Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kBZhtB0Kx4

Diesen: 0:00
Hi everyone and welcome. I am joined today by Gilbert Doctorow, a historian and an international affairs analyst. Welcome back to the program.

Doctorow:
Good to see you again.

Diesen:
Likewise. So I guess the big issue still remains the aftermath of this attack on the Russian nuclear forces. I find it personally frustrating that many people, especially in the political media establishment, do not seem to appreciate how dangerous this is, not only about not avoiding a nuclear disaster, but also the retaliation which seems almost required on the Russian side. However, the Russian response so far has been limited. Of course, it doesn’t feel limited if you’re living in Kiev, but there’s many good reasons, I guess, for why Russia should have retaliated in a much more powerful way. And many people therefore expected that there would come a response effectively heard around the world. How do you explain for this reaction or the muted one? Or Do you think the worst is yet to come?

Doctorow: 1:18
We don’t know. And there are a lot of things we don’t know. In my new book, you’re aware that I’m saying in the introduction that we are living in the fog of war. And that certainly applies to the question you’ve given. I was personally very disappointed with the weak, _ne adekbat_, the inappropriate or unsuitable response that the Russians have given so far. That’s more of the same blowing up more arms caches and blowing up more drone manufacturing and hitting the Dubno tactical aviation air base in western Ukraine — that’s all child stuff. How many hundreds of billions of dollars in armaments the West shipped to Ukraine?

They can spend another five years blowing things up and not get through all of it. So this is not a change, a step change or an escalation that you would expect given the escalation from the Ukrainian side in attacking the nuclear triad, part of the nuclear triad of the Russian Federation. However, I’m beginning to turn this around in my mind and think maybe I’m being unfair and unreasonable because I’m uninformed, as everyone else is, about what exactly Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump were talking about in their hour or hour and a half long phone conversation.

2:59
People were, the general, if you look at the independent media, alternative media, everybody was speculating on whether or not Trump was being asked how much he knew or didn’t know in advance or in real time about this attack. I don’t believe that now for a minute, in particular because of a stunning article that appeared in “Financial Times” today, explaining further how this was carried out. I mean, the first impressions we all had was “My goodness, the Ukrainians have struck 4000 kilometers into the Russian Federation. Boy, this is drone warfare.” It took us a while to understand that those drones were probably 20 or 30 kilometers away from the air bases when they were only 50. Anyway, they were close to the air bases in these trailers, special trailers with roofs that would open up on signal and so forth.

3:58
So that already put in question how much outside assistance you would need for this. And then today’s “Financial Times” raised a dramatic issue that these drones are the Mercedes of their class. They are highly advanced, they’re using AI, artificial intelligence, as self-targeting. So after they were– their release was done long-distance by remote, of course.

And they were launched. And then the last part of their trip to target was done by themselves. They had onboard sensors and cameras, and they had AI to identify what they should be going after, what they should be striking. There was no, this means that there was no satellite intelligence, which is what everyone’s talking about, people who are really military specialists. They’re talking about this drone strike as if it were a missile strike. It wasn’t. And it wasn’t coming from 1000 or 2000 kilometers away. It was coming from 50 kilometers or 100 kilometers away. And it was guided by itself. So the British and the US involvement was nil.

5:25
And yes, all people will say, “Oh, Doctorow was quoting the “Financial Times”. That’s just an English rag. And so–” Hey, wait a minute. I’m quoting it because it coincides with what I see on Russian television every day. But the Russians are doing it.

The point of the matter is that the Russians and Ukrainians are peers. This is a battle between equals in terms of technical competence in certain domains. Certain domains, not all domains, obviously. And drone warfare is what the game is today. The artillery warfare exists, but it has been overtaken by drone warfare, where the Ukrainians are equal to the Russians.

6:10
And they are both way ahead of the Brits and the US. How are we speaking about this nonsense to talk about assistance coming from the United States or Britain? Moreover, well, I mean, let me just explain because it’s not obvious from my last remark about what the Russians are doing. They are guiding their battlefield attacks, not by satellite intelligence, but by what their drones, their reconnaissance drones tell them in real time. Now, you don’t have to be a genius or military expert to understand that information that’s coming from a drone that is 10 kilometers away is much faster.

than the information coming from a satellite that is 500 kilometers away. Therefore, real time is real time when it’s done by drones. That’s the game today. And if the Russians have it, the Ukrainians have it, and talking about British or American assistance for the execution of it, it’s not the planning of it, but the execution of it is nonsense.

Now, if that is nonsense, then surely Mr. Putin knows that, and surely he never would have wasted time in a precious phone call with Donald Trump to talk about what the Americans knew or didn’t know. They would have been talking about something else and hopefully they were talking about finding a resolution to this war and moving the talks to Moscow, which seems to be the case right now.

Diesen: 7:46
But the Ukrainians made the point that this attack had been planned 18 months in advance. And as we’ve also learned from this New York Times article, was it a month or two ago, that almost all the military planning had been done by the United States. It is hard to imagine though that, I’m not sure about the extent of involvement, but that the US and the British at least, they must have had some knowledge of this, given that the drones have been shipped in, stored and they’ve been coordinated and planned in this way.

If not, only if not to you know, bite the hand that feeds you, because if the Ukrainians would do this without the knowledge of the Americans and keeping them in the dark, wouldn’t this have created a lot of divisions?

Doctorow: 8:40
Let’s go back to the start of your question, because it’s very important. I didn’t say that the Brits and the Americans were not involved in this. Of course they were. And just exactly as you’re describing, in the planning and the preparation for it. But preparation, who knows when the preparation ended? Could have ended a year ago. Could have ended two years ago. No, two years ago, no.

A year ago for sure. Someone had to bring in those drones and these trucks crossing through Belarus, as I understand. But more importantly, somebody had to locate them near the bases. Now, American intelligence, CIA presence in Russia, is not so much. The British presence in Russia is big.

9:25
And they had been involved in every scandalous false flag operation that we’ve seen in the last three years. They were deeply involved in Bucha. They were even not directly involved in the war, but to disgrace the Russians and Mr. Putin’s group in particular, they certainly were the ones who killed Navalny. And how did they do that? How could you reach Navalny in this remote location where the Brits have got their fingers everywhere?

And so I believe that they were deeply involved in the preparation of this attack when the drones were brought in and they were stored near bases. So there is a reason why Mr. Lavrov was singling out among the Anglo-Saxons, the Brits. The Russians have got it in for the Brits, and with good reason, because they have been really the barking and the biting dogs, unlike the poodles and lap dogs that we knew from Tony Blair’s time.

Diesen: 10:35
Well, I was wondering though how, to what extent, the, I guess, the muted response of Russia, do see this, you know, because it does create a lot of tensions within Russia. You know, the usual discussion is between those who argue that, you know, they’re sick of this. Let’s get it just done with. I’m not sure if that’s possible, just to get it done with quickly, even if they would want this without again blowing up entire cities. While the others are making the point that they’re doing everything right, what they’re doing now that is gradually wearing down the opposing army so you can have objective indicators measuring the lack of manpower, reduced equipment, increased economic problems, lack of social cohesion, desertions, I mean casualty levels.

11:29
You know, we have all these different measurements. You can assess the extent to which they are reaching their goal. But do you think this impacts how they responded? Because many thought this would give an excuse, if you will, to Russia to just turn up the violence to 100 and just push through and get a faster end to this war.

Doctorow:
You’ve omitted one factor in that list of measurements and parameters: will. And that is of vital importance. People can be losing, the attrition can be taking effect, they can be losing men, they can be losing equipment. But that doesn’t answer the question of will, will they fight for the last Ukrainian? Maybe they will. I think it was relevant that Mr. Medinsky said in his first discussion with the Ukrainians in Istanbul that he made reference to Peter the Great’s Northern War in 21 years, and we’re ready to fight for 21 years. Is he ready to fight for 21 years? Is Mr. Putin going to be there in 21 years? This is totally illogical.

And how long can the Ukrainians hold on? That is a really, that is a number one question in everyone’s mind. And it’s good that you raise it, I don’t have an answer. But I do say that the Ukrainians are far more capable, are far more determined, are less deserting and running from the field than a lot of my peers are saying or suggesting. And that at the same time, the whole logic of the timing of this war, starting in February of 2022, was based on window-of-opportunity logic.

13:14
That Russia understood that it was that Mr. Putin and his associates understood that they were sanction proof after eight years of preparing their financial system and trading partners and so on. And that they had strategic advantage over the West with their new weapons systems that were not only tested but also deployed. Now, we have to apply the same measure today. Is Russia, does Russia have an unlimited window opportunity?

I say no. When the West is throwing hundreds of billions of euros at it, was beginning to assign hundreds of billions of euros to ramp up military production, it will take effect. Not tomorrow, just speaking about a five year time horizon. Well, if Russia doesn’t solve this way before the five years are up, then we’re going to have World War III. Yes, indeed, I agree with you.

But it’s not tomorrow, because the West isn’t ready for tomorrow. Russia is. Therefore, if Mr. Putin is to follow the logic he used when he launched this war, he will strike now in a dramatic way, unless I’m dead wrong, which is possible, and he has reached some accommodation with Donald Trump that we don’t know about. It’s possible. I leave that open.

Diesen: 14:41
Yeah. Well, this is it. It’s very difficult to know what they’re talking about behind closed doors. And well, I would just add this comment: that they fought for 21 years. This was the Great Northern War from 1700 to 1721. So it’s been over 300 years. So the way society is structured, the willingness to fight prolonged wars, the economy that supports it, the nature of international relations, a lot of this changed over time. So I’m not sure if that would, 21-year-long war would be pulled off today, simply because it was pulled off three centuries ago.

15:21
But I guess it’s important to signal the willingness to keep on fighting until the objectives have been met. Again, especially if you consider this to be a war for survival and to signal clearly to the opponent that there’s no intention of at least making compromises on these key issues. But this attack on Russia’s nuclear forces, well, with these new powerful strikes now being launched against Kiev and other cities, it doesn’t just impact the way the war is fought in terms of the amount of force which is being used, but surely it will also have an impact on the peace which the Russians will demand. Do you see them, I guess, preparing to set higher demands now or– because the rhetoric became quite, well, much harsher, it seems now. Again, they talked about destroying Ukraine before, but now it’s becoming, I guess, louder.

Doctorow: 16:28
It would be better if they didn’t talk about destroying Ukraine, but talked about destroying the decision-making centers, which is also going back to February 2022. Why? Are they walking away from that? The implications are clear. If they want to be consistent, they should send the Oreshniks against wherever Mr. Zelensky happens to be with his close associates, and against Mr. Budanov and all of his associates, and leave the rest of Kiev alone. Because the broad population, even those who are working in these military organizations, they’re not the problem. The problem is the decision makers. And they’re being left untouched.

17:13
I find that very hard to understand. Here’s where I– Then the other question is, what are you doing for the West? Mr. Karaganov is coming back and back again with his remarks of the need for a dramatic strike in Western Europe to sober up minds. And yet to be sure you would think that this is implicitly very critical of Mr. Putin, but he is invited back and back again by Vladimir Putin. So that’s also a little bit hard to understand. Are the Russians going to make military strike against Britain? I don’t know.

Diesen: 17:53
Well, he’s more of a, I guess, hawkish element, but Karagonov, he also attends this Valdai meeting every year. And I saw him over the past few years, every year at Valdai making the same comment that perhaps we should change our nuclear doctrine. And Putin pushed back against it every year when we met in Valdai saying, “No, this is, you know, we have to keep it the way it is with predictability and stability,” all of this.

But then, of course, at the end, he ended up taking his advice, given that, well, what he argued that the West was becoming more and more irresponsible in terms of American long-range strikes into Russia. So at the end he took the more hawkish advice, if you will, and I guess now Karagonov is suggesting the same thing, like let’s take it one step further. We have to strike inside Western Europe to send a strong signal after all the attacks they’ve done on us.

18:57
But then I guess it makes sense to have him around in case Putin decides that, when it’s time to take that extra step. I did want to ask about your comment on not striking the political leadership in Ukraine, because I noticed recently that the Russians began to use the word terrorism more and more. Obviously, there’s some real events, which is the reason behind this, which was the Ukraine’s deliberate targeting of trains which had no military function. So again, deliberately only going after civilians. Now, so this is why it could be framed as terrorism if terrorism is targeting civilians to, I guess, elevate fear for political purposes.

But It’s also true that if this special military operation is defined more as a war on terrorism, it could, I guess, create the legal space for beginning to target political leaders as well. Do you see it in a similar way or do you think I’m reading too much into this?

Doctorow: 20:06
No, no, I think your reading is correct. It’s entirely possible. Look, Mr. Putin is a lawyer. That is a blessing and it’s also a curse, because many of his decisions are made looking for legal niceties in international law. When the United States and many other countries, Israel is an outstanding example, pay no heed whatsoever to international law. And they don’t think twice about it. Russia does, and I’m not sure that it is so wise, but nonetheless, that being said, by calling Ukraine a terrorist state, he’s preparing a way to legitimize the assassination of Mr. Zelensky and his associates. Yes, that’s true.

Diesen: 20:44
Yeah, and in terms of this peace, not only do they see it now more difficult to live with the current Ukrainian state in the future, in other words, any peace negotiation now would have to include at least a regime change. But in terms of any future peace, to what extent do you see the way Russia imagines living next to the West in the future? Because after this strikes, do you think the Russians are giving up on this reconciliation with the West after the war?

Because you keep hearing that once this is over, everyone will benefit from pursuing some reconciliation, start to trade together, have normal relations, which would benefit both sides. But there seems to be a lot of anger now, not just from the politicians and the military, but I also sense it from society that this desire to not kiss and make up, but seek to normalize relations after this war is done with, it seems to be going away. This becomes more obvious that the US has been pursuing the destruction of Russia, you have these very aggressive attacks. Now the Germans are talking openly about attacking Russia with Taurus missiles. Kaya Kallas speaking of how Russia should be broken up to smaller countries, it will be easier to deal with.

22:26
I mean, this seems to be changing some of the collective consciousness in Russia, they don’t seem that interested any more to get along with the West in the future.

Doctorow:
Well, in the comments sections, the Russian language version of your show, of other major video interviews, which are also being put into Russian and which have audiences that are like 100,000 people. Your own audience for some of these programs in Russia is as big or bigger than the English language, original ones.

Diesen: 23:04
Yeah, I noticed.

Doctorow:
And so I look at the comments and a lot of xenophobia, a lot of real anger at the West. And would– but comments are in general, one percent of the viewers. The other 99 percent I would take as an indication of how many thumbs-up there are, which usually outweigh by considerable numbers, the comments. Therefore it’s very hard to reach a firm decision, a firm conclusion, whether or not Russian society is really turning its back on the West. The people I know in Petersburg and in Moscow, they are an intellectual class, and they all would like to go back to Paris. They would like to let bygones to be bygones.

