Organisation für Zusammenarbeit war, bei dem Weißrussland als zehntes Mitglied aufgenommen wurde. Dies ist eine außergewöhnliche Veränderung in der Zusammensetzung der Schanghai Organisation für Zusammenarbeit, die seit ihrer Gründung im Jahr 2001 die Sicherheit in Zentralasien stärken sollte, die durch die extremistischen Islamisten aus Afghanistan bedroht war.

27:20

Und diese Verstärkung wurde von ihren Nachbarn vorgenommen, auf der einen Seite China, auf der anderen Seite Russland, und auch als Mittel, um die Ambitionen dieser beiden Großmächte auf die Kontrolle dieses Gebiets zwischen ihnen zu stabilisieren. Davon ausgehend hat sie sich weiterentwickelt und ausgedehnt. Sie hat Indien, Pakistan und den Iran mit einbezogen. Und jetzt ist Weißrussland hinzugekommen. Wenn die Chinesen also nach Weißrussland fahren, muss man das in diesem Kontext sehen: Sie fahren in ein Land, das jetzt Mitglied der Sicherheitsvereinbarungen ist, die in den Gründungsdokumenten der Shanghai Organisation für Zusammenarbeit verankert sind.

Das ist natürlich bemerkenswert, weil es eine Botschaft an Europa – und natürlich an die unmittelbaren Nachbarn, Polen und die Ukraine – sendet: Wenn ihr glaubt, dass ihr die weißrussischen Grenzen überrennen werdet – und das ist durchaus denkbar, da die Polen viele Truppen in die Nähe der ukrainischen Grenze zusammengezogen haben und sie die gescheiterte Alternative zu Lukaschenko als Staatschef in Weißrussland unterstützen.

28:37

Wenn sie also versuchen würden, derartige Spielchen grenzübergreifend anzuzetteln, dass sie versuchen würden, Anschläge, die die Russen als Terroranschläge bezeichnen würden, jenseits der Grenze zu verüben, wie es die Ukrainer in der Provinz Belgorod bei Charkow getan haben – das ist durchaus denkbar. Die Anwesenheit dieser chinesischen Truppen suggeriert: “Meine Herren, ihr müsst nicht darauf warten, dass die Nordkoreaner kommen. Wir sind schon da.”

Napolitano:

Nun, Sie liefern uns immer wieder eine anregende Analyse, Professor Doctorow. Ich weiß das sehr zu schätzen. Ich werde zwei Wochen lang weg sein, aber ich hoffe, Sie können zurückkommen und Ihre regelmäßige wöchentliche Zeit mit uns Ende Juli fortsetzen. Vielen Dank, mein lieber Freund.

Doctorow:

Es ist mir eine große Freude.

Napolitano:

Ich danke Ihnen. Nur kurz, wer den Rest des heutigen Tages, der für uns alle sehr interessant ist, noch kommen wird. Heute Nachmittag um 15 Uhr: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. Um vier Uhr heute Nachmittag, Professor John Mearsheimer. Und zum Abschluss des Tages, um fünf Uhr, der immer sehenswerte Max Blumenthal,

29:53

Judge Napolitano für “Judging Freedom”.

There are a very few internet platforms hosted by talented interviewers and interlocutors who give their guests an hour to discuss international relations and the present East-West crisis in and around Ukraine.  Nima R. Alkhorshid and his program Dialogue Works is an outstanding success in this domain. It now counts 149,000 subscribers and has brought ‘on air’ a steady stream of leading thinkers and actors in the Opposition to the Washington narrative.

For these reasons, I considered it an honor to be Mr. Alkhorshid’s guest last night and I offer to you links to the show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mH5F0OJCn8&t=172s  or

https://yandex.ru/video/preview/14821748208299941599

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus) followed by a complete transcript

Für diejenigen mit Sitzfleisch und etwas Zeit…

Es gibt nur wenige Internetplattformen, auf denen talentierte Interviewer und Gesprächspartner ihren Gästen eine Stunde Zeit geben, um über internationale Beziehungen und die aktuelle Ost-West-Krise in und um die Ukraine zu diskutieren. Nima R. Alkhorshid und sein Programm Dialogue Works ist ein herausragender Erfolg in diesem Bereich. Sie hat inzwischen 149.000 Abonnenten und hat einen ständigen Strom von führenden Denkern und Akteuren der Opposition zum Washingtoner Narrativ auf Sendung gebracht.

Aus diesen Gründen war es mir eine Ehre, gestern Abend Gast von Herrn Alkhorshid zu sein, und ich biete Ihnen Links zu der Sendung an:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mH5F0OJCn8&t=172s  oder

https://yandex.ru/video/preview/14821748208299941599

Transcript below by a reader

Nima R Alkhorshid: 0:05
Let’s get started with the current phase of the conflict in Ukraine. Orban is trying to do his best in order to bring NATO and Russia together to have some sort of negotiations, a political settlement. And what’s your interpretation of the current phase and what’s going on right now in the European Union, considering the conflict in Ukraine?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 0:32
Well, I have been following this conflict in Ukraine from well before it became a war. And like many observers, I have been misled time and again over the last 20 years by the seeming closeness of a Russian victory, which, and by predictions as a matter of weeks before the end is in sight, only to discover that this was changed completely by a new escalation and new direction to the war that has been propelled by the West. So that Russia has responded, the nature of the war has changed, and the timing of its conclusion has moved like the horizon. And that has been, that’s been the case. You have the Washington narrative, which is a pure propaganda narrative that is partly assisted by Kiev. Then you have the opposition or alternative media, of which I am a participant. And all too much of that has been cheerleading for Russia by people who very often know nothing about Russia and care still less about Russia, but see in this conflict a way of expressing their hatred for the United States and for its global abuse of power.

2:09
I understand their repugnance at the way the United States conducts itself across the world, but I am a specialist in Russian affairs, and I cannot link arms with people who don’t give a damn about Russia, people who speak about the conflict as if this is a walk in the rose garden, and the only victims are Ukrainians. No, there are victims who are Russians, and there are– but the numbers change, the estimates of how many losses there have been on the Ukrainian side have varied over time. Some people say it’s 500,000. Whether that is a number of killed only or it’s killed and mutilated or taken out of battle, out of combat because of their war injuries, nobody has a firm idea.

3:05
Then you have Mr. Putin, who acknowledged maybe three, four weeks ago that the kill ratio or the elimination from the battlefield is five to one in Russia’s favor. But assuming that 300,000 have been killed or taken off the battlefield, there’s still 60,000 Russians dead, 60,000 widows and orphans. It is a very painful experience for both sides, even if it’s much greater loss for the Ukrainians. So, the people who are very often talking, commenting about this conflict, ignore this fact. They only look at the harm caused to Ukraine, how close it is to being annihilated, or whatever terms are dramatic and emotive that they use.

So it is a very good thing, a very good thing, without any qualification, that a person like Orban has immediately seized upon the opportunities that he sensed was there for him in days after taking the role of the rotating presidency of the European Council. I take my hat off to him. I’ve listened to his interview with Welt Woche, which was amazing. I know something about Hungary. I visited many times on business going back to the late 1980s, early 1990s. I’ve had business associates there, some of whom I stayed in contact with, even though they loathed Orbán because they were all pro-Soros types in Hungary.

4:49
Nonetheless, I had a feeling for Hungary and I know the man is not without his detractors and without some reasons for that. But there are no pure heroes in life. And I take my cue from who is doing the most good. And as of today, Mr. Orbán is doing a remarkable job, an intelligent job, of seeking peace, of showing up European bureaucrats for being just that, sterile individuals, hateful people– and by that I mean particularly the top leaders like Charles Michel at the Council, or of course von der Leyen at the Commission, or Borrell at the Commission.

5:44
For these people to have reproached Orbán or his initiative is despicable. But I don’t think that I have to add adjectives to descriptions of these people. I think it speaks for itself. And I think that it has to be mentioned as well, that Orbán is not only doing this shuttle diplomacy and going to the ends of the earth– having been in Beijing yesterday, today, and probably on his way to Washington today or tomorrow for the NATO summit.

6:21
Not only that. He and his close associates have been organizing within Europe a new block of patriots that is attracting some very important partners, and which have a chance of giving a voice to the resistance to the clique around van der Leyen, who want to shut everyone up and want to dominate and monopolize power in Brussels and European institutions. He has brought in, most recently, yesterday or day before yesterday, Wilder’s group in the ruling coalition in the Netherlands. He has the support even of the Czechs. The Czech Republic is a special case because of the division between executive and parliament over relations with Russia. Nevertheless, he has brought in parties in the Czech Republic. He certainly has the backing of Fico in Slovakia. And you begin to see– and he’s reaching out to Meloni.

7:36
You begin to see the shape, the contours of a group within the European Parliament that can put a stick in the mechanism that is leading us all on the path to Armageddon. For that, I have to salute the sagacity, not just the courage and the energy of Mr. Orbán.

Alkhorshid:
If you remember, before this conflict started, they were all demonizing Putin, they were [demonizing] Russia. And it all started with this concept in the West. Why do they really hate Russia? What’s the reason behind this type of behavior on the part of the Western countries?

8:22
Well, the information war against Russia began with a vengeance in 2008, following Vladimir Putin’s astonishing speech at the Munich Security Conference. And then you saw the American delegation at that conference was left speechless. They never could have imagined that they would be denounced for their bullying, for their brutal conduct of international affairs as they were directly and to their faces by Putin at that conference. Washington was speechless, had nothing to say for a month or two until it found its footing and began a massive campaign against Putin.

There were publications in “Foreign Affairs”, there were denunciations of him. You had Yulia Tymoshenko coming out with an article there, which was intended to be a vicious attack on Putin. And that’s where it started. And it’s been accelerating ever since. So– but I take 2008 as a starting point. Of course, this developed within the States. In 2012, you have the first transfer of this media hatred and vengeance into actions with the passage of the Magnitsky Act that was so promoted by William Browder, a full-time Russia hater, who enjoyed a lot of support in Congress.

And that was a start, so 2012, it was two years before the whole Crimea adventure, that there was a pretext for really vicious sanctions to be taken up by Europe as well. In 2012, the United States began it. And surrounding this, you don’t just have these sanctions in isolation, they have to be supported by further information warfare. And then you have 2014, you know, let’s say the takeover of Crimea, its reunification with Russia, which provided the context for yet another great escalation, widening and deepening the information war and the economic war waged against Russia. That took us more or less to where we are today.

10:57
Why do they hate it? Because Russia has had the least to lose among all the potential adversaries of the United States on the global stage. You have China, but China’s economy has been until Mr. Trump began using his axe, his hatchet, against the tree of Chinese-United States economic bonds. Until the Trump campaign against China, China was doing very well in the States and globally as the world’s factory. And China has so much to lose by saying its mind about the nature of American hegemony and economic domination, and parasitism or rent-collecting, as some people call it, globally.

12:01
But China didn’t dare act on these convictions. There are other countries who were similarly comprehending of what America is doing and how it was dangerous for the world, but again, and they held their silence. By a combination of factors, Russia had very few economic bonds with the States. Oh, of course, we know that it has been a supplier of luxury goods and a supplier of uranium, enriched uranium, and at times of hydrocarbons, like xxxxx xxxx, petroleum products, which the United States was in one part of the country or another in need of.

12:43
But in general, the level of US-Russian trade has been very, very low. This goes back a long way in history. It didn’t just happen yesterday. Because the two economies simply have little need of one another. Unlike the Europeans with Russia, which for them, Russia was a great source of raw materials. This is insulting to say out loud, but it didn’t stop the French from saying that out loud that they looked upon Russia as strictly a source of necessary and cheap raw materials.

Then other countries had their own interests in Russia, in its arms, and having a diversity of arms suppliers not to be totally dependent on the United States. But generally speaking, the US-Russia trade was very low, and America and Russia both had very little to lose in economic terms by going at one another’s throats. So when Russia had enough of this denigration that it was receiving at the hands of the United States, of this condescending and scornful rejection of Dmitry Medvedev’s suggestion of revising the security architecture of Europe to bring Russia in from the cold, going back to 2008, rejected out of hand by the United States and also by Germany.

