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Diesen:
Hi everyone and welcome back. We are joined again by Gilbert Doctorow, historian, international affairs analyst and author of “The War Diaries – The Russia-Ukraine War”. So yeah, welcome back. It’s always great to see you.

Doctorow:
Good, a pleasure.

Diesen:
So as the Ukraine war appears to be entering its, if not final stage, at least the final stages, at least some things appears to be moving in that direction, It’s worth exploring what the relationship between the Europeans and Russia would look like after the war. And I guess a good case study would be to look at some of the comments coming from Finland. That is, the meeting between Trump and Europeans in the White House was interesting for a variety of reasons. But the interactions with President Stubbe of Finland was interesting, I guess, because he made several comments. He referred to Finland’s own historical experience with peace with Russia, but also the possibility of renewing relations with Russia after the end of this war. I was wondering what you read into this comment.

Doctorow: 1:19
I think Stubb’s remarks got far more attention at high levels in Russia than it did in the West. In the West, well, I for one was confused by what he meant. Is this supposed to be a recommendation to Ukraine to see how well Finland had done after a nasty war with Russia? … Finland’s participation on the side of Hitler against Russia was ended by a 1944 peace between the Soviet Union and Finland in which Finland ceded a lot of territory to Russia.

So that could sound like it was a recommendation to Kiev as to what to do. On the other hand, as after some thought and with reflecting on what Sergei Lavrov had to say about it the day after Stubb made his remarks, I come to a different conclusion that bears on your question, how Europe will deal with Russia as the war closes. It is important to note the remarks, the comments on Stubb that were made by Lavrov in an interview that was on Russian state television the next day. In this he reminded everyone what was that 1944 agreement all about? What did it contain? Why was it concluded?

2:37
It wasn’t just that Finland was changing alliances in an abstract or formal way. It is the fact that Finland was an active participant in the atrocities that the Germans oversaw and encouraged in the siege of Leningrad, that they did various acts of barbarism, which the Russians have slowly taken out of their archives. The Russians have a lot of goods on many countries in Europe, including the level of participation of the Belgians or the French in the military forces of Germany on Russian territory, which outweigh in their figures anything resembling the forces of the opposition resistance movements in these countries which everybody has celebrated, including the Russians, formally till now. Well, so they’re taking things out of the archives, which are not very pretty, but would have gotten in the way of reestablishing normal relations with the various countries that participated with Germany in the assault on Russia.

3:50
In the case of Finland, he was mentioning, yes, they committed these atrocities and some images of this were put up on the television screen, on Russian state television. And they concluded in 1944, seeing which way the war was going, which was coming to a conclusion against Germany, they decided to change sides, which they did at a considerable price. But that agreement, that peace treaty had conditions which Mr. Stubb didn’t mention, but Mr. Lavrov did.

Precisely, Finland was obliged to maintain in perpetuity neutrality. It was obliged not to enter into any military bloc directed against Russia. And there you have it, they joined NATO. So, Mr. Stubb did not go into that aspect of what his country had agreed to.

4:42
But let me move on from that to further consideration of what he may have meant. It came out a day later when he said, without any particular reference why he was saying it, that Finland sought to reestablish relations with Russia. One could read between the lines “normal relations with Russia after the war ended because after all we are neighbors, direct neighbors”. Well, that was quite a signal of a change in position.

The Russians immediately pounced on it and asked, well, why do you wait? You can reestablish relations with us right now. We’re not the ones who broke them off, you are.

He didn’t respond to that challenge. But it does indicate something that I think we will see a lot of in the coming weeks as the war comes to its conclusion, which will be a military defeat that is universally recognized and even in Ukraine. So some sort of treaty will be negotiated.

5:50
And that is that the smaller countries will probably be the first ones to leave this 27 nation wide consolidated opinion on Russia that the EU has maintained for most of the last three years. They are the ones who are most to suffer by the weakened economies resulting from the sanctions and their impact on inflation and on jobs in Western Europe. I live in Belgium. And I can tell you that right now, the country is experiencing severe economic pain. We’re not far from one of the premier commercial avenues, boulevards in Brussels, the Avenue Louise, and there are a lot of empty restaurants and storefronts.

I am sitting now in Knokke. Knokke is the most elegant, most prestigious resort on the North Sea, on sea coast of Belgium. And there are vacancies on the digue, on the seafront, and on a few of the major retail districts. This is unthinkable. This is the most prosperous part of Belgium, and there are vacancies.

There are restaurants that have gone out of business. Some of them are rather large. So I have a relative whose employment has been related to as a son-in-law, whose employment is related to marketing. And he was meeting with his confreres, with his fellow practitioners in marketing, preparing films for advertising and marketing. And they’re all suffering. Marketing is the first thing to go in the budget lines of corporations when they see the economy is sinking.

7:53
So here in little Belgium and in a place like Finland and in many of the smaller countries which have been dependent on Germany as a locomotive to keep them all doing well, now that Germany is officially in recession, continuing in recession, they are all suffering and they cannot afford to continue the sanctions on Russia, particularly after the war ends and there’s no logical reason for them to continue it.

Even in France, I wonder how long Mr. Macron can sing his aggressive songs about Russia and the coalition of the willing and so forth. He’s about to face the fall of his government as Prime Minister Beyrou has announced that it’s impossible for him to accept changes to the budget, which he has prepared, a very strict budget because the country now is experiencing a severe decline in its creditworthiness and is paying a premium price, even above Italy and Greece and other rather weak economies that we traditionally speak of as having high bond rates, because the markets do not give them good grades for managing the economy, France is now above, paying higher rates of interest on its bonds than those countries.

9:31
This cannot continue because France will be penalized. It may find itself in the arms of the IMF if this goes on much longer. Therefore, considering these weaknesses, France among the big countries is the worst case, although Britain isn’t doing very well. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is facing severe criticism because their budget is going into serious deficit and they have been unable to cut costs. And so they face the very unpleasant task of raising taxes. So these are two out of three countries that are facing up to credit problems, all resulting from a weak economy and from the enhanced military expenses if they are assuming to wage war against Russia in 2029.

10:34
These are, I say the big countries are just beginning to see it. The smaller countries are feeling it. But now Mr. Stubb, I think, is the first swallow here to fly by, a new changing direction of politics within the EC, the European Union over relations with Russia.

Diesen:
It’s certainly interesting that after the war is done and everyone, the overly hardened position has to be loosened up. This could be something that fractures the Europeans as well. It’s often pointed out that once the war is over, the Americans might leave, but it’s also interesting that the Europeans might end up taking very different approaches. But who do you think would be the most hardliners within Europe and who would run fastest to try to mend some ties?

Doctorow: 11:30
Well, the … mending of ties, as I say, will be the small countries who are badly hurt by the weakened economy of Germany in particular because they were so dependent on its maintaining the GDP growth in Europe as a whole. The hardliners, well, two days ago, there was a two-page broadsheet interview with a professor of European, a specialist in European security at the University of Lille in France, that was featured on the most important economic or finance daily in Belgium, the “Écho de la bourse”.

12:18
And there you had the logic for the hardliners. Note that Belgium always French- speaking Belgium, always looks to what the French are doing and saying. They take them as the etalon, as the high standard for what should center in public discussion in Belgium itself. This Leo professor was saying, he was very quite intelligent and quite open with his observations on Mr. Trump and Europeans’ handling of Trump, which was interesting because it contradicts what many of my peers and myself included have thought about the European understanding of Trump. That they were taken in, that they don’t see that he is using them.

No, no. This professor was acknowledging that Trump may very well be trying to deceive them and trying to string them along, but their response to that falls within certain limits what they can do. One is they can turn that back on him or they can directly oppose him or two, they can humor him and throw carrots to him as the professor said and show him every politesse, every sign of respect, which they did.

13:57
But without themselves believing that this would change his course, that there would be a pivot back to the pro-European, anti-Russian positions. The logic is different. The logic is: don’t do anything to upset his plans. Let Mr. Putin do that for us. Because they don’t believe that Putin will follow the recommendations or diktat of Trump regarding a meeting with Zelensky and an early conclusion of what will now be a peace treaty rather than a ceasefire.

So they expect that to fall through and they want Putin to take the brunt of Mr. Trump’s dissatisfaction rather than to point to them as having spoiled it, something that would have happened if they hadn’t stood in the way. So that is a more nuanced approach to what Europe is doing than I have seen anyone else say, and I take my hat off to them. At the same time, his overall logic I think explains very well what’s going on in the mind of Mr. Macron and people around him or Mr. Stammer, namely that in no way should this war end in a treaty that compromises Ukraine’s sovereignty, its ability to conclude alliances with anyone it wants, its ability to maintain an army of the kind that it wants for its security and so forth.

With the idea that Ukraine will always be a reserve force of 800,000 man army ready to help Europe at any moment. That is to say, very close to what Mr. Zelensky has been saying, that he is a defender of Europe. If, for example, says this professor, the Russians should move on Estonia, but we could open a second front with the help of Ukraine.

So that is the logic that I have. And it’s exactly what Mr. Putin had in mind when he opened the special military operation: to make that kind of relationship impossible by imposing neutrality limitations on the Ukrainian size of its army and de-Nazification, that’s to say regime change.

There you have it. As I said, I take this professor from l’Ille as being a very good exponent and explainer of what is probably going through the minds of many of his peers in the academic advisors to Mr. Macron and possibly, probably their equivalents in Germany and in England.

Diesen: 17:01
Yes, Stoltenberg, when he was a NATO secretary general, said something similar to that. If the Ukrainians are victorious, then the benefit would be to have as a partner state an army with hundreds of thousands of men who would be battle hardened on the Russian border who would then function as a shield more or less. So I think this is what Europeans want at the end of this war. They can’t accept a neutral Ukraine which can’t be used as an instrument possibly to deter.

But this is why I found the comments by Alexander Stubb interesting as well, because his argument was more or less that Russia cannot be appeased, it must be contained. And this was kind of the lessons that they had with, historical lessons they had with Russia. But it seems that it would be the opposite because from my perspective, the main lesson that should be learned is the security competition you should avoid on the borders of other great powers because a lot of Finland’s experience with the Soviet Union was exactly back in ’39 when the Soviets feared that Finland was too close to, well, Leningrad which is now St. Petersburg, and the Germans could use this in the future as a northern flank against them.

18:20
So they had fought in the winter war. But after this, the Finns indeed, they did join the invasion of the Soviet Union on the side of Hitler, partly to regain their territory, of course. But when they were defeated, they accepted a peace that entailed territorial concessions, but also permanent neutrality. And the whole idea then would be not to be an instrument of security competition between the great powers. So take yourself out of this and by doing this, the Soviets wouldn’t have anything to fear from Finland and they wouldn’t have to go against the Finns.

And to a large extent, the story of Finland is a great success story of neutrality. This massive border, yet no more problems through permanent neutrality. I mean, it’s pragmatic, it shows neutrality works, they ensure their independence, sovereignty, peace. So often people would then look to Finland, why wouldn’t this be a good model for Ukraine?

19:22
But instead of making Ukraine into Finland, we’re doing the opposite. Finland is becoming a frontline like Ukraine. And this is the whole point. When Finland joined NATO in 2023, they changed this power balance. I guess when President Staib says that they want to revive relations after this war, to what extent is it possible to go back to the same? Because now Finland is the largest NATO frontline against the Russians and the Russians are rebuilding the Leningrad military district. It’s a response to this reality, which means that the border with Finland as it’s ended its neutrality will become more militarized.

We have countries like the Baltic states, Poland talking about Finland in NATO allows the Baltic Sea to become a NATO lake. We’re seeing more preparation for a fight or confrontation in the Arctic. It does seem that Finland is becoming a frontline state though. So how possible is it to actually go back, try to restore relations as they were?

Doctorow: 20:32
Well, Russia has had relations with NATO countries. It has very good relations, or reasonably good relations with Turkey, which has the largest military force within NATO. So I don’t think that being in NATO by itself excludes having a normalization and even very good commercial relations with Russia. That’s to hold up Turkey as Exhibit A. As for what has happened to Finland by, I think they were probably the biggest losers economically in this conflict with Russia. We speak about Germany, that is always brought up because of the cheap energy resources that it received via the gas pipelines and also petroleum pipelines.

How will Finland as a case of many times over dependence and profitability from its commercial relations with Russia. This goes back to the Soviet period when they were selling, to be honest about it, quite shoddy consumer items to the Russians in exchange for very fine energy resources and not only. Look, Finland has a very big lumber processing industry, a paper industry. And these were heavily dependent on cheap Russian raw logs. There was a big discussion of course in Russia about the practical benefits or losses in this type of exchange, and there’s no question it was losses.

22:17
The Finns got the logs and then they turned it into a typing paper or anything else you want to think of and cellulose and for rayon and the rest of it. And the Russians got small change and then they received in return leather shoes, which nobody could wear without getting blisters. So I know this a practical matter. That’s what it looked like when you looked at the consumer goods from Finland. They were on sale in Russia in the Soviet Union. They were quite shoddy first by the level of what Bulgaria would ship. The Finns’ economy in every respect was profiting from Russia and that is inside Finland; and their operations in Russia were profitable.

And the Russians wanted it that way. They weren’t stupid about this. They were buying the, this they did with their own Warsaw Pact countries, their control over Eastern Europe, all of these commercial relations were disadvantageous for Russia. And they, again, not because they were stupid, but because they were buying the passivity, the peace with these countries. And it worked, to a certain extent. But to a certain extent, these countries were unwilling to sacrifice their identities for the sake of cheap Russian resources.

23:54
So Finland has suffered enormously and as I said, taking the example of Turkey, I don’t see any reason why their being a member of NATO means necessarily that they have to be on a war footing with Russia.

Diesen:
Well, you mentioned Lavrov’s comment that “Why wait until after the war, we can have diplomatic relations now. It’s the Europeans who broke off diplomacy, not the Russians.”

This is a good point though, because again, as President Stubb suggested, we can have renewed dialogue with Moscow, but only after there’s been established a just and lasting peace in Ukraine. I guess my first question would be why? Why would the diplomacy enter after a conflict? Also, to what extent would it be possible if we recognize that this war is, as many have suggested from Leon Panetta, Boris Johnson, that this is a proxy war indeed?

Wouldn’t the dialogue be required in order to reach this lasting peace? Because again, from the Russian perspective, the main problem is that we cancel these agreements for pan-European security, indivisible security. So again, constructing this Europe without Russia meant re-dividing the continent, reviving the Cold War, zero-sum logic, and even refusing to then take into account Russian concerns, given that this was a hegemonic peace.

25:31
But if the Russian thesis is correct, that the consequence of this is that the deeply divided states, be it Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, would then be pulled in both directions in order to wrestle control over them, to see what side of the new dividing lines in Europe. All of this seems to be requiring some agreements between the Europeans and the Russians as well. So to what extent can you actually have a lasting peace unless you have the diplomacy before the peace. I mean, I understood the initial logic that will isolate Russia, this will put pressure, but who’s thinking these days that Russia’s isolated with the Americans now talking to Russia? It’s just the Europeans.