23:56
But I think in answer to your question more broadly, what Europe does will depend entirely on what Donald Trump can [do] and does. If he restores direct flights between the United States and Moscow, the European airlines will die. They will sweep all the politicians aside to have their flights into and over Russia restored. And it will be the same way with other industries. If the United States takes the first step, the Europeans will be tripping on one another to also restore normal commercial ties.

They will not go back to where they were before the operation, before the sanctions, because so many foreign companies have been displaced. Their properties in Russia were sold off and taken over by Russian entrepreneurs. And there’s no way back as it was, but there’s still room for substantial restoration of trade ties and certainly restoration of energy supplies and other critical raw materials, which Russia was providing Western Europe at bargain basement prices in the past. So I think there will be a way back.

25:17
That comes up in little things. I follow culture very closely. We just had the Queen Elizabeth piano competition, once-in-four-year event here in Brussels. Our whole Belgian society was– high society, of course, but not all, but cultural society was there vying for tickets to the … competition proper and then to the performance of the … winners, of the [six top-placed] people. I, we went to one of these, the ones performed who received the awards of four, five and six. Number six was a Russian.

This, despite everything, despite all of the … hostility I’d say towards Russia, the, his, this man’s exceptional talent was acknowledged. When the concert came, he didn’t receive any encore requests. The two others, a Frenchman and a Japanese, they were, ah, everyone rose to their feet, and they demanded an encore.

They got it. So the cancel Russian culture is over. That wave is gone. Russian culture is slowly crawling back into everybody’s consciousness, but there is a certain coolness, okay? That’s what I see will happen in other domains where the West and Russia have exchanges.

26:56
There’ll be coolness, it won’t be the overwhelming joy of sometimes in 1990s on the part of Westerners visiting Russia, xxxxx xxx xxxxx, but things will somehow restore. I think airlines will be the first thing.

Diesen:
I remember the first year of the war, everything had to be canceled. There was, I think it was a tree competition for old trees, and they canceled the Russian tree as a nominee. I was hoping that would be peak hate and after this we would start to let the cool heads prevail and return to something of normal behavior.

But we might hopefully be going back, because a lot of this seems to be irrational. A lot of the things have been done. But I was wondering how do you see, because we’re not going back to the old world anyways after this is over. This seems to be gone. Indeed, I think the world even that existed before the attacks on Russia’s nuclear forces also probably won’t go back.

But how do you see then the extent to which Russia’s foreign policy could be militarized as a result of this? I mean, to some extent, it already has. That is, the military might of Russia, its expertise in drone warfare, you can argue military culture, something has been built up over the past three years. Do you see this impacting future foreign policy, I guess? Having incentives to find military solutions to political problems.

Maybe not so much as speculation about the nature of the Russians, but instead as a historian, do you see, maybe it’s too specific, but the capabilities influencing the intentions? So in other words, if you have all this military power, then if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Do you usually see this through history, or… ?

octorow: 29:03
I think Russia will not be on a war footing economically, but the military component of its general economy will remain at a very high level, not just for its own needs. But when the war ends, Russia will begin to conclude contracts for sale of its advanced … equipment.

All of that has been suspended. India did not receive equipment that it contracted for, because everything the Russian factories are producing is going to the front, their own front, and they couldn’t care less about selling the stuff abroad at this moment. But once peace is concluded, then I think the Russians will start to commercialize very successfully what they have demonstrated to be superior to American and West European military equipment. And they have the videos to show it. And they have the trophies to show it, because they’ve hauled back Leopards and American equipment as trophies to Moscow.

30:01
So they will be in a very good position to have massive sales of arms and to be a real competitor to both Western Europe and the United States. So in that sense, the Russian economy, even after the war ends, will have a much bigger military component than it ever did before the war. Otherwise, I think the, you say militarized foreign policy, I don’t see that happening, because Russia’s foreign policy now is within the constraints of its agreements to Shanghai Organization, its agreements with its Central Asian neighbors, and of course, BRICS, and all of that will not support Russia being visibly militaristic in its foreign policy. I don’t believe that.

Diesen: 31:04
Well, that makes me think if obviously the Russian military industrial complex will be much greater and more competitive, that obviously will have an impact on geopolitics as well.

It kind of takes me to my last question, which is perhaps a bit too big in nature, but what will be the, I guess, wider geopolitical consequences of this war coming to an end? I mean, It seems as if we’re going to, there’s going to be a lot of resentment for many years to come on both sides. So I’m guessing this won’t come to a complete end. Even if it would in Europe, we won’t end up quarreling over Georgia or Moldova or the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Arctic. We have a lot of possible areas of conflict.

31:52
We can have Belarus in there as well. But in other parts of the world, we’ve seen during the war the Russians pushing out the French. Well, they haven’t necessarily taken credit for it, but there’s other variables, but I’m sure the Russians had had their say in it. But how will the rest of the world reorient after this? Because this is, I think we’re moving towards a very humiliating defeat for NATO.

I mean, at least Europe, America’s been pulling back a bit, but Europeans, we really bet everything on this war. So what do you think will be the wider geopolitical ramifications of this war, assuming that it is being lost now by NATO.

Doctorow: 32:40
That’s a safe, I think that’s a safe assumption. But once again, I think we have to look at just what Donald Trump does, how, and– because he has the capability, the United States has the capability of really influencing what Europe does and how long the detritus in power today, by that I mean Kallas and der Leyen and our wonderful NATO boss, chief, how long they stay in their positions. The United States has the ability to influence their removal.

But for that, Donald Trump has to keep his political capital at home, has to score successes in his domestic policy. There are a lot of things that are unforeseeable or can’t be, which you cannot plan. I wouldn’t look for Europe to save itself and remove itself from the conflicts that we see today, the pro-war movement that it has become in the last several years under the guidance of von der Leyen. It will all depend on Mr. Trump, frankly, as I see it.

33:54
Like it or not, of course, many people don’t like him, but he has it within his power, or may have it within his power, to find a beneficial result, a change of political landscape in Europe that will facilitate the negotiation of a new security architecture. With the people in power today, it’s impossible. I don’t see any chance for Merz and Macron. They were so invested in their personality and political power in the war with Russia, which was for them, the unifying element for the new Europe, that I don’t see that they can stay in power. But the only one who has the strength to sweep them from power by one maneuver or another is sitting in the Oval Office in Washington.

Diesen: 34:50
Yeah, I think this is a key problem. The Europeans have gone down because they accepted, you know, not just throwing away all their weapons, but accepted this deindustrialization. The whole economic, I guess, utility or purpose of the European Union has been severely weakened. Indeed, the EU itself is now talking about itself as a geopolitical block. If you’re going to be a geopolitical block with internal cohesion, you really need that external threat. I mean, it’s a very different animal, the European Union, if you want it to be a geopolitical union instead of an economic block. So it remains to be seen what kind of problems they have, what kind of corner they have painted themselves in.

35:38
Anyways, as always, thank you for your time. I greatly appreciate it and hope to have you back very soon.

Doctorow:
All right. Thanks. Thanks for the invitation.

Diesen:
Thank you.

Doctorow: 35:51
Bye bye.

Listening to my chat yesterday evening with Professor Glenn Diesen of the Southern Norway University. I understood that his professional interest in geopolitics prompted him to pose questions that other interview hosts are not asking and which the audience should find refreshing because they look beyond the questions of this very moment to where Europe is headed when the Ukraine war comes to an end, whether Russia and Europe can re-knit commercial, cultural and other relations and the like. We are daily witnesses to a changing world order but how often do we lift our heads to consider these big picture questions?

I have no intention of spoiling the pleasure of discovering how we dealt with the big questions except to say that I am more predisposed to see the solutions not in what Europeans can do for themselves on their own but in how what the Americans do creates a scramble in Europe to catch up. For example, once Washington and Moscow agree on restoring direct flights between their countries, I expect there to be a stampede of European airlines to be liberated from the awful constraints of flying around instead of over the critical 12% of the world’s land mass, meaning Russia, which represents the only economically viable routing to East Asia. This obstacle is a major factor in explaining the great increase in passenger traffic on the airlines of the Gulf States these past few years. And so it will be with other commercial domains: the US rescinds sanctions and the Europeans fight among themselves to shed sanctions here.

Will the Russian foreign policy be overmilitarized when the war ends? Will Russia’s military industrial complex downsize or grow still further to support export sales of its world-beating arms?  Have a listen!

Of course, in the opening minutes we did spend a bit of time considering the adequacy or not of Russia’s response so far to the Ukrainian attack 10 days ago on the strategic bomber that form part of its deterrent nuclear triad at air bases across the Russian Federation.

I am appreciative of Professor Diesen’s flashing the front cover image of my new book War Diaries at the very start of our interview. Hopefully some viewers will get the hint.

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC6IGxEnJhk

Napolitano: 0:33
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, June 11th, 2025. Professor Gilbert Doctorow will be here with us in just a moment. Just what is the Kremlin thinking and what is the Kremlin planning to do next? But first this.

Commercial

Napolitano: 2:21
Professor Doctorow, welcome here, my dear friend. Thank you for accommodating my schedule and thank you for all of the off-air communications that we have informing me of your very thoughtful observations. Are you satisfied that the Kremlin is satisfied that the drone attack two weekends ago was certainly perpetrated with the help of the British and probably perpetrated with the help of the United States?

Doctorow:
I think that there’s an article in today’s “Financial Times” which the viewers of this broadcast should follow up. I’m not a fan of the “Financial Times” regarding their Russian coverage because they’re quite biased, but occasionally they come up with something that is important that cannot be ignored, and today was the day. They had, one of the reporters interviewed the people responsible for developing the drones that were used in the attack on these four Russian air bases housing their strategic triad bombers. And it comes out from that that the Ukrainians were entirely capable of carrying out this act on their own. Of course, they go back 18 months.

3:45
And of course, 18 months ago, no doubt, the United States and Britain helped them to decide where to attack, what to attack, and maybe even the mechanics of the attack, not to be an attack from long distances, but from short distances. I have little doubt that British, with their extensive espionage network across Russia would have been facilitators in helping the Ukrainians to decide how and where they would hide their drones for eventual use, kind of sleeper drones we can call them.

But as regards the attack itself, I don’t think that the Brits or the Americans had anything whatever to do with it, because the Ukrainians were capable. And this is an important fact, which is overlooked, unfortunately, by the whole, virtually the whole, of independent media. We all assume that the Ukrainians are helpless fools, that they just throw their lives away by combating the Russians without their own means of producing weapons, and they’re entirely dependent on what they get from outside, often which is misaligned with their needs.

Nonetheless, the point that came out of this article today is that the Ukrainians are surely ahead of the United States and ahead of Great Britain in drone warfare. And why shouldn’t they be? They’re doing the battle on the battlefield, not the Americans or the Brits. And they are up against an opponent who had to catch up in drone warfare, but has done, I mean the Russians. And I’d say they are peers now. They both are the world’s leading fighters of drone warfare.

05:30
Now, why do I say that about the Russians? Because I watch Russian television, which some people disparage, but if you watch it properly, you’ll get something interesting and useful. The useful point is that the targeting of all Russian activity now on the front is not satellite reconnaissance. It is reconnaissance drones. That gives an instantaneous location of targets in, that’s the article [on screen], instantaneous location of targets even faster than you get from satellites, because they’re farther out, and it takes longer for real-time information to arrive.

The Russians are doing it, so why shouldn’t the Ukrainians do it? They’re not stupid, they’re very good at computer games.

Napolitano: 6:19
Is the media narrative, and this is not mainstream, I mean this comes to me from guests on this show, who are former intelligence officers themselves, that Ukrainian intel is wedded at the hip and subservient to MI6 and CIA. Is that necessarily proving to be accurate a hundred percent of the time?

Doctorow:
It’s accurate some of the time, not all of the time. It depends on what weapons we’re talking about. And when you talk about drones, as I say, the Ukrainians and the Russians are way ahead of everybody else. So what kind of help do the Ukrainians need from Britain? None. Once the drones were put in place, and this is months, if not years ago–

Napolitano:
What, do they have the intel or the satellite capability of knowing where the Russian targets are without British or American assistance? You don’t need satellite reconnaissance. That’s the whole point. The war is now done by drones which have artificial intelligence and they are doing their own targeting. That’s what this article is all about.

And I say it just is believable. I understand that this supports the overall editorial position of the “Financial Times”, which is not the position of you or me or nearly all of our viewers. That’s not the point. It doesn’t make their information less accurate.

Napolitano: 7:43
Agreed. And as you know, I devour the “Financial Times” every day, even though many times I grit my teeth at their editorial policies. Watch Foreign Minister Lavrov on Monday on this very issue. So Chris, cut number eight.

Lavrov: [English voice over]
It is obvious that the Ukrainian side is doing everything possible, but it would be absolutely helpless without the support, I was tempted to say Anglo-Saxons, but probably without Saxons, just without the support of the British. Although you never know probably by inertia, some US special forces would be involved in that, but the British are actually behind all those things I’m one hundred percent sure.

Napolitano: 8:34
Agree or disagree? Or is this misleading when he says the British are behind it? He didn’t say they paid for it or they crafted it, but they’re behind it.

Doctorow:
It’s misleading intentionally, which is another way of saying he’s lying. There’s obviously no reason to believe that Mr. Lavrov is an angel. He isn’t, why should he be? Angels do not serve at top levels of government for 20 years. They got thrown away long before that. So of course he’s saying what the current Kremlin policy is.

9:05
My insistence is that we as observers and as analysts should keep our sense of detachment from all sides, including the Russian side.

Napolitano:
Is the Kremlin finding credible or not credible President Trump’s denials of US knowledge and awareness? Because we do have this ambiguous statement from Secretary Hegseth, which I’ll play for you in a minute. But what does the Kremlin think of Trump’s denials to President Putin on the phone?

Doctorow:
If we follow up the logic of the article we were just discussing, I think President Putin was a hundred percent confident that Trump knew nothing about this. He knew nothing about it because there’s nothing to know. The actual implementation or execution of this attack on the basis was a hundred percent Ukrainian when it took place. I’m not speaking about the planning or the assistance in putting these drones where they were, but that goes back months if not years. In the present tense, the Ukrainians did it themselves.

10:14
Therefore, I’d say that Putin had to know the capabilities of those drones. And therefore he would know that Trump wasn’t informed because the US intel didn’t know exactly when this would happen.

Napolitano:
Here’s Secretary Hegseth. So it’s long. Chris will stop it after he says “following the drones in real time”. He both, he says both US knew. He’s under oath before the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he says both. “We didn’t know anything about it. Oh, and by the way, we follow the drones in real time.” You tell me what you think this means. Cut number ten.

House questioner:
Are we seeing the ushering in a new era of warfare, the use of drones from afar? After all, these drones were smuggled into Russia, hidden for a great span of time and then activated from 2,500 miles away. Are we prepared both defensively and offensively [let’s say Terry]

Hegseth:
It was a daring and very effective operation that we were not aware of in advance and reflects significant advancements in drone warfare, which we are tracking in real time inside Ukraine.