14:18
Russia then decided to say what it really thinks and to proceed with this alienation from the United States, which is proceeding today in front of our eyes in much more important material ways, not just information warfare. So, Russia has been the single biggest obstacle to the American unipolar world. And going back three, four, five years when the States were still speaking very disparagingly and insultingly about Russia’s economy, going back to McCain and Russia being just a gas station parading as a nation. And Obama saying very much the same thing and adding insult to injury by pointing out that Russia was really just a regional power.

15:21
This is a phrase which didn’t just come out of the air. This is a phrase that goes back to 1997 and Brzezinski’s “Grand Chessboard”, the notion that Russia is just a European state. It’s another country that fits in a little box in Europe and is out of the way and doesn’t cause any nuisance. And when Russia did present itself and its claims for security on the stage, the Americans dismissed it as being just a troublemaker that is on its way down.

And I’d like to point out, without intending to detract from the expertise or importance of some of our major scholars like John Mearsheimer, this notion of Russia as a country on its way down was widely held by some of our senior academicians who otherwise are quite reasonable and informative and useful experts. When it came to Russia, they weren’t saying anything more insightful than you’ve had from the worst propagandists in Washington. Power in the world, even by the realist school, was being defined in terms of GNP, and that was equated to be the same as military power. And since Russia only accounts or counted, well, still accounts for 3% of global GNP, the notion that it could be a major player on the international stage and a major power, a superpower was considered to be laughable as recently as three or four years ago.

17:18
The Special Military Operation has changed that. Three or four years ago, we heard about the United States as being the world’s leading military power, and the second and fast-rising power is China. You don’t hear much about China as the fast-rising power, except if they’re talking about how many naval vessels it has compared to the United States. In overall military strength, there are no fools who are saying that any more, that Russia is just a laggard and that China’s number two. Most anybody who has his head turned on, screwed on right is saying the facts. The facts are that Russia is the world’s second most powerful military force in the world. And in some areas, it’s the first most powerful. And certainly in a traditional ground warfare, artillery production and implementation availability, nobody has any doubts today that Russia is the world’s biggest power.

18:24
So, this is where the military operation in Ukraine has changed the American and global perception. It’s not a strange thing to say or discover to say that countries looking for allies or for partners look to winners, and they don’t want to be associated with losers. And I think that we see, we saw a week ago, at the Astana meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, that the central Asian countries are solidly with Russia, and of course with China. China is the economic power, has much more to offer them economically; but for military security issues, there’s no question that they are solidly allied with Russia.

Mr. Turkayev, the remarkable president of Kazakhstan, who is a fluent speaker of Russian, a fluent speaker of Mongolian, it’s not that bad. He’s just the president. He’s not an academician. And he was wobbling this way and that way when the American diplomats came through his region. He’s not wobbling any more. Mr. Blinken can pass through and they’ll treat him to tea, but he is not making any progress in hopes of winning the minds and hearts of Kazakhs. The same is true of David Cameron’s swing through this area less than a month ago. He came back with nothing.

20:19
And why did this happen? I have not a moment’s hesitation in saying: because these countries perceived that Russia is the winner in the contest against NATO. Countries like to be with winners.

Alkhorshid:
How far is the West willing to risk Ukraine and the future of Ukraine in order to inflate suffering on Russia?

Doctorow:
Well, I’m a very big admirer of Jacques Baudin, the Swiss military analyst, whose view of the war is very much the terms that you just phrased it. The West has no interest in the fate of Ukraine. Its only interest is in using Ukraine as a tool to weaken Russia. What the objectives are of weakening Russia, well, different analysts have different views. Some will say that it is to lessen the attractiveness of Russia to China, to help break Russia and China apart. Perhaps that’s the reason. I think a much simpler reason is that by eliminating Russia, they prepare the way to attack and isolate China, which makes China much more vulnerable. So the reasoning here is, I think, pretty obvious.

Alkhorshid: 21:47
Can we consider the conflict in Ukraine as a watershed moment in which that the face of the world has changed. And the way that we are witnessing the events in the Middle East, in Europe, in Africa, is everything seems that it’s changing and it’s changing so fast.

Doctorow:
Well, there used to be a song about the head bone’s connected to the neck bone, the neck bone’s connected to the backbone and so on. Or as the BBC says in its promotional advertisements for BBC business news, “Everything’s connected”. Indeed, all of these things that you mentioned are not disparate. They’re all connected and certain key players or actors are involved in all of them. And Russia is one of those key players. When you speak about the changing scene in Africa, particularly French Africa, the departure or kick out of the French colonial forces, and the deconstruction of the French economic colonialism in these countries, Russia is present as a major factor, just as China is, to provide a sense that you can win the war against these former colonial powers, but you will not be economically destroyed by them.

23:12
If Russia has been able to survive and even prosper in the face of the sanctions from hell that Victoria Nuland and her fellow conspirators devised in the State Department, then these countries also, if they have friends, friends like Russia and China, have a very good opportunity to get out from under the heel of their former colonial masters. That’s for Africa.

23:44
For the Middle East, the fact that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia were brought into BRICS forming a Middle Eastern core nations that have joined an organization whose mission is to establish a parallel world order. Not to overthrow the existing world order, but in the expectation that the existing American-dominated world order will crumble when a viable alternative that is more democratic in the way it’s governed presents itself.

24:29
And that is what they’re doing as [more have joined], and that gives them a lot of confidence. A perfect example, one that I follow rather closely because I’ve been a frequent guest on Iran’s PressTV. So I paid more attention to what’s going on there than I otherwise would have. And what I see there is that there’s much greater moderation. The victory of this so-called, so-designated reformist candidate in the election a day ago in Iran is just another sign of it, but the man he’s replaced after this tragic death of Raisi in the helicopter crash was, I think, an incarnation of dignity. And dignity comes from self-confidence, and self-confidence comes from having powerful and well-meaning friends.

25:26
And those two friends, in the case of Iran, are China and Russia. What I see here as an important element in the changing world is the approach of BRICS and of Russia and China to the whole question of: what do you do with difficult states? The American view is simple. You turn them into pariah states. You cut off economic ties, you cut off diplomatic ties, you isolate them, shame them, and try regime change in order to get them to submit to your will, and to be “good and upstanding members” of the international community, in quotation marks.

26:11
The Russian and Chinese method is– in a way, it’s very close to what was used in Germany in its relations to Russia in the period of the 80s and 90s and up into the period of Merkel. This whole Ostpolitik of Germany– it goes back to Willy Brandt– had as an underlying logic or justification, or explanation in any case, to the German public and to European public, that by drawing closer, you can have more influence and moderate the behavior of the country that you are in rapprochement with.

27:00
I think that is a very good model. Of course, the United States has denounced this sort of approach. It has gone crying out to the world how it was misled by such thoughts when it gave privileged access to its market to China and allowed China to become its major supplier of so many manufactured goods. But China, to the great disappointment of the United States, didn’t become just like us. It didn’t renounce its sovereignty, didn’t kneel before the altar of the American Republic.

27:46
But I hold a different view. I think that what the Russians are now trying to do with Taliban in Afghanistan to drop all listing of the Taliban as a terrorist organization, to try to establish normal diplomatic, cultural, political, and economic ties to Afghanistan and its Taliban government. This is another instance where the policy is to normalize relations in the hope and expectation that you will moderate the behavior of the country you’re approaching, rather than the [counter-voltage] in a very severe and destructive behavior that America practices.

Alkhorshid: 28:36
When we look at Russia today, a country, when Putin came to power in 1999 and 2000, he was trying to get closer to the West, to the European Union, to the United States, but every [time] he was trying to do that, he was rejected; they were not willing to cooperate with Russia. Right now, with this conflict in Ukraine, it seems that Russia totally perceived that there is no way forward for Russia together with the United States and European Union. And they’re doing everything right now. They’re talking about BRICS right now. When we talk about BRICS everybody’s talking about China.

29:20
China is the biggest, but it seems that Russia is the backbone of BRICS right now. Because the way that they’re leading in BRICS politically and militarily they’re having good relationship with Iran, with China, with India, many of these countries don’t have– with Pakistan, and the way that they’re managing right now within BRICS is so amazing to see, and how they’re trying to do their best in order to bring all of these countries together.

Doctorow: 29:54
I think this is a very big compliment you’re making to Russian diplomacy, and I agree completely that Russian diplomacy is highly professional and very skillful in dealing with these very difficult countries and relationships that they have with one another, and not getting and caught in the middle of their disputes.

I want to add though, that the Russian diplomacy and Mr. Lavrov for all of his experiences as the doyen of major power diplomats in the world– longest serving and most professional, hardest working– they are not their own men. What they’re doing, what Lavrov does, is implement what his boss tells him to do. So, the master plan that Russian diplomacy implements is coming from the office of Vladimir Putin. I don’t mean to suggest that Putin himself is the author of everything that bears his signature, of course not. He’s remarkably hard-working and so on, but he’s not superhuman. He also has his limitations in time and space.

31:20
But what I see in Putin is unusual, and I have various ways of measuring this and justifying what I’m about to say, is that he has been not just an intellectual leader, although that didn’t come quickly. He was a follower, as you were suggesting a minute ago, by particularly early in his presidency, continuing the Iraq raprochment, the drawing closer, the hopeful expectations that we Russians and Americans can be great friends. He continued that. It took a while before he found his own position, particularly after 2008 when he had no choice but to find a new position.

32:07
But not just as an intellectual leader, but as a man-manager. I think that he has remarkable talent in this area, which nobody talks about. What you get is the usual flipant or ignorant statements about how he was a KGB operative. This is– much more important to watch his conduct is how he was a graduate of St. Petersburg Law School because he’s very legalistic- minded.

But he is a man-manager. For that, he obviously has an innate talent because he was a rank-and-file intelligence analyst in Germany. He wasn’t managing tens and tens of people. I wonder if he even had a secretary to manage. The point is that he quickly learned. And what do I find outstanding here? I don’t think I’m the only one who compares him and his 24 years in power as a Peter the Great of our age. And there’s a certain specific similarity that I want to bring up because nobody talks about it. and it bears on my stating now that he is a man-manager of extreme conpetence.

33:26
Peter the Great had around him opportunists, liars, thieves, cheats, people who were raised from rags to riches, which is– very often arrived at in a thief-like way. And he kept them on, and he promoted them to get the best out of them for Russia’s benefit. And that is exactly how Mr. Putin has conducted himself. He has been surrounded by thieves and liars. Chubais was a perfect example of it. He stole billions, if not just millions, from the Russian state, but he has kept by his side people whom he thought could make major contributions to the welfare of the country, and he has used them for Russia’s benefit, knowing for certain all of their personal drawbacks and their vices.

34:37
He kept Prigozhin on when he had proven himself less than loyal, I mean, before the mutiny, after this big public fight that he had with Putin’s senior military. It was out in public, they were being denounced by Prigozhin, and Putin kept him on and tolerated him so long as he could perform and do things that were valuable to Russia, which he did. And this is a distinguishing feature that I think has to be brought up in any discussion.

Alkhorshid: 35:25
When you look at Europe today, considering your article, your recent article, In your opinion, what’s going on in Europe? I’ve seen an interview of Marine Le Pen with CNN, with Christiane Amanpour on CNN. Christiane Amanpour was calling her a far-right candidate and she said that, no, we are not far-right, we are a center-right party. But it seems that Le Pen is totally in my opinion is totally correct when she says she’s center-right. We don’t see far right, far left right now in the European Union, because the outcome of Meloni, for example, in Italy was the same outcome as we see in Germany and other countries. [It] doesn’t seem that they have any sort of difference when it comes to their policy in Ukraine, for example. What’s your understanding of this?

Doctorow: 36:31
Well, we’ll get to the question of how these various movements or parties see Ukraine, but I’d like to come back to adjectives, which are very important because they are like these dog whistles. They are sending out messages that are instantly perceived and understood without the one blowing the whistle having to say much.