The rest of the world is doing business. They’re talking with them. The Americans are trying to improve the bilateral relations. Where does this logic come in then? Because I always make the point, I can understand the Russian position well, I understand the Ukrainians very well, I can understand the Americans, but the Europeans, it doesn’t make much sense why they would still boycott diplomacy.

26:37
Well, I think Mr. Lavrov was making debating points rather than saying what is constructive, what happens next. I don’t think that repairing relations with any of the European countries is really on the top of the agenda for Moscow. I think that its first concern is repairing relations with the United States. And the single most important thing to be fixed with the United States and say urgently is an agreement not to– that the United States not bring over its intermediate range missiles into Germany in 2026, which is five months from now. That is of vital importance. And there you need an agreement with Mr. Trump. After that, they can turn around and look at the European states.

27:35
But on this whole question of who’s who and Russia’s relations with Europe and with the United States, I just go back in time. The whole psychology of Russia, or the Soviet Union, was that there were two superpowers, the United States and Russia and Europe didn’t really count. Despite the fact that Russians on the street may consider themselves to be Europeans, that did not carry over into the thinking in the Kremlin. They measured themselves against the states. All of their descriptions of themselves were in units of the United States. So just as in Australia, I think every distance between cities is measured between, is taken by contrast or comparison with the distance between Melbourne and Sydney.

28:34
It is the basis for making judgments about anything. And our newspapers, so populated by journalists who don’t have a memory that goes back more than a few weeks, don’t understand that this is a persistent element of Russian mentality, particularly official Russian mentality, that the United States is what you measure yourself by, not by these little countries in Europe, even if they’re rather big, even if they’re Germany. They are secondary considerations. So first is repair relations with the United States, get this terrible security issue of intermediate-range missiles in Europe off the table, and then go after these countries in Europe.

29:19
I think they will follow what I just observed. They will work first with the smaller countries that are more amenable to reason. And once they’ve facilitated the breakdown, the breakup of the bloc and facilitated the pursuit of national interests particularly among the smaller countries, then they can deal with the larger countries. The real tough nut to crack here, of course, will be Germany because Mr. Metz continues to invest political capital in the confrontation with Russia. And his words are more important than those of Macron because he has the credit worthiness and the ability to build military assets that Mr Macron does not have.

Diesen: 30:13
I guess my last question was on the European strategy, as you suggested that the goal would be for the Europeans to seemingly just nod along and say, of course, Trump, you’re great, we’ll follow your excellent peace initiatives. We’ve never been more optimistic than now. All you have to do is pressure the Russians, you know, to make sure that this is where his negotiation– or threats as this is how he negotiates– goes. You know, I can see a lot of evidence behind this when they began initially to suggest a 30-day ceasefire. I remember all the European leaders, they sent out a tweet which was almost identical.

30:58
They all had the same phrase, ah the ceasefire, “the ball is now in Russia’s court”. In other words, Trump could go over there, you know. Now you have to pressure them, knowing that Russia would never accept a ceasefire because it doesn’t make any sense without political settlement and hoping therefore that, you know, the diplomacy with the Russians would end up in renewing Trump’s commitment to the war and pulling him into the Biden 2.0 or the European camp of a long war with Russia.

But now that the ceasefire is out of the question, this becomes a bit more difficult, or does it? Because the whole thing appears to be premised on the notion that Russia doesn’t really want peace. It’s just prolonging the time so it can gobble up more territory.

But if the conditions of Russia were actually met, that is the territorial concessions and the neutrality, what are the Europeans going to do if the Americans and Russians come to a peace and the Europeans then have to try to fight this tooth and nail. I mean, how can they actually stop this from happening?

Doctorow: 32:09
Well, they can’t, and I think they will simply split, along the lines I mentioned. Mr. Stubb was being very, very careful, very cautious. He’s making baby steps. And if what he said wasn’t entirely consistent, this has to be considered that he can’t go too far out of line with his peers. But we will see more of this as the war grinds on and as the Russians come closer to taking the whole of Donetsk for example, which they’re doing very nicely right now. I think the opinions will change within Europe.

There’ll be some surprises which countries come out first in an olive branch, but there will have to be a split in Europe. To my understanding, the logic suggests that. And it’s not because the Russians are forcing it, it’s because these countries are chafing under the direction given by Germany and by France and by the UK. And finally will revolt against that because it’s so much against their interests and the interests of their peoples and their prosperity.

Diesen: 33:29
But that also makes me think about the expectations for Ukraine, what comes after this war, because what the Europeans appear to want is to have this hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians prepared to die for Europe essentially to be as their active frontline if they have to have a conflict with Russia.

But the Ukrainians, obviously they hope that it would be the Europeans who would come to the aid of Ukraine not the other way around. Of course if there would be a military block, [those] wouldn’t be mutually exclusive, but then the West of course would be pulled into a war, which the Europeans wouldn’t do without America. So I guess my point is there’s been more voices coming out of Ukraine that what happens after this war, because the Europeans seem to be signaling a lot that we need to keep the war going a bit so to protect Europe from the Russian aggression. So people like Yulia Tomashenko has made a point that we just pretty much meet for the Europeans. They just want to throw Ukrainians at Russia to buy time for Europe.

34:36
So in other words, they’re kind of understanding that Europe is there not to protect Ukraine, but to use Ukrainians to protect Europe essentially. So how would that work after a peace? Because based on the assumption, it seems that Ukraine will continue to do this forever, that there will be a political consensus to throw Ukrainians at Russia to help the Europeans. It doesn’t seem like this will be… Well, I can see some flaws in the plan, I guess.

Doctorow: 35:06
Well, in the musical world, going back 20 years, there was a trend particularly strong in the United States called minimalism. I don’t want to propose a one-note symphony here, but I have said several weeks ago that it really is in the Russians’ hands to make a proposal that could solve all of these issues. It would take the Europeans out. It would give an off-ramp to the Europeans because if the Ukrainians agree to a settlement, what can they say? And to make the Ukrainians agree to the settlement, Russia just has to say, liberate the 350 or 250 billion dollars in our assets that are frozen, make them available for the reconstruction of all of Ukraine, including what we occupy. And that would end the war. And that would end Mr. Zubensky and his gang.

35:57
I’m happy to say that I’m not the only one who has been playing this note. It was picked up by a rather reputable and widely read journal in Germany, the Berliner Zeitung.

And they repeated this proposal, happily with attribution to myself. But the point is it is possible to find solutions if you really want to, and to be a little bit creative here. So I don’t think that we are totally blocked. But of course, even if situation looks rather difficult and even if Mr. Merz and Mr. Macron, Mr. Starmer are awfully stubborn and are supported by academics like the one who appeared in “Echo de la bourse” the other day, there are solutions. And there will be an end to this war. The Russians are really approaching Kramatorsk and Slavyansk. They more or less have Pakrovsk surrounded. They have made some sallies into Pakrovsk.

37:00
And so I really think the war on the ground in Donbas is measured in weeks, perhaps in months, but not in years any more. And once the Russians have seized the whole of Donbas, the excuse that Mr. Zelensky gives that he cannot give up territory that hasn’t been conquered will be removed. He can give it all up or he can take the first plane out and let his successor give it all up. So there will be an end to this war. It’s not going to go on forever. I’m looking to publish volume two.

Diesen: 37:42
Well, that’s the frustrating part that everyone recognizes more or less that the Russians won’t give up on Donbass. So they can either appease now or wait until, you know, pull it a few more months until Donbass has been lost and then make the peace. But of course, at that point, Ukraine will be in a much more difficult position because by that time, much more of Zaporizhzhya would have been lost and of course, much more Ukraine will have been destroyed.

Many more men will have died. The ability to reconstruct everything will have been diminished. So if all was completely rational and you would have leaders with some political weight, they would be able to make an unavoidable deal today as opposed to having to choose the worst deal tomorrow just because it’s politically easier to do. But again, everything about this has frustrated me for the past decade. So I think, yeah, they will not go for the best solutions just yet.

Doctorow: 38:41
There are symbolic things that are going on. Kramatorsk and Slaviansk are symbolic because they were the cradle of the Russian Renaissance, what they call it, going back to 2014. Their last stand against the onslaught from vastly superior numbers, the Ukrainian and military forces who were sent in to crush precisely this resistance to the new regime in Kiev. There are also, you mentioned Zaporozhzhye, but I would add to this Dnepropetrovsk, because the Russians had captured their first towns in that oblast. And as they approach Dnepropetrovsk or as the Ukrainians call it, Dnipro, let’s remember what that is.

39:28
That is the home ground of Pellamoysky, the oligarch who owned the largest bank in Ukraine, who owned the Ukrainian airlines and who virtually controlled the government and who financed the Azov batallions and the other violent nationalists. And so it has great symbolic value also that the Russians are marching on Dniepro. The Ukrainians are being battered, which is not to say that there isn’t a real war. There is. And when you watch Russian television and you watch, listen to the reporters, their war correspondents who are traveling along, close to the front, and they have to leave their vehicles and they have to proceed on foot because the vehicles are just a trap for attack drones.

40:20
So it’s not as though this is “Ah, the Ukrainians are all running from the front.” The Russians are not approaching in large contingents. They’re approaching small groups on foot or on motor scooters or motorcycles precisely because of the drone threat. This nature of warfare is still under-reported and it has changed the character of this war dramatically.

That said, they are proceeding in small groups. They are penetrating Ukrainian settlements, taking them by surprise. And while the Ukrainian defenders flee to the next town where they can make a stand. It is a tough war. And all notion that the Russians are doing this according to a fixed schedule, of course that is not happening. They’re moving to where the weak points are, where the Ukrainians cannot cover the whole line and therefore on their way to the weak points to suffer the least losses on their side because attackers always face the threat of greater losses than defenders. It’s a slow moving scene, but where it’s headed is very clear.

Diesen: 41:53
Well, thank you again for your input. I thought this is quite interesting to look at. It’s worth starting to think about what Europe will look like after this war. And I think this question is also one of the reasons why the Europeans are so stubborn in terms of hoping not to end the war given a lot of the uncertainties of what will actually follow. But yes, always thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Doctorow: 42:21
Thanks for inviting me.

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9pivYDY8gY

Napolitano: 0:34
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, August 20th, 2025. Professor Gilbert Doctorow will be with us in just a moment on what does the Kremlin think of Trump now? But first this.
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2:00
Professor Doctorow, welcome here, my dear friend. Let’s start with Alaska. If President Putin’s goal was to appear presidential on the international stage and to educate in private President Trump on the genesis and the causes of the special military operation in Ukraine, it appears he succeeded. Do you agree?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD 2:32
Yes and no. I think that President Trump was predisposed to change his position as he did during that meeting, and it was only partially as a result of the tutorial he was given by Putin. I think everyone, absolutely everyone, including myself, have underestimated Team Trump. I stress the word “team” as opposed to– we spoke about the collective Biden; there is a collective Trump. And that is to say he has some very, very clever advisors assisting him. I believe that in this case, just as in the case of the United States security guarantees that we probably could talk about later, Trump’s position is already made up and he is saying what he needs to say to keep his opponents off balance and to prevent their striking too early when he hasn’t yet got his ducks lined up.

3:30
So what do I mean? He didn’t know exactly whether he could do a deal with Putin until he met Putin. And he was persuaded that he could, and therefore he changed positions for the outside world, not for the inside world. I don’t think he needed Mr. Putin to give him the lessons on the root causes. But that is what was convenient for him to allow to happen.

Napolitano:
You’re telling me that all along he knew that his demands for a ceasefire made as recently as during the Air Force One flight from Washington to Alaska was not something he truly expected to happen or not something he wanted and he was just duping people or lying to people or again trying to keep the other side off guard?

Doctorow:
All of the above. That is the latter part. He knew what he wanted. Just as this whole question of the security guarantees, he is stringing the Europeans along. He has no intention of giving US security guarantees for this, because he knows the Russians are dead set against it. But he is saying that to keep them, well, let them play with their toys. And while they’re playing with their toys, the problems will be solved.

4:43
And I believe that the same question comes up, how stupid or smart was it for him to say the next step is a face-to-face between Putin and Zelensky, without–?

Napolitano:
That’s just not going to happen.

Doctorow:
Yeah. Well, I think it could happen. But there’s something that Zelensky can do if he pays attention that would make it happen.

I refer now to Mr. Lavrov’s interview last night on Russian state television, which was very, very interesting. He said that, you know, we Russians, the territorial side of it has not been fundamental. It has been the human side of it, protecting our fellow Russian speakers, our fellow ethnic Russians in that area. And in that regard, we bitterly oppose, and we discussed this with President Trump, we bitterly oppose the language laws and the persecution of Russian speakers.

5:44
That was the very first act of the government installed after the coup d’état and which turned the Donbas region and the Crimea against the new government. That is to say the ban on speaking Russian in schools, the ban on speaking Russian in public, before public authorities, and the prohibition on dissemination of Russian language media.

Napolitano:
Yes, I saw that clip. He made a very interesting point. This is the only country in the world which bans the use of another language.

Doctorow:
Not true. We’ll get to step two. Step two will be Latvia, because they’ve been doing that since 2004, and the Russians have been quiet. I think when the Ukraine situation quiets down, the Russians will come back and revisit what is going on in Latvia. But Mr. Lavrov correctly said that these laws are in violation of the UN guarantees on human rights. Now, if I were in Mr. Zelensky’s shoes, which I really wouldn’t want to be in, I would take note of that. It was a strong hint by Lavrov, hey, you want this negotiation to proceed? Just revoke those laws. It’s a good start, a show of goodwill, and then we can sit down and talk.

Napolitano: 7:06
It’s hard for me to believe that Putin would be in the same room with Zelensky. Zelensky isn’t even the legitimate lawful head of the government.

Doctorow:
The reason why the Russians have been unwilling to, is partly, what you just said, is a major factor. And of course, the West has turned that back on Putin by saying that Putin isn’t legitimate. He’s a wanted man by the International Court of Justice. So that is all a question of a public spat. But I think the issue is that Zelensky has pushed for such a face-to-face because he knew that the Russians didn’t want it, and he expected that to make it possible to say that they don’t want to make a peace, “You see? I told you, they don’t want to come to a meeting and make a peace.”

Napolitano:
Right, right. How was the Russian trip perceived in three categories? By the Kremlin, by Russian elites, by the average Russian folks — in your view from your observations in Europe?

Doctoorow:
You’re speaking now of the … which trip exactly the one going to Alaska, or…?

Napolitano
Yes. Yes. How was Putin’s trip to Alaska with Trump perceived by and how was it perceived today, four days later, by the Kremlin, by Russian elites and by Russian folks?

Doctorow: 8:38
Well, Russian folks, I think, may have been a bit skeptical about it. Russian influencers in the creative classes were probably 100% behind it, Russian intelligentsia has a lot of anglophiles, people who can’t conceive of a summer vacation without being on the Cote d’Azur, and all of those people were very happy about this.

As regards the entourage of Mr. Putin, I think they were strongly in favor of it. Partly as a validation that all attempts to isolate Russia have totally failed. The economic sanctions failed. The military efforts on the battlefield failed. And now the pariah status that the EU and the United States under Biden was assigning to Russia have failed because now here he is meeting not just with Xi of China or Modi of India or the Kazakhstans and the rest of it, he’s meeting with the president of the United States on American soil. He has a red carpet rolled out for him.