Napolitano:
Okay, we didn’t know about this, but we tracked drone warfare in real time inside Ukraine. I don’t know if he realized what he said with the second part, but I have to ask you about the first part. Is that credible that the US didn’t know about this?

Doctorow: 11:57
Let’s parse what he said.

Napolitano;
Because you’re smiling as I am over this.

Doctorow:
Let’s be very careful about this. He didn’t say that we followed this attack. He said we follow drone warfare, generic, right? I mean, you can interpret as you wish. I interpret it as a generic statement. We are monitoring drone warfare because the United States is interested. They have to have capability in this too, eventually. But he did not say that we saw this in real time.

Napolitano:
Are you satisfied that the United States did not play any role in this, notwithstanding what Foreign Minister Lavrov said? And then we’ll jump to another aspect of this.

Doctorow;
Lavrov was, look, Lavrov is not an independent party. He has been the loyal servant of whoever is his boss. When he was working for Putin in Putin’s first terms in office, he was Putin’s man and he was supporting completely the foreign policy that Putin sketched for him. When Medvedev took over and was promoting a foreign policy, I wouldn’t say 180 degrees opposite, but let’s say 90 degrees at variance with what Vladimir Putin was doing, Lavrov became a loyal servant of that policy. He is today a loyal servant of the latest Russian explanation of their policies, which is what you were just saying. It’s not, it is-

Napolitano: 13:30
Why would the Kremlin want to promote the false idea that someone was involved in this if they weren’t? Are they looking for an excuse to attack another country and widen the war? I don’t think so.

Doctorow:
Well the country involved was specifically named. They want to attack the United Kingdom. And let’s face it: they, the Brits, have been behind most every monstrous thing that has gone on in Russia, whether it’s the Navalny killing or it’s the Bucha massacre, which– these are all false-flag catastrophes that they put at the door of Russia. Who is behind this? MI6, no question about it. They have run way ahead of the Americans in this monstrous activity. The Russians know it perfectly.

14:19
If they were to sink, let’s just ask this question. If the Russians were tomorrow to sink two British nuclear submarines, what would come out of that? Nothing. The Brits can’t do a damn thing without American permission, and Washington is not going to let them go to war to see the United States cities hit the next day by Russian ICBMs.

Napolitano:
All right. If Donald Trump is telling the truth and if Pete Hegseth is telling the truth, who’s running American foreign policy? Are rogue CIA agents, or was the CIA’s hands clean of all this?

Doctorow: 14:56
Look, this is a very important question you’re asking and I’ve been in the middle of a debate over this and even comments on my appearance last week raised this question. “Oh, Doctorow says that the deep state is dead.” Ha ha ha. I’m sorry that my words have been misinterpreted intentionally.

I was saying that there’s always a deep state. The question is what kind of deep state? A deep state by definition is bureaucratic continuity. Officials have 20-, 30-year careers, and they see administrations come and go. That is normal, and it should give some stability and moderation to policy.

15:33
So nothing wrong with that. The question is, have they been purged to introduce a single policy or approach to policy? Under Dick Cheney, they were. American State Department and the agencies were purged. People who knew anything about Russia, Eastern Europe, were thrown on the street.

A lot of the career analysts were thrown on the street. And a large part of American intelligence was outsourced to commercial operations using open sources. Now, all right, then that created a new deep state, which was deeply hostile to what you believe, what I believe, and I think most of the viewers believe. Mr. Trump in his first days in office has had another purge in the deep state. When he threw out 40,000 employees of USAID more or less on the street [he] was going at the jugular vein of the neocon control of the federal government.

16:35
So when we speak about rogue CIA, I don’t believe it for a minute. I think those people have been, have gotten the fear of God in them.

Napolitano:
If Trump stops all US aid to Ukraine, can Ukraine continue to maintain the war using its superiority in drone warfare?

Doctorow:
Unclear. But the notion– There have been apocalyptic statements by my peers in the last week or two, how Ukraine is going down the drain, how it’s going to be overrun, how the Russians will be at the Dnepr tomorrow. I don’t agree with that. These are hyperventilating. Does that mean that Ukraine will go on for 20 years? I hope not. I also, again, keep our distance.

Let’s keep our distance from everybody. I keep my distance from Mr. Medinsky when he said, “Well, they did great for 21 years against Sweden. We can do the same.” No, you cannot do the same.

Mr. Putin will likely not be in office five years from now, let alone 20 years from now. Russia’s event, Russia got into this war in February of 2022 for one specific reason. They had a window of opportunity where they knew that strategically they were five to ten years ahead of the United States in weapons systems, particularly in hypersonic missiles, and not only. And they had made themselves sanction proof. In the eight years while the United States was building up Ukraine, the Russians were building up themselves.

18:17
So on these two grounds they were, had a window opportunity that would not extend forever. The Europeans now are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into defense industry. There will be results.

Napolitano:
What is the pressure, if any, from either his inner circle, elites, or the public perception of the war going on and on and on, on President Putin? Is that pressure to maintain the slow, methodical, patient, and exorably slow pace of the war. or to just get it over with once and for all?

Doctorow:
We cannot say with any certainty. And let me be specific why. Look, I follow, you know, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, this particular program has a very large followership in Russia. They now have “Judging Freedom” is now, a few hours after it goes on the internet, it is available in Russian with a voiceover or synchronized lips, the whole thing, AI control, beautiful. And it gets 100,000 views.

It gets as many views per program, per individual and per topic, as you get in the English original. Now, I look occasionally at these videos. I look at the comments section. And I can tell you, I don’t like what I see. There is a very strong xenophobic current, anti-Western current.

They are not kind to you, they’re not kind to me, they’re not kind to anybody in the West. Now, is that justified? Of course it is. Is it nice to see? It certainly isn’t.

20:03
So these people are defending Mr. Putin, by the way. They’re questioning you or me or anybody who suggests in any way that Russia does not support their president. So that is a strain that is certainly present and that Mr. Putin’s advisors no doubt are watching. At the same time–

Napolitano:
As you have written, Russia is not the brutal murderous dictatorship that it was in 1942. It’s now a democracy in which people can express their opinion and Putin relies in large measure for everything he does on popular support, as it should be.

Doctorow:
I agree. By the way, the latest proof that it’s not what it was in 1942 were the pictures of the returning young men who were prisoners of war and were released in the exchanges that took place on Monday.

And they were interviewed with smiling faces and the people like Grymodinsky and others who were interviewed were speaking about humane policies now. Let’s remember what happened in 1942, 1945. Russian prisoners of war returning from Germany were incarcerated if they weren’t shot. That was the dictatorship of the 1940s of Mr. Stalin.

21:20
That is worlds apart from Russia today. Is Mr. Putin susceptible to the currents of popular thinking in Russia? Of course he is.

Napolitano:
Last question or last subject matter, Professor Doctorow: the Ukrainian nuclear assets, who has them? Does Russia have them? Does the United States covet them? Are they still Ukrainian?

Doctorow:
Let’s go back a few weeks. So this was something, a subject, I believe we discussed. And again, I got some real flack from readers of what, of my essays on this subject, to say, well, what … right does Mr. Trump have to make claims on the … Ukrainian nuclear reactors as a source of possible revenue to offset the shipments of arms to Ukraine during the Biden administration? Well, it sounded like a really peculiar thing. Where did he pull this out of, other than the fact that there will be money there, it’s clear. All of the coal burning and gas and the oil burning, traditional power generation has been knocked out by the Russians.

22:32
And I didn’t touch the nuclear plants. They’ve been shut down because of risk of war, but they can be started up instantly. And so this would be a likely source of important revenue which Mr. Trump would like to tap into. But there’s more to it than that, and it’s not my say.

It was the Russian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Ryabkov, who was quoted in “Commercant”– which is one of the more responsible business-oriented daily newspapers and online newspapers in Russia– as saying, “We’ll have to talk to the Americans about this.” He’s speaking about the Zaporozhzhye nuclear plant, which is Europe’s largest, of course, Ukraine’s largest, with six reactors on site. “We have to speak to the Americans about this because you know, four out of the six reactors are now fueled by Westinghouse. And there are American technicians who supervise the transition.” So it’s more complicated than it looks.

Napolitano: 23:29
I can’t make this stuff up. Professor Doctorow, thank you very much. Your analysis is always scintillating, even if you are iconic. I welcome it here. I welcome your views.

And of course, I welcome all of our Russian viewers. And thank you for reminding me that they are out there. I did have the opportunity to speak via the internet to a Russian gathering put together by our mutual friend, Dmitry Simes, and I’m happy that it was well received, particularly when I referred to Russia as Mother Russia. Professor Doctorow, thank you, all the best. We’ll look forward to seeing you next week.

Doctorow:
Thank you.

Napolitano:
Okay. And coming up later today at 11 o’clock this morning, Professor, oh, God, I don’t remember who we have on. At 11 o’clock, Colonel Douglas McGregor. Bear with me a minute here.

Sorry for that. At 11 o’clock, Colonel Douglas McGregor. At 3 o’clock, Daniel McAdams, who’s not new to the show, but who’s going to talk about, “do we still have a constitution?” And at four o’clock, what are the British up to? with our former British diplomat, Ian Proud.

Transcript submitted by a reader

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

Exposing the deep state and government overreach. You’re with Pelle Neroth Taylor on Today’s News Talk, The Pulse.

Taylor: 0:10
Welcome to the Pelle Neroth Taylor show. Well, we’re going to talk about Ukraine again today. I make no apologies for that. It’s a question of, an existential question for all of us. Trump famously said he’s not worried about global warming but he’s worried about the global warming that results from a nuclear explosion.

So with us today we’ve got Gilbert Doctorow, who for many of you he doesn’t need an introduction, but I’ll give an introduction anyway. He’s got a PhD in Russian history from Colombia and speaks fluent Russian. He spent most of his life in corporate Russia, with a focus on Russia. He’s written five books of essays and is well known from various podcasts and YouTube videos. And actually I’m a regular viewer of his, and so it’s a great privilege for me to have him. And he’s just published a book of a kind of war diary, which I guess covers his travels to Russia. I think he’s got a flat in St. Petersburg. Welcome to the show, Professor Doctorow.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, thanks for having me.

Taylor:
What, well, tell us a little bit about your book, and then we’ll spend the first part of the show on that. I’m quite curious, just because you’ve got inside experiences, I guess, of actually going to Russia, you speak the language, you watch the media closely, you have a finger-spitzke feel, a feeling of what’s really going on there, and you see how the country’s really doing, you talk to a lot of people there. And then maybe we can focus on some of the other stuff, like the momentous events that are taking place behind the scenes or in front of the scenes. So what would, tell us about your book and what it’s about.

Doctorow:
Well I say first of all what it isn’t. This is not a comprehensive history of the war. It is instead a view of how Russia fared during the war, based on my visits there both before the start of the special military operation and during. This book covers the periods ’22, ’23, when almost all foreign journalists had left Russia. And so my contributions, which you find in this book, to my observations on what is going on in Russia. By that I mean how consumers are doing, what the feeling of prosperity or poverty is, what the chattering classes are saying. And that comes from my following the major talk shows and state newscasts, which are widely watched and talked about in Russia.

So these are observations. Also books that were published which are very relevant to our understanding of this war. For example, a book about the 85 days in which the town of Slavyansk, which is in the center of Donetsk province, which gets a lot of news because it is the front line today. Anyway, this town was a kind of Alamo of Ukraine in 2014. It was the cradle of what the Russians call the Russian Renaissance, the rebirth. And it held out against vastly superior Ukrainian forces.

Well that was written about in a very competent book. It received very little attention in the West. And that’s the sort of thing that I covered and described in some essays. Or I described some documentaries that were produced in Russia relating to the experience of two nations living together for several centuries, that is Russia and Ukraine. These documentaries I found to be highly informative and they received no coverage in the West. Well, I covered them.

So aside from my own personal observations of what I saw in street markets, the supermarkets, in electronic stores and so forth, what I heard from my taxi drivers, and at least in the period of ’22, ’23, taxi drivers were a very good source of information on what’s going on, particularly if you happen to have, as I did once, a retired colonel in the military intelligence driving the car. So this is what you’ll find in this book.

It is, I just will say one more word, that I view my role here not as an historian in the sense of going through what happened after it happened, but as a chronicler of what’s happened around me and I recorded that. That’s why I call these diaries.

Taylor: 4:28
I think it’s an incredibly important perspective because a lot of us, a lot of people in the alternative media, independent media, call it whatever you like, we’re willing to give Russia, you know, the benefit of the doubt simply because of our own-side lies and propaganda, but you’re able to give a xxxx you speak Russian and you not quite as– you don’t watch Russia with quite the same rose-tinted glasses, and you have a more realistic view. Let’s say somebody who watches the independent shows and believes that the CIA does terrible things, and all that, I’m all on board with that. And read, I mean there’s that fantastic book called _Unprovoked_. I think Scott Horton is very good on that historical aspect. Reading your book, what perspective coming away from that, what piece of the puzzle would you be able to contribute that they wouldn’t get from us Anglophones?

Doctorow:
Precisely the Russian perspective. I am well aware of this _Unprovoked_. I bought the book. I glanced through it. It is a different approach, of course. It is documentary. It is, again, history looking backwards. It’s compiling relevant documents after the fact. What you find after the fact is very different from what you find around you in timepresent. My diaries are diaries in the sense that they are time-present.

They’re not making reference to landmarks. And this gives you advantages and certain disadvantages. The advantage is that you can understand what it’s like to live in the period. People living in the period weren’t reading history books. They were always guessing what comes next.

And part of this was the natural circumstances of what’s called the fog of war, where states intentionally conceal what is going on, because they don’t want to affect their electorate in a way that gets people very wound up, very militant, or very exasperated with the government. They want to keep people calm, so they don’t give out the facts. That’s true on both sides, both the Russians and the Ukrainian side. Then you have the distortions that are put in after the fact for political reasons. I think of something very relevant, very recent.

We all know that there was a nearly-signed peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine that was negotiated in Istanbul in the end of March 2022. We learned some details about this. When President Putin held it up in front of reporters, there was a thick document that you see, he initialed everything. It was all set to be signed off by the two presidents, himself and Zelensky. And then came Boris Johnson and persuaded Zelensky not to sign it, and it was finished. And we know that close to a million people have lost their lives ever since then in three years of war.

This is a very nice perspective, but I believe it doesn’t reflect the facts. Certainly, it doesn’t reflect what you’ll find in my book. I took diary notes. I hardly covered, and only one diary mention, did I speak about the negotiations in Istanbul.

At the time, it seemed improbable to succeed, with or without Mr. Johnson coming. In fact, his coming was hardly known. The point is that after the fact, we can say probably the Russians didn’t really want to implement that. And we certainly know the Ukrainians didn’t, because they staged the massacre in Bucha, which was used to justify breaking off all negotiations.