And that is misleading, seriously misleading. To speak in terms– as we open this discussion, to speak in terms of centrist right, extreme right. Extreme already is an adjective that tells you that the speaker doesn’t like these people. Who likes extremes? By definition, a normal-headed person wouldn’t. They are inaccurate. They are not telling you what’s going on, just like if you listen to particularly American politicians who are talking about identity politics or talking about inclusiveness by bringing in LGBT and Lord knows what else. This is meant to be misleading.

38:00
So let’s go to the essence of what people really are talking about. In the latter case, when I talk inclusiveness or these identity politics are intended to distract the audience from what politics are all about, always have been, and someday in the near future will revert to [be], which is about how you divide up the economic pie and who gets what from the economy. That’s what politics are supposed to be about.

And when you talk identity politics and minority politics, it’s intentionally distracting the voter on what politics are all about. But let’s go back to the extreme right, far right, whatever the adjective they put here. That’s not what her party stands for. It’s not what Orban stands for. It’s not to a lesser extent what Meloni stands for. What we’re talking about here, and particularly well-defined now in the group of patriots that Orbán is putting together, it is, first of all, less EU. And what does that mean by less EU?

39:14
It is a declaration of nationalism. Nationalism is by definition in the lexicon of the authoritarian left, and it is meant to be misleading. The– nationalism is said to be a cause of wars. The European adventure, the creation of the EU was supposed to be about preventing wars. And so, logically, you should be throttling, strangling nationalism. But there’s more to it than that. When you deny people their national identity, you are denying them their identity, and you’re preparing the way for fascism and for dictatorship. If people do not have an identity, religious, ethnic, otherwise, they have nothing to fall back upon. They are atomized in front of an authoritarian state. So all of these people professing liberal values, that is all completely phony and intentionally misleading.

40:41
Nationalism is one thing, but that’s not the whole story at all. Let’s take a less emotive word. A word that has been used a lot by Mr. Putin, and now is being used by other people. The word here is “sovereignty”. Mr. Orban is talking about Hungarian sovereignty. Wilders is talking about sovereignty. Even Meloni, weak reed that she is, is talking about Italian sovereignty — as opposed to globalism, which is denying national distinction, because national distinction is bad, and replacing it with this amorphous, empty designation, like Citizen, Citizeness of the French revolution. They are denying people their birthright for the sake of stealing their power.

42:00
it is all– i mean i said that politics is about economics and dividing the pie– the politics on a personal level of those who are practicing it is about power. And they are using these various word games to seize power and to hold power against the popular will and against the interests of their own people.

Alkhorshid: 42:29
Do you have any hope for the European Union, with the current situation, considering the current situation of the Union, to be a powerhouse? Everybody, I think, the European Union needs to be a powerhouse, just independent of Russia, China and the United States. Just deciding, considering their benefits. I’m talking about each and every of these countries, or even together.

Doctorow:
For it to be a powerhouse, it has to change its thinking entirely about what makes for power. The present conformist vassals of the United States who occupy the positions of power in the European Union have a mantra. And the mantra is: “Unity gives us strength”. I contest that. Unity in pursuit of delusional objectives gives you weakness. And all I see around me is weakness that thinks it is strength, because all 27 people, or countries, are saying the same thing. But 27 times “wrong” is still wrong, with just bigger letters.

43:48
And what they’re saying is dead wrong, but their understanding of so many factors in their neighborhood, starting with Russia, of course, is dead wrong. So, Europe cannot be a superpower if all of its thinking is founded on a fallacy, that Europe cannot be a superpower if it denies the civilizational values that it pretends to promote, starting with freedom of speech.

There is very little freedom of speech in Europe, much less than in the United States. And why is that? It’s not as if the United States hasn’t had its fit of McCarthyism, not just going back in the early days of the Cold War, but 10 years ago. When I was in– I was in a visiting fellow at Columbia in 2010, 2011, and what I saw around me was the aftereffect of the general paranoia that hit America after 9-11, when Americans willingly traded freedom for security.

45:09
Our journalists in newspapers like the “Financial Times” pretend to be very intellectual. They like to speak about Russians who trade “a chicken in every pot” for security and let the government do what it wishes. Well, that isn’t very true; not at all, from my experience; but that’s a separate issue. The main issue is: that’s exactly what Americans have done. They traded after 9-11 a hope for security against any say in how they’re governed. And that psychology, that is destructive of freedom, and destructive of the values that that our leaders pretend to honor in Europe.

46:08
Now, that was the case before Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump came along. I don’t like Mr. Trump particularly. I don’t like him as a personality. I don’t like his boastfulness, his arrogance, his ignorance, and whatever else. There are many things you can [cite] against him, including lying, of course. I’m more tolerant of lying, because it comes with the job. You cannot be perfectly frank and honest if you are a president. That’s a separate issue of taking us back to Machiavelli and “The Prince”.

The question is about what Mr. Trump did for all of us, wittingly, unwittingly, let’s say unwittingly. By saying what he did in the 2016 campaign, by putting in question NATO, by putting in question the value of hostility with Russia, he freed us all. I can tell you right now, I mean, take a publication that was widespread, widely subscribed to among American academics, “Johnson’s Russia List”. “Johnson’s Russia List” was, and still is, a daily digest of articles about Russia, about Ukraine, by professionals, for professionals.

47:36
In the period before Mr. Trump got his campaign going well, you could just die bored of reading it because all of the entries were by the slavish scribes and propaganda disseminators of the State Department. Nobody dared to say something different, because they didn’t want to lose their tenured positions, or they didn’t want to lose the respect of their colleagues. Mr. Trump opened his mouth and started saying things that if we ordinary mortals had said, we would have had the FBI at our door. He said it, they could not touch him; then he’s kept on saying it when he was president.

48:24
He gave us freedom, and those who say, “How horrible, he’s divided us”, what is politics about if not division? If politics is everyone singing from the same songbook, you don’t need elections. It is– you only get to the truth and you only get to good or better policies if they are questioned, if there are debates and if there is serious difference of opinion. Unfortunately, Europeans have forgotten these things, and they keep on saying how horrible it is for anyone to divide us. The Russians are trying to divide us, but they don’t tolerate any dissent or any other thinking.

49:09
When you have no dissent, you have inferior intellectual … roadmaps. You have to have dissent, you have to have differences of opinion, publicly expressed and defended, if you’re going to arrive at anything resembling workable policies and good policies, as opposed to intellectually inferior policies. Here in Europe, they just don’t get it, and they keep on clambering for unity, when what we need is division.

Alkhorshid: 49:44
You know, it seems that the conflict in Ukraine is approaching to the final stages, but at the same time we’re witnessing that the United States is forcing Europe and to move them toward China to be more aggressive toward China. And the question would be, we know that Europe was totally in line with the United States foreign policy in Russia, in sanctioning Russia, but when it comes to China, how capable is Europe to do that and how damaging that would be for Europe?

Doctorow: 50:22
Well, there won’t be much left of the European economy. The economy is limping along. You have to keep in mind that the destruction of the economy does not occur from one day to the next. It’s a slow process. Back in the 1980s, I worked for a company called ITT, International Telephone and Telegraph, which was the world’s biggest conglomerate put together by a business genius, a financial genius called Harold Geneen, and operating in all kinds of different industries.

And I knew soon after I joined, “This ship is going down.” It had new management. It didn’t under… And it was a victim of the business wisdom “horses for courses”. The business model that Mr. Geneen created did not long survive him as a viable model in a new business and interest environment. Interest is a key word. It’s always a major factor in viability of businesses.

Well, that kind of issue is what we see today. Here in Europe, the economy is sinking, but not in the way that you can see, “Ah, there are people that are going to drown tomorrow.” No, but it’s heading in that direction. When I walk down the street here in Brussels, the major commercial street, elegant, center of elegance, since its creation in the turn of the 20th century, there are so many shops that are vacant. When I hear the Belgian authorities say we have 2 percent inflation– yeah, maybe year on year, but we have like 40 percent inflation going back two years.

52:27
When you go to a restaurant and you see prices that are 40 percent higher than they were the last time you looked, I don’t want to hear about two percent inflation. It’s nonsense. And so it is about the state of the economy here. You just have to keep your eyes open. They tell you much more valuable things than what you can read in “Le soir” or “Echos de la Bourse” about the state of the economy. You see those empty shops, it tells you the real state of the economy, not good.

52:58
And in Germany, it’s a lot worse. Here in Belgium, we have a lot of protections put in place to prevent popular disturbances, namely inflation adjustments to shut up the labor unions and to counteract the worst effects of inflation. They’re much less practiced in Germany. Although Mr. Scholz tries various times to take the pain out of the soaring energy costs to households, in general, the protection of the German consumer is less solid there. The state of the German economy is deteriorating sharply. The biggest export industries are the worst hit, ever since the start of this economic war with Russia.

53:51
I have in mind particularly the automobile industry, where you speak to people who have friends who are working in the major German car producers. They know that this or that product line is down 30 percent, not 1 to 2 percent. So, the decline of the European economy, given that it’s so big and so rich, it takes time for the poverty and underlying weakness to become evident to everyone. But its trajectory is clear. Europe is in serious decline. And the people who are in charge, like Mr. Scholz, he doesn’t, he’s not capable of seeing, appreciating, let alone responding to these facts that are obvious to anybody who has a bit of sense in finance and business.

Alkhorshid: 54:50
Just to wrap up this session, do you see a future for European Union together with Russia when this conflict comes to an end and everybody want to know what would be the new face of Europe, what would be the future of Europe without Russia. Is that possible in your opinion?

Doctorow: 55:11
Well, how this war ends and how the European elites survive this will determine the outcome that you are asking me about. If NATO crumbles, if it faces the fact that it has not lived up to the reason of its foundation, which was to keep Russia down and out, and it turns out that Russia is resurgent, far more powerful, far more rational, and much better led than the NATO member countries, and these people are chased out, then what can come about is, as you say, a reconciliation, an acceptance of basic economic facts of life, which is that Russia is the best and most accessible source of critical materials for the European economy, and then logic will prevail, economic logic.

56:13
But if the present elites manage to hold on to their vestiges of power, and deny power to those who have better understood the situation and are better prepared to find a way out of the crisis, then I’m afraid Europe will not rise to the challenge and extricate itself from the present downward course that I have just described a moment ago.

As happens from time to time, it was an early morning WhatsApp invitation from a global broadcaster requesting interview time to discuss that 75^th anniversary summit opening today in Washington that prompted me to put on my thinking cap and make an effort to get my mind around this given event and offer an analysis that, hopefully, has added value and stands out among the myriad commentators that mainstream news purveyors will be publishing today.

The WION interview is posted on the internet here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaepcAih3kA

In what follows below, I build on the points set out in the video.

First, I was called upon to confirm the obvious: that the Ukraine war will be the leading subject for discussion among the assembled NATO leaders. This is so because it is the glue that holds the Alliance together today and gives it justificatory purpose. The expected presence of the self-proclaimed, presently unelected president of Ukraine Zelensky at the gathering is a token of the prominence that will be given to the Ukrainian question. However, this does not mean that there will be any date set by the Alliance for Ukraine’s being admitted. That eventuality is pushed back with the horizon as time marches on, the reason being that there is no unanimity among Alliance members on the point, and unanimity is an absolute requirement.

The mood in Washington is unlikely to be celebratory for several reasons, beginning with the political travails of several key members and due to the latest activities to defang NATO by one member, Hungary.

The host of the Summit, President Joe Biden, is presently fighting for his political life after his dismal performance in a televised debate with Donald Trump brought disarray to the Democratic party, where many party stalwarts and business financiers are openly calling for him to gracefully withdraw from the race to make room for an energetic candidate of a younger generation. Accordingly, other Alliance members are left to brood over the possibility of an electoral defeat for the Democrats in November, with the accession of Donald Trump to the White House likely spelling withdrawal of American military and financial support that are critical to the organization’s survival.

Meanwhile, France, another heavy-weight in the Alliance is now without a government due to self-inflicted wounds administered by President Macron in an opportunistic and short-sighted effort to keep from power his sworn enemy, Marine Le Pen by rigging the candidate lists across France during the week between rounds of balloting so as to present only the strongest candidate from among the New Popular Front (United Left) and his own centrist party. He achieved his objective: Le Pen’s National Rally party picked up only one third of the seats and not the anticipated absolute majority that would have assured France of a viable government of ‘cohabitation.’  Instead, with the seats allocated among three mutually incompatible blocs, France is now returned to the instability and weakness of its Fourth Republic. The country will be in no position to lend strong assistance to NATO in its Ukrainian adventure and all else.