9:49
Russian television played this very positively. And I believe that their positivism was backed by the conviction they received from Putin and the people around him that Trump is genuine, is trying very hard, and is likely to succeed because his people around him are very clever.

Napolitano:
What did Trump accomplish from his own perspective?

Doctorow:
I think– I don’t know if he saw this, but he could have or should have. I’m sure that he has people who also are watching Russian television also. What I’m doing is not unique. We have intelligence agencies who have people in Moscow embassy, have people in Washington DC who are doing exactly the same thing. They just don’t share what they see with the general public. But these people would have found what I found, that the Russians, official Russia was very favorably disposed towards Trump.

They believe– my colleague, Ray McGovern, has called out repeatedly the issue of trust. And trust is there. In case anyone had doubts, Mr. Lavrov repeated it yesterday. They trust Donald Trump.

11:07
As I say, the collective Donald Trump. Nobody has any illusions of the, that he is running the show by himself.

Napolitano:
Well, it’s hard to figure out exactly where Trump is. I mean, at the end of the day on Friday, it sounded as though he was pushing the neocons under the bus. General Kellogg wasn’t even there.

The president says he understands the origins of the special military operation. He understands that NATO can’t be involved in the new Ukraine. And he understands that there’s not gonna be any ceasefire. This will end when it ends, either by a grand peace treaty or by Russian triumph in the battlefield. That rejects everything from Victoria Nuland to then Senator Marco Rubio.

11:57
Then on Monday, he makes the unmistakable impression of boots on the ground or boots in the sky over Ukraine working with European troops in order to secure, in order to guarantee some sort of security. That, of course, delighted the neocons. Put aside what the Russians will reject. You and I know, and everybody watching us now know what they’ll reject. [Foreign Affairs] Minister Lavrov has been very clear. Trump is speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Trump is trying to please whoever is in front of him at the moment. Agree or disagree?

Doctorow: 12:35
I disagree. He is trying to please his opponents who are in front of him. Let’s remember what happened in Washington, DC. He didn’t have to, Trump didn’t have to invite them in. In the past, he’s never dealt with them as a group. He’s only dealt with them one to one, and this was remarked upon as meaning that he would try to play them off against one another. This time he allowed the whole lot of them to come and visit him, and he humiliated them all in front of one another.

When he told them to leave the room during his meeting with them in the White House, to go to the Oval Office and wait because he had to make a call to Putin, because that was very important; then he spent 40 minutes on the phone with Putin, letting them wring their hands in the next room and understand that they had been treated like second-class people, which is what they are.

Now, I do not believe that he has any intention of providing security guarantees in the sense that the Europeans expect it and that he was just stringing them along, just as he was stringing them along on whether there would be an immediate ceasefire. If they don’t see it, then they are very stupid.

Napolitano: 13:56
Well, I don’t think your view and my view are very far apart on that, but I’m looking for President Macron. Here is President Macron the day after, which I guess would be yesterday before he left Washington. Chris, cut number 12.

Questioner:
As it relates to security guarantees, does that mean European troops, and does that mean U.S. Troops?

Macron:
Look, I think for me it’s a very important progress of the past few days that your president expressed a clear commitment of the US to be part of the security guardantees. It’s brand new. And last February, when I took the responsibility to gather a series of European leaders with President Zelensky in Paris, and we followed up in London, and we created this coalition of the willing.

And it was a reaction to the feeling we had that we could see a temptation to go to a rapid peace, but without any guarantee for Ukraine. And we know what it means. It was Georgia 2008, but it was as well Crimea 2014. And there is full certainty that if you make any peace deal without security guarantee, Russia will never respect its words, will never comply with its own commitments.

15:23
So it’s for us totally critical. And this is an essential part of any deal for Ukraine and for the Europeans. This is for our own security. So this is a very important progress of the past few days that the US now is willing to be part of this.

Napolitano:
“The US is now willing to be part of this.” He left that impression unmistakably with them. And it’s an untrue impression, because he must know that the Russians would never go along with it. What difference does it make if American boots are on the ground or if they’re on jets overhead?

Doctorow: 16:00
Well, let’s revisit this. I spoke categorically and I think I should correct myself. It is possible that Trump will participate in security guarantees, but not in the way that any of the Europeans expect or want. I was interviewed this morning by WION, the main, almost the largest Indian global broadcaster in English. And they are pretty close to the Indian government. And the, I was asked, or I was told rather, that the, there is talk that the Chinese are going to be invited in to take part in the peacekeeping mission.

Well, there you have it, Judge. It’s entirely possible they will. And in that case, the Americans can go ahead and provide air cover. But what’s the difference here? The difference is that a strictly European peacekeeping force, which would not be monitors in fact, they would be armed, they’d be ready to go into action. They would be a trip wire for direct European and American intervention in the war and then start or restart a war. They could provoke a new war.

Napolitano:
Right,

Doctoorow:
What was going on before the Russians moved in in February of 2022? The OSCE monitors who were along various parts of the border were reporting finally– because mostly they kept their mouths shut since they were being given instructions by Europeans– about [how] the firing of artillery and missiles against the rebelling provinces had stepped up enormously. And this sent messages to Moscow that yes, the anticipated “final solution” of the Ukrainian rebellion was about to start. And that the, because of 150,000 Ukrainian soldiers amassed next to the border ready to pounce on Donbass. And that that triggered the war.

Now this– what was going on was firing, massive firing of weapons against the East. If these Europeans were there as the so-called peacekeepers, who’s to say that they wouldn’t start firing artillery and missiles? And there you have it. They could end the Russian– yeah.

Napolitano:
What is a security guarantee? I mean, what is being guaranteed? Ukraine’s neutrality, or that the Russians won’t use military force against Ukraine? What’s the guarantee?

Doctorow: 18:50
Well, the Europeans and Zelensky are presenting it in the latter case. That the Russians are aggressive, they’re going to restart the war at the first opportunity, they want to take Poland, the Baltics and France at the first opportunity and so forth. This is, of course, rubbishy propaganda, but that’s what they’re saying, and that’s what the BBC is repeating. So that is their official position, and of course, it’s completely false.

The security guarantees that Trump might take part in would otherwise be called monitors. And they will be consistent– if it happens at all, there will be global-south countries participating. That would be probably acceptable to the Russians because it’s not a first step towards a pseudo-NATO Ukraine.

Napolitano:
What’s wrong with the Austrian model of true neutrality, no military activity, economic prosperity, personal liberty. It may have been you who pointed out to me that when the Austrian Treaty of Neutrality was agreed to with the old Soviet Union and everybody else, the Soviets actually had an official on the Austrian National Security Council and it worked out fine.

Doctorow: 20:12
That’s fine, if the West European countries can be brought around to it. In fact, one country seems to, in a most paradoxical way, the president of Finland, Alexander Stup, when he was in Washington, I’d say rather stupidly, commented that, you know, the end of the war in Ukraine could be similar to what happened with us in 1944 when we concluded a peace with the Soviet Union and gave up territory. And after that, we all lived happily together and prospered.

Napolitano:
Yeah, until they joined NATO.

Doctorow:
Until they joined NATO. And he undid– and he violated– Mr. Lavrov spoke about this yesterday in Russian television and reminded us what that treaty was in ’44. It was a treaty of permanent neutrality in which Finland was obliged never to join an alliance directed against Russia. And that’s what they’ve just done.

Napolitano:
Wow. … Well, I’m of the view that the war in Ukraine is not going to end by any kind of an agreement. It’s going to end when the Ukrainian military collapses. What do you think?

Doctorow:
It’s entirely possible. No one cab say. I don’t pretend to have superior vision on this. It really is, you cross your fingers and it’ll go one way or the other. But the one thing that is outstanding and certain is the Russians are going to win. The Russians will get what they want, the basic things that they want. And here, of course, there’s a lot of confusion about what do they want, but you’ve touched upon them.

They want neutrality, They want the size, they want the nature of the Ukrainian armed forces to be described and certain categories of weapons not to be delivered to them. And they want progress on the well-being of their ethnic co-nationals, you could say, who remain under Ukrainian control to end the persecution of these people, which is ongoing.

Napolitano:
You know, as we speak, this was not mentioned in any of the commentary and that’s American intelligence. If you’re going to have American planes in the sky, Mr. President, that means you’re going to have American intelligence on the ground.

Right now, There are still 20 CIA stations in Ukraine. American intelligence is still helping Ukrainian soldiers aim American equipment at Russian soldiers, and MI6 is doing the same. That’s not likely to stop, is it?

Doctorow: 22:52
Well, it depends on their agreeing on definition of armed forces. The CIA people that you’re describing are for all practical purposes an army, but as you yourself have discussed, they are an army, although they are outside, formally speaking, the US Armed Forces.

That goes counter to the Russian demand that there be no foreign military forces or installations on Ukrainian soil. So, all of this, but this, this, they have gone through all of this with the Ukrainians in March of 2022. And this was more or less accepted by the Ukrainians. So I don’t see something horrible, impossible to achieve now. It all depends on whether Mr. Zalensky can be persuaded to avoid 20, 30, 40,000 more unnecessary deaths of his soldiers. And will sign on to give up the Donbass now, rather than waiting until the Russians to conquer it.

Napolitano:
Professor Doctorow, a fascinating conversation. You always present a very unique viewpoint, and it’s deeply appreciated here and around the world for all the people that watch us. Thank you very much. We’ll look forward to seeing you next week.

Doctorow:
And I look forward to it as well.

Napolitano:
Thank you. Coming up later today at 11 this morning, Max Blumenthal; at one this afternoon, Ian Proud; at two this afternoon– I’m not sure where he is, but he’ll be here with us–
Pepe Escobar; at three this afternoon, Phil Giraldi.

24:27
Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.

Transcript submitted by a reader

Prof. Glenn Diesen: 0:00
Hi everyone and welcome back. We are joined today by Gilbert Doktorow, a historian, international affairs analyst and also author of books such as “The War Diaries: The Russia-Ukraine War”.

So I tend to be more pessimistic than you in terms of the future of this war, the ability to reach some peaceful settlement. But I was struck a bit by some optimism now with this recent meeting, that is Witkoff going to Moscow. And again, anyone familiar with the NATO-Russia relations over the past 30 years is probably aware that deception has been a key component. But what we saw is the deadline expired. That is what began as a 50-day, then became a 10-day deadline.

Instead of sending weapons and sanctions, at least for now, Witkoff went to Moscow and his peers were getting a meeting between Putin and Trump. What are you reading into this quick development? Do you see something which has happened behind the scenes, or is this just noise?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 1:15
Well, a lot of things clearly have happened behind the scenes, and for that reason it’s difficult to judge the degree of agreement that Witoff reached with his Russian counterparts, Putin and this Shakov and who else was there, Mikhail Dmitriev. Look, in my recent interviews, I look at comments, one of them was, “Oh, Doctorow has become really an apologist for Trump.” I consider this progress, because before, six months ago, they would have said Doctorow was an apologist for Putin. So we’re getting there.

I tried not to be an apologist for anybody. And if Trump is doing something stupid, I will not hesitate to say that. If what he’s doing is unlikely to succeed to my knowledge, I will also say that. There is one troubling note here in the brief information that has been sent out as to what was discussed and how our preparations are being made for the Trump-Putin meeting in the near future, meaning possibly in the coming week. That is the– what I find disturbing is the notion that Zelensky would have been invited. Because that goes contrary to what I understood was the hopeful sign coming out of the Witkoff- Putin talks.

2:51
The hopeful sign being that the discussions would go far beyond the particulars of the Ukraine crisis, the territories that each side would retain or have to give up, the question of Ukraine in NATO and the rest of it. And they would talk about bigger issues, constructive discussion they had. I think Ushakov said it was, there was the probability, likelihood, of discussing strategic cooperation.

Well, yes, that would definitely interest the Russians and would bring Mr. Putin together with Mr. Trump, but Mr. Zelensky doesn’t fit into that at all. And so if indeed Zelensky were to be invited, that puts in question the first point. Are they discussing only Ukraine and only the terms of the ceasefire, or are they discussing the issues which the Russians really want to talk about?

3:50
Now what are the issues the Russians want to talk about? One of your recent guests put out some ideas. And he is well informed; I’d say he’s probably a centrist person within the American foreign policy establishment. And he was saying, yes, they would talk about cooperation in the Arctic, and they would talk about ending the sanctions and reintegrating Russia into the greater world, the Western world. Because as he said, Russians in general consider themselves to be Europeans, to be part of Western civilization, and they are very disappointed that they are excluded from that context, from that place where they believe they belong to be, by the sanctions which are caused by the war.

4:44
Here I disagree completely. Five years ago, yes, that would have been an accurate statement. As I have been saying for some time, and this is not just my own observation; the Russians have been talking about it with great insistence. The war has brought forward new elites. The war has made even among the intellectuals who are almost by definition not supporters of the Putin regime, so to speak, that they had become patriotic and that they were less concerned that they couldn’t spend a summer vacation in Paris or elsewhere in Western Europe or even visit the States. So if they could come back with a lot of stories to discuss with their friends.

5:36
That’s over. Russia may not feel comfortable with Chinese cars. That’s now being discussed, how these cars are being accepted or rejected by Russian consumers. They may not feel comfortable with spending a summer vacation on North Korea’s latest tourist beaches, But they certainly will not exchange the loss in treasure and in life of the last three years for the sake of going back to the status quo ante and being integrated into Western economy and society.

6:15
That’s gone. That is over, and it will not come back. There will be some accommodation with the West, but not in the sense that existed before. No one talks about it, but I’ll say it right here and now. Russia had a big inferiority complex across the board. Anyone you spoke to, other than a handful of super patriots, before this war, the predominant feeling in Russia was, “we can’t make anything”.

This takes me back to late 1990s. I remember a very smart taxi driver was taking my wife and me around downtown Petersburg and he remarked, we Russians, we make very cute babies, but we’re lousy at making cars. Now, that was a widespread belief. And I think that the last three years and the re-industrialization of Russia and the import substitution in Russia and the takeover of Western companies by Russian entrepreneurs or the Russian state producing virtually the same products under a different name. That’s changed it all.

Russia didn’t produce any cheese before. Ridiculous. They didn’t produce cheese. In 1912, Russia was supplying butter to Denmark. This is not my guess. I have a yearbook on my library shelf. A 1912 yearbook was published in the UK, all describing all the trade relations between Russia and UK and the West, and they were exporting butter to Denmark. Well, they can’t, they weren’t making any cheese. Well, they’re making all kinds of cheese now. The, as I said before, what Mr. Trump wants to do with his tariffs is to imitate what the Russians have done, thanks to Western sanctions, to re-industrialize. So the game has changed. The idea that this could be an issue for discussion that would bring Mr. Putin, Mr. Shakov, Dmitriev to the table and, “Yeah, well, let’s get on with it. We’ll have an immediate ceasefire, and you’ll put us back into the European and American markets.”