So could there have been a peace really signed in March, April, 2022? It’s not clear. And here we have a distortion that’s introduced into the current events, what you find in newspapers today, introduced actually by Mr. Putin, which gives us a false understanding what the chances were.

Taylor:
Well, I mean, that’s a very interesting perspective, because you’re saying that as somebody who is not you know, a Ukrainian fan boy, part of the mainstream media propaganda machine. I mean you’ve got a lot of integrity and you’re sort of saying something against the Russians here, saying that they, post the event, are reconstructing a story that makes them look more peace-minded. But how can you be sure that your contemporaneous perspective writing diary notes was more accurate than what was going on behind the scenes? I mean, maybe … they were keen on peace; they just didn’t tell the talk shows that you were watching or that the taxi drivers that you interviewing.

Doctorow:
Of course, nobody could be certain, and it probably will be 50 years from now before you can draw final conclusions, if then. History by its very nature is always being rewritten. Not necessarily distorted, but the events are viewed from different perspectives, because we know where they led. 20 years from now, 50 years from now, you know where they led. Today we don’t. And so you draw out different elements that took place in the time- present, today, and you give them a different interpretation.

9:43
I didn’t mean to say that Mr. Putin is distorting things, but he is omitting something very important. There was considerable dissatisfaction within Russian elites over what little they knew about that peace treaty, because it seemed to confer far too many concessions to the Ukrainians. And so I don’t think that– I don’t think, I know– that Russian elites, the people who set the limits on what Mr. Putin can do, because it is a democracy, different from ours, but is a democracy, and Putin is responsible and answerable to a large swathes of the population.

And they were not happy with it. So that is as much as I can say. Was this decisive? Would it have been executed if Boris Johnson had not intervened? Would it have been executed if MI6 did not stage the Bucha massacre, to put at the door of the Russians and find an excuse for breaking up negotiations? Who knows? But the question has to be posed. And looking at media discussions today, it isn’t being posed.

Taylor:
So I get you, I mean that’s interesting, because the Ukrainians rejected even something that the Russian elites thought was too generous to them, which makes me wonder whether anything will be resolved now when Putin is likely to be even harder. I mean that he might satisfy his public opinion, but he’s certainly even less likely to satisfy the Ukrainians, although of course they’re now losing, they’re be more amenable to a deal.

Doctorow:
You’ve identified precisely the reason why I raised this question. It’s not an abstract, it’s not something picayune, something of minor– no, no, it’s something major in understanding where we are today. Can the sides reach an agreement when they’re so far apart?

Taylor:
I mean, just what do you think the Russians were trying to achieve in 2022? I mean, I was talking to another guest and I’m wondering whether the West was trying to put, it’s called a Zugzwang in chess apparently, trying to make your opponent have just bad choices. Whatever he does, it’s bad. So if Putin didn’t invade, they’d carry on the boiling-the-frog method of putting more CIA bases into Ukraine, giving Zelensky his lines about, you know, rearming and getting nukes, reinforcing the Black Sea bases, which the British navy could then get into. And if they, so they get worse and worse for Putin. But if he did invade, they’d hammer Russia with sanctions and they probably believe that they could destroy the Russian economy that way. So that’s the Zugzwang, apparently. And Putin could see this, and he acted on that. Would you agree with that?

Doctorow:
Let me, something, a point that I make at the very beginning of my book, which is worth repeating here. There were many explanations made by the Russians of why they went into the special military operation. And some of them were the ones that you are thinking now, which are national security issues.

Others you have not mentioned, but were also very prominent. And that was the Russian national defense, defense of Russian national interests of the speakers of Russian in Ukraine who had been subjected to oppression, to military strikes on their residences. And I’m speaking now about those provinces in the east of Ukraine who refused to accept the coup d’etat of February 2014 and who rebelled. These were then supported largely verbally, diplomatically, very little militarily, by Russia from 2014 on. And to protect them from an ethnic cleansing or genocide, which is one of the reasons why Putin went in, in February 2022.

He had– his intelligence told him that the Ukrainians were ready to pounce. They had concentrated 120,000, 150,000, more than half of their total military they had concentrated on the border with the rebelling provinces. And they had been armed to the teeth by their Western friends. And so [it was] supposed by Moscow that there was going to be a genocide. And they moved in on the same principles as the West moved into Libya of the right to defend or the obligation to defend and protect.

So that is a big aside to the … special military operation. It is important, because that is something that Mr. Putin can address to his public. It speaks to the heart. It is our people, our brothers, our sisters are facing a massacre.

14:52
They certainly are facing daily bombardment for the last eight years from the Kievan forces, meaning that 14,000 civilians in these rebelling provinces had been killed by, largely by artillery shells and short-range missiles fired by the Ukrainian government at the rebels in their residences, in their playgrounds, in their hospitals. So that plays to the, that message plays to the heartstrings of any people, and the Russian people included. The other side of it, which you were discussing, I think was what really drove this. It was the national security, if the British succeed in establishing naval bases within easy striking range of Sevastopol [ewhere] the Russian Navy had its Black Sea headquarters. If missiles, long-range missiles are put in by the Americans and others into Ukraine, then Russia faces a severe security risk.

But you can’t talk to your people about that. People do not, people anywhere, they are not moved by these issues of military balance, of raison d’etat, state interests. People do not take that up, send their sons, their fathers, their husbands out to possibly die for these reasons. When you say that it’s to preserve the lives of your distant relatives, and of course there are many intermarriages between Russians and Ukrainians of your distant relatives, your cousins, your father-in-law, whatever, in these areas of Ukraine, then people are willing to sacrifice their lives for that purpose. So there are several reasons, as I say.

Taylor:
Very good. And you’ve actually explained it. I mean, I didn’t know that the Ukrainians had gathered quite so many. But it’s interesting, because Zelensky was telling the world media that he wasn’t expecting the Russians to attack even as he must have known it because he was escalating on the border there although I did know that the OSCE the organization that was patrolling the border and monitoring the border showed a huge uptick in fire, on shellings, just before the February invasion, which no one in the West reported.

We’re just going to go into a break and back after the break.
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Taylor: 18:42
Welcome back to the Pelle Neroth Taylor Show. We’ve got Gilbert Doctorow with us, who’s just written a book of war diaries, which covers him as one of the few sort of geopolitical analysts out there who’s actually speaks Russian and has been to Russia and regularly during this special military operation. I think he’s got a flat in St. Petersburg and he wrote a contemporary, contemporaneous diary, which I think fills in some of the gaps because I said history, we’re always looking back, and we kind of, even the best historians create a post hoc reconstruction of events and yours has got the freshness of being written at the time, and you explained very … clearly what Putin’s motivations would have been there. I just, this Bucha massacre, what’s been worrying about me, I mean, since that happened, is whether the Brits or someone else will stage another false flag to create something else, right?

You know, I mean, that was to stop– that was to create opinion in the West against peace. Would they do something like that again, because if the stakes are so high, and that might bring us into what Merz is doing, you know, the German Chancellor, he’s provoking, or, you know, the Russians must be absolutely neuralgic about this, a German Chancellor, Lavrov has been calling, comparing him almost to Hitler, perhaps either firing, knocking down the Kerch bridge which is of huge symbolic value, or maybe even striking Moscow which would force Putin to listen to the public opinion and maybe strike Germany and then we’re into World War Three territory. What is Merz trying to do, and what are the Russians doing to combat that?

Doctorow: 20:11
Well, the Russians have very effective air defence. We have heard in the last week, just before Mr. Trump said that he didn’t know what got into Putin, that Putin is absolutely crazy. Before he said that, and the reason he said it, how justified in saying that, is that all Western media were reporting on the devastating strikes. These are combination strikes of drones and precision missiles, either ground-launched or air-launched from significant distances, either from the Black Sea or interior of Russia, against major cities, foremost of them Kiev, but also other cities around Ukraine in the last week, or particularly concentrated over last weekend.

What our Western media has not reported was what touched that off. Again, throughout the war, it’s been a, the coverage has been like in a kindergarten playground where the camera shows the fellow who punches the other kid back, but doesn’t show how he was punched first.

And that’s exactly what we have here. In the lead-up to these Russian revenge attacks– that’s what they call them openly, revenge attacks– the Ukrainians had fired more missiles, so it was like 2,000 to 2,500 missiles were fired, say 50-50 between the Russian-occupied eastern provinces of Ukraine and Russian Federation proper. In the latter category, many of them were concentrated on the city of Moscow. The Russians claimed that they knocked down, which means either they shot them down or they used electronic warfare to down them, to disarm the software guiding the drones.

These were drones. And everyone talks about how Ukraine needs missiles in order to do damage to Russia. Well, this is absolutely empty talk. The Ukrainians are doing very well, thank you, with long-range airplane-like, airplane-shaped drones. And they cover 1,000 kilometers or more.

So the idea of striking Moscow or striking industrial or residential cities in the middle of Russia doesn’t require a missile. They’re doing very well with drones, and drones are actually harder to locate, to identify and to destroy than missiles are. So in that sense the Russians were very, very upset about 2,400 drones swarming. And although they nearly were all downed, that doesn’t tell you this whole story. We all know that drone attacks lead to deaths and damage, not from the drone hitting the target, but from the pieces of a destroyed drone coming down to earth.

And so there were deaths among civilians in Russia, even as the Russian military could claim that their air defenses stopped all the drones. And the response was what I’ve said. Russians say that they concentrated their efforts on identifiable military targets as confirmed by reconnaissance drones. And they’ve shown on television just what damage they did to this airport which was used to launch F-16s that themselves launched Storm Shadow missiles against Russia or against a container ship in the port of Odessa which had 100 containers of various assemblies for making highly high-powered drones, kamikaze drones. This type of site was destroyed.

And you’ve seen pictures of it. And then the Ukrainians are rushing to our press to say that the Russians have struck civilian targets. The numbers speak for themselves. If the Russians indeed launched in three days from this last weekend 1,000 or more drones and missiles. The Ukrainians speak of 13 or 30 civilian deaths.

What they don’t speak about of course is military deaths, which were, one can assume substantial because among the targets were barracks of mercenaries, French mercenaries, by the way, and Ukrainian armed forces. But civilian deaths, 30. This is negligible.

Taylor:
It’s incredible. I mean, it’s the … war with the least number of civilian deaths in history probably isn’t it? And the aim of this, of course, was to break up the peace talks between Russia and the rapprochement between Russia and the United States with the assistance of the Western media which just reports on what the Russians did and then allows Merz to say, sort of evoke pictures of terror bombings of World War Two somehow, and then maybe get those bone-crunching sanctions and then break off relations between Trump and Putin because the media– because Trump seemed quite surprised by what– when some reporter pointed out that the Ukrainians had struck first.

25:58
We’ve just got time for one last question, although I’d love to continue for longer. A lot of the independent media are kind of gone sour on Trump, you know. They say they feel he’s a traitor and that he’s listening to his neocons. But you made an interesting point.

Check out Gilbert Doctorow dot com for your essays and your transcripts of your interviews. You make the point that he’s actually a brave man and he knows what he’s doing. He probably knows much more than what people attribute to him. So you said this is the man who approved closing down USAID, the main instrument for regime change paid for by the CIA. The man who’s decapitated the US intelligence agencies now purging the State Department, who’s scaling back the National Security Council from a bloated 200 staff under Biden to a headcount of 60.

The man who’s doing all this cannot be a buffoon. He is a brave man, knowing what he’s doing and probably throwing out a lot of chaff to confuse people and his enemies while being kind of laser focused, you know, playing the buffoon but like he knows what he’s doing. Can you just expand on that for about a minute or two?

Doctorow:
Trump talks a lot. Trump talks too much. But his talk is intended to confuse people. He’s not confused, I assure you. And I’ve said the thing about Trump is follow what he does, not don’t follow what he says. What he says is intended to disarm his opponents, to let them believe that he’s a buffoon and that they can influence him and bring him around to their positions. If they believe that, then they don’t stick a dagger in his back. And that is what it’s all about.

But when you look at what he’s done, you just enumerated the things he’s done. He didn’t even talk about them. They, in fact, are destroying the power base of neocons in the federal government. And people heard about them because, oh, yes, because Elon Musk is saving money.

That was also a cover. Why exactly is the first place he looked to save money to close down USAID, which was the main instrument for CIA money to stage color revolutions around the world? So trust Trump that he’s no fool. He is not a likeable personality. I’m not praising him for his egotism and his in-your-face behavior, but he’s saving our lives.

And he’s certainly saving free speech, despite contradictions about about free speech over … Gaza and so forth. That’s all he’s [crazy for].

Taylor:
But I mean– sometimes I disagree with him over Gaza– but I mean if he stops the war in Ukraine, at least thank him for that. And there’s some people in independent media so blinded by his apparent kowtowing to Zionism that they can’t credit him for for Ukraine. Anyway, maybe that’s for another time or do you want to say some last thing?

Doctorow:
Well, it’s the last point. It’s all politics. I, He is, his feet are pointing now towards disengagement with Israel, not just with Netanyahu. But the question is, how can he put through his peace plan on Russia and Ukraine, or how can he withdraw the United States from that conflict, as he says he would like to do, without having political capital?

You don’t do anything without political capital in the federal government. And if he were to do the decent thing, the honest thing, and to denounce what Israel is doing in Gaza for what it is, genocide, he would lose in one day all of his political capital and would be able to do nothing to save you, me and the rest of the world from a third world war over Ukraine.

Taylor: 29:35
Absolutely. I agree with all that. Amen to that. Thank you so much, sir. It’s incredibly interesting discussion there. Gilbert Doctorow, you can see the name at the bottom with a dot com. You’ll find your website and you Google that, go to Amazon. I guess you can find that and in many good bookstores Thank you so much, sir.

This is the Pelle Neroth Taylor Show, and we’ll be back after the break.

Transcript submitted by a reader

NewsX: 0:00
Now we move on to Russia. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov warned that the US Golden Dome anti-missile system will militarize outer space and heightened global tensions. He called for international agreements to prevent an arms race in space, highlighting Russia’s push for a UN ban on space weapons deployment. Ukraine claims it struck two Russian airfields and fuel sites overnight in a major retaliatory operation. President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed the strikes followed a massive Russian assault involving over 400 drones and 40 missiles.

Zelensky also called on Western allies to act decisively and ramp up pressure on Moscow. He warned that failing to respond promptly would encourage further escalation. Zelensky said Russia must feel the cost of terror. “We need more air defense, long-range capabilities and firm decisions from partners.” He stressed that delayed action only strengthens the enemy and urged the West to speed up weapons deliveries and sanctions.

1:06
Russia claims it intercepted several Ukrainian drones. Moscow also says ties with Washington are in ruins, diminishing hopes to renew the New START nuclear treaty. Meanwhile, the EU is weighing whether to add Russia to its money-laundering gray list, a move that would increase financial pressure on Moscow. Meanwhile, the EU says a new trade deal with Ukraine could be struck by summer, which sugar quotas set to rise sharply under the proposed agreement. Pre-war trade rules will resume from Friday as temporary exemptions expire, but talks are underway to reach a balanced long-term agreement.