As if that were not enough to dampen spirits, the energetic, very brave and apparently effective efforts of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban to shake up the EU and NATO these past several days indicate that Uniparty rule in Europe under the aegis of Washington’s ventriloquist dummies Ursula von der Leyen and Jens Stoltenberg may be coming to an end.

Within a day of taking over the six-month rotating Presidency of the European Council, Orban flew to Kiev to discuss with Volodymir Zelensky prospects for a ceasefire and opening of peace negotiations, followed by a similar mission to Moscow where he was received on short notice by President Vladimir for two and a half hours of talks.  Orban’s trip was denounced by von der Leyen as a betrayal amounting to appeasement of Russian aggression. He was denounced by Charles Michel of the European Council for acting without mandate from the EU.  However, Orban responded that he was not acting in the name of the EU but in the name of humanity, to spare us all further escalation of the conflict in the direction of Armageddon, where it is now headed absent any effort by the West to enter into direct diplomacy with Moscow. He successfully publicized in meetings with journalists that peace will never be achieved by bureaucrats, meaning the entire flock of unelected EU officials busy preening their own feathers; it will come about thanks to politicians opening up communications channels between the warring parties.

What has received little or no attention in mainstream is that in parallel with diplomatic travels that yesterday took him to Beijing, Orban’s Hungarian team has been busy building a new bloc of like-minded deputies to the EU Parliament who are taking their seats in Brussels as we speak. So far, to my knowledge, he has signed up MEPs from 12 countries under the name Patriots for Europe, and they will constitute the third largest bloc in the Parliament. This group will oppose the status quo domination of European politics by the Center Left-Center Right coalition of the European People’s Party and the Socialists and Democrats party.  The rallying cry of the Patriots for Europe is less Europe, meaning less intrusive EU Institutions, legislation, regulation and debt financing. They are calling for restoration of national sovereignty, stricter control of the borders to keep out illegals, and other causes that have broad popular backing but have been opposed, suppressed or marginalized by the EU powers that be these last five years.  None of this bodes well for NATO, of which nearly all EU Member States are participants.

Finally, I was privileged to be given the opportunity on WION to discuss the latest news from Kiev about a missile strike, allegedly by the Russians, that yesterday destroyed a children’s cancer hospital in the capital with loss of life among medical staff and patients.

As I noted, responsibility for this brutal act must be laid at the door of Mr. Zelensky, and not Mr. Putin. It fits perfectly into the pattern of false flag events that have been choreographed by intelligence operatives from Great Britain and the United States in a number of countries over the past decade, with particular attention now to Ukraine.

Very conveniently for Mr. Zelensky this disaster occurred the day before today’s opening ceremonies for the 75^th anniversary of NATO in Washington. It provides him and other speakers at this Summit with a rallying cry against Russia’s alleged inhumanity and violation of the rules of war in the Ukraine conflict, all for the purpose of rousing the participants to approve still more munitions and money for Kiev.

Similar coincidences have marked many of the false flag events of the past.  The cold-blooded murder of civilians in Bucha occurred in March 2022 just days after Kiev disavowed its signature on a draft peace treaty with Russia at the urging of Boris Johnson. It was a convenient post fact justification for doubling down on the war against the Kremlin.

Similarly, the death of Russian Opposition leader Alexei Navalny in his prison camp occurred very conveniently the day before the opening of the 2024 Munich Security Conference to which his wife, now widow had been invited to speak.

I will stop my detailing of these false flag events here and suggest that you take a look at the WION video.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Translation into German below (Andreas Mylaeus)

Die NATO feiert ihr 75-jähriges Bestehen heute auf einem Gipfel in Washington, D.C.

Wie so oft war es eine frühmorgendliche WhatsApp-Einladung eines internationalen Senders mit der Bitte um ein Interview zum Gipfel des 75. Jahrestages, der heute in Washington eröffnet wird, die mich dazu veranlasste, meine Denkmütze aufzusetzen und mich zu bemühen, mich mit diesem Ereignis auseinanderzusetzen und eine Analyse zu liefern, die hoffentlich einen Mehrwert hat und sich von den zahllosen Kommentaren abhebt, die die großen Nachrichtensender heute veröffentlichen werden.

Das WION-Interview ist hier im Internet zu finden:

Im Folgenden gehe ich auf die in dem Video dargelegten Punkte ein.

Zunächst wurde ich aufgefordert, das Offensichtliche zu bestätigen: Der Krieg in der Ukraine wird das wichtigste Diskussionsthema der versammelten NATO-Führer sein. Dies ist so, weil er der Kitt ist, der das Bündnis heute zusammenhält und ihm einen rechtfertigenden Zweck verleiht. Die erwartete Anwesenheit des selbsternannten, derzeit nicht gewählten ukrainischen Präsidenten Zelensky auf dem Treffen ist ein Zeichen für die Bedeutung, die der ukrainischen Frage beigemessen werden wird. Dies bedeutet jedoch nicht, dass das Bündnis einen Termin für die Aufnahme der Ukraine festsetzen wird. Diese Möglichkeit rückt mit der Zeit immer weiter in den Hintergrund, da sich die Mitglieder des Bündnisses in diesem Punkt nicht einig sind, und Einstimmigkeit ist ein absolutes Erfordernis.

Die Stimmung in Washington dürfte aus mehreren Gründen nicht gerade feierlich sein, angefangen bei den politischen Schwierigkeiten mehrerer wichtiger Mitglieder und den jüngsten Aktivitäten eines Mitglieds, nämlich Ungarns, die NATO zu schwächen.

Der Gastgeber des Gipfels, Präsident Joe Biden, kämpft derzeit um sein politisches Überleben, nachdem sein enttäuschendes Abschneiden in einer Fernsehdebatte mit Donald Trump die Demokratische Partei in Aufruhr versetzt hat, wo viele Parteigrößen und Finanziers aus der Wirtschaft offen fordern, dass er sich mit Würde aus dem Rennen zurückzieht, um Platz für einen energischen Kandidaten einer jüngeren Generation zu machen. Dementsprechend müssen andere Mitglieder des Bündnisses über die Möglichkeit einer Wahlniederlage der Demokraten im November grübeln, da der Einzug von Donald Trump ins Weiße Haus wahrscheinlich den Entzug der amerikanischen militärischen und finanziellen Unterstützung bedeuten wird, die für das Überleben der Organisation entscheidend ist.

In der Zwischenzeit ist Frankreich, ein weiteres Schwergewicht in der Allianz, nun ohne Regierung, da Präsident Macron sich selbst Wunden zugefügt hat, indem er opportunistisch und kurzsichtig versuchte, seine Erzfeindin Marine Le Pen von der Macht fernzuhalten, indem er in der Woche zwischen den Wahlgängen die Kandidatenlisten in ganz Frankreich manipulierte, um nur den stärksten Kandidaten der Neuen Volksfront (Vereinigte Linke) und seiner eigenen zentristischen Partei zu präsentieren. Er hat sein Ziel erreicht: Le Pens Partei Nationale Rallye erhielt nur ein Drittel der Sitze und nicht die erwartete absolute Mehrheit, die Frankreich eine lebensfähige Regierung des “Zusammenlebens” gesichert hätte. Stattdessen ist Frankreich mit der Verteilung der Sitze auf drei miteinander unvereinbare Blöcke in die Instabilität und Schwäche der Vierten Republik zurückgefallen. Das Land wird nicht in der Lage sein, die NATO bei ihrem ukrainischen Abenteuer und bei allem anderen tatkräftig zu unterstützen.

Als ob das nicht schon genug wäre, um die Stimmung zu trüben, deuten die energischen, sehr mutigen und offensichtlich effektiven Bemühungen des ungarischen Ministerpräsidenten Viktor Orban in den letzten Tagen, die EU und die NATO aufzurütteln, darauf hin, dass die Herrschaft der Unipartei in Europa unter der Ägide der Bauchrednerpuppen Ursula von der Leyen und Jens Stoltenberg in Washington möglicherweise zu Ende gehen wird.

Nur einen Tag nach der Übernahme der sechsmonatigen rotierenden Präsidentschaft des Europäischen Rates flog Orban nach Kiew, um mit Volodymir Zelensky die Aussichten für einen Waffenstillstand und die Aufnahme von Friedensverhandlungen zu erörtern, gefolgt von einer ähnlichen Reise nach Moskau, wo er kurzfristig von Präsident Wladimir Putin zu zweieinhalbstündigen Gesprächen empfangen wurde. Von der Leyen bezeichnete Orbans Reise als Verrat, der auf eine Beschwichtigung der russischen Aggression hinauslaufe. Charles Michel vom Europäischen Rat warf ihm vor, ohne Mandat der EU zu handeln. Orban entgegnete jedoch, dass er nicht im Namen der EU, sondern im Namen der Menschlichkeit handele, um uns allen eine weitere Eskalation des Konflikts in Richtung Armageddon zu ersparen, auf das der nun zusteuert, da der Westen keine Anstrengungen unternimmt, eine direkte Diplomatie mit Moskau aufzunehmen. In Gesprächen mit Journalisten hat er erfolgreich verkündet, dass der Frieden niemals von Bürokraten, d.h. von der ganzen Schar nicht gewählter EU-Beamter, die sich mit ihren eigenen Federn schmücken, erreicht werden kann, sondern nur von Politikern, die Kommunikationskanäle zwischen den Kriegsparteien öffnen.

Was im Mainstream wenig oder gar nicht beachtet wurde, ist die Tatsache, dass Orbans ungarisches Team parallel zu seinen diplomatischen Reisen, die ihn gestern nach Peking führten, damit beschäftigt war, einen neuen Block gleichgesinnter Abgeordneter des EU-Parlaments aufzubauen, die in diesem Moment ihre Plätze in Brüssel einnehmen. Soweit ich weiß, hat er bisher Abgeordnete aus 12 Ländern unter dem Namen “Patrioten für Europa” unter Vertrag genommen, die den drittgrößten Block im Parlament bilden werden. Diese Gruppe wird sich gegen die Vorherrschaft der Mitte-Links-Rechts-Koalition aus Europäischer Volkspartei und Sozialisten und Demokraten in der europäischen Politik stellen. Das Motto der Patrioten für Europa ist weniger Europa, d.h. weniger einschneidende EU-Institutionen, Rechtsvorschriften, Regulierung und Schuldenfinanzierung. Sie fordern die Wiederherstellung der nationalen Souveränität, eine strengere Kontrolle der Grenzen, um Illegale fernzuhalten, und andere Anliegen, die in der Bevölkerung breite Unterstützung finden, aber in den letzten fünf Jahren von den EU-Mächten abgelehnt, unterdrückt oder an den Rand gedrängt wurden. Das alles verheißt nichts Gutes für die NATO, der fast alle EU-Mitgliedstaaten angehören.

Schließlich hatte ich das Privileg, in der Sendung WION über die neuesten Nachrichten aus Kiew über einen angeblich von den Russen durchgeführten Raketenangriff zu sprechen, der gestern ein Kinderkrebskrankenhaus in der Hauptstadt zerstört hat und bei dem medizinisches Personal und Patienten ums Leben kamen.

Wie ich bereits sagte, muss die Verantwortung für diese brutale Tat Herrn Zelensky und nicht Herrn Putin angelastet werden. Sie passt perfekt in das Muster von Ereignissen unter falscher Flagge, die von Geheimdienstmitarbeitern Großbritanniens und der Vereinigten Staaten in den letzten zehn Jahren in einer Reihe von Ländern choreografiert wurden, wobei der Ukraine jetzt besondere Aufmerksamkeit gilt.

Es kommt Herrn Zelensky sehr gelegen, dass sich diese Katastrophe einen Tag vor den heutigen Eröffnungsfeierlichkeiten zum 75-jährigen Bestehen der NATO in Washington ereignet hat. Sie liefert ihm und anderen Rednern auf diesem Gipfel die Möglichkeit zu einem Aufschrei gegen Russlands angebliche Unmenschlichkeit und Verletzung der Kriegsregeln im Ukraine-Konflikt, und das alles nur, um die Teilnehmer dazu zu bewegen, noch mehr Munition und Geld für Kiew zu bewilligen.