That’s gone. So what could they talk about? What is the big issue that would have persuaded Mr. Putin and his close advisors that they should meet with Trump now? What could Mr. Witkoff have brought with him? Well, I think he had to have addressed the core issues. What he could have done to make the whole thing palatable to all sides, meaning also the Ukrainians if they are strong-armed and the Europeans, is to speak about phasing in what is essentially the Russian solution and presenting it in such a way that it would not look like what it is, which is virtual surrender. Virtual surrender is not acceptable to NATO, is not acceptable to the United States.

9:20
Mr. Trump will be pilloried if he does nothing to sweeten the settlement and to make it seem as though he’s in control. All the news we see on every possible subject these weeks has one newsmaker, and his name is Donald Trump. It gives you the sense that he’s in control of things even if he absolutely is not. And he is certainly not in control of how this war will end.

But he has to have the appearance of that. And so he has decided that he should meet with Mr. Putin. And Mr. Putin has responded.

Although if you read yesterday’s and today’s “Financial Times”, oh, no, sorry, if you listened to the BBC this morning, you would understand that Putin was eagerly pursuing Trump for a meeting, because that will restore his prestige as an international player. That’s how they turn everything on its head.

Well, coming back to this answer to your question, I’ve been a bit long-winded, but the answer to your question: the Americans probably brought a phasing in, stage one, stage two, stage three, which makes it possible to sit and negotiate. The end result will be very much in accordance with the Russians’ demands, which are not maximalist. They haven’t changed one iota from where they were in June 2024, when Mr. Putin reiterated what he first said in February 2022, what Russia’s ambition is, although he put it more clearly and in easier-to- understand terms. But essentially it came to the same thing, what this denazification, well that’s regime change, the demilitarization, well the Ukrainian army goes, but mostly it’s evaporating in front of our eyes. So these things are being achieved and now they want to codify it, but they cannot do it in one session. That will be too awful for the West.

11:28
So I think the issue to discuss is how to phase this in, in a way that leaves Mr. Trump at least with an off-ramp that’s respectable and the Europeans can go to hell. They’ll have to accommodate to whatever the Americans and the Russians agree, because they will have no weapons to supply to the Ukraine and Ukraine will sink.

So that is what I see coming, a discussion of the timetable for arriving at the Russians’ Dzerak, their requirements for peace treaty.

Diesen: 12:04
I was told by a credible American source that not only was Washington becoming much more eager to find a settlement because of the disaster happening on the front. That is, it looks like a total collapse could happen within the next few months. But I was also told that Zelensky, that he had apparently changed a bit as well. While in the past viewed himself as being this new Churchill who will bring back the glory of Ukraine and defeat Russia, all of this has now begun to fade away. And if the Americans put something in front of him and pressured him, he would likely sign. So it’s again, it’s none of the certainty.

12:53
And indeed the Russians are asking for a lot. But now this, yeah, Kremlin advisor Yuri Ushakov, he was in the news arguing that the Americans had put forward a proposal, which they, which he said was seemingly acceptable to Moscow. This is, I never heard this language before. And given how far the parts, the two different sides have been apart, it seems as if something significant must have shifted. Because my first impression was perhaps this Witkoff going to Moscow, talking about a Trump-Putin meeting is just a way to get Trump, well, save face after he made this silly, you know, 10 day deadline, which I don’t understand.

But there seems to actually be some substance in place here. But did you read the comments by Oshokov the same way? And if so, what do you think such a deal must include? Because again, the Russians aren’t going to, after 30 years of struggling over the European security architecture, more than three years of losing men on the front lines. Now, finally, at the cusp of victory, it’s going to just throw it away.

14:14
I assume that there’s a reason why they’re able to put these harsh demands. So what do you think might be in this deal that Osakoff is referring to?

Doctorow:
I’m not quite sure, but there are sticking points here. Again, to address that question with being an apologist for Trump, I have no illusions about the humanitarian motives that are absent from his peace seeking. Nor do I accept the notion that the man is so vain that he’s doing everything for the sake of getting the Nobel Peace Prize.

I don’t think even Mr. Trump is that vain, to put aside national interest of the United States and the lives of all the other parties to this conflict, for the sake of getting that piece of paper, that little award which Obama received for doing nothing whatsoever, just for not being Bush. I think there’s much more to it, but it’s in conflict in my mind. What exactly? The overall overarching concept could be “separate the Russians from the Chinese so we can proceed with taking on China”.

15:31
However, that falls flat. There is no way conceivable that Russia is going to betray China. No way. When I said the other day that one, that Mr. Witoff could have been talking to Dmitriyev about getting access to Russian-produced rare metals, rare-earth metals, as the point for negotiation or preparing for negotiation with the Chinese in the coming week or two, where the Chinese are withholding those urgently needed materials to frustrate any plans of punishing tariffs or any limitations on export of technology to China by Mr. Trump. It is inconceivable that Mr. Putin will give free access to Russian rare-earth metals to spite China. That is off the table.

16:37
So what exactly Mr. Trump hopes to achieve considering that Russia and China are inseparable, I’m not quite sure. So we really have to look a little bit further. And I’m not sure that Mr. Trump is, his advisors are blind to that reality. I also have mentioned the timing coming back to why 10 days or what 50 days because September 3rd is inconvenient.

It’s too close to the convening of this end of the Pacific war for World War Two the 80th anniversary celebrations will be in Beijing, to which Mr. Trump presumably is desperate to be invited. That is possible. It suggests that the Yalta type meeting that we all thought might possibly happen, when Moscow celebrated the 80th anniversary of the end of the European war, and didn’t happen. Maybe would happen now in the Pacific, in Beijing. It’s possible.

17:46
As I’ve said recently, I don’t have a microphone under Mr. Putin’s pillow. We really don’t have a microphone under Mr. Trump’s pillow. And there are contradictory objectives when you look at what he says and even what he does, to complicate our reading of these tea leaves, our attempting to make sense out of it all. It could be that they still have some illusions or delusions with respect to separating Russia from China. I find it hard to believe, but Americans can be peculiar. What else could be going through their minds? What else [could they] be using to reach a quick accommodation with Mr. Putin without looking like they’ve lost the war?

And I think Putin will be very amenable to helping them off the off-ramp. He’s certainly smart enough. He did that with Obama with respect to the bombing Syria over the alleged use of chemical weapons. So he knows how to let his opponents off the hook, getting what he wants without embarrassing them to the point where he’s got enemies. But for me right now, it’s a bit hard to say just how this trick will be done.

Diesen: 19:16
Yeah, I would have been more reassured if I heard some talks about actually the European security architecture, because so far there’s been too much reference to an unconditional ceasefire and Trump still in his language. I mean, there’s a contradiction. His language still refers to this as as if it would be a war between Ukraine and Russia, which is problematic for the peace efforts if it takes NATO and America’s role out of this. On the other hand, he calls the war Biden’s war, which Biden began by pushing NATO.

So it’s not very consistent. If it’s Biden’s war, how is it only limited between Ukraine and Russia? But again, with Trump, you never know what is the noise and what does he actually know. I was wondering though, how you read his, if you think Trump is misinformed either deliberately or just out of ignorance by his advisors, because from Trump we hear these comments such as, I think he said, there’s 20,000 Russians dying a month, which is, it doesn’t make any sense in any way. It’s quite outlandish.

And also when he was asked about what’s happening in Ukraine, people elderly people being dragged to the front. And he said, Oh, I don’t know anything about that. And now of course, putting this deadline to begin with, the 10-day deadline … if he knows that Russia considers this to be an existential threat, they’re willing to fight this all the way, why would he think that they would capitulate now, in other words, accept freezing the front lines and allowing NATO to revive the conflict in the future if they would need to put pressure on Russia. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense that this was always ridiculous, that the Russians would accept this. Is this misinformed or is it just, you know, talking to his own base or what is he? I have a very hard time understanding some of the strange information and decisions which are coming out.

21:35
Well, they’ll confuse the other side, but don’t confuse yourself. I would take as an operating assumption that he is not confused and that all of these confusing and oftentimes very bizarre statements that come out of him are intended, are a demonstration of his contempt for the press and for his opponents who are the most vocal elements of society at large. The silent majority doesn’t say much. His opponents say a lot and are hurt a lot and what they say is picked up by media.

22:11
There are contradictions here, and I think It’s much too early for us to present with clarity what is going to happen when they meet and what is the intended outcome, why the Russians would have agreed to this meeting when it goes against all of their rules. Russian television is informing us that yes, contrary to the general rule of preparing in great detail and over considerable time for summit meetings, the Russians are prepared this time to make an exception and to hold this very quickly, and they’re working like mad. The Americans are working like mad to observe this shortened schedule. Supposedly it’s about agreeing a ceasefire, but I don’t believe that.

23:07
There’s no way that the Russians can accept a ceasefire when the Europeans are not present at this. The Americans, by definition, are not going to be supplying further weapons to Ukraine. The Europeans are. And the Russians do not accept under any condition that a ceasefire will take place while weapons are being dispatched into Ukraine. So that is a non-starter.

There’s something else going on in Ukraine. We don’t know it. But I think it’s best not to assume that people are ill-informed, that some maliciousness is at work. The advisors to Putin, to Trump, or I should say even to Putin one of one very well-known former economist and at a high level in American politics is insisting that Mr. Putin is being deceived and misled by his advisors.

24:04
I think it would be safe just to hold back and let’s see what happens at this meeting. But there are definite contradictions in the structure of the meeting, which is what is called out now. How can you agree on a ceasefire when Europeans aren’t present? The only person who was called out, the need for Europeans has been Urban, who came out yesterday with a statement that Merz and the French Macron should go to Moscow now, or after the meeting that Trump has with Putin, and present the European position to Moscow, because the EU institutions are totally incapable of doing that.

24:47
Well, I agree with him on that point. But whether or not much will be achieved by Macron and Merz going to Moscow … well, better to talk than not to talk. That can’t see a solution on the ceasefire without the Europeans being brought in. But obviously not at the first meeting, just as it’s senseless to have Zelensky there when the only thing that could have motivated the Russians to agree to a meeting has nothing to do directly with the Ukraine conflict. It has to do, as you said, with revising the security architecture of Europe, for which Mr. Zelensky has no place at the table.

25:26
So there are confusing signals that you and I have detected, and I suppose others as well, which make it difficult to predict what the outcome of this meeting would be.

Diesen:
I got that impression both from some Americans and Russians that they need to first get the big pieces in place, that is the European security order, which effectively means the relationship between the Americans and the Russians. And then once this is an order, then the Ukrainian issue can be resolved. So you want to deal with it in the right order and also been told that yeah that they have the same both the Moscow and Washington have the same views of the Europeans, that yes, they have to be brought in, but first after the decisions have been made.

So, and then, you know, if you can get the Washington, Moscow, and then get the Kiev to sign under then the Europeans will just be a formality, I guess. But let’s say this, I wonder what the post-war settlement might look like when the war is done. Because in terms of the wider European order, if you thought about this, let’s say next week they hash out the deal, I’m not so that optimistic, but the war can come to an end within a few weeks.

The Russians make the point that they have to deal with the Americans because they have to. America remains a very important part of the international system. And also, if you want the world to function and have stability, Russia and America always have to work together. But as you suggested before, there is a longing to return to Europe. It seems to be gone.

27:15
Indeed, when you talk to migrants from Russia in Europe, many say that they were initially surprised. They knew that Russia was always a bit mocked for being an economic mess, but they were surprised about how much hatred there is towards Russians. But now, of course, this inferiority complex, it’s more or less gone. I guess this is what happens when you defeat NATO on the battlefield, but it’s also the sense of admiration for Europe, which is gone. I mean, throughout the Cold War, yes, there was some animosity towards Western governments, as you would [think], but overall there was some admiration for the way society was organized.

The economies we had, the social systems, the technologies, there seemed to be some moral or values. But now, of course, a lot of this is seen as decaying and indeed the culture wars we’re having where everything has to be deconstructed. This has become a source of mockery in the Russian media. What do you think, or your sense, what kind of relationship do you think the Russians want with Europe once this war is actually over?

Doctorow: 28:28
Well, I think they would be very happy to go back to their position as very close economic partners of Europe without taking it to the embarrassing extreme that Macron described several years ago, that Russia was a big, great supplier of raw materials.

I think that notion is not satisfactory or sufficient for restoring economic ties with Europe. But let me just make an attempt. What could they possibly have said to President Putin, what Witkoff could have brought with him, that would be considered constructive and could justify this meeting? And let’s take, put it in the historical context. What did the Americans and the Russians, who disliked one another, who didn’t necessarily respect one another, always put forward as the first topic for discussion? Arms control.

29:26
Arms control. That is the most value-neutral thing that they could discuss next week, which would set the tone for solving all the other issues, which would receive the undeserved acclaim in Europe and the United States. If they were to discuss restoring the intermediate and short-range missile agreement in a new form and preventing or removing the advance-positioned Russian missiles and the plans for stationing American missiles in Germany next year, that would be hailed by everybody. And from that good atmosphere, they could proceed to the really tough and miserable discussions about concluding the Ukraine war.

So there might be something, I say this completely off the table, but nobody’s talking about it because it’s all been kept very highly secret from all of us, whereas it should be till now.

30:37
So I wouldn’t eliminate the possibility some concrete positive and promising could come out of a meeting between Putin and Trump in a week’s time, one which has no need whatsoever for Mr. Zelensky or for the Europeans to be present. And that could set the tones I’d say for dealing with the really tough questions of resolving the Ukraine war and also revising European architecture. If you take off this five-minute long delivery strike times of missiles within the European theatre, life gets a lot easier. You can breathe much easier, and the tension over European security would be toned down considerably. So that could be it, but it’s a guess, nothing more than a guess.

Diesen: 31:31
Well, you know, this is a problem when the diplomacy, of course, is behind closed doors. Just my last question though is, if this peace agreement goes through, if they actually deal with the European security architecture, what happens to NATO? Again, I think that one of the reasons why the Europeans are or seem to prefer keeping the war going is as long as you have a conflict, then NATO will still have a purpose and it will keep the Americans on the continent. You and I discussed before that the fear of the Europeans is once the Americans get to leave Ukraine, they will also likely leave Europe to a large extent, both resource priorities and everything going to Asia. So do you think peace in Ukraine could destroy NATO?

Doctorow: 32:27
Again, if it’s taken by itself, yes. If it’s put in a broader context, such as I just was mentioning, just on the arms control or also with regard to new technologies and putting a lid on drone warfare, putting a lid on AI warfare, robotics, putting a lid on these new technologies, which are awesome, frightening, and drive the anxiety on all sides, then these other issues, the traditional issues of territory and language rights and the rest of it, become much easier to deal with. And NATO’s fading away is almost an afterthought rather than the first urgent concern, which it is today for Europeans. So I don’t know how smart these people are. I don’t know how wide, broad their perspective is, whether they’ve taken it in, in a sense that I just presented it or not.

33:41
But I would give them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think, unlike Craig Roberts, I don’t think Mr. Putin is being managed by his advisors, who are all lovers of foie gras and the Mediterranean coast. I think that there are some serious people on the Russian side. I hope they’re equally serious people.