NewsX: 1:49
Now we have guest Gilbert Doctorow. He’s a Russian affairs expert joining us live from Brussels, Belgium. Thank you for joining us today. Is there a risk that outer space could become the next frontier of the arms race between superpowers?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
I don’t think that risk is going to be very great. The Russian complaint over US plans for using space, these complaints are supported by many other countries. And the whole project, it’s a very expensive, “Golden Dome” project, is unlikely to be realized. It is a talking point for Mr. Trump, and I don’t think much more.

NewsX: 2:35
And according to how does Russia view the EU’s plans to deepen trade ties with Ukraine in the midst of this war?

Doctorow:
Well, whether they deepen them or don’t deepen them, I don’t think makes much difference to Moscow. Moscow was interested in the military and financial aid from the European Union and from NATO to Kiev. And that, despite all the fine words coming out of Western Europe, is unlikely to happen, simply because the money isn’t there and the war materiel isn’t there to give to Kiev. Moreover, all European leaders have their eyes on Washington, where they expect Mr. Trump to leave the field to them and to withdraw American assistance.

NewsX:
And following up on that, how does Russia respond to Western concerns that Moscow itself is testing space-based military technology?

Doctorow:
Well, the Russians will not really comment on that. So there is not, there is not much material for me to use to answer your question. They, of course the Russians are prepared to enter that sphere if necessary. It is not a matter of immediate concern. This project will take years to realize, and there’ll be many changes in relationships between the United States, Russia, and other major powers while these tentative developments are occurring. So it’s not an urgent issue that bears on the present very strained relationships in global affairs.

NewsX: 4:19
And is there any room left for de-escalation, when both sides are striking deep into each other’s territory?

Doctorow:
Well, both sides striking deep — the Ukrainian side striking deep is striking locally. That’s to say they’re not striking from Ukraine. And that is hard to repeat. This project that was so stunning last weekend, their Operation Spiderweb, took 18 months from conception through final implementation. I doubt that there are many reserves of Ukrainian drones on Russian territory to deploy to use in the near future. So I think this is a one-way street. The Russians have every capability of striking deep with missiles, with drones, and so forth. The Ukrainians don’t.

5:13
Nonetheless, the situation that was created by the strike on Russian air bases last weekend is of major international concern, because of one other item in the news that you mentioned in passing, that the Russians are saying it’s unlikely they will be a renewal of the New START arms limitation treaty. The reason for that is precisely what happened last weekend. The United States, no doubt, was a party to the planning of the strike that eventually took place last weekend, going back into the middle of Joe Biden’s term in office. And this was, this meant that the United States was in direct violation, egregious violation of its basic obligations under that treaty. The treaty, as you know, obliged the Russians to leave their aircraft, their strike, their nuclear triad strike aircraft exposed on the tarmac so that they could be watched from space and counted to see that the terms of the agreement were being honored.

6:21
That was used by the Ukrainians, of course with the help and connivance of the British and the Americans, to strike, to try to destroy those very bombers. That cannot pass as a basis for any further talks. And therefore, we’ve heard from Moscow remarks that you commented upon and you delivered to the audience a few minutes ago.

NewsX:
And with that in mind, on US-Russia relations and nuclear tensions, Moscow says ties with Washington are in ruins. Who is responsible for this collapse in dialogue, according to you?

Doctorow:
The United States, because the Russians never cut their relations. I mean, the Russians never cut their relations. They were on the receiving end of America’s attempts under Joe Biden to isolate Russia and to make it a pariah state. Therefore, any Russian acts curbing diplomatic presence, making it difficult for citizens to get visas to Russia, these were all a Russian reaction. And indeed, it has to be said that the Russians went out of their way to maintain relations, people-to-people relations, even as the United States did everything possible to cut every variety of ties.

7:44
What I mean is that seeing that diplomatic core of each of these powers in the other country was curtailed to an extent where visa issuance became problematic, the Russians reopened the channel of electronic visa issuance on the internet, making it possible for Americans to travel, one could say freely, to Russia. So for the Russian side, they have to a limited extent tried to maintain ties, while the United States did everything possible to cut ties.

NewsX:
And that explanation raises a critical follow-up. Is there any hope for reviewing the New START Treaty, or is arms control now dead between Russia and the U.S.?

Doctorow:
Well, this is a major point that I’ve been trying to make and introduce with various broadcasters and I find myself regrettably pretty much alone in making this point.

Everyone has called attention to the dramatic damage done to various Russian bombers. Yes, that was of course striking, but the biggest damage was precisely to the whole concept of arms limitation. The United States, as the other power, the other partner in such treaties violates them in the most cynical way as it did clearly by facilitating the launch of Operation Spiderweb 18 months ago, then there’s no sense whatsoever for the Russians to enter into arms limitation talks with the Americans. They are not an honest partner whose word is worth anything. That is very sad, because arms limitation talks are much more than reducing the numbers of warheads or putting caps on the numbers of arms that each country has.

9:42
They are a process. That is, not the negotiation, but the final treaties, are a process of dialogue between the countries that maintain something resembling trust. And if there are no agreements in place, then there is zero trust between the parties, and we are very close to possibly terrible consequences of mistakes, of erroneous identification of coming, of in-bound strikes, nuclear weapon strikes, where each party follows the rule of “fire at once upon suspected incoming missiles” because you use them or you lose them. That is a very dangerous situation today, all the more so considering that the time from pushing a button to launch to its reaching its target has descended from the traditional 1960s 1970s Cold War scenario of 30 minutes to something like five minutes. So the lack of trust is a fatal risk to all of us.

NewsX: 10:52
Yes indeed, and thank you very much for sharing that insight and joining us, Gilbert Doctorow. He’s a Russian affairs expert. He joined us from Brussels, Belgium. Now we move on to our next story.

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4DCzMfqhzA

WION: 0:00
The American President Donald Trump is yet to issue a public comment on Ukraine’s 1st of June Spiderweb operation, which targeted billions of dollars worth of Russian nuclear-capable fighter jets that were stationed at bases across the country. This, even as his social media activity has significantly increased over the days. In the past couple of days, Trump has in fact posted about a gamut of different issues on his Truth Social network, from his relationship with the Chinese President Xi Jinping to Poland’s elections, but there’s not been one word on the Russia-Ukraine war. The White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt has confirmed in a briefing on Tuesday that he was not informed in advance about Operation Spiderweb.
——–

Reporter:
Was President Trump informed in advance by Ukraine that the attack is coming?

Leavitt:
He was not.
——–

WION: 0:52
Now the American President Donald Trump is in fact on an online posting frenzy. He’s been posting on the internet at a much faster rate than what he did in his first term. As of the 1st of June, Trump had posted about 2,262 times in his company’s social network Truth Social in the 132 days since his inauguration. And this is according to a Washington Post analysis, [and now] this is more than three times the number of tweets that he had put out during the same period in his first presidency.

Now, during his first term, Trump had used Twitter, but his account was blocked by the network’s administration following the attack on the Capitol Hill by his supporters on the 6th of January back in 2021. In 2022, the tech billionaire Elon Musk took charge of X, lifted the restrictions, but by then, Donald Trump was already using his own Truth Social network, where he continues to post pretty much on a day-to-day basis. While the American president began to use social networks for communication with his supporters more than 10 years ago, but his activity has since been significantly on the rise. In 2017 the President had posted about 14 tweets per day at the most. And this number is nearly 10 times greater, 138 posts on Truth Social.

2:11
The heightened volume is not just to the credit of Trump. He has now a team of aides who actually help him post through the [day]. To give us more perspective on this, we’re joined by Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, who’s a Russian affairs analyst and also an international affairs expert, an author, and a historian. Dr. Doctorow, thank you very much indeed for joining us here on WION. And let me, in fact, start off by asking you this: in the aftermath of Ukraine having carried out those drone attacks that targeted Russian nuclear-capable fighter jets, in your assessment, why is it that we’ve not heard anything from American President Donald Trump, who is so given to putting out his ideas on his social network?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 2:56
Well, we also haven’t heard very much from Mr. Putin. So it’s not just Donald Trump has been quiet about this. I think there’s been enormous speculation as to whether or not the president of the United States was informed in advance. The question that was posed to his press secretary, Leavitt, was whether the Ukrainians had informed him. But in the alternative media there is some great speculation and discussion that he should have or could have been informed by the CIA. in the assumption that the American CIA was involved in the preparation and execution of the attack. That of course is pure speculation, which I don’t share.

3:39
Coming to Mr. Putin, I think we will hear from him in a very important way in the coming days. I don’t think your audience is aware, but all Russian ambassadors around the world have been called back into Russia for a meeting. Now, this could be just an annual event. In the spring there are such events.

But the timing is peculiar. And I expect that Mr. Putin will be briefing them on what he is about to announce to all of us on Russia’s revenge for this disastrous strike on its nuclear assets.

WION:
Right. It’s interesting that you point out that not only Donald Trump, but even Vladimir Putin has said very little. But the fact is, Putin would see this as a massive, massive embarrassment for what has been done to him in a war that he believes he is actually quite clearly winning on the battlefield. But the question that I want you to weigh in on, Gilbert Doctorow, is, you know, considering the level of American involvement in this war, the amount of intelligence that the Americans have been sharing with the Ukrainians, the sophistication of this attack that was carried out by the Ukrainians, do you think the Ukrainians could have done this without active American support? And if that is the case, could the American president not have been aware of this?

Doctorow: 5:05
Well, let’s take what Ukraine has told us, that this event was planned 18 months ago. The preparations began 18 months ago. And this was all during the period of Joe Biden’s presidency. So it is not an attack that was arranged or staged during Mr. Trump’s time in office. It is unlikely that the United States, which had surely participated in setting up this type of attack 18 months ago and contributed no doubt to its planning later on, it is inconceivable to me that after Trump came into office and purged the intelligence agencies, decapitated them in fact, that those agencies would persist in a program that was directly opposed to the plans of their boss, Mr. Trump, to find a common language with Russia.

WION: 6:09
You know, it’s interesting that you point out that this could have been an attack for which the planning may have been going on for 18 months, so it may have been sanctioned very well by Joe Biden when he was the president. But the fact is, it is Donald Trump WHO has now been pushing for a deal to bring about a ceasefire. In the aftermath of this attack, what happens to those negotiations that the American President Donald Trump has taken upon himself to try and bring about a ceasefire?

Doctorow:
If there is any hint that Americans have continued to participate in the planning and execution of this attack after Donald Trump came into office, then I think we would see, and we would have seen already, but certainly if not already, then in the coming day or two, the Russians pulling out of peace negotiations, denounce the United States.

7:00
And it’s more than just the loss of this equipment. It would be the complete loss of trust over the viability of the New START treaty, which still has a year to run, which the Russians have suspended but say that they are still respecting. And the fact that all of their jets were lined up on the tarmac for open view was a consequence of their following the agreements they had negotiated with the United States. The United States would be utterly destroyed in terms of credibility and as a talking partner for Russia if that were so. And therefore I believe it is not so. that the Americans were not involved, though the Brits very clearly were.

7:45
And I’d like to add, let’s be a bit more kind, or at least a bit more understanding of the Ukrainians. To say that this could not have been done without foreign assistance, I think is missing the point. The Ukrainians in drone affairs are probably way ahead of the British. It’s a joke to think that they would need massive help from abroad to perform this drone attack.

WION:
A lot of people have turned around and said they need the satellite data that would be supplied by the Americans to give effect to an attack of this nature. But we’re completely out of time. Thank you very much indeed, Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, for joining us with that perspective there.

Doctorow: 8:24
Thank you.

The web is now afire with sensationalist titles of interviews with talking heads of all political convictions who are telling us that World War III is fast approaching. Yesterday, none other than Jeffrey Sachs weighed in on the prospects for a US-Russia nuclear exchange in the coming days.

My best advice to the Community is to remember that yellow journalism is not something that went out of style with the print newspapers. It is very much with us in the digital age. It sells, it attracts incredibly large audiences.

For all of these reasons, I am especially appreciative that WION has kept the titles attached to this morning’s interview factual and not speculative.

The interview is only 10 minutes long and I leave it to you to watch it or wait for the transcript which will be posted before long.

I use this space to expand upon one point I made in the interview: that the Spider Web attack on Russia’s heavy bombers, which form a key part of its nuclear triad, may ruin any chances for the Trump administration to enter into arms limitation talks with the Russians should the move towards rapprochement be pressed by his administration.

Just remember that arms limitation negotiations have been the key interest of Russia-haters in the USA in good times and bad. They want to be sure that their own necks are safe even if they are planning and doing their best to sabotage the Russian economy, to isolate the country and otherwise to do it harm.

There can be little doubt that the USA and Britain were active in the planning and for some time in the implementation stages of Spider Web. Most likely Britain was a participant right up to the launch of the attack.

The operation took advantage of the vulnerability of the Russian bombers out in the open that was mandated by the New SALT arms limitation treaty. The Russians have suspended their participation in that treaty but pledged not to violate its terms. Clearly, they kept to their word. And equally clearly the USA under Biden egregiously violated the treaty by enabling the Ukrainian attack on those jets.

If I were Vladimir Putin, which I am not, I would say to the States that there can be no talks, no extensions or new treaties on arms limitation until and unless the USA and Britain admit to their foul play and pay compensation for the damaged jets. We will see in the immediately coming days what Putin actually does to exact a price from Russia’s enemies.

As I say in this interview, all of Russia’s ambassadors have been called home and will be meeting with Lavrov and likely with Putin during this  week before heading home to officiate at Russia’s National Day festivities, the equivalent of their July 4^th on 9-10 June. I fully expect Putin to issue an address at this meeting that represents Russia’s response to the attacks of this past weekend.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Transcript submitted by a reader

Mike Farris:
Gilbert, good to see you again. I always appreciate you making yourself available. We set this up just a few days ago. Let me start off with congratulations on your new book.

Doctorow:
I’m very happy with this newly-hatched book. It took a great deal of effort, frankly, to put this together and I’m pleased with the result. It is in two formats. First, a week ago, the paperback edition appeared on all of Amazon’s websites across the globe. And this is not an abstract consideration. One of my first orders came from Japan, another order came from Australia.

Not to mention, of course, the States is obvious, Britain and English-speaking countries are obvious. But these remote locations already have placed orders to receive the book, which is a great pleasure because the issues are global. The interests of the whole world are in what is taking place now in and around Ukraine. So it’s logical that this would be topical. The achievement here was to cull the writings that I do several times a week to try to reduce duplication, because necessarily you cover the same track when you are writing about events before, during, and after them, and to give a very important introduction forward to this to prepare the reader for what they’re about to see and what they’re not going to see.