Ähnliche Zufälle haben viele der Ereignisse unter falscher Flagge in der Vergangenheit gekennzeichnet. Der kaltblütige Mord an der Zivilbevölkerung in Bucha fand im März 2022 statt, nur wenige Tage nachdem Kiew auf Drängen von Boris Johnson seine Unterschrift unter den Entwurf eines Friedensvertrags mit Russland verweigert hatte. Dies war eine bequeme nachträgliche Rechtfertigung für die Verstärkung des Krieges gegen den Kreml.

Auch der Tod des russischen Oppositionsführers Alexej Nawalny in seinem Gefangenenlager erfolgte praktischerweise einen Tag vor der Eröffnung der Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz 2024, zu der seine Frau, jetzt Witwe, als Rednerin eingeladen worden war.

Ich werde meine Ausführungen zu diesen Ereignissen unter falscher Flagge hier beenden und schlage vor, dass Sie sich das WION-Video ansehen.

In the past five days, parliamentary elections were carried out in Britain and in France. The results were dramatic, attracting a great deal of media attention.

In this brief essay, we will look behind the bald facts of vote counts and strive to make sense of where the UK and France are headed. What does the latest news tell us about the ‘managed democracies’ in Europe? I will direct particular attention to the different electoral and governance systems operating in Britain and France, given that these respective systems were so influential in delivering the results we are seeing?

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The sitting governments in both France and the United Kingdom were overturned in the past week. Looking at the winners, one might conclude a new or updated Left has won in both elections. If so, this runs directly counter to the media bugbear of resurgent populism that supposedly endangers democracy. Should the winners break out the champagne?

In Britain, Labour won a landslide victory, taking absolute control of Parliament and ending 14 years of Tory chaos and misrule. In the American vernacular, British voters were given the opportunity to ‘throw the bums out’ and they availed themselves of it.  Tory leader and incoming Prime Minister Keir Starmer achieved this success by having expelled from the party the genuinely Leftist former leader Jeremy Corbyn and taken up the winning ‘New Labour’ centrist position first defined by former Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Some of the more odious former or present Tory ministers, such as the holder of the record for shortest time serving in 10 Downing Street, Liz Truss, lost their seats in Parliament.

In France, Macron’s party, or ‘movement,’ yesterday lost its tenuous hold on parliament, coming in second to the New Popular Front, as the united Left parties call themselves, in a three-way race. Macron and his supporters could savor a victory of sorts by having risen from the ashes of the European Parliament voting on 6 June and of the first round of balloting for their national parliament a week ago, when they appeared to enjoy no more than 15 – 20% of voter support. Now they hold nearly a third of parliamentary seats and can hope to forge a coalition with the united Left parties to keep their sworn enemies, the so-called ‘Extreme Right’ National Rally of Marine Le Pen, away from the levers of power. The outcome is what political commentators call a ‘hung parliament’ in which two of the three rival blocs of deputies will try to form a ruling coalition while the President tries to stand above the bickering and back-stabbing while exercising near-dictatorial powers of legislating by decree.

That there will be a lot of bickering is beyond doubt: the single most prominent voice in the New Popular Front is that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, head of the France Unbowed party. He is the embodiment of anti-capitalist spirits within the country, and though he claims that the Left is ready to govern, and though he or one of his allies may well be tapped by Macron to form a cabinet, it is hard to see how parliament and president can cooperate on anything whatsoever in the days and months ahead.  It is nearly certain that France will continue its descent from relevance within the EU and within the world at large that the dimwitted and cowardly François Hollande oversaw from his CIA-stage managed electoral victory back in 2012 onwards. In his years in office, Macron has tried repeatedly to rescue the country from its descent by one failed initiative after another.

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The opposing principles of the electoral and governance systems in Britain and France are ‘first past the post’ in the former, where victory is handed in each district to the candidate with the greatest number of votes, and inclusive, proportional representation in government of the latter wherein seats are reserved for representatives of minorities in the voting public. I say this in the full knowledge that the coalition governments which are the almost inevitable consequence of power sharing schemes and are widely practiced across the Continent, are the rare exception, not the rule in France. In France, it has been customary for one party to hold an absolute majority in parliament and to form a cabinet of ministers that shares the same policy priorities and is chosen from among those prepared to assume power at any time in what the British call a ‘shadow cabinet.’

The strength of the British system is that it makes possible sharp changes in direction of government policy when the public is persuaded that the powers that be are not functioning in their interests. The weak point is that given the often low levels of voter turn-out and the share of votes cast held by the winning party relative to all votes, the incoming government may actually be said to represent a very small percentage of all eligible voters. Margaret Thatcher, for example, dramatically changed the direction of the British government while having enjoyed no more than 25% of the popular vote.

In the given case of the British elections on 4 July, something similar occurred. It has been widely commented by political analysts, and stated most succinctly and pointedly by the leader of the Reform UK party Nigel Farage, that the vote for Labour was not so much attributable to support for Labour as it was a rejection of the Tories.  By Farage’s estimate, perhaps half of the Labour vote falls into this category, so that the actual support level of Labour and its policies may have been no more than 18% of the electorate.  Of course, this detail is swept under the carpet in the headlines and opening paragraphs of the reports we read in the press and see on mainstream television.

The strength of the Continent-wide system of power sharing and coalitions is its ‘progressive’ appearance, its very inclusiveness.  Inclusiveness, let us remember, is the new divide between Conservatives and Liberals, whether it goes by the name ‘identity politics’ or not.  It long ago replaced policies for how you divide up the economic pie among contending strata of the population. On the Continent, many different parties get to share in the responsibilities and spoils of power.

I put the accent on ‘spoils,’ because I maintain that coalitions are a formula for institutionalized corruption. Governments are formed by back-room deals among the various parties in the agreed coalition. Ministerial portfolios are allocated with scant attention to the competence of the appointees for the given post, looking instead to the need to reward top party personalities for their adherence to the coalition.  And the policies set out may well be in sharp contradiction with one another, meaning implementation can well be inconsistent and ineffective. There can be no better illustration of the pitiful results of coalition building than the current federal government of Germany, where ill-educated and wholly incompetent ministers such as Annalena Baerbock at Foreign Affair and Economy Minister Robert Habeck are a disgrace to the good name of European statesmen and women from generations past.

Let me emphasize here that a hung parliament was precisely the wish of Macron and his immediate entourage when they understood that there was no chance of their own list of candidates holding onto power alone and there was every risk of Le Pen getting an absolute majority. The pro-Macron forces of French politics are strongly pro-market, as one would expect from a leader who entered politics after making his career in the counting rooms of the Rothschild bankers and brokers. Yet, out of purely opportunistic calculations, in the week between the first and second rounds of balloting, they reached agreement with the New Popular Front on which of the two would withdraw their candidate from the race in given electoral districts so as to better ensure victory over Le Pen’s party there.  It worked, but will the resulting parliament work?  That seems not to interest M. Macron at this moment.

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In his victory speech, following official release of the vote results, Keir Starmer twice made the remark that in power he will place ‘country above party.’  Emmanuel Macron and his allies have pursued the opposite, party above country, and France will be the worse for it. 

But then again, we in the pro-Sovereignty, anti-globalist, anti-supranational bureaucracy Opposition can only say ‘the worse, the better.’

One thing is certain in France: the country will be rent with internal discord at the highest levels of government.  The Fifth Republic has survived periods of ‘cohabitation’ between a President of one party and set of policy priorities and a parliamentary majority held by another party with different policy priorities. It has not experienced the cohabitation with a hung parliament that we see now.

As regards foreign policy, our newspapers today speak of the blow to Israeli interests that the approach to power by Mélenchon with his pro-Palestinian bias signifies. We hear less about what the electoral outcome in France signifies for the war in and about Ukraine.  A victory by Le Pen would certainly have put a check on any further French military commitments to Kiev, and possibly would have led to French withdrawal from NATO.  For the moment, that very possibility has been eliminated.  Nonetheless, a weak and divided France, such as we shall see in the months ahead, is good news for those of us who wish to see an end to the spineless conformism at the top of European Institutions leading us all towards Armageddon.

Regrettably, in Britain there will be no change from the pandering to Washington’s worst instincts and unlimited support for the dictator in Kiev. The only voice in British politics who stands for reason on relations with Russia is Nigel Farage. It is some small consolation that Farage has won a seat in Parliament, even though the 15% of the popular vote that his party achieved has not been rewarded by more than a handful of seats.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Postscript: One reader has brought to my attention the fact that France in fact has a first past the post as opposed to the proportional representation system so common elsewhere on the Continent. Accordingly I shift my emphasis elsewhere in the French situation and say that the outcome is uniquely due to Macron’s opportunism and tactical thinking at the expense of strategic thinking and patriotism; he has engineered a three way split in the lower chamber to keep Le Pen from power while knowingly making Franch ungovernable and returning the country to the instability it suffered during the Fourth Republic.

Yesterday I was contacted by RIA Novosti to offer my thoughts about the ongoing visit of Hungary’s premier, current holder of the EU’s revolving presidency Viktor Orban. This is what I wrote:

Quote

I find Viktor Orban’s visit to Moscow remarkable for its demonstration that courage and decency have not utterly disappeared among European elites. His riposte to taunting by Josep Borrel and Charles Michel was exemplary for its reasonableness and moderation. They had denounced Orban for traveling to Moscow without a mandate to speak on behalf of the European Union. He responded that he was speaking on behalf of humanity which is deeply interested in the return of peace to Europe and was not speaking on behalf of the EU in his capacity as holder of the six-month revolving presidency.

Let us hope that such boldness will enable other heads of state and government in Europe to depart from their slavish conformism and do the right thing, namely withdraw military and financial support from Kiev unless it enters into negotiations with Russia to end the war with immediate effect.

Unquote

Today there is a video of the press conference held in Moscow by Orban and Putin following the conclusion of their talks which allows me to fill out this appreciation with several further remarks.

See  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_J9aZgNBHw   (in Russian and Hungarian)

Leaders’ closing statements, Orban’s peace mission to Moscow.
Rough ENGLISH subtitles. Spoken translations REMOVED.

https://odysee.com/@unRhodes-ian:6/Putin-Orban-EN-subs-v2.1:1

This “press conference” was in fact a platform for Orban and Putin to state publicly their views on what took place between them and what lies ahead. No questions were taken from the journalists in attendance.

What each had to say was important.

Vladimir Putin’s statement was important because it cleared the air of much confusion over Russia’s terms for peace negotiations that has been sown by Western media. I think in particular of this eye-catching article in The Daily Mail of 3 July:  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13596493/Putin-prepared-SHARE-Crimea-Ukraine-according-new-peace-plan-presented-Russia-US.html The newspaper tells us about an alleged back channel to Washington used by the Kremlin to propose startling new conditions for peace.

Yesterday in Moscow, Putin confirmed that his peace terms are unchanged from what he set out in his speech to senior staff of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs a couple of weeks ago. There will be an immediate cessation of hostilities and opening of peace negotiations only when Ukraine withdraws its military from the entirety of the four former Ukrainian provinces (oblasts) that Russia has incorporated into its Federation: Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhie. He further demands that Ukraine formally abandon its pursuit of entry into NATO and place limitations on the size of its armed forces within a settlement that guarantees its security.

Vladimir Putin reiterated that Russia stands ready to declare a ceasefire and enter into peace talks at any time, but that Kiev refuses to do so. And he identified a reason for Kiev’s refusal that we have not heard before: namely the by ending hostilities, Kiev will have to end rule by martial law and to hold presidential elections which were cancelled in March precisely because of the martial law conditions. The chances of the current Kiev regime winning such elections are, in Putin’s estimation, nil and this is understood perfectly well by Zelensky and his minions.

As regards the talks with Orban, Putin stated only that Orban set out the West’s positions on the international situation, including the Ukrainian conflict. He called their talks ‘frank,’ which in diplomatic lexicon means that the sides remain far apart.