I don’t consider Witkoff to be anything but a very serious man. And I don’t think he would have wasted his time on this mission if he saw it as hopeless. I’m being an optimist. I don’t deny the right of pessimists to also claim the same territory.

Diesen: 34:34
Well, this week at least, we’re much closer to your optimism as, yeah, there seems to be some movement, which you suggested in the past as well, that there are things happening in the background.

But yeah, well, as you said before, you used to be referred to as a Putin apologist. Now you’re a Trump apologist. I do think this is one of the wider problems we’re having though. It’s always during wars. So you see that if you’re not sufficiently, for example, anti-Russian, then you can be accused of being pro-Russian.

So everything is so polarized. It’s either black or white and all gray is just eliminated. So this is one of the things I’m most fearful of now in the West as well, the inability to consider the security concerns of opponents. I always make this comment that the media, the politicians, I never hear anyone talk about the Russian security concerns, the Iranian, the Chinese. It’s always, it’s always colored in the language of just being belligerent and evil, essentially.

I think this is a, makes it much more difficult to understand our opponents. But unfortunately, if you try to understand Trump, that label fits as well, then you’re a Trump apologist.

Doctorow:
Well, as we gather today, the tea hasn’t even been poured. One week from today, we can read tea leaves.

Diesen:
Well, as always, thank you so much for your insights, and have a great weekend.

Doctorow: 36:10
You too, thanks.

Today’s chat focused on the visit of Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff to Moscow in which he spent just under three hours with President Putin. The very length of their meeting suggests that there was a lot more going on than the delivery by Witkoff of Trump’s ultimatum over ending the war at once. This is further confirmed by Witkoff’s walk yesterday in the Zaryadye park next to Red Square in the company of Kiril Dmitriev, head of Russia Direct Investment and the man best prepared to discuss with the Americans prospective cooperative projects, not escalation of the confrontation.

I made the point that the seemingly bizarre actions of Trump in the past week – namely the dispatch of two U.S. nuclear missile bearing submarines closer to Russia, the delivery of nuclear weapons to the U.K. and the declaration by the senior U.S. military officer in Europe Christopher Donahue that the U.S. has ready plans to seize the Kaliningrad enclave of the Russian Federation – were just posturing to appease Senator Lindsey Graham and other radical politicians supporting Trump in Congress and were seen as such by the Kremlin. None of this creates new existential threats to Russia.

However, my main point, which Judge Napolitano now plans to put to Scott Ritter for comment later today is that the more pressure Trump & Co. place on Russia by introducing new sanctions, such as those directed against the shadow fleet of oil tankers delivering Russian oil to India and other global markets, the faster the Russian armed forces are taking territory and destroying the military assets of Ukraine. The attempted bullying only has a perverse effect of bringing peace nearer by hastening the Russian victory.

I enjoyed the opportunity to pass along to viewers speculation in Russian news today that a young parliamentarian in the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada, 35 year old Anna Skorokhod is being mentioned as a possible candidate to replace Zelensky now that the Americans are intent on his removal. Skorokhod has been loudly criticizing the forcible recruitment of youths and seniors into the Ukrainian army. She has said to the press that there are 400,000 deserters from the Ukrainian army today and she supports them. They say that Skorokhod has the support of a close business associate of Donald Trump. Could this be Witkoff?

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEO16V1X7Fg

Prof. Glenn Diesen: 0:00
Hi everyone and welcome back. We’re joined today by Gilbert Doctorow, an international affairs analyst, historian and author of books such as “War Diaries: the Russia-Ukraine War”. So welcome to the show. I want to ask you about the state of relations between the European Union and the United States, because as we all know, von der Leyen and Trump, they reached a US-EU trade agreement. And for many people, myself included, it looks more or less like a complete capitulation and subordination, and something that could, I guess, change the relationship between the EU and US, but also something that can undermine the internal cohesion of the European Union itself. So given that you’re located there in Brussels, what does this agreement actually include? And can you make any sense of it?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 1:03
The agreement that was reached in Scotland has two important sides to it. One is what everybody is talking about, the tariffs. And the tariffs are now set at generally 15% down from a tentative 25% before an agreement was reached. But that doesn’t cover all products and services. Airplanes or airplane parts, for example, are not included in this. They are at a much lower tariff rate. There are other products which will be negotiated still.

For example, wines and liquor, which are of great interest to one of the leading countries in the EU, that is France, and that probably will be negotiated at a different level, lower level, in the wishes of the French. But looking at the tariffs, that is severe. It is compared to where we were at the start of the year. It is less than the dramatic and ruinous tariffs that Trump had spoken about before he would negotiate a deal.

And will this bring European manufacturing across the ocean to the United States at the expense of jobs in Europe? It’s not quite clear. There is very little discussion of what Europe actually sells to the States and how vulnerable it is to loss of market share due to price increases. That’s something we can perhaps get into, but what I have in mind is that mass products, products that are bought and used by the vast majority of the population, they are not typically European products. They are Chinese products. European products include a lot of luxury goods, and luxury goods are being sold to wealthy people for whom a 15% tariff won’t make a big difference.

3:07
So the real impact on European sales in the States from this agreement in Scotland still has to be refined. One cannot make definitive statements yet, because it’s not complete. There are these negotiations at the margins. But what was most outstanding and of course what impressed observers of all political stripes by the way, not just observers who are anti-American or pro-American. No, no.

All observers came to one conclusion. It was, as you say, a capitulation. To put it in other terms, it was an enormous humiliation for Europe. Von der Leyen went to Scotland, cap in hand, as more or less a beggar without any, not negotiating from strength, as I like to say these days. On the contrary, she’s negotiating from weakness and from the fear that the failure to reach an agreement would end in a tariff war that could cost Europe five million jobs.

So she was under enormous pressure to ingratiate herself with a man whom she knows despises her. Trump has never made that a secret. And she came away with something that isn’t too terrible. That’s the consensus, again, of observers here in Europe. It’s not too terrible, but it’s bad and it’s particularly bad for the way it was reached, because it demonstrated that there is no leverage from the European side.

4:40
But that is one side of the story. The other side of discussion was the commitment by Europe to purchase 650 billion dollars in American hydrocarbons, that is, liquefied natural gas and petroleum, over the next three years. That is potentially a far bigger impact on Europe from this whole tariff discussion, because it locks in the non-competitive situation of European wares on world markets. The single biggest factor in the deindustrialization of Germany that has gone on for the last three years at least, when the Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed, when Europe swore off buying more Russian pipeline gas and cheap oil. That was a decisive factor making the German economy uncompetitive.

5:47
It was a decisive factor in whole sectors of industry shutting down completely, those sectors that were highly dependent on cheap energy, like glass manufacturing, for example. And fertilizers, of course. These were hit enormously. And the fertilizers being hit, of course, has passed along to consumers in higher prices for all fresh produce, which is produced with less efficiency, with lower yields when the fertilizers are used more sparingly because it’s more expensive.

So this aspect is not in the featured news, when it deserves to be. As I said, it locks in the uncompetitive status of European products on world markets. Now, can that figure be reached? That is another question. Will they actually reach it? Will they actually achieve that over the three-year period?

These are quite big question marks. The United States now exports 80 billion dollars a year of hydrocarbons to Europe. To go from there to 215 billion dollars a year is a big stretch, particularly since it’s not obvious that America has the production capacity to fill orders should they come in. So that is all debatable.

But if it were to be exercised, if in some way the United States could achieve these exports and Europe could absorb them, that will be a big dent in the European economies. And Europeans, the middle-of-the-road supporters of Atlanticism, had been searching hard to explain why they were so disadvantaged in the negotiations with Trump, how he was able to vanquish and have von der Leyen kneeling before him and kissing the ring. This is something that they’re debating. The Belgian leading French-speaking newspaper, “Le Soir”, blames the problem on Europe’s over-dependence on exports to drive economic growth. That is not a convincing argument to anyone who is aware of global trade, since that is precisely the formula that China has used and continues to use so successfully to achieve its enormous growth, presently 5% per annum, whereas in the first quarter of ’25, the Europeans were displaying great pleasure to have 0.1% GDP growth.

Diesen: 8:33
Well, isn’t the real dilemma of the European Union then not that they’re dependent on foreign trade, but that they’re excessively dependent on the United States as a partner? Because it seems as if the EU wants to have a reliable dependency on the United States as it had in previous decades. And in order to do this, they have to win over the … I call it the good will or affection of America by doing as they’re told, which includes reducing their economic ties with countries such as Russia, China, Iran, and well, American adversaries. But by trying to win over the love of Washington, they isolate themselves more in the world and become more dependent on the United States.

9:25
So is this, by committing themselves solely to the US, will this strengthen the relationship with Washington, or will it undermine it by giving the Americans too much leverage in this partnership?

Doctorow:
If “strengthen” means for both parties, of course not. Strengthen the American leverage over Europe, definitely. The question is why did Europe submit to this? Did it have to? What was the overriding consideration?

I think there is a certain understanding among many observers that the driving force was defense. And they hope that by staying close to Trump, by submitting to his will, they could maintain an ongoing conversation with him and persuade him to do what they want most of all, which is to continue to support Ukraine in its war on Russia, because they have made that, arbitrarily they have made that an existential threat to themselves for the sake of the leadership staying in power. That is to say, they’re singing and dancing and moving from the story of last three years that “Russia has to be defeated” to the story of the present, which is “We have to stay united. We need the present leadership in power because this is the only way that we can rearm Europe and prepare for a war with Russia that may take place as early as 2029.”

That is the current story that the present leadership in 25 out of 27 countries of the EU is putting forward to the press, to the public at large, as their re-election bid and as their bid for support. This is based on the same delusion that we’ve seen in their understanding of the Russia-Ukraine war from the beginning. The delusion here is that they can persuade Mr. Trump of anything. They can’t.

And they’re listening to what he says, which is a terrible mistake. Mr. Trump has nothing but contempt for the press. He has nothing but contempt for most of the European leadership. He knows that they are weak, that they are cowardly, they are conformist, and that they will be bullied.

And that is essentially what he is. He is a bully. He’s a bully who is successful at this trick. And he is telling them one thing and doing something else. What he’s doing is stopping supplies to Ukraine.

What he’s doing– this is something we can get into– is probably aiding and abetting the eviction of Zelensky from office and his replacement by somebody who is capable of negotiating a peace treaty with the Russians. So they are going to be bitterly disappointed. They’ve made a bet, they have allowed themselves to be humiliated, for the sake of continuing a war with American help, which will not happen.

Diesen: 12:43
Yeah, this is a comment I made all the way back in Munich when Vance gave this speech. And I was making the point that the Europeans’ efforts to show their loyalty to the United States instead of being rewarded, I think not just Trump, but at some general level across the political class, they’re getting some contempt for the Europeans for the, well, their spinelessness or the inability to stand up for their own interests.

So, and again, this is something I’ve heard from many people as well, so the assumption here is you make a deal, a humiliating deal, a bit of subordination and then somehow this would be rewarded by the United States locking in its presence in Europe. But we also had the Ukrainians making the same assumption with this minerals deal. If we just sign this deal, then Trump will be locked into the Ukraine conflict. But a counter-argument would be then that he can come home to his own people and say, “Look, I got our money back. Now we can leave.” I mean, do you see this? You said they make a mistake by trusting that he will stay there. But how do you see Trump’s commitment to Europe in the months to come, because he has been making a lot more aggressive rhetoric towards the Russians. Is this essentially what the Europeans bought themselves with this horrible trade agreement?

Doctorow: 14:17
Well, he keeps everybody guessing, including those who have bet the House on the unsuccessful relationship with Trump by the handshake agreement this past weekend in Scotland. He keeps them all guessing. Even yesterday, there was this expression of horror that was picked up by major media here in Western Europe that Trump was about to do a deal, cut a deal with Vladimir Putin, that would be vastly destructive of all the ambitions of the EU. I don’t think he’s going to cut such a deal. I don’t think that he has anything to offer the Russians that could persuade them to yield in any way on their conduct of the war, when the victory on the ground is so close to being achieved.

So that is also nonsense. But they are uncertain. The Europeans here are hoping that they have him on line and can persuade him by pointing to these terrible acts of bombing that the Russians are committing now in Kiev and elsewhere. They can persuade him using Melanie perhaps, all kinds of levers that they believe, want to believe, can get Trump to change his mind in the hope that he is not a serious man, that he does not have long-term vision, and that he can be changed from one day to the next by somebody whispering in his ear. That is all false, completely false.

Nonetheless, it persists as a widespread notion of who Mr. Trump is, here in Western Europe. And then you have the special relationship with Keir Starmer, which would seem to demonstrate the validity of such assumptions about Trump. But also, Starmer went to Scotland. Trump didn’t come down to London.

16:33
He was also a supplicant, and the relationship there with the British, they have the most-favored tariff deal out of all countries with the United States at present with a 10% tariff. And they’re gloating over that. But they still have 50% tariffs on steel, which were a very important export product to the United States. And so the British have been given the hope that they have a favored position with the United States as against Europe. But it can change at any moment.

And I think that, again, looking at politics, who stands where? Mr. Starmer, head of the Labor Party, which is to the left, shall we say, of Mr. Trump’s politics. I don’t think he enjoys real respect.

Trump has it his way. And he gets a meeting with the king, that’s fine. He likes pomp and circumstance. But I don’t think that he is genuinely influenced in making policy on these superficial acts one way or another with this or that state leader. He has his own determination to self-impose sanctions on the United States by way of tariffs for the sake of re-industrializing the United States. And I don’t think it’s a vain proposal.

Diesen: 18:00
No, but some of these threats, though, they seem to become actions. Well, I’m thinking then especially what Trump is doing with the Indians, that is putting this additional tariffs on and justifying it by their trade with the Russians. And this is why I was wondering as well, these 10 days, which he has put on, well, it was 15, now it’s 10. Obviously, this could become another 50 again.

So these deadlines doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything, but it does beg the question why he would make himself vulnerable in terms of putting these deadlines to begin with. What is the thought process here? What is it that he’s trying to achieve? And not if, when Russia predictably ignores this, what will happen on day 10?

Doctorow: 18:52
Well, let’s, there’s speculation about day 11. But let me add to the complexity of the analysis, by bringing in what Russians are talking about on their talk shows. I think it’s a different perspective from what is being said by any of my peers in the United States and Western Europe. And that is: why the 10 days, what is it all about? It’s because 50 days, inconveniently, inconveniently expires on September 3rd.

And that is much too close to the celebration of the end of the World War II in the Pacific, which will be marked by the visit of heads of state from all over the place in Beijing. Putin will be there, I think 20, 30 or more heads of state from around the world will be there. And Mr. Trump wants to be there. He wants to have his face-to-face meeting with Xi during that time.

And possibly he could also have this, use that to have a face-to-face meeting with Putin. So I think in consideration or reconsideration of how inconvenient the September 3rd closing was in light of the new aspiration to meet with Xi in Beijing, which is supported by a number of other things, namely his refusal to allow the president of Taiwan to visit New York. I think their whole visit to the States was scrubbed with the intent to avoid any embarrassing conflict with the Chinese that would interfere with his being invited to the festivities in Beijing. So with that in mind, there’s a different focus entirely on what his deadlines are about. There’s more than one consideration when he sets these deadlines.