I’ll say right up front what they will not find here is a comprehensive history of the Russian-Ukraine war. That’s something that there are dozens and dozens of historians and political scientists who will be doing that for forever. And the public, the audience can choose among them. What I’ve done is something they do not do, because they weren’t in Russia, and I was. This book in particular covers a period, this is 2022, 2023, when virtually all foreign journalists left Russia.

Some of them weren’t there anyway because the Russian-Ukraine war started only a few months after the Covid epidemic ended. During the epidemic, there were relatively few foreign journalists anywhere outside their home base. So that was how we went into the war. And during the war, they of course, the Russians, stopped issuing visas. And so, visas for all purposes, business visas, visas for journalists, visas for anyone, except humanitarian visas.

And my visas fall in that category because I have a Russian wife. And those who were in close family relations were issued visas by the Russians. So I got into Russia and I wrote about what I saw. And this book is about how the Russian society fared during the war. Nobody else was paying much attention to it.

Certainly Western newspapers and electronic media were not interested in conveying to their publics anything that they might know, because Russia was taboo, Russia was supposed to be isolated, Russia was supposed to be collapsing. Therefore I recommend this book to those who want to see how Russian society developed, because it was not static, the war as I– there’s an old saying that wars make nations, And it is true. Of course, in Western media, that has been used with respect to Ukraine, how Ukraine consolidated and became a single culture country under the impact of the war. In the case of Russia, it also had dramatic effect on rising patriotism by creating new elites to replace the elites that we all know about from the Yeltsin period, that is to say the oligarchs, who are deeply tainted with corruption and with selfishness and so on. And they are steadily being replaced by patriotic self-sacrificing people who have impressed the broad public, and of course the powers that be, with their possible contributions in future.

For the Americans who are watching this, I refer to the effects of military service in creating whole cadres of higher business executives and government officials following the World War II, following the Korean War. When I was coming up through the business in the late 1970s, almost anybody who was at the top of a major corporation had seen military service in one of the many wars that America had been engaged in. So Russian society has been shaped also by the pressures and the opportunities for upward movement that come out of wars. And this is something I describe. Of course, greater interest, I think, to the general public is consumer, the consumer services and goods that were available in supermarkets, in the corner grocery store, in the electronics store, how these things changed over the three years.

And the changes were very significant. Of course, the single biggest item here when speaking about supermarkets is that Russia became really very self-sufficient in almost everything that you would find in a supermarket. And they’ve also created new sources of supply from Iran, from Azerbaijan. So, I’m not going to repeat here points in the book, but I will say that for the general reader, this type of material, my travel notes in Russia during my periodic visits in 22, in 23, will be of particular interest. And then there are other items, because the book has several different genres.

It has book reviews of books that I think are highly relevant to understanding. The Feeling of Patriotism, my one book, I found for 85 days that the city of Slaviansk survived as a cradle of Russian renaissance in 2014, this was the Russia’s Alamo to liken it to historical events that would be known to Americans at least, standing up against vastly superior forces and ultimately losing, but creating a kind of landmark kind of tradition that Russians would return to in 22 and 23 when an actual war took place with participation of the Russian Federation. So there are books. There are some very important documentary films, which most of the audience, most of the readership of this book will not know about, should know about. So as I say, there are a number of genres, not a single one.

I hope, as I say in the introduction, there are, there’s material here that not everyone will be interested in. And my recommendation is to skim and to go to what you find is of particular interest to you in the general subject matter of the Russian-Ukraine war. It’s 772 pages of rather condensed print, typeface, and of large format book, 7 by 10 inch book instead of the usual 6 by 9. So there is, there are 280,000 words. I do not recommend to anyone other than scholars who are keen to do a book review to try to sit down and take on this book in one sitting or two sittings.

I myself, in editing it, took a week to get through 280,000 words with some comfort. But there is material here. And I’ll answer the question, why republish and present here material that otherwise was available on my internet sites. My internet sites are here today and gone tomorrow. I expect that this book will find a readership not just next week and next year, but for a good long time.

And I say that not idly, but with good reason from my experience. I am still selling comfortably books which I published in 2010, like my analysis of the great writers or authors of road maps to the future after the United States was looking for the next big thing, having slain the other communists in Russia by their own thinking. Of course, not in fact, but that’s how they imagined it. In any case, the books that go back to 2010, also collections of essays, are still selling with good reason, because they have a lot of relevance. And so I believe that this book will find readers, not just among scholars, for several decades.

I think it’s easier, the last comment I’ll make, to help people understand what this is. It is a primary source, it is not a secondary source. Secondary sources are based on materials like this primary source. Otherwise, primary sources are autobiographies or similar material. This is personal journalism, and it is–I position myself as a chronicler.

I am a historian by training. And in Russian history, there are figures who are very well known to the broad public who are chroniclers. Pymian is the one case in point. The one man who wrote about it, Isidman, who wrote about what the Russians call the “time of troubles” in the early 17th century, which led to the installation of the Romanov dynasty. He was recording what he saw around him.

And that is what I am doing in this book, recording what I saw around myself. And I hope people will find it to be of value.

Farris:
And for people, we didn’t say the title of the book, so would you like to share the name of the book?

Doctorow:
Oh yes, oh yes please. It is “War Diaries” with “Volume One”, Volume One because there’s going to be a “Volume Two”, and I hope that will be the end of it.

Volume Two, I expect will come out at the end of this year, assum ing that the war winds down one way or another, although how it will wind down is still a matter of great conjecture. So “War Diaries, the Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023”. This is Volume 2, where it is intended to be 24-25.
——–

Farris:
This episode is brought to you by Vaulted, launched by McElveany Financial Group, the simplest and most affordable way to own physical gold and silver. Physical gold is the only asset outside of the control of the government and banking system.

They can print dollars but they can’t print gold. Click on the promo link in the show notes or go to vaulted.blbvux.net forward slash coffee and a mike.
——–

And so for people that are listening on the audio, I’ve just put up an image of the cover page for Gilbert’s new book. And where can people find it?

Doctorow:
It’s available globally from Amazon. There are, people like their little bookshops, I understand that. So I hope they’ll bear with me. As an author and self-published person, I am very satisfied with Amazon, even if I don’t like the owner of Mr. Bezos. These are unrelated issues.

What he has created is brilliant. For authors, I have experience both with publishers who look like traditional publishers, though actually they’re also just typography, so printing houses, and who pretend to give you full service and promotion and rest of it, for your money, of course, and who keep almost all the royalties to themselves. Thank you very much. Amazon is a generous partner with the authors who publish on it. And so I am a, also they give the author instantaneous information about sales and where the sales take place.

This is invaluable for properly positioning and promoting your book to audiences who are interested in it. So my experience with them has been very good. My experience with other means of publishing, like my memoirs, physically the books look wonderful. I was very pleased with them. But as an author who would like to be reimbursed for my expenses, possibly make a cent or two on my intellectual efforts, I find these alternative ways of publishing to be considerably less attractive.

So I hope that the audience will bear with me and understand why I’ve chosen to market this book exclusively through Amazon. Now, there are, it’s in two formats. I mentioned at the start of this explanation of the book. The first that came out was the paperback, and that is not cheap, but the production costs of the book aren’t cheap. A 772-page book costs quite a bit to make.

So the retail price in the US is $36 for that book. Now I’m happy to say a more democratically priced solution is also available. For $10, you can get the e-book also on the Amazon website starting June 4th, which is the proper launch date of the ebook, it will be instantaneously available for download from the various Amazon websites. And I mentioned various because they’re all over the globe. They have centers, of course, nodes, which serve several countries at a time.

Here in Europe, almost every country has an Amazon website. Of course, the States, Canada, South America, Brazil, Mexico, in the Far East, or Australia, or Japan, these all have Amazon websites, and they serve the country where they’re located, and they serve neighboring countries. So, from the standpoint of the audience, this is readily accessible and they ship very quickly. So that is my recommendation.

Farris:
Well, again, congratulations on that. When you look at the completed book now and it’s it’s been released and you know, starting in 2022 and where we’re at, especially the events that unfolded over the weekend you know, what were your thoughts with seeing this drone attack? And it’s unbelievable where we’re living, the times we’re in, because I’m reading this stuff yesterday morning, and I don’t know Gilbert, like it’s just, you’re like, okay, was it just damaging? Was it not damaging? Depends on who you read. And what will the response be from it? So what were your thoughts yesterday?

Doctorow:
Well, my thoughts are the same that you’ll find expressed in the foreword to the book, that this war has had many turning points. And the people like myself, who have been on interview programs and who have written essays have been proven wrong, consistently wrong, because no one could participate in the escalations that have changed the nature of the war periodically or the dramatic events that occurred this past weekend, which you’re alluding to. And they open up complete change of perspective of what happens next. So in this, I think it is essential, an essential point of the book, that we have been proven wrong, not because we’re stupid, but because events have changed in an unforeseeable way.

And by the events I mean the level of US and NATO participation in the war, which changed the war from what was initially a special military operation, meaning a certain cleanup or regime change plan that Mr. Putin and his colleagues had to justify their military entry into Ukraine to a full-blown proxy war between Russia and the collective West. That was unforeseeable. Also, the level of offensive weapons, of deadly weapons that the West gave to Ukraine after forswearing it at this point and at that point, changed the Russian approach to the war.

As I have said repeatedly, in order for the Russian Federation to be safe from attack from Ukraine, they have to push Ukraine back the distance that the latest weapons systems give them to attack Russia. As Mr. Medvedev said the other day, “We soon will have to push Ukraine back to the Polish border, because– if we are to be safe from weapons that are put on the ground or in the air in what remains of Ukraine.”

So these things were foreseeable. Now as to what’s going to happen next from this weekend, there is, as you say, uncertainty about the extent of damage that was carried out by the drones on Russian planes in the various air bases from Murmansk in the north to the Moscow, a central Russian region, all the way out to the Irkutsk, 5,500 kilometers east of the Ukraine border.

How many of the nuclear-capable big bombers were actually destroyed? Well, Some people, the Ukrainians, were saying initially that they had destroyed one-third of the Russian fleet of these strategic bombers, and that 40 planes worth $7 billion had been destroyed. Latest indications, unofficially coming out of Russia because the ministry of defense says nothing, but unofficially it’s believed that maybe five of these bombers were actually damaged, or a few of them were destroyed. But the issue of course is bigger than the dollar value on how many planes were destroyed and whether it is just a tiny fraction of the Russian fleet that is part of their nuclear triad, which was destroyed, or a more significant number of planes. The issue is much bigger than that.

And it has to do with possible involvement, or likely involvement, of the United States intelligence, the CIA, of MI6, in helping the Ukrainians to prepare for this attack 18 months ago when the work began. The good thing to come out of this event is that it took them 18 months to prepare this attack, so it is virtually excluded that anything similar can be done now by the Ukrainians for as long as this war goes on. That doesn’t mean that something different that is devastating cannot be done by the Ukrainians. But this type of attack on air bases, we can exclude for the future. Nonetheless, it puts into question much bigger issues than just Ukraine.

The– people have asked “Why were all these Russian planes sitting like sitting ducks out on the airstrips exposed to possible attack?” Well, they were there because that is the condition of the New StART arms limitation treaty that had both the United States and Russia still honor it, though the Russians suspended participation in it. And so the planes were there. And the question, next question is, how did this, these drones get into Russia? Why were the– because they all seemed to have passed Russian customs border points being carried in semi-trailers.

So why did they, the Russian customs officials, not stop them? But I have traveled repeatedly across the border from Estonia into the Russian Federation, and our bus was almost taken apart by Russian border guards looking for Lord knows what in the engine case. How did these semi-trailers get across the border with no one stopping them anywhere with more than one border crossing? And if any one border crossing had stopped and discovered them, they all would have been discovered. So there are unanswered questions.

Was it, were these border posts bought off? Were they traitors? It’s possible. There’s a lot of corruption in these underpaid positions. How about the drivers? Did they know if they were carrying? Of course they’ll say they didn’t know. But what is the truth? Several have been arrested, and I imagine that their interrogation will be more intense than just a verbal interrogation, to get to the bottom of what was going on. So Russian security has been shown up to be very lacking.

And that is a big problem for Mr. Putin. The bigger problem is: the loss of prestige and humiliation that this entails, and how, whether or not Mr. Putin can resist the surely growing calls of patriots to do something serious about Ukraine, by which I mean to do what he said he would do three years ago, when they challenge strategic interests, strategic defenses of Russian Federation, namely to destroy decision-making centers. Well, that means the Ukrainian government. Can the Russians do that? Of course they can. They have the Oreshnik. It’s not nuclear. They could, with surgical precision, wipe out the Ukrainian government from one day to the next.

Will they do that? I just will introduce here an observation. You know that I have been interviewed weekly on Judge Napolitano’s program. That has in recent weeks, every program, has been translated into Russian, not just translated, voiceover and synchronized lips. This is the latest development AI re-engineered in Russia.

And I looked at, first there were just a few thousand viewers of that. Now there are 50,000, 60,000 Russians who are viewing these interviews. And I look at the comments, several hundred comments, and I can tell you they’re very violent. They’re very xenophobic. They’re very condescending to the West.

And so there are a great many Russians who are outraged by how the West has been abusing Russia and who are shocked at the, shall we say, timidity or lack of force of their president responding. I personally see it as very difficult for Mr. Putin to remain in office if he doesn’t do something serious now.

Farris:
And are you surprised that he’s held back for as long as this has been going on? Because I mean, do you feel like he’s been holding back?

Doctorow:
Oh, of course he’s been holding back. The question is, was he justified? Because if he did something dramatic, if the retaliations could be charged with being disproportionate, then we could well be moving closer and faster toward World War III. So this held him back. Besides, he was, with good reason, persuaded that the American leadership under Joe Biden was insane, that insane, drunk, whatever you want to call it, certainly the behavior of everyone around Biden, that Biden was somehow was beyond discussion, but that his immediate keepers, the subordinates who actually were running Mr. Biden, whether it’s Anthony Blinken or Jake Sullivan, from the perspective of Moscow, these people were insane. Therefore they were doubly cautious to do anything that might set them off. Now, I think they’re satisfied that Mr. Trump is not insane, that he is a rational actor, he’s a businessman, that the things that are said about him which are not flattering have nothing to do with his sanity, they have to do with his morality.

And so the Russians, I think, are satisfied that they are not dealing with a madman, which is a big change from where we were before the new administration came in. How will Mr. Putin react to this latest threat, which crosses the red lines of damaging part of the Russian nuclear triad? That’s what these bombers are. We’ll have to see.

But I’d say I venture to guess that he might declare war on Ukraine. Let’s remember that this is a variation on the question that some interviewers have asked me in the recent days, does Mr. Putin really want a peace treaty? And I have said unequivocally yes. He is a lawyer by training.