What Viktor Orban had to say was important because it broke new ground, moving from the Brussels chant of ‘war, war’ and ever greater arms shipments for Kiev to recognition of the need for peace through diplomacy. In this first visit to Moscow since the start of hostilities in Ukraine two and a half years ago, he insisted on the necessity for reopening dialogue, saying that peace will not come of itself but will require hard work to be achieved, for which dialogue is an essential precondition.

He set the task of bringing peace to Europe as the purpose to which he dedicates his term as head of the EU presidency.  He claimed that the war had negatively impacted Europe, undermining its prosperity and global competitiveness.

Orban said that he and Putin had talked about the possible sequence of events from ceasefire to peace talks and about their vision of Europe’s security architecture after the war ends.

Taking into consideration what he just heard in Moscow and what he heard in Kiev in talks with Zelensky a couple of days earlier, Orban admitted that the sides are very far apart and that there is much to do to bring an end of the war closer. But, at least, we have established contact, he concluded.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Postscript : Victor Orban’s interview with Weltwoche on return flight from Moscow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-KbKJfPM1I

Note that the journalist opens this video in German but the entire interview is conducted in English.

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Viktor Orbans Friedensmission in Moskau

Gestern wurde ich von RIA Novosti kontaktiert, um meine Gedanken über den aktuellen Besuch des ungarischen Ministerpräsidenten und derzeitigen Inhabers der rotierenden EU-Ratspräsidentschaft Viktor Orban darzulegen. Dies habe ich geschrieben:

Zitat

Ich finde Viktor Orbans Besuch in Moskau bemerkenswert, weil er zeigt, dass Mut und Anstand bei den europäischen Eliten noch nicht völlig verschwunden sind. Seine Antwort auf die Verhöhnung durch Josep Borrel und Charles Michel war beispielhaft für ihre Vernunft und Mäßigung. Sie hatten Orban vorgeworfen, er sei ohne Mandat nach Moskau gereist, um im Namen der Europäischen Union zu sprechen. Er antwortete, dass er im Namen der Menschheit spreche, die zutiefst an der Rückkehr des Friedens in Europa interessiert sei, und nicht im Namen der EU in seiner Eigenschaft als Inhaber des sechsmonatigen rotierenden Ratsvorsitzes.

Es bleibt zu hoffen, dass dieser Mut andere Staats- und Regierungschefs in Europa dazu veranlasst, von ihrem sklavischen Konformismus abzuweichen und das Richtige zu tun, nämlich Kiew die militärische und finanzielle Unterstützung zu entziehen, wenn es nicht in Verhandlungen mit Russland eintritt, um den Krieg mit sofortiger Wirkung zu beenden.

Ende des Zitats

Heute gibt es ein Video von der Pressekonferenz, die Orban und Putin nach Abschluss ihrer Gespräche in Moskau abhielten, was mir erlaubt, diese Würdigung mit einigen weiteren Bemerkungen zu ergänzen.

Siehe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_J9aZgNBHw   (auf russisch und auf ungarisch)

Diese “Pressekonferenz” war in Wirklichkeit eine Plattform für Orban und Putin, um öffentlich ihre Ansichten über die Ereignisse zwischen ihnen und die Zukunft darzulegen. Von den anwesenden Journalisten wurden keine Fragen gestellt.

Was beide zu sagen hatten, war wichtig.

Wladimir Putins Erklärung war wichtig, weil sie die Verwirrung über Russlands Bedingungen für die Friedensverhandlungen, die von den westlichen Medien verbreitet wurde, ausräumte. Ich denke dabei vor allem an diesen aufsehenerregenden Artikel in der Daily Mail vom 3. Juli: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13596493/Putin-prepared-SHARE-Crimea-Ukraine-according-new-peace-plan-presented-Russia-US.html

Die Zeitung berichtete über einen angeblichen Hintergrundkanal nach Washington, den der Kreml genutzt habe, um verblüffende neue Friedensbedingungen vorzuschlagen.

Gestern bestätigte Putin in Moskau, dass seine Friedensbedingungen unverändert gegenüber denen sind, die er vor einigen Wochen in seiner Rede vor hochrangigen Mitarbeitern des russischen Außenministeriums dargelegt hatte. Eine sofortige Einstellung der Feindseligkeiten und die Aufnahme von Friedensverhandlungen wird es nur geben, wenn die Ukraine ihr Militär aus allen vier ehemaligen ukrainischen Provinzen (Oblasten) abzieht, die Russland in seine Föderation eingegliedert hat: Donezk, Lugansk, Cherson und Saporoschje. Außerdem fordert er, dass die Ukraine ihr Streben nach einem NATO-Beitritt formell aufgibt und die Größe ihrer Streitkräfte im Rahmen einer Regelung begrenzt, die ihre Sicherheit gewährleistet.

Wladimir Putin bekräftigte, dass Russland jederzeit bereit sei, einen Waffenstillstand auszurufen und Friedensgespräche aufzunehmen, Kiew sich aber weigere, dies zu tun. Und er nannte einen Grund für die Weigerung Kiews, den wir bisher noch nicht gehört haben: Wenn Kiew die Feindseligkeiten beendet, muss es das Kriegsrecht aufheben und die Präsidentschaftswahlen abhalten, die im März gerade wegen des Kriegsrechts abgesagt worden waren. Die Chancen, dass das derzeitige Kiewer Regime solche Wahlen gewinnt, sind nach Putins Einschätzung gleich null, und das wissen Zelenski und seine Gefolgsleute sehr wohl.

Zu den Gesprächen mit Orban erklärte Putin lediglich, dass Orban die Positionen des Westens zur internationalen Lage, einschließlich des Ukraine-Konflikts, dargelegt habe. Er bezeichnete ihre Gespräche als “offen”, was im diplomatischen Sprachgebrauch bedeutet, dass die Seiten noch weit auseinander liegen.

Was Viktor Orban zu sagen hatte, war wichtig, weil er neue Wege beschritt, indem er sich vom Brüsseler Ruf nach “Krieg, Krieg” und immer größeren Waffenlieferungen für Kiew abwandte und die Notwendigkeit eines Friedens durch Diplomatie anerkannte. Bei seinem ersten Besuch in Moskau seit Beginn der Feindseligkeiten in der Ukraine vor zweieinhalb Jahren betonte er die Notwendigkeit der Wiederaufnahme des Dialogs und sagte, dass der Frieden nicht von selbst kommen werde, sondern harte Arbeit erfordere, für die der Dialog eine wesentliche Voraussetzung sei.

Als Ziel für seine Amtszeit als EU-Ratspräsident nannte er die Aufgabe, den Frieden in Europa zu sichern. Er behauptete, der Krieg habe sich negativ auf Europa ausgewirkt und dessen Wohlstand und globale Wettbewerbsfähigkeit untergraben.

Orban sagte, er und Putin hätten über die mögliche Abfolge der Ereignisse vom Waffenstillstand bis zu Friedensgesprächen und über ihre Vision der europäischen Sicherheitsarchitektur nach dem Ende des Krieges gesprochen.

In Anbetracht dessen, was er gerade in Moskau und einige Tage zuvor in Kiew bei Gesprächen mit Zelensky gehört hatte, räumte Orban ein, dass die Seiten noch sehr weit voneinander entfernt seien und dass es noch viel zu tun gebe, um ein Ende des Krieges näher zu bringen. Aber zumindest haben wir Kontakt aufgenommen, schloss er.

Yesterday saw the conclusion of the two-day summit in Astana, Kazakhstan that brought together the heads of state and government of eight of the nine members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The only missing prime minister was Modi from India, but he will shortly make amends by paying a state visit in Moscow in the coming week. On the positive side of the ledger, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus was present to witness the rise of his country from observer status to full membership. Among the several candidate states for entry into this club represented in Astana at the highest level, the most notable was President Erdogan of Turkey.

As for what may have been accomplished in Astana, we can say that at a minimum it provided its participants with the opportunity for confidential bilateral talks at a time that is fraught with risk, given the hearths of war in Ukraine, in Gaza and in the Straits of Taiwan. We know that Vladimir Putin made good use of the visit to line up a full day’s sequence of tête-à-têtes, the most important of which, surely, was with Chinese President Xi.

So far, the texts of official documents signed by the participants have not been published or even described. We may assume these are mostly of an economic nature. However, the news about Belarus gaining full membership and the announcement on the sidelines of the summit by President Xi that China will back SCO host Kazakhstan’s bid to join BRICS give us clear indications that this summit marks a turning point in the repurposing of the SCO from a regional club that ensures security in Central Asia, which was its founding mission in 2001, to become the security provider to the Eurasian continent, and also that it may ultimately, before 2030, merge with BRICS.

At the founding of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2001, Islamic terror emanating from Afghanistan was a real threat to the Central Asian region which borders China in the East and Russia in the West and North. This region was central to American and British efforts to weaken the security and divert attention of these two Great Powers from their presence at the global level. Moreover, both terror and the intervention of Western powers complicated efforts of China and Russia to avoid conflict between their own competing political and economic ambitions in the region. Creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization made it possible to manage these challenges effectively.

The durability of this solution was proven most recently, when U.S. efforts by Tony Blinken in the past year and British efforts by Lord Cameron in the past several months to draw the various Central Asian states away from Russia and China and into the U.S.-led world order failed miserably. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan remain solidly embedded in the Russian-Chinese spheres of influence, and Russia’s clear victory in its military confrontation with the Collective West in and over Ukraine has brought to bear on the attractions of the regional status quo the luster of being on the winning side in the worldwide competition. One can put paid to the notion of a revival of the 19^th century British-Russian Great Game in this part of the world.

The admission of India and Pakistan in 2017, then, in 2023, the admission of Iran to full membership in the SCO pointed to its repurposing to come. From that point on it represented the lion’s share of the population of Asia. The addition of Belarus now adds a distinctly European dimension to the membershjp, since Belarus, unlike Russia, is strictly a European geographic entity. This suits the new interest of both Russia and China to create a security architecture for the entire Eurasian land mass built upon the nation states residing there and excluding outside powers, most notably the United States.

We are moving on metaphorically from the Mercator Projection maps to a Eurasia-centric map of the word which has no tolerance for Atlanticism. In this new map, the outlying fringes of the world are not somewhere in Africa or Southeast Asia: the outlying fringe is Europe, which is reduced to a peninsula at the western extreme of the Eurasian continent. Put in geopolitical terms, Russia and China are presently declaring their own version of the Monroe Doctrine and telling the United States to clear out.

This changed view of the world and of how security can be assured is a direct result of what Russia has experienced these past two years plus of the war in Ukraine.

Back in 2008, in the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been tasked with presenting and negotiating with NATO member states a revised security architecture for Europe that would bring Russia in from the cold.  As we know, that initiative was haughtily snubbed by Angela Merkel and by the other decision makers in Europe and North America. 

As recently as December 2021, President Putin had attempted to renew dialogue with the United States and with NATO over a revised security architecture for Europe that would move back NATO’s troops and installations from the easternmost member states to where they stood before the NATO expansion of the Clinton years.

The new concept of a Eurasian security architecture that we now see developing within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization marks a break from all those past Russian initiatives and presents the greatest challenge to the existence of NATO at the very time when a possible return of Donald Trump to the presidency puts that organization in jeopardy from withdrawal of support by its single biggest contributor.

In yesterday evening’s panel discussion on Iran’s Press TV, I was given the opportunity to set out key points from the foregoing.

See https://www.urmedium.net/c/presstv/130005

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Transcript below by a reader

PressTV: 0:01
Joining us now for the program is Gilbert Doctorow, independent international affairs analyst out of Brussels; and John Bosnitch, journalist and activist and political analyst, joining us out of Fredericton. I’d like to welcome you both, gentlemen, to the program.