Diesen: 20:57
When we look though at the Europeans, there is a strange development. That is, they seem to solely focus on foreign policy these days. This is as you mentioned with Starmer, this is seemingly especially the case in the UK, where he spends very little time on domestic issues. I guess you can say the same about Macron. And again, this trade deal as well seems to sacrifice a lot of domestic priorities, that is to develop an economy, deal with social issues.

All of this is being, well, reduced in priority in order to instead buy some favor with the Americans to, again, for foreign policy objectives, no matter how foolish they might be, such as continuing the war in Ukraine. But how long do you think this can go on for the Europeans? Because this kind of doubles down on the disaster of first cutting themselves off from Russian energy and then of course destroying, the destruction of Nord Stream. Did you see the political instability permitting such an agreement to be passed, or not really?

Doctorow: 22:12
Well, one thing I wanted to bring up is what we mean when we say “Europeans” and who makes European policy. I’ve been rereading my materials going back to 2015 in preparation for the volume three of my memoirs.

And I was very focused on Germany in 2015, spoke about it at several conferences, and wrote about it in what I consider to be a very important policy analysis that was published in comparative politics of Megimo, the Russian university that prepares diplomats. What I was saying then is the European policy is made in [Berlin], And this is a well-kept secret. In 2015, just as in 2025, all the top posts in the European institutions are German designated. They were appointed by Germans. And they have appointed in this present case, von der Leyen has appointed people like Kallas, people from Lithuania, people from Poland who are under her thumb.

23:33
They are representing small countries, insignificant weight compared to the 450 million population of the EU. They are often people with– intellectual lightweights like Kallas who can be dominated by a strong and willful personality like von der Leyen. And that is to say, the commissioner, the head of the president of the commission, the head of the parliament, the president of the parliament, yes she’s Italian, but she’s appointed by the majority which is dominated by the European People’s Party which is dominated by the Christian Democrats. It all goes, but the strings all go back to Berlin, just as they did in 2015 when Junker was there. Yes of course, he was a Luxembourger, but he was a weak man who was … nominated and supported by Merkel, because she knew she could controll him, because there were scandals around, just as Tusk at that time.

24:37
He was made the president of the European Council. Tusk, who could hardly speak English, but spoke very good German by the way, was– she appointed him. And nobody bothered to think about what the German connection was there. He was under her thumb. So that was how it was in 2015. That’s how it is today.

And just as– the only thing that’s changed is that Europe, is that Germans today have come out behind, from behind the apron strings of EU institutions and are saying openly that they want to become, for example, the main military force in Europe. So the, who is Europe? Europe is Germany. Mr. Merz is the decisive voice on whether the tariffs agreed by von der Leyen will go through. And many other policy decisions. Your question about why foreign policy? That’s what you do when you’re losing and you can’t control domestic policy. You’re speaking about very unpopular leaders.

25:45
Keir Starmer has lost control of the Labour Party on domestic issues. He had a very severe setback when his reforms on support of the needy, of the wealth, of the benefits reforms were rejected by his own party and watered down to almost nil where they hoped to save a lot of money in the budget. Starmer on domestic issues is very weak. Therefore he can only hope to shine on international issues where nobody can say much.

The same is true of Macron. His domestic standing is negligible. He has very little popular support. And so he goes trotting around the globe, speaking like Mr. France and getting the press to listen to him. This is normal politics of the losing side.

Diesen: 26:46
What does it say about the future of the European Union though? Because not only was this a terrible agreement being made, but as you suggested before, the optics wasn’t great either. That is, von der Leyen coming to Trump’s golf course in Scotland. And well, the general benefit, I guess, or attractiveness of the European Union to begin with has always been this collective bargaining power, that they can negotiate from a position of strength. With obviously the US being the most important partner; that you can have some equality between Europe and the US as opposed to having 27 member states stand on their own.

But if we look back in the ’90s, early 2000s, this was the main selling point of the European Union as well. That is, it could set this asymmetrical interdependence with its neighborhood in the wider world. That is, when the EU sat down to negotiate trade with another state, Moldova or anyone, then the EU could dictate all the terms and not only having a favorable economic agreement, but they can also translate this into political power. So they set political conditions for trade, which became a form of external governance, which is why many people in academia refer to the EU as a regulatory power or regulatory superpower. If you want to trade with us, you have to follow our rules.

28:12
And this imperial model is maybe a bit over the top, but nonetheless, what will happen to the EU now? Because there is no equality with the US. The EU has … kissed the ring of Trump and subordinated itself and also with the rest of the world as the economic power of the EU continues to decline, as its leaders look more and more incompetent and corrupt and unable to reach proper agreements, this whole geopolitical EU, It seems to become more of a burden. If you’re Germany, you want to have good trade deal with the Chinese, you don’t bring the EU along because they will come with their geopolitical objective, which means to insult the Chinese instead. So, well, what does this say about the future of the European Union? Is this club, you know, is this a death sentence or is it, you know, expiring? How are you reading it? It’s not a good sign at least, I would say.

Doctorow: 29:17
To relax, I often turn on YouTube and just see what they’re proposing to look at. And mixed in with the geopolitical videos, they have a lot of animal videos, particularly dogs.

I think about one of these little videos which has a German shepherd and a golden retriever. They’re in the middle of a maze, And the golden retriever is saying, “We’re doomed.” Europe is doomed. The present configuration is doomed. This cannot continue.

They are driving down the welfare of people directly in measurable ways. As I’ve written recently, the rejuggling of the Belgian budget, which the new Flemish-dominated federal government has put into place, takes away benefits from what has been outstanding medical services, severe cuts. This is typical. The cuts are being made to make room for the burgeoning re-armament program, which is all a result of a dead wrong foreign policy. I’m just wondering when this will come out and we will have demonstrations similar to what we saw in Kiev a week ago.

31:03
This cannot go on forever. It defies gravity that the national leaderships in Belgium and in 25 out of 27 other member states of the European Union are working directly against the interests of the people who voted them into office. That is becoming more and more apparent as the budgets are revised to take away benefits for the sake of raising arms manufacturing, for the purpose of fighting a war which is unnecessary, which is driven by the same personal ambition as Mr. Netanyahu and his war in Gaza. That is called out by the Western press now openly.

This is not just a supposition of people like you and me. It is accepted as mainstream that Netanyahu is fighting a war to keep himself from going to court and prison. I say the same thing about all of the European leaders. They are pushing re-armament to avoid being put out in the street where they belong, because the budgets that they are submitting to the member states are anti-popular, they are against the people. It cannot go on, and so I agree with that … golden retriever: we’re doomed.

Diesen: 32:34
If, well, if you’re going to look at how this will affect Europe, then obviously, given that the main purpose of this trade agreement was to tie the Americans in and commit them to Project Ukraine. But also a lot of, as you said, a lot of the political elites there, they see their hold on to power that is in Brussels, dependent on the continuation of the Ukraine war again.

Continuation of Ukraine war is necessary to keep America in Europe, it’s necessary to keep these political elites in power. But beyond that, we also see that not just the European Union, but the European member states bet a lot of political legitimacy on defeating Russia. And not just the political legitimacy, the entire economy has been thrown into this and sacrificed. So what happens when the Ukraine war is eventually lost? And well, it depends what a defeat looks like, but what the Europeans were promising, they’re destroying Russia and having the Ukraine join NATO, all of this obviously is not going to happen.

33:59
And I think that’s an important question now, that Zelensky looks as if he is somewhat in a weaker position. He’s no longer the reincarnation of Churchill, apparently. And suddenly the Europeans, you know, a few weeks ago, it was Russian propaganda to say that he was an authoritarian. Now, suddenly, it’s permitted. So what do you see happening with Zelensky and Ukraine? How does this affect Europe once we eventually lose this war?

Doctorow: 34:35
It’s permitted not just to YouTube channels, it’s permitted to the “Financial Times”. They use that word in a headline of an article dealing with the new law stripping the anti-corruption agencies of their independence. He is damaged goods now. And he’s damaged goods in the Anglo-Saxon press in particular, on both sides of the Atlantic. Now, the question that I’ve had is: who was behind the enabling of the demonstrations that took place, the mass demonstrations that took place in Kiev and in other major cities in Ukraine over the course of several days, in the past week, against the law, which ultimately ended in the revocation of the new law and restoration of what is said to be the independence of these agencies.

35:36
The speculation, and again, I will share with your audience what the Russians are saying about this. They’re saying that we can expect in the immediate future, very scandalous trials. Already yesterday’s indication [was] that the newly installed prime minister was about to be charged with corrupt practices for having used together with Yermak, the head of the presidential administration, Ukrainian airplanes which are only to be used for state purposes. She as the prime minister has the right to use it. Yermak didn’t.

It was pretty obvious that she was doing the man who was behind her, who protects her, Mr. Yermak, she was doing this trip with him for his benefit, not for her own. So that’s the first shoe to fall. There are going to be some very big accusations made in the next few weeks against people in the close entourage of Zelensky and probably of Zelensky himself.

36:53
We are now in the last stages of Zelensky’s time in office. The question is who is pushing this most? Is it Britain with the MI6 who helped arrange that the Ukrainian police and military would not attack the demonstrators? Or was it the CIA?

There are two. These are now, you could say in the past they were one and the same, but not any more, because the United States and Britain have parted ways on the Ukraine war. For the Brits to have done this, it would be to replace Zelensky probably with Zaluzhny. Let’s remember for the last year and a half Zaluzhny, who was the head of the armed forces of Ukraine for several years and who was viewed by Americans in particular as being a good candidate to replace Zelensky, was moved out of Kiev and sent off into exile to London precisely so that to avoid that eventuality, that he would be on the inside, being able to muster support if the West nodded to him as the one to succeed Zelensky.

38:16
Well, he’s been biding his time in London. He’s been learning English, because he hardly could say two words when he arrived there. And he got there because he had said at the time what was true, how badly the Ukrainians were losing the war. And that was unacceptable to Zelensky. Now, that is one possibility. Another candidate, one that I call out on the American side is a very different story by saying Zaluzhny would be put in if the intent was to continue the war and to have somebody who has more credibility with American and West European suppliers of arms to Ukraine, because he is a genuine military person, and his orders would not be for PR stunts like Zelensky’s were, but having some genuine military foundation. Now, the other I’m saying is the Americans probably have a different game.

If they were behind this, then it is probably to install somebody like Umerov, who is now the leader of negotiations in Istanbul. Umerov is a civilian. Umerov is a Crimean Tatar, a Muslim by the way, probably speaks some Arabic, some Turkish, it would be logical. He has been a leading personality in Ukrainian meetings with the Gulf States.

39:45
More importantly for the United States, he’s their boy. When he was in secondary school, he spent a year in the United States living with an American family. When he went back, finished his higher education, became a successful businessman in high tech area, made a lot of money, he established fellowships for Ukrainians at Stanford University. Why Stanford University? Why United States? So he has an American connection, which is always looked upon. He doesn’t have an American wife, but you can’t get everything.

40:21
So he would suit the Americans very nicely as a stand-in and it is reasonable to assume that he could and would negotiate a peace treaty with the Russians, not on the ridiculous basis of Russian capitulation, but something close to Russian demands.

Diesen: 40:41
Yeah, this is interesting though. Of course, who Zelensky is replaced with will be a good indication of what’s intended for Ukraine to go. That is, is it continuing the war or not?

But yeah, I remember back in the days when it looked as if Zelensky was on very shaky grounds and I thought that he might be going away and then instead of course he shipped Zaluzhny to London which is an interesting thing. So I guess Zelensky would, well people like Aristović have said he will probably leave. I mean, I would also expect him to go to Miami or the south of France, but there will be a lot of pressure in the future to have him return to Ukraine. He made himself a lot of enemies and it wouldn’t be very difficult to put in a criminal case against him. However, how do you see, as I guess my last question, how do you see the war progressing from here though?

Is peace agreement now completely off the table or will it depend on who comes after Zelensky? Because it seems as if it would be possible to get an agreement on Ukraine’s neutrality that is going back to Istanbul. The problem is the plus, Istanbul plus the territorial concessions, especially humiliating would be to have a recognition of territories which aren’t even seized by Russia yet, that is of the four regions. But as Russia progresses on the territory, that humiliation wouldn’t it be reduced. That is the Russians are controlling more and more territory.

In other words, the gap between what they demand and what they already have is reduced. Do you see any possibility of anyone in Ukraine accepting these terms? Because you said they’re quite draconian. It’s, you know, I’ll be the first to say that Russians have some very high demands upon Ukraine.

Doctorow: 42:59
They are especially high demands when you’re demanding a concessionary territory that you haven’t even won on the battlefield. I think that problem will be solved before September. I think it’s entirely to be envisaged that Russia will sweep to the Dnieper. Chasov Yar was fought over for more than six weeks, seven weeks. This is a logistics center that was highly contested, very well armed, protected, fortified, and Russians finally overran it in the last few days. The next big center is in Pakrovsk, which the Russians call Krasnoyarsk, that is now facing Russian troops on the outskirts of the city. This has been going on for months, of course, this progress.

43:58
The Russians draw it out because they have wanted to avoid close-contact fighting, which can be very expensive in human life for both sides. They’ve mostly been conducting their war on Pakrovsk with aerial bombing, artillery bombing, and so forth, which costs them very little in lost soldiers and officers, but it’s quite devastating to the Ukrainian side. Once they take Pakrovsk, it’s a clean sweep across to the Dniepr. And so I think that if they take Pakrovsk in the next few weeks, they will take the whole of Donetsk and possibly Zaporizhzhye by September. And then the Russians can be generous in the terms of a settlement, because they will not have to haggle over taking territory that they didn’t win on the ground.

45:04
So that would be a good time to look for a settlement. Again, coming close to Mr. Trump’s original deadline of first days of September, in anticipation of the general meeting of world powers in Beijing to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the end of the war in the Pacific. I think these things come together. And so I would look for a change of leadership in Kiev within that timeframe, engineered either by the United States or by the Brits, depending on – now that will depend whether a peace treaty can be negotiated. But on the ground, the Russians will have gotten what they want.

Diesen: 45:53
Yeah, it looks, yeah, I think people– often you look at the defensive lines, obviously it’s not much west of Pakrovsk, but as you pointed out in this war especially, the logistics is really important and these logistics centers of Chasuviar, Kopiansk is what we can put in this. And Pakrovsk I think will be very important to crack the final stretch towards the Dnieper. So–

Well, thank you as always. It’s always a great pleasure to get your insights on this. So thanks again. And for people who want to follow you, you have your Substack. And of course, I’ll leave a link to your book, anywhere else people should look for you?

Doctorow:
No, no, that sums it up. If they look at the substack, just look at the last few issues because I’m particularly proud of, as I say, of 2015, which was quite a remarkable year for understanding who is who in Europe.

Diesen: 47:03
Oh, thanks again.

Doctorow:
All right.

This 47 minute discussion with Professor Diesen was concentrated on the two interrelated issues in the headline.