He thinks today in these terms. He wants to stay on the right side of international law. And just an attack on Ukraine, a decapitating attack more particularly, would not be his way of behaving if he didn’t have openly declared war on Ukraine. So I watch this closely. If in the coming weeks Mr. Putin goes before the nation and declares war on Ukraine, then I think a decapitating strike will follow the next day.

Farris:
What do you think of Putin as we sit here June 2nd today as a leader?

Doctorow:
He is a brilliant leader. I have various essays in this book and otherwise have said that he is a brilliant manager of human resources. His basic approach is that everybody is good for something. And even openly exposed, openly criticized villains, thieves who have stolen large sums from the Russian federal budget, had been retained by Putin, because they also could contribute unparalleled, unequaled services to the state.

So in this sense, he has been, in this sense, he’s been like Peter the Great, who did exactly the same thing, who was surrounded by a lot of scoundrels, whom he used very effectively for the benefit of the state. So that’s one aspect of Mr. Putin. But the single biggest proof that the man is extraordinary is that he has raised Russia from, in a phoenix-like way, from the ashes. What he took over from Yeltsin was a ruined country.

And it didn’t, it was a deeply corrupt country, and its economy had been smashed and had not reconstituted itself. And he turned this around, not at once, it took years. I would say that the complete recovery of Russia coincided with the start of the special military operation. Mr. Putin launched it because he was confident that his military had been raised to the level of the most efficient and strongest in Europe, if not in the world, ground forces, and because the Russian economy had been made sanction-proof in the preceding eight years from 2014.

This is all under his watch. So what he achieved speaks for itself. But there are, nobody is perfect and this has been said “horses for courses”, that a race horse is not good for the plow and a plow horse is not good for the races. And the question is whether Mr. Putin is good for today.

It’s an open question. Is Mr. Lavrov good for today? I’ve already said no. I think he should have been replaced two years ago, not just because he’s been here too long and has fallen prey to corruption, by corruption very specifically, raising his son in his path, this type of, this is very widely practiced in Russian senior positions.

And unfortunately, Mr. Lavrov has done that also. So in business, it’s a widely considered good management to rotate people. Now, some of them, they don’t gather too much moss under their feet. This is something that is a weak point in the Russian senior ranks.

Mr. Putin also, in 25 years, he is not irreplaceable. He came in, when he came in, everyone was asking, who is he? Because he seemed to have no merit to justify that position as president. Similarly, Mr. Putin will be replaced. Nobody lives forever. The question is how smooth that replacement will be, and will he be replaced by somebody who also has good judgment and isn’t too trigger happy. So this is the situation today. I mean, after all, Mr. Putin was almost killed. He was almost murdered two weeks ago by drones, which the Ukrainians sent against his helicopter. So the question is not something that I’m introducing as coming from nowhere.

We have to consider who runs Russia, for how long, and is there somebody around? Nobody has been groomed to replace Mr. Putin. But among those people who are at the top levels of the Russian government, who could fill his shoes without bringing us all into World War III?

Farris:
How much time, how much rope does Putin have before, say, the neocons and the people will demand an action?

Doctorow:
I’m sorry…

Farris:
I said how much time does he have for a proper response that will satisfy the people.

Doctorow:
Well, I wouldn’t expect it to take place tomorrow. He’s a man whose favorite word is akuratma, which Russian translates as carefully, cautiously. So he will do nothing precipitous. But will he do something? He has to do something.

Russian society will be deeply disappointed with him if he doesn’t do something. Just throwing a few more bombs at a few more underground factories making drones will not satisfy public opinion, considering the gravity of both the attacks we’ve discussed on the Russian heavy bombers and the terrorist attack, which we haven’t discussed, also this past weekend, where the Ukrainians blew up a railway in Kursk and blew up an automobile bridge in the neighboring region, just to the north of Kursk, Gansk, whereby the bridge collapsed on trains passing below and killed outright seven people on the train, injured 100 and sent 40 to hospital. Russian society is still reeling from this. Just imagine, this is within the Russian Federation, of Kursk. It’s nearby. It’s across the border from Ukraine.

Nonetheless, this is an attack on civilians which caused deaths and was attacking the transport infrastructure, which is vulnerable. You cannot have guards riding over every bridge in the country. And so the only way you can stop that is by stopping the people who are sending these saboteurs into Russia, which means destroying the Ukrainian government at a blow. That’s the only thing that can stop this.

Farris:
Well, and what I’m perplexed by is, you know, Trump comes into office. Shortly thereafter, Zelensky comes for a visit, and everybody saw that video, and he said, we’ll be out, we’ll be out. And yet they have not cut off funding to Ukraine, which could, I mean, ultimately wrap this thing up very quickly, but yet they haven’t.

Doctorow:
Mike, when we touch upon Trump, we’re touching upon a man who’s under fire from very big domestic opposition that is aligned with European opposition. And so it is quite strong. He has said many contradictory things, flip-flopping day to day, which make him look foolish, which make him look like a buffoon to those who are unkind.

I am not in the unkind group. I believe that this is all tactical, to keep at bay his enemies, to persuade them that “the fellow really listens to the last person who spoke to him. If we can get his ear long enough, we can bring him around to our position.” And for this reason, they don’t stab him in the back, which they otherwise would do. If they were confident, or if they were certain that he is in the enemy camp and could not be brought around, then they will be going after him with their daggers.

So this explains a lot of the peculiar behavior of Mr. Trump, including what you were just alluding to. He has effectively kept the Europeans out of all the negotiations. We don’t hear a word any more about the coalition of the willing putting boots on the ground in Ukraine. Dead, why is it dead?

Because Mr. Trump has kept them at arm’s length from the Russian-Ukrainian negotiations. Why has he not stopped the flow of money and weapons that were appropriated by Biden?

If he did that, then he would be seen to favor the Russians, and his enemies would all gang up. As it is, he has a big problem with the bill which senators– with a bipartisan bill, which has 80 signatures on it and is therefore not vetoable in the Senate, which is calling for imposing very harshly economic sanctions and financial sanctions on Russia.

This is the bill that was sponsored by Richard Blumenthal from the Democrats in Connecticut and the villain of the Republicans, Graham from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham. I expect that bill will be passed in Congress. And at that point, Mr. Trump can put lipstick on the pig, can claim that he has no objection to that new sanctions because the Russians have behaved badly, and these sanctions will help to temper the Russians and to bring them closer to peace.

At the same time, he will do what you were just suggesting. He will cut off all financial and military aid and reconnaissance aid to Ukraine, saying that will also temper them and make them more amenable to compromise and reaching a peace settlement, and he’ll walk away from Ukraine. That is how I see this end game of the United States, leaving the Europeans left with chaos and disaster, and the Ukraine probably having a coup d’état to remove Mr. Zelensky and to put in charge somebody who could negotiate an end to the war with the Russians. This is my reading of the situation and my explanation of why, to answer your question directly, why Trump has not cut off the flow of weapons and finance to Ukraine till now.

Farris:
So your estimation then kind of summarizing this to make sure I heard you correctly, this is all being tactically done by Trump, knowing the adversity he’s facing domestically and from Europe.

So he will do this, his bill will get through, at the same time he’ll cut off funding to Ukraine in order to remove the United States from this, and then it will get dumped onto Europe. And do you see, how do you see Europe and the rest of NATO then responding for Ukraine?

Doctorow:
I see Europe pretending to give assistance to Ukraine for two or three months, which will be a transitional period. They can’t just drop the ball. They need time to reformulate a narrative to explain why they are leaving Ukraine also.

For some of the European leaders, that would be easier than for others, because some are more invested in the continuing war than others are. Nonetheless, the end result will be Europe will also leave Ukraine under the bus, after a certain grace period so if they can find a common narrative to hand to the mainstream media.

Farris:
Then you see Zelensky getting removed. Then what will the future of Ukraine be? Because with the United States removing itself, NATO and Europe also removing itself, will they create a new government or?

Doctorow:
Oh yes, there will be an interim government, probably a military government, because there are no leaders from the past. Mr. Poroshenko, Timoshenko, Madame Timoshenko, who is known as the braided, she had wonderful braided hair. These people are no solution for Ukraine.

They are as guilty as Mr. Zelensky in bringing on this disaster. So I think the only solution for interim government will be a military government pending maybe a year or two when society can be brought back to reality in Ukraine, then there would be elections and a normal civilian government installed. This is how I see it.

Faarris:
Who would be overseeing? Would Putin and Russia be participating in this restructure to make sure that what has occurred over the last several years now never happens again?

Doctorow:
Well, I think the prudent thing would be for there to be a group of nations to oversee this transition in Ukraine, not just Russia. If Russia took that on singly, it would face tremendous resistance. So several major powers, the United States, China, Russia, and a few others, maybe from the global south, would be nominally supervising the transition to democracy over a period of a year or two.

Farris:
I know I’m running out of time here with you, but I do want to ask, what will the future of NATO be if the scenarios that we discussed play out this way?

Doctorow:
I think it will fade away. The United States cannot leave NATO formally de jure. That has, requires approval of Congress. Mr. Trump will not get that approval. But if he takes the stuffing out of NATO, the effect will be the same.

It will lose its value. I’m hopeful that in this period, as I described as a grace period of two or three months for the European leaders to reverse course and to move away from Ukraine and let it collapse, I think that hopefully in that period there will be a political realignment within the European institutions. And those who have been the most vociferous defenders, what’s so-called defenders of Ukraine, actually destroyers of Ukraine, because they’re promoting this continued war against Russia, I think that, I’m hopeful that they will receive the just desserts, which will be to be removed from office.

Farris:
As we’ve talked here for the last 40, you know, over 45 minutes, how concerned are you about all this, with everything going on? You know, what is in comparison to when we’ve talked previously? Is it higher now? Same?

Doctorow:
No, I wouldn’t say it’s fine. It all depends, of course, on what Mr. Putin does, how dramatic it will be. I’m fairly confident that Trump’s reaction to whatever Putin does will also be sensible and will keep us away from a progression to a nuclear war between the major powers. I trust in Trump’s judgment in that respect. I understand how many of the viewers of this program will be skeptical about that, because all major media have for the last six years painted Trump in the blackest terms. He is not a likable personality. I wouldn’t necessarily want him for a neighbor, but that’s irrelevant.

Machiavelli said it a long time ago, and these verities do not change. The morality of individuals is not the same as the morality of state actors. You like it, you don’t like it, that’s the way the world was, is, will be. And from this viewpoint, Mr. Trump is a realist. He’s not all that bad. Even if he doesn’t write his own speeches, he reads them okay. The speeches that he reads are amazing. Everyone, the last thing I’ll say, Ibecause I do have to go, is that everyone listens to Trump.

Don’t listen to him. Now he’s not addressing you, he’s addressing his enemies. Watch what he does. He closed down USAID, which was the main vehicle for regime change financed by the CIA. He is now purging the State Department of all the villains who have risen in the ranks and in the diplomatic service ever since Dick Cheney chased out decent people from the State Department at the start of this millennium. He made a speech in Saudi Arabia denouncing the whole fiction of America’s spreading democracy through its wars.

The speech he didn’t write, obviously, but he read it. And he knew what he was reading. So the man, I say, look at what he’s doing, what he has done. He didn’t make any speeches about closing down USAID. In fact, you’d hardly know that he was involved.

It was all Elon Musk who was saving government money. Don’t believe that for a minute. That was a political move which was approved, which was agreed between Trump and Musk. It was sold as a money saving venture. The hell it was.

It was all about dumping 40,000 neocons out on the street. And I say bravo to him, and I say please trust that not every US president is a villain.

Farris:
Where could people find you, Gilbert? Where could people find you? Are you Substack?

Yeah, Substack. gilbertdoctorow is just one word, my first name and last name, dot substack dot com. And you find me in the search box in Amazon.com .

Farris:
And I’ll put the description to people who want to order the book and then your substack on the show notes. So Gilbert, as always, thank you for making time to speak with me. We’ll follow these events and look forward to more conversations ahead.

Doctorow:
Well, don’t despair. We have been through worse times.

Yesterday’s 52-minute chat with Mike Farris covers some of the issues that I have addressed in other recent interviews but updates them with the latest news, as for example relating to the Ukrainian attacks Sunday on air force bases across the Russian Federation, or goes into greater depth, as for example the discussion of my newly published book War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023.

The real punch comes in my words about what response we may expect from President Putin to the Ukrainian destruction of some as yet unquantified number of Russia’s heavy bombers that are an important part of its nuclear triad.

With respect to the last named, I have been shocked by the remarks yesterday by some of my best-known peers speaking on some of the best-known interview programs questioning whether Trump had been informed by the CIA ahead of the attacks. They speculated that Trump was not so informed, following the long-standing practice of keeping the Boss ignorant for the sake of deniability. They speculated that Defense Secretary Hegseth was watching the Ukrainian attack in real time.

Of course, none of us has a crystal ball, and I do not insist that what I am about to say is irrefutable. But, let’s go at it.

Firstly, the notion that Trump would have discomfort lying is other worldly. Reading The Washington Post for the last 5 years, you would assume that everything he says is a lie. They ran a Pinocchio index daily to prove that point.

More seriously, however, the notion that the CIA was presently involved in the attack on Russian nuclear triad assets ignores what Ukraine said explicitly about Operation Spider Web: that it was planned and preparations began 18 months ago. That is to say, the project dates from the last third of the Biden presidency when the CIA indeed could have had a hand in it.  I find it inconceivable, however, that after the purge of the intelligence agencies from the first days of the Trump presidency that the leadership of the CIA would have facilitated an attack on Russia that goes directly against the policy of détente espoused by The Boss in the Oval Office.

The glove fits for the British MI6, where their ultimate boss, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, is an out-and-out war monger. I personally have little doubt that the Brits assisted Kiev from start to finish with Operation Spider Web.  At the same time, I say that we should not patronize the Ukrainians:  they are in some ways more capable of modern warfare than their British ‘curators.’

As regards the idea which retired British diplomat Alastair Crooke, a Middle East specialist, put forth on his latest interview with Judge Napolitano, namely that Israel’s Mossad had a hand in these attacks, I am left speechless.  Crooke’s only argument in favor of this is the well-known antipathy of Jews for things Russian going back to the tsarist days.  I leave it to readers to determine for themselves how sound they find that argumentation.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Kaffee und ein Mikrofon: Wie wird Putin auf die jüngsten Angriffe der Ukraine reagieren?

Der gestrige 52-minütige Chat mit Mike Farris behandelt einige der Themen, die ich bereits in anderen aktuellen Interviews angesprochen habe, aktualisiert sie jedoch mit den neuesten Nachrichten, beispielsweise zu den ukrainischen Angriffen vom Sonntag auf Luftwaffenstützpunkte in der Russischen Föderation, oder geht noch tiefer in die Materie, wie beispielsweise bei der Diskussion meines neu erschienenen Buches War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022–2023.

Der eigentliche Punch kommt in meinen Worten darüber, welche Reaktion wir von Präsident Putin auf die Zerstörung einer noch nicht bezifferbaren Anzahl russischer schwerer Bomber durch die Ukraine erwarten können, die ein wichtiger Teil der nuklearen Triade Russlands sind.