I guess we’ll start with you, Mr. Doctorow. Your initial thoughts, I mean the Shanghai Organization, Cooperation Organization, along with BRICS, started off with just a couple or handful of countries, and they’re quickly spreading and ballooning. Now I believe the SCO has nine permanent members and four observer members, but both the SCO and BRICS are rapidly growing. What is the attraction here?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 0:42
The attraction is that, well, taking the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, that alone is 40 percent of the human population on Earth. It is 20 percent of the GNP. So, it is a very large part of human activity and a great opportunity for its members to increase their economic activity and the security arrangements with fellow members. Now, the expansion is not chaotic, the expansion is not chance, the expansion of the Shanghai Organization, just like the recent expansion of BRICS, has some logic to it. And the logic, if you project out several years, is that these two organizations will merge.

1:31
The Shanghai Organization was founded as a security organization primarily, with an economic and trade interest as a secondary field of activity. BRICS, on the other hand, was founded primarily as an economic and trading and finance organization. The BRICS has no institutional structure, whereas the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has traditional international type elements to its structure. So these two organizations are complementary, and it’s not at all accidental that Iran is a member of both.

The expansion this year of the Shanghai Organization by the addition of Belarus tells us that this organization is changing its purpose substantially, and that is of course of interest to Iran and the other members. It was created initially, going back to the Chinese and Russian start of it, to look after Central Asia and to provide security provisions for Central Asia in an age of rampant terrorism.

2:56
However, what we see now is a rewriting, a revision of the Shanghai Organization in keeping with what founding members, and particularly Russia, see as the new mission. Russia had been, since 2008, in the presidency of Mr. Medvedev, had been working to rewrite, to revise the security architecture of Europe. And it had proposed to Western Europe and to the States provisions for revising that security architecture.

What we see now is something very different. Russia has moved on as a result of what it has learned in the conflict with NATO over Ukraine, and Russia is now pressing for a pan-Eurasian security architecture. And that is a very interesting proposition, which I imagine will be developed in coming sessions.

PressTV: 3:59
Okay. Thank you, Mr. Doctorow. Mr. John Bosnitch out of New Brunswick, welcome to the conversation here. Now, John, how does the SCO promote a multi-polar world order, and how does that challenge the status quo?

John Bosnitch
Well, as we know, the American, and we basically call it the Anglo-American empire, is slowly collapsing. And in an effort to avoid a direct military confrontation, both China and Russia opted to create self-defensive mechanisms and bilateral trade organizations, which have now spread across, as my fellow commentator today has said, spread across the economic borders and are mixing economy and state security and started with the actions against terrorism.

4:55
But now that the West elevated their operations in Ukraine to the level of state terror, by taking over the government of Ukraine in a coup d’etat, then these organizations have to continue to expand. And it is not coincidental that Belarus– bordering directly on Ukraine and on the conflict region there– that Belarus has now been brought into the fold. This is a clear indication that China has a great interest in protecting Russia’s status in Ukraine and protecting the ethnic Russians of Ukraine.

These developments, done in typical Chinese and Russian fashion– in other words, well thought out, deliberately planned and executed in a calm manner– these developments pose a serious blockade against a continued Western aggression into the entire Eurasian region. And they come exactly in time as we see the West’s failure to take military control over the whole of Ukraine and perhaps they could lose the conflict there completely. So this is a critical parallel development in the interests of peace, and against the continuing military aggression that has been pushed from the West ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

PressTV: 6:19
Thank you, Mr. Bosnitch. And now, Mr Doctorow, back to you. Iran: how can Iran benefit from its SCO membership in a new light, especially with the heavy sanctions it has hanging over its head?

Doctorow:
Well, on the economic side, as we know, both BRICS and the Shanghai Organization are working for de-dollarisation. That is a matter of great interest to Iran. Both organisations are supportive of the North-South corridor, for which Iran is a major actor and beneficiary. This transport’s logistical hub position of Iran, it provides a great opportunity for expanded sales of hydrocarbons by Iran and for leveling out the supply domestically in Iran of hydrocarbons, which are not uniform across the country but are concentrated in various areas.

7:25
The cooperation with Russia, both as a fellow BRICS and SCO member, in the energy area is of paramount importance. We know that Russian hydrocarbon companies are investing heavily in facilitating exploration and production in Iran. So, Iran, I think, feels the comfort of the strong political support that both of the founding and most important members of both organizations, China and Russia, are giving it. And that moderates policy within Iran, to everyone’s benefit.

PressTV: 8:04
Right, and final thoughts with you Mr. John Bosnitch. This is a growing list of countries that find such an attraction and are gravitating toward this ideology of de-dollarization. Why are we witnessing this?

Bosnitch:
Pardon me, the last sentence?

PressTV:
De-dollarization. Why has it become such an attractive ideology?

Bosnitch:
Well, obviously, if you allow the Anglo-American empire to endlessly print dollars, and you accept those dollars as having an exchange value against real items such as gold, such as oil, such as other gas and similar products, then you’re actually allowing the empire to print unlimited toilet paper, which you are accepting as having some value.

8:56
So as soon as the countries that are gathered in these various broader economic organizations– that range all the way from the Pacific right into the center of Europe and down into Africa and across into South America– as soon as these countries accept the fact that they are providing the value to the U.S. dollar by exchanging it in return for their massive resources, as soon as they refuse to do that, then the U.S. dollar has nothing to stand on except the resources of the United States.

And as we know, the United States is the most indebted country in the history of the world. This is the end. If the American dollar is no longer accepted as being worth something in hydrocarbons and is no longer accepted as being worth something in terms of gold, it is the end of the empire. An empire is determined by– the power of an empire is determined by the buying power of its currency. If the US dollar fails to buy what it used to buy in the past, the empire is done, and it is done without firing a shot.

PressTV: 10:04
All right, gentlemen, thank you both for joining us on the program. Gilbert Doctorow there joining us from Brussels. And John Bosnitch is joining us from Fredericton, New Brunswick. That’s out there in Canada.

10:19
And, viewers, this brings us to the conclusion of this segment of your PressTV News Review program. Thank you for tuning in, and goodbye for now.

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Bedeutung des jüngsten Gipfeltreffens der Shanghaier Organisation für Zusammenarbeit in Astana (Kasachstan)

Gestern ging der zweitägige Gipfel in Astana, Kasachstan, zu Ende, an dem die Staats- und Regierungschefs von acht der neun Mitglieder der Shanghai Organisation für Zusammenarbeit (Shanghai Cooperation Organization – SCO) teilnahmen. Lediglich der indische Premierminister Modi fehlte, doch wird er dies in der kommenden Woche mit einem Staatsbesuch in Moskau nachholen. Positiv zu vermerken ist, dass Alexander Lukaschenko aus Weißrussland anwesend war, um den Aufstieg seines Landes vom Beobachterstatus zur Vollmitgliedschaft mitzuerleben. Unter den zahlreichen Beitrittskandidaten, die in Astana auf höchster Ebene vertreten waren, fiel vor allem der türkische Präsident Erdogan auf.

Was die Ergebnisse von Astana betrifft, so können wir sagen, dass sie den Teilnehmern zumindest die Gelegenheit zu vertraulichen bilateralen Gesprächen in einer Zeit boten, die angesichts der Kriegsherde in der Ukraine, im Gazastreifen und in der Straße von Taiwan mit Risiken behaftet ist. Wir wissen, dass Wladimir Putin den Besuch genutzt hat, um einen ganzen Tag lang eine Reihe von Tête-à-Têtes zu führen, von denen das wichtigste sicherlich mit dem chinesischen Präsidenten Xi stattfand.

Bisher wurden die Texte der von den Teilnehmern unterzeichneten offiziellen Dokumente nicht veröffentlicht oder gar beschrieben. Wir können davon ausgehen, dass diese hauptsächlich wirtschaftlicher Natur sind. Die Nachricht von der Vollmitgliedschaft Weißrusslands und die Ankündigung von Präsident Xi am Rande des Gipfels, dass China den Antrag des SCO-Gastgebers Kasachstan auf Beitritt zu den BRICS unterstützen wird, sind jedoch eindeutige Hinweise darauf, dass dieser Gipfel einen Wendepunkt in der Umwidmung der SCO von einem regionalen Klub, der die Sicherheit in Zentralasien gewährleistet, was ihre Gründungsaufgabe im Jahr 2001 war, in einen Sicherheitsdienstleister für den eurasischen Kontinent markiert, und dass sie schließlich vor 2030 mit den BRICS fusionieren könnte.

Bei der Gründung der Shanghai Organisation für Zusammenarbeit im Jahr 2001 war der von Afghanistan ausgehende islamische Terror eine echte Bedrohung für die zentralasiatische Region, die im Osten an China und im Westen und Norden an Russland grenzt. Diese Region stand im Mittelpunkt der amerikanischen und britischen Bemühungen, die Sicherheit zu schwächen und die Aufmerksamkeit dieser beiden Großmächte von ihrer Präsenz auf globaler Ebene abzulenken. Darüber hinaus erschwerten sowohl der Terror als auch die Intervention der westlichen Mächte die Bemühungen Chinas und Russlands, Konflikte zwischen ihren eigenen konkurrierenden politischen und wirtschaftlichen Ambitionen in der Region zu vermeiden. Die Gründung der Shanghai Organisation für Zusammenarbeit ermöglichte es, diese Herausforderungen effektiv zu bewältigen.

Die Dauerhaftigkeit dieser Lösung wurde zuletzt unter Beweis gestellt, als die Bemühungen der USA unter Tony Blinken im vergangenen Jahr und der Briten unter Lord Cameron in den vergangenen Monaten, die verschiedenen zentralasiatischen Staaten von Russland und China weg in die US-geführte Weltordnung zu ziehen, kläglich scheiterten. Kasachstan, Usbekistan, Kirgisistan und Tadschikistan sind nach wie vor fest in die russisch-chinesischen Einflusssphären eingebettet, und der klare Sieg Russlands in der militärischen Konfrontation mit dem kollektiven Westen in und um die Ukraine hat den Attraktionen des regionalen Status quo den Glanz verliehen, im weltweiten Wettbewerb auf der Gewinnerseite zu stehen. Der Gedanke an eine Wiederbelebung des britisch-russischen Great Game aus dem 19. Jahrhundert in diesem Teil der Welt kann ad acta gelegt werden.

Die Aufnahme Indiens und Pakistans im Jahr 2017 und die Aufnahme des Iran als Vollmitglied in die SCO im Jahr 2023 deuteten auf die bevorstehende Neuausrichtung hin. Von diesem Zeitpunkt an repräsentierte sie den Löwenanteil der Bevölkerung Asiens. Die Aufnahme Weißrusslands verleiht der SCO nun eine eindeutig europäische Dimension, da Weißrussland im Gegensatz zu Russland eine rein europäische geografische Einheit ist. Dies kommt dem neuen Interesse Russlands und Chinas entgegen, eine Sicherheitsarchitektur für die gesamte eurasische Landmasse zu schaffen, die sich auf die dort ansässigen Nationalstaaten stützt und äußere Mächte, vor allem die Vereinigten Staaten, ausschließt.

Wir bewegen uns metaphorisch von den Karten der Mercator-Projektion zu einer eurasisch-zentrierten Weltkarte, die keine Toleranz für den Atlantismus kennt. In dieser neuen Karte befinden sich die äußeren Ränder der Welt nicht irgendwo in Afrika oder Südostasien: Der äußere Rand ist Europa, das auf eine Halbinsel am westlichen Ende des eurasischen Kontinents reduziert wird. Geopolitisch ausgedrückt, verkünden Russland und China derzeit ihre eigene Version der Monroe-Doktrin und sagen den Vereinigten Staaten, sie sollen sich zurückziehen.

Diese veränderte Sicht auf die Welt und die Gewährleistung von Sicherheit ist eine direkte Folge dessen, was Russland in den letzten zwei Jahren und im Krieg in der Ukraine erlebt hat.

Im Jahr 2008, während der Präsidentschaft von Dmitri Medwedew, hatte das russische Außenministerium die Aufgabe, den NATO-Mitgliedstaaten eine überarbeitete Sicherheitsarchitektur für Europa vorzulegen und mit ihnen zu verhandeln, die Russland aus der Kälte herausholen sollte. Wie wir wissen, wurde diese Initiative von Angela Merkel und den anderen Entscheidungsträgern in Europa und Nordamerika hochmütig abgelehnt.