Europe is doomed because 25 of the 27 heads of government of the European Member States presently have no interest in the prosperity and wellbeing of their citizens and are interested only in holding on to power, for which purpose maintaining support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and rearming Europe in preparation for a NATO-Russia war in 2029 are their top priority. Europe’s capitulation to Trump over tariffs may be explained by the hope it would keep Trump on side over further aid to Ukraine.  This, of course, is utterly delusional, since Trump has clearly shown he wants the USA to exit that war as soon as possible without any regard for Europe’s wishes.

Regime change in Kiev is coming soon. Thanks to the scandal over a new law that stripped the anti-corruption agencies in Ukraine of their independence, Zelensky lost credibility both in the USA and in Europe. Major media now speak of him as authoritarian, meaning anti-democratic. The wave of protests in Kiev and other major Ukrainian cities was unprecedented in the three years of war and suggests to me the active intervention of one or another Western power to bring down Zelensky and achieve regime change.  The question of the day: was it the Brits, who surely would like to install as president General Zaluzhny, former commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, who has been serving as Ukrainian ambassador to the UK these past 18 months.  Zaluzhny as president would mean continuation of the war under the direction of someone who actually understands military strategy as opposed to the PR driven direction of the armed forces from Zelensky.  For their part, the Americans surely would favor as successor Zelensky Umerov, the current head of the Ukrainian negotiating team in talks with the Russians in Istanbul.  Umerov is a civilian who made a fortune in high tech commerce and who has a clear connection to the USA going back to his secondary school year spent in America.  Umerov, we may assume, could negotiate a peace with the Russians if he were his own man, not a subordinate to Zelensky as he is presently.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Interview with Professor Glenn Diesen:  Europe is doomed, Regime change in Kiev

This 47 minute discussion with Professor Diesen was concentrated on the two interrelated issues in the headline.

Europe is doomed because 25 of the 27 heads of government of the European Member States presently have no interest in the prosperity and wellbeing of their citizens and are interested only in holding on to power, for which purpose maintaining support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and rearming Europe in preparation for a NATO-Russia war in 2029 are their top priority. Europe’s capitulation to Trump over tariffs may be explained by the hope it would keep Trump on side over further aid to Ukraine.  This, of course, is utterly delusional, since Trump has clearly shown he wants the USA to exit that war as soon as possible without any regard for Europe’s wishes.

Regime change in Kiev is coming soon. Thanks to the scandal over a new law that stripped the anti-corruption agencies in Ukraine of their independence, Zelensky lost credibility both in the USA and in Europe. Major media now speak of him as authoritarian, meaning anti-democratic. The wave of protests in Kiev and other major Ukrainian cities was unprecedented in the three years of war and suggests to me the active intervention of one or another Western power to bring down Zelensky and achieve regime change.  The question of the day: was it the Brits, who surely would like to install as president General Zaluzhny, former commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, who has been serving as Ukrainian ambassador to the UK these past 18 months.  Zaluzhny as president would mean continuation of the war under the direction of someone who actually understands military strategy as opposed to the PR driven direction of the armed forces from Zelensky.  For their part, the Americans surely would favor as successor Zelensky Umerov, the current head of the Ukrainian negotiating team in talks with the Russians in Istanbul.  Umerov is a civilian who made a fortune in high tech commerce and who has a clear connection to the USA going back to his secondary school year spent in America.  Umerov, we may assume, could negotiate a peace with the Russians if he were his own man, not a subordinate to Zelensky as he is presently.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Transcript submitted by a reader

RT: 0:00
And let’s now cross live to Gilbert Doctorow, a former visiting scholar at Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Welcome to the program, sir. On Tuesday, Zelensky and the Ukrainian parliament put an end to any independence the anti-corruption watchdog had, and today they’re restoring it by introducing a new bill in the Rada. Why such a quick turnaround, do you think?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, because of the massive demonstrations. I would like to complement the report that you’ve given very ably on what Mr. Zelensky did, what he has just undone, how he received pressure. That’s all fine. But let’s go to the question of these massive demonstrations. The “New York Times” said in their first report on the demonstrations, this goes back to Wednesday, “Well, this is the first mass demonstration in Ukraine in three years of war.”

Yes, very interesting. And why is it that there were demonstrations now? Nobody’s asked that question. Let’s deal with that. Does that mean that everybody was very happy in Ukraine with the government? Of course it doesn’t. It means that you’d get your skull fractured if you dared to step out and think of a demonstration. Going back to October 2014 and the elections of the [Rada] at that time, when the first elections that took place after the new regime was put in place by a coup d’etat, those elections were witnessed by foreign observers who reported extensively on the violence that was used against the opponents of the regime. That hasn’t changed. Now, what has changed is that nobody confronted the 10,000 or more demonstrators that came out on the streets of Kiev, not to mention thousands more in all the other major cities of Ukraine.

2:01
Why did that happen? Let’s try to think. I would suggest we should think that someone, probably in the West, wants to change the regime. And that is the investigation path that I urge upon listeners to this, I would suggest that the usual actors like MI6 are behind it. Why did the Ukrainian army not fire into the crowd? They got orders not to. And I don’t believe that Mr. Zelensky gave those orders. So we are about to witness regime change in Ukraine. And the major media in the West are preparing, at least in the States, the American public for regime change and for the removal of Zelensky.

RT: 2:49
And if we look at the reaction of the public, Ukrainians have not reacted in such a strong way to other controversial events, like when the country’s national resources were sold to the United States, for example. Why has this caused so much controversy now?

Doctorow:
Because now you weren’t going to get your head bashed in, that’s why. You weren’t going to get shot. This is the cardinal change that has to be brought out, what happened in this week. It is the first step of two or three steps to remove Zelensky and the whole gang of neo-Nazis who have the Ukrainian nation by the neck. It is not thinkable that the whole public was satisfied with the Zelensky regime and therefore didn’t demonstrate. No. They just used common sense, which was: you don’t want to risk your life. Now, it was clear the government had, the army had been given orders not to fire.

3:49
Moreover, the instruction that we understood again from major Western media is that the army was told not to come out in the streets in their uniforms to demonstrate against the law. My goodness, what a change. This is the first stage in the removal of the Zelensky government.

RT:
What about his image, Zelensky’s actions concerning NABU and the restoration of its autonomy? Do you think that will save the image or will it damage even more?

Doctorow:
Among whom? Among Ukrainians, I don’t think there is a particular love for Mr. Zelensky. The country is patriotic. Ukrainians share the same religious and political conservatism, shall we say, of Russians. They are going to fight to the end, but they’re not stupid. And if they did not demonstrate in any way against Mr. Zelensky, it was not for love of him and his peers and his colleagues. It was because they were afraid for their lives. That somehow miraculously has changed in the past week, and it deserves proper attention.

5:07
I have said for some time this war will not end by a military capitulation. The idea that next week the Ukrainian army will raise a white flag is totally unrealistic, even though nearly all of my peers are suggesting that will happen. No, no, the Ukrainian government will collapse of its own weight and of its own unpopularity. And with some help from those Western sponsors who want to see it collapse.

RT:
And meanwhile, Zelensky keeps asking for money from the Western backers, let’s call them that, Western friends. And now he wants the EU to pay Ukrainian soldiers their salaries. Do you think Europe will agree? And where is it going to find the funds?

Doctorow: 5:54
Well, I don’t think they’ll say no, but they just won’t do it. There aren’t funds available. And I don’t think there’s a great eagerness to provide them even if they were available. The standing of the Ukrainian government is very low. The notion that the Ukrainian army can defend its territory and that it, not to mention that it will gain back territory and defeat Russia, that is only maintained by complete fools. The Western mainstream media no longer holds that to be true.

And that is the point. They are preparing, at least in the United States, where there’s far more political freedom for the press than there is in Europe, the press in the States is giving strong signs. Less than two weeks ago there was a feature article in the “New York Times” on the war crimes committed by the Ukrainian forces during their occupation of Kursk Oblast. This is unbelievable.

6:57
From the start of the war, Western media portrayed Ukraine as bunny rabbits, which were being assaulted, attacked by the big bad wolf. Well, you know who that is. That’s Russia. Now we find the “New York Times”, by reporters on the ground, were explaining in detail the war crimes that these bunny rabbits were committing on Russian soil. That is a sea change.

RT 7:26
Well, the vibe definitely is changing, if we may call it that. Also this Friday, Russia reported destroying four Patriot systems. At the UN, the Russian representative said the more weapons the West delivers to Ukraine, the more will be
destroyed. What are your thoughts on that?

Doctorow:
Well, I think it’s an absolute statement of fact. Among my peers, almost everyone is in agreement that any new weapons shipped to Ukraine will be destroyed very quickly, and in any case cannot help the Ukrainian cause. The list of weaponry, the Bradleys, the armored personnel carriers, the tanks — all of that which was in Biden’s list is useless in Ukraine today, because the war has changed. The most dynamic part of the war is drone warfare. And heavy mechanized equipment, like what was in the Biden list, hides in forests today, because it would be blasted to pieces if it comes out in the open field.

8:32
So the war has changed. The Biden list of equipment to be shipped to the Ukraine is utterly useless. And the Patriots, of which there’s been so much reporting — as you say, they’ve been destroyed by the Russians. They are vulnerable to Russia’s most advanced missiles and they will not save the Ukrainian army.

RT:
Gilbert Doctorow, former visiting scholar at Harriman Institute, Columbia University, thank you so much for this analysis.

Doctorow: 9:10
My pleasure.

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09TIrNrAZIA

Prof. Glenn Diesen: 0:00
Hi everyone and welcome. We are joined again by Gilbert Doctorow, historian, international affairs analyst, and also author of many books such as the “War Diaries – the Russia-Ukraine War”, [for] which I will add a link in the description. So yeah, welcome back to the program.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Yeah, very good to speak to you again.

Diesen:
So one of the more recent news is that Trump says he’s very angry with Putin. He says they have a nice conversation, but then in the evening he goes on bombing Ukraine. And as always, it’s some uncertainty in terms of the difference between the noise and the action. Either he’s seeking to manage opposition at home and in Europe, or he’s lacking in strategic focus and being, you know, swinging a bit back and forth. It’s, I haven’t been able to solve this riddle, if I can be honest. It’s, it’s very, it seems like very erratic behavior often.

1:11
So I was wondering if you can, well, try to share your perspective and shed some light on what you think is happening here, because it doesn’t seem to make much sense, even his argument or even the way he’s going back and forth.

Doctorow:
Well, this is one instance of very important international news where the leading, or the best, most widely seen experts on independent media, on various YouTube channels, are agreed more or less on the facts, and are completely in disagreement over the interpretation. We won’t have a clear indication of what the interpretation is, until we know what the content of his arm shipments to Ukraine [is]. So far we only know about Patriots. There is speculation that’s partly encouraged by his reported discussion with Zelensky over long-range missiles. Can he reach Moscow, can he reach Petersburg?

2:38
And of course, this fired up a lot of speculation about Trump’s possibly giving this important offensive weaponry to Ukraine. We don’t know anything though. That is all– I consider what he’s doing is a continuation of what we’ve seen in the past several months on various international developments.

This is political theater. And he is playing it for all it’s worth. He gets in front of the television cameras daily. He’s on international news. There’s only one person making the news these days, and his name is Donald Trump. So in that sense, the narcissist Trump can be very happy.

3:19
But is there anything more to it than that? Is he, as one extreme interpretation, a hazard, that is by Scott Ritter, is he an idiot? Are the people around him all idiots? Is the Congress populated by idiots? Well, I personally find that a very poor start for serious analysis of most anything, to assume that your opponents or the leading figures of the day are idiots.

I prefer to consider what is behind what seemed to be strange or ineffectual actions. Can it be something else going on? One person who has taken that approach, who has a lot of respect in alternative media, and not only, is Colonel Douglas Macgregor, who was saying that Trump adopted the least-bad solution to the pressure he’s been receiving from Congress and from Europe to respond to Putin’s very aggressive and very destructive new attacks, aerial attacks on Ukraine. So that was a kind of middle position. I take a position that goes a little bit further than Colonel Macgregor on the political side.

4:45
And that is that Trump knew very well what he was doing. He was saying what he said about arms deliveries, about new sanctions and secondary tariffs on Russia, precisely to silence his critics, to give satisfaction to the most, the loudest-talking member of the Republican group in Congress, in the Senate, Lindsey Graham. Graham could take pride that the bill that he is steering through the Senate now has the support of Trump, who on his own initiative has stated to the public that he will be adopting the key point here of secondary tariffs at a hundred percent.

Well, that’s one thing, silence the critics. I can tell you that my recent appearances on various video programs has been picked up by the Russians. And they pick up precisely this point from my message, which to my mind is the least important part of my message, that he was silencing his critics. No, for me the most important thing is the 50 days. The fact that he has given President Putin 50 days is indicative that he has little or no intention of continuing the war, of making Biden’s war his own war, but instead is giving Mr. Putin time to finish up the job, in the same way that he instructed Netanyahu early in his presidency to get on with it, do whatever dastardly things you have to do in Gaza, but let’s be done with it and move on. That’s what he was saying to my way of thinking, to Vladimir Putin.

5:41
But none of us will know what really has happened. Has he joined the new cons? Has he made common cause with them? Or is he duping them, as I believe, with these words about sanctions and arms shootings, and intends to go for his detente? The proof will be what is in that package of weapons being shipped.

Diesen: 7:07
Yeah, the 50 days. I was thinking a bit about this as well. It could be a delaying tactic in order to not have to pick a side or make any big decisions because again, he wants to normalize relations with the Russians, but he doesn’t want to alienate too many in his own camp. It could also, as you said, allow the Russians to finish off what they’re doing. Well it could also be an effort to negotiate, to put some pressures, a deadline. So it can be interpreted in many ways.

But this is something that confused the Europeans a bit as well. Why do we have to wait 50 days for these sanctions? And his response was simply, well, 50 days isn’t that much. Maybe it comes earlier. But I’m often inclined to lean in the direction that there is incompetence or as you said, the stupidity, but on the other hand, he does from, yeah, from the past decades, he’s always talked about the importance of strategic ambiguity when you negotiate.

And he does like to think of himself as a negotiator. So if you, if you’re … playing with [a] too-open hand, it’s very difficult to … get the deals you want. So again, this is something his own administration says as well. “We won’t let anyone know exactly what we’re thinking or what we’re doing.” This is what he was always criticizing Biden for as well.

8:45
So if it works or not, putting that aside, nonetheless, I think we can conclusively say that this is something he believes in, this strategic ambiguity. So I do see the argument there, that ambiguity allows him to get some room for maneuver to do other things. And the pressure, as you said, has been mounting, given that the Russian strikes last night on Kharkov are becoming much more brutal in nature, that is both the quantity and the targeting. So one can see why there will have to be some reaction. But I guess your argument though, is that his response to this is to talk big, but it’s somewhat muted because it all depends, I guess, on the weapons he’s sending.

9:41
And I’m not sure if I’m understanding this correctly, but to what extent are the Americans sending weapons, or to what extent are they actually selling them? Because it seems as if he’s selling weapons to the Europeans, and the Europeans can give it to Ukraine, and somehow this has to happen under the umbrella of NATO for some reason?