In Bezug auf Letzteres war ich schockiert über die Äußerungen einiger meiner bekanntesten Kollegen, die gestern in einigen der bekanntesten Interviewsendungen fragten, ob Trump vor den Angriffen von der CIA informiert worden sei. Sie spekulierten, dass Trump nicht informiert worden sei, da es seit langem üblich sei, den Chef aus Gründen der Abstreitbarkeit im Unklaren zu lassen. Sie spekulierten, dass Verteidigungsminister Hegseth den ukrainischen Angriff in Echtzeit verfolgt habe.

Natürlich hat keiner von uns eine Kristallkugel, und ich behaupte nicht, dass das, was ich jetzt sage, unumstößlich ist. Aber lasst uns einmal darauf eingehen.

Erstens ist die Vorstellung, dass Trump sich beim Lügen unwohl fühlen würde, total abwegig. Wenn man die letzten fünf Jahre die Washington Post gelesen hat, könnte man meinen, dass alles, was er sagt, Lüge ist. Die Zeitung hat jeden Tag einen Pinocchio-Index veröffentlicht, um das zu beweisen.

Noch schwerwiegender ist jedoch, dass die Vorstellung, die CIA sei derzeit an dem Angriff auf russische Atomwaffen beteiligt, ignoriert, was die Ukraine ausdrücklich über die Operation Spider Web gesagt hat: dass sie vor 18 Monaten geplant und vorbereitet wurde. Das heißt, das Projekt stammt aus dem letzten Drittel der Präsidentschaft Bidens, als die CIA tatsächlich ihre Finger im Spiel gehabt haben könnte. Ich halte es jedoch für unvorstellbar, dass die Führung der CIA nach der Säuberung der Geheimdienste in den ersten Tagen der Präsidentschaft Trumps einen Angriff auf Russland ermöglicht hätte, der direkt gegen die Politik der Entspannung verstößt, die der Chef im Oval Office verfolgt.

Das passt zum britischen MI6, dessen oberster Chef, Premierminister Keir Starmer, ein ausgesprochener Kriegstreiber ist. Ich persönlich habe kaum Zweifel daran, dass die Briten Kiew bei der Operation Spider Web von Anfang bis Ende unterstützt haben. Gleichzeitig sage ich, dass wir die Ukrainer nicht bevormunden sollten: Sie sind in gewisser Weise besser für die moderne Kriegsführung gerüstet als ihre britischen „Kuratoren“.

Was die Idee betrifft, die der pensionierte britische Diplomat und Nahost-Experte Alastair Crooke in seinem jüngsten Interview mit Judge Napolitano vorgebracht hat, nämlich dass der israelische Mossad an diesen Anschlägen beteiligt gewesen sei, bin ich sprachlos. Crookes einziges Argument dafür ist die bekannte Abneigung der Juden gegen alles Russische, die bis in die Zarenzeit zurückreicht. Ich überlasse es den Lesern, selbst zu beurteilen, wie stichhaltig sie diese Argumentation finden.

This weekend as the warring parties prepared to resume direct talks in Istanbul tomorrow, Russia and Ukraine exchanged blows of unprecedented scope. 

About the Russian strikes against military assets across Ukraine you will find nothing new in kind from what we all heard and read in major media exactly a week ago.  It was just more of the same.

Turning to the Ukrainian attacks on Russia these past two days, there is indeed a change that merits close attention.

The first news to break was Ukraine’s destruction of bridges in the two oblasts of the Russian Federation that border on Ukraine:  Kursk and Bryansk. 

We all know where Kursk is thanks to its being in the news almost constantly since the Ukrainians staged an incursion, later full invasion of that oblast in August 2024 from which they were entirely dislodged just a month ago. The Ukrainian army lost 75,000 of its soldiers in that militarily useless operation that was intended to capture the nuclear power plant just 75 km inside of the Kursk region, to be held as a trading chip for Russian concessions.  In any case at 3.00 am today, a railway bridge was blown up in Kursk.

Much more serious was the bombing late on Saturday of an automobile bridge in neighboring Bryansk oblast, which faces Ukraine to the West and Belarus to the north. That bridge collapsed onto a train passing below, derailing it and causing damage that cost the lives of seven on board the train and sent more than 40 passengers to hospital with serious injuries.

The Russians have denounced the bridge bombings as state terrorism. This has been denied by Ukrainian authorities, who say such allegations are being made only for the purpose of stopping the peace process. Of course, the Ukrainian regime is no stranger to terror tactics. In the past year two Russian generals were blown up in downtown Moscow by agents in the pay of Ukrainian security services.  And there was the massacre staged at the Crocus entertainment center in a suburb of Moscow, also by mercenaries paid and directed by Ukrainian intelligence. The head of these security services, Budanov, has boasted of his feats of daring-do.

In the past hour or so, another vector of Ukrainian activity has begun to appear on major Western media, including the Financial Times, as I discovered after I was tipped off by India’s News X during an interview. Swarms of Ukrainian drones attacked a half dozen Russian airfields in an extended geography going from the central region of Russia all the way out to Irkutsk-Lake Baikal, 5500 km from the Ukrainian border. The Ukrainian authorities say that their drones damaged several dozen Russian bombers.  So far, the Russians are entirely mum about the extent of damage. I only found on their ticker news remarks that the police have closed highways in the Irkutsk region due to risk of drone attacks.

Ukrainian drones reaching to 5500 km from the Ukrainian border?  As the FT reporters explain, and as common sense would otherwise tell you, these drones were launched from within the Russian Federation. They had been secretly transported across the state-to-state border and moved onward to staging areas not far from the intended target airfields. They were hidden in wooden sheds.

Given the porous nature of the Russian-Ukrainian border which runs for well over a thousand kilometers, it is not surprising that such an operation could be carried out.

Now, let us ask what this drone attack indicates.

I believe it is proof positive that drone warfare is of decisive importance in the current Ukrainian-Russian conflict.  More to the point, it indicates that the entire confrontation between Moscow and Berlin, Paris, London and Washington over the delivery of long-range missiles to Ukraine has been an artificial confrontation whipped up by Ukraine, which has bleated for missiles for most of the past three years.

The U.S. made Himars were very quickly countered by Russian technical solutions.  The vaunted British and French Storm Shadows have only been a minor nuisance to Russia, which found ways to bring them down and most importantly found ways to destroy or scare away their delivery means, namely F16s and specially adapted Ukrainian jets from the Soviet period.

I maintain that Kiev has insisted on the utility, nay on the absolute necessity of possessing these missiles only for the sake of fomenting war between Russia and Britain, France, and now Germany, with its Taurus.

It remains to be seen who provided the Ukrainians with the drones they have used in the Operation Spider Web attack this weekend on Russian air bases.  Perhaps they are Ukraine’s own drones. Perhaps they were Western supplied.

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The other very serious question which the Ukrainian attacks of this weekend raises is how long can or should the Russians tolerate this level of destruction of critical military assets, on the one hand, and this level of terror attacks on civilian transportation within the Russian Federation.

I can easily imagine that in the coming days thousands, nay hundreds of thousands of Russian patriots will be demanding that their President finally does what he threatened to do three years ago:  namely to destroy the decision-making centers in Ukraine without further delay.  If I may translate that into simple English:  destroy the entire government apparatus in Kiev at one blow during working hours. The unstoppable Oreshnik hypersonic missile  gives Moscow the capability of doing just that.

 Russia has from the first listing of its war objectives in February 2022 intended regime change in Kiev.  Mr. Putin is facing the moment of truth.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Nachrichten vom Wochenende vom 31. Mai bis 1. Juni: Ukrainische Terroranschläge auf russische Züge mit Zivilisten und ukrainische Drohnenangriffe auf russische Flugplätze bis nach Irkutsk in Ostsibirien

An diesem Wochenende, während sich die Kriegsparteien auf die Wiederaufnahme der direkten Gespräche morgen in Istanbul vorbereiteten, lieferten sich Russland und die Ukraine Auseinandersetzungen von beispiellosem Ausmaß.

Über die russischen Angriffe auf militärische Einrichtungen in der Ukraine gibt es nichts Neues gegenüber dem, was wir alle vor genau einer Woche in den großen Medien gehört und gelesen haben. Es war einfach mehr vom Gleichen.

Was die ukrainischen Angriffe auf Russland in den letzten zwei Tagen angeht, gibt es jedoch eine Veränderung, die besondere Aufmerksamkeit verdient.

Die erste Nachricht war die Zerstörung von Brücken in den beiden an die Ukraine angrenzenden Gebieten der Russischen Föderation: Kursk und Brjansk.

Wir alle wissen, wo Kursk liegt, da es seit dem Einmarsch der Ukrainer in diese Region im August 2024, aus der sie vor einem Monat vollständig vertrieben wurden, fast ständig in den Nachrichten ist. Die ukrainische Armee verlor 75.000 Soldaten bei dieser militärisch sinnlosen Operation, deren Ziel es war, das nur 75 km innerhalb der Region Kursk gelegene Atomkraftwerk zu erobern, um es als Verhandlungsmasse für russische Zugeständnisse zu nutzen. Auf jeden Fall wurde heute um 3:00 Uhr morgens eine Eisenbahnbrücke in Kursk gesprengt.

Viel schwerwiegender war die Bombardierung einer Automobilbrücke am späten Samstagabend in der benachbarten Oblast Brjansk, die im Westen an die Ukraine und im Norden an Weißrussland grenzt. Die Brücke stürzte auf einen darunter fahrenden Zug, der entgleiste und dabei sieben Menschen tötete und mehr als 40 Passagiere mit schweren Verletzungen ins Krankenhaus brachte.

Die Russen haben die Brückenbombenanschläge als Staatsterrorismus verurteilt. Die ukrainischen Behörden weisen dies zurück und behaupten, solche Anschuldigungen würden nur erhoben, um den Friedensprozess zu stoppen. Natürlich ist das ukrainische Regime kein Unbekannter, wenn es um Terror-Taktiken geht. Im vergangenen Jahr wurden zwei russische Generäle in der Moskauer Innenstadt von Agenten der ukrainischen Sicherheitsdienste in die Luft gesprengt. Und dann war da noch das Massaker im Crocus-Unterhaltungszentrum in einem Vorort von Moskau, ebenfalls von Söldnern verübt, die vom ukrainischen Geheimdienst bezahlt und gesteuert wurden. Der Chef dieser Sicherheitsdienste, Budanow, hat sich mit seinen waghalsigen Taten gebrüstet.

In der letzten Stunde oder so ist ein weiterer Vektor ukrainischer Aktivitäten in den großen westlichen Medien aufgetaucht, darunter auch in der Financial Times, wie ich nach einem Hinweis von India’s News X während eines Interviews erfahren habe. Schwärme ukrainischer Drohnen griffen ein halbes Dutzend russischer Flugplätze in einem ausgedehnten Gebiet an, das sich von der Zentralregion Russlands bis nach Irkutsk-Baikalsee, 5.500 km von der ukrainischen Grenze entfernt, erstreckt. Die ukrainischen Behörden geben an, dass ihre Drohnen mehrere Dutzend russische Bomber beschädigt hätten. Bislang schweigen die Russen über das Ausmaß der Schäden. Ich habe in ihren Kurzmeldungen lediglich gefunden, dass die Polizei aufgrund der Gefahr von Drohnenangriffen Autobahnen in der Region Irkutsk gesperrt hat. Ukrainische Drohnen erreichen eine Entfernung von 5.500 km von der ukrainischen Grenze? Wie die FT-Reporter erklären und wie es auch der gesunde Menschenverstand vermuten lässt, wurden diese Drohnen innerhalb der Russischen Föderation gestartet. Sie wurden heimlich über die Staatsgrenze transportiert und zu Sammelplätzen unweit der vorgesehenen Zielflugplätze gebracht. Dort wurden sie in Holzschuppen versteckt. Angesichts der Durchlässigkeit der mehr als tausend Kilometer langen russisch-ukrainischen Grenze ist es nicht verwunderlich, dass eine solche Operation durchgeführt werden konnte. Nun stellt sich die Frage, was dieser Drohnenangriff bedeutet.

Ich glaube, dass dies ein eindeutiger Beweis dafür ist, dass Drohnenkriegführung im aktuellen ukrainisch-russischen Konflikt von entscheidender Bedeutung ist. Genauer gesagt deutet dies darauf hin, dass die gesamte Konfrontation zwischen Moskau und Berlin, Paris, London und Washington über die Lieferung von Langstreckenraketen an die Ukraine eine künstliche Konfrontation ist, die von der Ukraine angeheizt wurde, die seit fast drei Jahren lautstark nach Raketen verlangt.

Die von den USA hergestellten HIMARS wurden sehr schnell durch russische technische Lösungen konterkariert. Die viel gepriesenen britischen und französischen Storm Shadows waren für Russland nur ein kleines Ärgernis, da es Wege fand, sie abzuschießen und vor allem ihre Trägersysteme, nämlich F16 und speziell umgerüstete ukrainische Jets aus der Sowjetzeit, zu zerstören oder zu vertreiben.

Ich behaupte, dass Kiew auf dem Nutzen, ja sogar auf der absoluten Notwendigkeit des Besitzes dieser Raketen bestanden hat, nur um einen Krieg zwischen Russland und Großbritannien, Frankreich und nun auch Deutschland mit seinem Taurus zu schüren.

Es bleibt abzuwarten, wer die Ukrainer mit den Drohnen versorgt hat, die sie bei der Operation „Spider Web“ an diesem Wochenende gegen russische Luftwaffenstützpunkte eingesetzt haben. Vielleicht sind es Drohnen aus der Ukraine selbst. Vielleicht wurden sie vom Westen geliefert.

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Die andere sehr ernste Frage, die die ukrainischen Angriffe dieses Wochenendes aufwerfen, ist, wie lange die Russen einerseits diese Zerstörung wichtiger militärischer Einrichtungen und andererseits diese Terroranschläge auf den zivilen Verkehr innerhalb der Russischen Föderation noch tolerieren können oder sollten.

Ich kann mir gut vorstellen, dass in den kommenden Tagen Tausende, ja sogar Hunderttausende russischer Patrioten von ihrem Präsidenten verlangen werden, endlich das zu tun, was er vor drei Jahren angedroht hat: nämlich die Entscheidungszentren in der Ukraine ohne weitere Verzögerung zu zerstören. Wenn ich das in einfaches Deutsch übersetzen darf: den gesamten Regierungsapparat in Kiew während der Arbeitszeit mit einem Schlag zerstören. Die unaufhaltsame Hyperschallrakete Oreshnik gibt Moskau die Möglichkeit, genau das zu tun.

Russland hat seit der ersten Auflistung seiner Kriegsziele im Februar 2022 einen Regimewechsel in Kiew angestrebt. Herr Putin steht vor dem Moment der Wahrheit.