Noch im Dezember 2021 hatte Präsident Putin versucht, den Dialog mit den Vereinigten Staaten und der NATO über eine überarbeitete Sicherheitsarchitektur für Europa zu erneuern, die die Truppen und Einrichtungen der NATO aus den östlichsten Mitgliedstaaten dorthin zurückführen würde, wo sie vor der NATO-Erweiterung der Clinton-Jahre standen.

Das neue Konzept einer eurasischen Sicherheitsarchitektur, das sich jetzt im Rahmen der Schanghai Organisation für Zusammenarbeit entwickelt, stellt einen Bruch mit all diesen früheren russischen Initiativen dar und ist die größte Herausforderung für die Existenz der NATO, und zwar genau zu dem Zeitpunkt, an dem eine mögliche Rückkehr Donald Trumps ins Präsidentenamt diese Organisation durch den Entzug der Unterstützung durch ihren größten Beitragszahler in Gefahr bringt.

In der gestrigen Podiumsdiskussion des iranischen Senders Press TV hatte ich die Gelegenheit, die wichtigsten Punkte des Vorstehenden darzulegen.

Siehe https://www.urmedium.net/c/presstv/130005

Nachstehend das Transkript eines Lesers

PressTV: 0:01
Gilbert Doctorow, unabhängiger Analyst für internationale Angelegenheiten aus Brüssel, und John Bosnitch, Journalist, Aktivist und politischer Analyst aus Fredericton, sind jetzt bei uns zu Gast. Ich möchte Sie beide in unserer Sendung willkommen heißen.

Ich denke, wir beginnen mit Ihnen, Herr Doctorow. Ich meine, die Shanghai Organisation für Zusammenarbeit (SOZ/SCO) und die BRICS begannen mit ein paar wenigen Ländern, die sich schnell ausbreiteten und grösser wurden. Ich glaube, die SCO hat jetzt neun ständige Mitglieder und vier Beobachter, aber sowohl die SCO als auch die BRICS wachsen schnell. Worin liegt hier die Anziehungskraft?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 0:42
Der Reiz liegt darin, dass die Shanghai Organisation für Zusammenarbeit allein 40 Prozent der menschlichen Bevölkerung auf der Erde ausmacht. Sie macht 20 Prozent des BSP aus. Es handelt sich also um einen sehr großen Teil menschlicher Aktivitäten und eine große Chance für ihre Mitglieder, ihre wirtschaftlichen Aktivitäten und die Sicherheitsvereinbarungen mit anderen Mitgliedern zu steigern. Die Expansion ist nicht chaotisch, die Expansion ist nicht zufällig, die Expansion der Shanghai-Organisation hat, genau wie die jüngste Expansion der BRICS, eine gewisse Logik. Und die Logik besteht darin, dass diese beiden Organisationen, wenn man sie auf mehrere Jahre hinaus projiziert, zusammenwachsen werden.

1:31
Die Schanghai-Organisation wurde in erster Linie als Sicherheitsorganisation gegründet, mit einem wirtschaftlichen und handelspolitischen Interesse als zweitem Tätigkeitsfeld. Die BRICS hingegen wurden in erster Linie als Wirtschafts-, Handels- und Finanzorganisation gegründet. Die BRICS haben keine institutionelle Struktur, während die Shanghai Organisation für Zusammenarbeit traditionelle internationale Elemente in ihrer Struktur aufweist. Diese beiden Organisationen ergänzen sich also, und es ist keineswegs zufällig, dass der Iran Mitglied in beiden ist.

Die diesjährige Erweiterung der Schanghai-Organisation um Weißrussland zeigt uns, dass sich der Zweck dieser Organisation grundlegend ändert, und das ist natürlich für den Iran und die anderen Mitglieder von Interesse. Ursprünglich wurde die Organisation, die auf die chinesische und russische Gründung zurückgeht, geschaffen, um sich um Zentralasien zu kümmern und in Zeiten des grassierenden Terrorismus Sicherheitsvorkehrungen für Zentralasien zu treffen.

2:56
Was wir jedoch jetzt sehen, ist eine Neufassung, eine Überarbeitung der Schanghai-Organisation im Einklang mit dem, was die Gründungsmitglieder, insbesondere Russland, als neue Aufgabe ansehen. Russland hatte seit 2008, während der Präsidentschaft von Herrn Medwedew, daran gearbeitet, die Sicherheitsarchitektur Europas umzuschreiben, zu überarbeiten. Und es hatte Westeuropa und den Staaten Bestimmungen zur Überarbeitung dieser Sicherheitsarchitektur vorgeschlagen.

Was wir jetzt sehen, ist etwas ganz anderes. Russland hat seine Lehren aus dem Konflikt mit der NATO über die Ukraine gezogen und drängt nun auf eine gesamteurasische Sicherheitsarchitektur. Und das ist ein sehr interessanter Vorschlag, der, wie ich vermute, in den kommenden Sitzungen weiterentwickelt werden wird.

PressTV: 3:59
Ja, gut. Ich danke Ihnen, Herr Doctorow. Herr John Bosnitch aus New Brunswick, willkommen zu unserem Gespräch. Nun, John, wie fördert die SCO eine multipolare Weltordnung, und wie stellt sie den Status quo in Frage?

John Bosnitch
Nun, wie wir wissen, bricht das amerikanische, wir nennen es im Grunde das anglo-amerikanische Imperium, langsam zusammen. Und in dem Bemühen, eine direkte militärische Konfrontation zu vermeiden, haben sich sowohl China als auch Russland dafür entschieden, Selbstverteidigungsmechanismen und bilaterale Handelsorganisationen zu schaffen, die sich nun, wie mein Kommentatorenkollege heute sagte, über die Wirtschaftsgrenzen hinweg ausbreiten und Wirtschaft und Staatssicherheit vermischen, die mit den Maßnahmen gegen den Terrorismus begonnen hatten.

4:55
Aber jetzt, da der Westen seine Operationen in der Ukraine auf die Ebene des Staatsterrors gehoben hat, nachdem er die Regierung der Ukraine durch einen Staatsstreich übernommen hat, müssen diese Organisationen weiter expandieren. Und es ist kein Zufall, dass Weißrussland – das direkt an die Ukraine und an die dortige Konfliktregion grenzt – jetzt mit ins Boot geholt wurde. Das ist ein klares Indiz dafür, dass China ein großes Interesse daran hat, den Status Russlands in der Ukraine zu schützen und die ethnischen Russen in der Ukraine zu schützen.

Diese Entwicklungen, die in typisch chinesischer und russischer Manier ablaufen – mit anderen Worten: gut durchdacht, bewusst geplant und in aller Ruhe ausgeführt –, stellen eine ernsthafte Blockade gegen eine fortgesetzte westliche Aggression in der gesamten eurasischen Region dar. Und sie kommen genau zum richtigen Zeitpunkt, da wir sehen, dass es dem Westen nicht gelingt, die militärische Kontrolle über die gesamte Ukraine zu übernehmen, und er den Konflikt dort vielleicht ganz verlieren könnte. Es handelt sich also um eine entscheidende parallele Entwicklung im Interesse des Friedens und gegen die anhaltende militärische Aggression, die seit dem Fall der Berliner Mauer vom Westen vorangetrieben wird.

PressTV: 6:19
Ich danke Ihnen, Herr Bosnitch. Und nun, Herr Doctorow, zurück zu Ihnen. Iran: Wie kann der Iran von seiner SCO-Mitgliedschaft in einem neuen Licht profitieren, insbesondere angesichts der schweren Sanktionen, die ihm auferlegt wurden?

Doctorow:
Was die wirtschaftliche Seite betrifft, so arbeiten bekanntlich sowohl die BRICS als auch die Schanghai-Organisation an der De-Dollarisierung. Das ist für den Iran von großem Interesse. Beide Organisationen unterstützen den Nord-Süd-Korridor, bei dem der Iran ein wichtiger Akteur und Nutznießer ist. Die Lage des Iran als logistisches Drehkreuz bietet eine große Chance für eine Ausweitung des Verkaufs von Kohlenwasserstoffen durch den Iran und für einen Ausgleich der inländischen Versorgung mit Kohlenwasserstoffen, die nicht gleichmäßig über das ganze Land verteilt ist, sondern in verschiedenen Gebieten konzentriert ist.

7:25
Die Zusammenarbeit mit Russland, sowohl als BRICS- als auch als SCO-Mitglied, im Energiebereich ist von größter Bedeutung. Wir wissen, dass russische Kohlenwasserstoffunternehmen in großem Umfang in die Exploration und Produktion im Iran investieren. Ich denke, der Iran fühlt sich durch die starke politische Unterstützung, die ihm die beiden Gründungsmitglieder und wichtigsten Mitglieder beider Organisationen, China und Russland, gewähren, beruhigt. Und das mäßigt die iranische Politik, was allen zugute kommt.

PressTV: 8:04
Richtig, und abschließende Gedanken von Ihnen, Herr John Bosnitch. Die Liste der Länder, die sich von dieser Ideologie der Entdollarisierung angezogen fühlen, wächst. Warum erleben wir das?

Bosnitch:
Enschuldigung, wie war der letzte Satz?

PressTV:
Entdollarisierung. Warum ist sie zu einer so attraktiven Ideologie geworden?

Bosnitch:
Nun, wenn Sie dem angloamerikanischen Imperium erlauben, endlos Dollar zu drucken, und Sie akzeptieren, dass diese Dollar einen Tauschwert gegen reale Güter wie Gold, Öl, Gas und ähnliche Produkte haben, dann erlauben Sie dem Imperium tatsächlich, unbegrenzt Toilettenpapier zu drucken, das Sie als etwas wertvoll akzeptieren.

8:56
Sobald also die Länder, die in diesen verschiedenen größeren Wirtschaftsorganisationen versammelt sind – die sich vom Pazifik bis ins Zentrum Europas und hinunter nach Afrika und nach Südamerika erstrecken –, sobald diese Länder die Tatsache akzeptieren, dass sie dem US-Dollar einen Wert verleihen, indem sie ihn im Gegenzug für ihre massiven Ressourcen eintauschen, sobald sie sich weigern, dies zu tun, dann hat der US-Dollar nichts mehr, worauf er sich stützen kann, außer auf die Ressourcen der Vereinigten Staaten.

Und wie wir wissen, sind die Vereinigten Staaten das am höchsten verschuldete Land in der Geschichte der Welt. Dies ist das Ende. Wenn der amerikanische Dollar nicht mehr als Wert in Form von Kohlenwasserstoffen akzeptiert wird und nicht mehr als Wert in Form von Gold akzeptiert wird, ist dies das Ende des Imperiums. Die Macht eines Imperiums wird durch die Kaufkraft seiner Währung bestimmt. Wenn der US-Dollar nicht mehr das wert ist, was er in der Vergangenheit wert war, ist das Imperium am Ende, und zwar ohne einen Schuss abzufeuern.

PressTV: 10:04
Nun gut, meine Herren, ich danke Ihnen beiden für Ihre Teilnahme an unserer Sendung. Gilbert Doctorow meldet sich aus Brüssel. Und John Bosnitch ist aus Fredericton, New Brunswick, bei uns. Das ist draußen in Kanada.

10:19
Und damit, liebe Zuschauer, sind wir am Ende dieses Abschnitts Ihrer PressTV-Nachrichtenübersicht angelangt. Vielen Dank, dass Sie eingeschaltet haben, und auf Wiedersehen für heute.

As promised when I described the remarkable documentary film shown on Russian state television to mark the 80th anniversary of Communist Party of the RF leader Gennady Zyuganov, an edition of the film with English subtitles has been posted on the internet:

https://odysee.com/Pravda-Zyuganov-ENGLISH-subtitles:f

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Sjuganow-Dokumentarfilm mit englischen Untertiteln

Wie versprochen, als ich den bemerkenswerten Dokumentarfilm beschrieben habe, der im russischen Staatsfernsehen anlässlich des 80. Jahrestages des Führers der Kommunistischen Partei der RF, Gennadi Sjuganow, gezeigt wurde, ist eine Ausgabe des Films mit englischen Untertiteln ins Internet gestellt worden:

https://odysee.com/Pravda-Zyuganov-ENGLISH-subtitles:f