Doctorow: 10:03
That’s a distinction without a difference. The question that I had in my mind is: is he just going to ship more of the same, meaning more tanks, more Bradleys, more artillery shells, so much as they have them, which certainly must have been in the pipeline. Let’s come back to this question, is this Biden’s war or Trump’s war?

What he said about the ship was authorized under Biden. This is not new appropriations from Congress. So in that sense, I think it is not proper to speak about these shipments making it Trump’s war. Now, if indeed, it is materiel that was authorized by Biden, then it is no cause for worry, because there’s nothing that will threaten the Russians, or will change or will escalate the war. However, if new items are being put in, and particularly offensive weapons, long-range missiles, like ATACMS, which were never shipped, if they are now in the mix, then it’s a very different readout of what Trump is doing. And he would be going beyond the irresponsibility button to a new level that takes us to World War III.

11:28
The Russians have made it plain by their latest revised nuclear doctrine that if they are hit by such weapons– this was either, it was originally discussed with respect to ATACMS and with respect to Taurus– if they are hit with this, they can respond with nuclear arms. And I find it incredible that Trump’s team would not take this into account and would authorize ATACMS or something that could reach far into Russia. So I believe that we’re on the plane of empty rhetoric, shipping things which everyone knows will be of no use to the Ukrainians, because the tanks and the Bradleys will just be hidden in the forest since if they put them in the open space, they’ll be destroyed at once.

Just as the Russians are not using their superiority in tanks on the ground. They are also hiding them in the forest and shooting out from under cover. And they’re using the tanks just as can, more precise can, with maybe 8-10 kilometer range.

12:44
The war has changed. And I don’t see my peers taking that into account properly. What we are witnessing now is massive air attack, not just that came into the head of Putin or his general staff. “Well, let’s try this.”

No, it’s precisely because what they were doing up to this point has reached the point, the stage where it’s no longer productive. The Russians, to advance deep into Ukraine now, would have to take enormous losses because of the drone, the omnipresent Ukrainian drones on the battlefield. Therefore, they have gone to aerial bombardment. Now, once you’re in aerial bombardment and missile strikes, it’s only a half step to using those Oreshniks and getting the damn thing over with. If they take out, if they decapitate Kiev, which is entirely within their possibilities, then a lot of lives will be saved at all sides.

13:42
Now, this comes within the 50 days. It’s entirely possible to finish off Ukraine within 50 days if they decapitate the country with the missiles they have ready. My question is, is Mr. Putin going to rise to that challenge? I don’t know. Nobody knows. And so we may be stuck with still stalling and stalling. As regards aerial attack, it doesn’t have a time limitation the way ground assalts do. Because of seasonality, there is a negligible factor in the devastation that is being brought. So if Putin responds both to the challenge, finish it up, and to the opportunity, now that he’s not going to be escalating, he’s already in the next stage of an aerial rather than ground war, we may see the end of this.

14:41
And I think that Trump could find this very satisfactory. Then the United States and Russia can put their heads together and say, “Well, what are we going to do to put Ukraine back together again?” Along the lines of Russia’s desirata of what they want as their end game. And Europe would be sidelined unless they invite them in on the same conditions. But let’s be constructive. Let’s talk about an investment fund. Let’s talk about a neutral Ukraine. And we’re talking about a rump Ukraine. That could be the basis for moving on to detente. It’s all there. Am I right, am I wrong? We will know in a few weeks, depending on the content of the military package.

15:24
Yeah, that’s what I thought. Now I saw the weapons would be important because, well, if the, well, there’s some flaws in the, in the whole optimism, at least we see now in Europe. Because well, the Europeans, do they have the money?

And do the Americans have the weapons to sell them? And do the Ukrainians have the human resources to operate them? I was wondering if you see it likely in terms of the Tomahawks being sent because this is something that you suggested that would trigger great concern among the Russians. Indeed, having Tomahawks and other missiles in Ukraine was one of the reasons for the invasion to begin with.

But how worried should they be though? Because usually they have to be launched from, you know, warships or strategic bombers. To … what extent– I guess would make sense. Again, I’m never sure if this is a lack of [logic], flawed logic or if it’s a strategic ambiguity, but what kind of weapons would be crossing the line?

Doctorow: 16:40
Well, ATACMS to begin with. No one was talking about Tomahawks in the past. They were speaking about these precisely ground-launched missiles using the already existing HIMARS launchers. The United States shipped a lot of HIMARS, and the launchers arre there. And the same launchers can be used on the ground to launch the ATACMS. And that’s why there was great concern in Russia, because they are– the limitation on the Storm Shadow and the SCALP from France and also Taurus is that they are air-launched. And you have to have planes that are adapted to those particular missiles, and you have to have planes and pilots, and you have to have airfields, which the Russians have done a pretty good job of savaging. So if they were, as you say, the Tomahawks, the version exists, it can be ground launched, it’s quite exotic.

17:40
If these were to be supplied, then we’re heading into the unknown. I can’t imagine that Trump could agree to that, because it would be a level of escalation that takes us just to the brink of nuclear war.

Diesen:
So what can we expect then from the Russians in the next 50 days? You used the word “decapitating” strike. Do you think they can try to go in for finishing off Ukraine? Because again, we’ve spoken in the past about the danger of underestimating the resilience of Ukraine. That is, they do keep fighting on. I thought things would have begun to collapse militarily as well as politically a long time ago, but here they are. They’re still putting up a pretty good fight. But given the huge intensity now, increasing intensity from the Russian side, in attacking targets across Ukraine, do you think they are going for, if not knocking out the military, then going for the political leadership or something to put an end to this war?

Because in the war of attrition, you do exhaust the adversary, but the Ukrainians appear quite exhausted now. At least an attempt by the Russians to go for this over the next 50 days. Or if this is as you suggest, Trump’s purpose might be to give the Russians 50 days to get this done with, whatever they want to do and then end the war. Is this what they might spend their 50 days on?

Doctorow:
There’s one issue here that has to be addressed, and that is the nature of Mr. Putin. Not just that he’s very cautious, but that he approaches everything from a lawyer’s perspective, being a trained lawyer. And that has its up side and its down side. In the given case, I cannot see him giving orders for a decapitating strike under the terms of the Special Military Operation. That would be illegal, as he would determine it.

19:50
However, Mr. Zelensky should be careful about what he wishes for. If he receives any offensive weapons, which he then uses and strikes within the Russian Federation at what they consider to be strategic assets, then Mr. Putin would declare war. That would be considered an act of war. He declares war, and then it can decapitate Ukraine, in the context, only in the context of a declared war, from the perspective of Mr. Putin’s mentality. So there’s the qualification on how the 50 days could be used. I don’t think that Donald Trump is aware of that feature in Putin’s behavior. Certainly Mr. Trump himself doesn’t care a whit for law, what’s written even in the constitution. So it could not occur to him that Mr. Putin would. And that is exactly the case. There has to be a declaration of war for the Ukrainians to receive their decapitating strike.

Diesen: 21:00
I also want to get your opinion on an item in the news, which was that Trump had allegedly asked Zelensky if he’s able to strike Moscow or St. Petersburg, so Putin would feel the pain. And then later on he was asked, I think it was on the tarmac, the same question. And he said, “Oh, no, no, I don’t want him to Moscow.” Do you have any thoughts around this back and forth?

Doctorow:
He was feeding the jackals. And the jackals picked it up. They picked up this piece of rotting flesh very nicely. By here I mean the BBC. They have gone into overdrive on how Mr. Trump is fed up with Putin. He’s now aligned with the haws in Congress and and so forth. I don’t believe that for a minute. But again, this is my my best guess. It is not founded on anything concrete, because we just discussed what the missing pieces to the puzzle are, which will decide whether the puzzle is being assembled, the jigsaw puzzle is being assembled properly or wrongly.

22:11
The discussion was piquant, he knew it would attract the press. It did, of course; as I say it’s all over the BBC today. That’s just what they wanted to hear, that is giving Zelensky hopes that he can strike Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Diesen:
But the, yeah, you referred to the, give them hope to the, to the Europeans and the hawks within the United States as well as Zelensky. But if Trump wanted to end this war and he knows that Russia considers this to be an existential threat and it won’t move much on its key demands — wouldn’t Trump need to mount more pressure on the Ukrainians and Europeans as opposed to, I guess, throwing them some red meat and, well, making them feel more comfortable with this leadership and the possibility of continuing this war instead?

Doctorow: 23:11
Again, we’re in the realm of political theater. And I don’t believe the seriousness of what he has tossed out to the press. As I’ve said, he despises the press and he’ll say anything, that he thinks will make them look like fools.

Diesen:
And, I guess the last back and forth I noticed of Trump was the arms deliveries. It was reported that, I think it was Pete Hegseth that halted arms deliveries to Ukraine. Again, with the engagement with the media, he was first asked, well, he was, he first stated that he wasn’t sure who had halted the arms deliveries. And when he was asked, “Don’t you know what’s happening in your own administration?” He said, “Well, I will be the first one to know. Indeed, I would have ordered it.” Except, you know, he didn’t. So how do you make sense of this?

Doctorow: 24:13
Well, there isn’t any sense to make of it. He’s contradicting himself. And again, it is another expression of his contempt for the press. He’ll say anything to them. He doesn’t take them seriously, with good reason. He is treated very badly by Fox News, by CNN, he’s treated with contempt by them and he returns the coin. So I wouldn’t follow this too closely. Don’t look for logic in what he says with a microphone in front of him. I follow what his feet are doing and particularly I place emphasis on 50 days, which undermines everything else. As you said, he could impose these sanctions tomorrow. He didn’t do that. And so I don’t believe he ever will.

Diesen: 25:11
Okay, so if you put the American side of this war aside to conclude him more or less pursuing strategic ambiguity. We won’t really know yet if he’s appeasing the hawks, the neocons, or if he’s joined them, but we should know based on the weapons which are delivered. Again, the Tomahawks or any long range missiles. This is kind of the red lines.

But if we shift over to the Europeans, what is the strategy of Europe? Are they hoping that any of these weapons would turn the tide or, or is it just to pull America further into this, to make it a long war? What is– it’s very hard to read the Europeans, and here one gets the impression sometimes that there’s no one behind the wheel.

Doctorow: 26:07
Oh, there are people behind the wheel, but I think they’re driving a different vehicle, and they’re concerned with a different road. The road that interests them is power and retaining it. They have put themselves in very fragile position by backing to the hilt a losing cause. And for them now to move the discussion from Ukraine to our own defense and to building our military industry and to how we deal with filling out the numbers of our men and women at arms — that changes the discussion completely.

And it’s all about their retaining power. Because if there is this big threat from the East, then the logic is we are the leaders, like as Ursula von der Leyen was saying, trying to defend herself against charges of fraud and abuse of power over vaccines. And how does she defend herself? Well, “We are now facing a very important threat from Russia, and we need strong leadership”, meaning herself. That’s what it’s all about, is keeping their hands on power at all costs, whether it serves the national interest or not.

27:30
National interest, not to mention Ukraine’s interest, don’t count. The spoils of power, what it’s all about. And here in Europe, in most of Europe, with exceptions, France is an exception because the way it structures its governments differently. But most of the European countries have coalition governments. And the whole game of a coalition government is dividing the spoils of power. So that is the center of attention of everybody at the top in Europe today. Not Ukraine, not Mr. Trump, not tariffs, but keeping power.

Diesen: 28:12
So the initial or the main argument for the past three-plus years– in terms of boycotting all diplomacy, rejecting negotiations and instead just pumping weapons into the war– the argument was, “Well, we need to put the Ukrainians in a better position. We’ll negotiate later once the Ukrainians can negotiate from a position of strength.”

Does anyone actually believe this in Europe now? I mean, your position there in Brussels, because it does seem as if it’s becoming harder to deny that the war is shifting more and more in the favor of Russia. That is the Ukrainians having more and more problems building up. The Russians keep strengthening in the rear.

29:07
And also, again, in a war of attrition, you should look at the ratio of casualties. But the West, we tend to focus excessively on the territorial shifts. But even this is starting to intensify. We see now the semi-encirclement of Pokrovsk, which would be a strategic disaster, opening up the road all the way to the Dnieper and of course, Constanivka, which would then begin to seal off the entire Donetsk region. So there’s a desperation in there, isn’t there? I mean, so what exactly do they hope to achieve here?

Doctorow: 29:51
Let’s divide up the West, because the United States is running on its own course. And in the question of how the war is proceeding, the United States is much more open than Western Europe journalism. A little bit seeps in here, in the press, but it’s really in “New York Times” and the British press. I think the “Financial Times” also has articles which run completely counter to the editorial position of newspaper.

Journalists are reporting what’s going on. “New York Times”, they are every few days speaking about Ukrainian retreats or losses and the Russian advances. No question about it. They’re preparing the public for Ukrainian defeat.

30:38
The most important indication of that was what appeared on Monday in the “New York Times”. They had a front-page article on the crimes that the Ukrainians committed during their occupation of Kursk oblost. This was immediately denounced by Kiev as dissemination of vile propaganda. The “New York Times”, for the first time in the whole war, had an article devoted strictly to the war crimes that the Ukrainians are committing. Now that tells you they’re preparing the public for the Ukrainian defeat and they will find many reasons why they should have lost the war.

I say the game is moving on, the competition now is not about the fate of Ukraine. It’s about the future of the present-day leaders in Europe, who have committed so much of their personal prestige and political power to winning a war that they’re losing. And so they’re diverting attention to, well 2029, how we have to be prepared for Russian invasion and so forth. They’re changing the subject, because they lost this subject.

Diesen: 31:54
Well, the use of the media to exercise narrative control and prepare the public for a defeat in Ukraine — I was thinking the same when I saw the gradual shift in the media coverage in the United States. And of course, this “New York Times” article was quite important as well. The fact that you had an American journalist from the “New York Times”, I think she was already, well, the journalist was accompanying Ahmad through Kursk.

I mean, the fact that this was being done and the conclusion on the coverage was the Ukrainian war crimes. This is something unthinkable two, three years ago, when the Ukrainians could do no wrong and every person even with a SWAT sticker had to be, the first instinct was always to whitewash it. But in Europe though, I do not see this at all, especially in, well, I’m located in Scandinavia, and here the war propaganda is just going full steam ahead, hardly any changes. And indeed to suggest that Ukraine can’t win the war is denounced as Russian propaganda, trying to reduce public support for what we call “helping Ukraine”, which is pushing a war which the Ukrainians themselves want an end to.

33:21
But of all the Europeans, for many people, well, if you would have said this four years ago, that Germany would position themselves as the main country to essentially take over the fight against Russia now that America is pulling back — this would have been very much unthinkable a few years ago, but here we are. How are you reading the German position? Because it’s not simply Merz; this is something deeper in German society, isn’t it?

Doctorow: 33:53
It covers the whole political spectrum. I believe this started with the Alternative fur Deutschland, when they were the first to speak up, well this goes back five years or more, the first to speak up and say, “Hey, we are not responsible for the sins of our grandparents. We are new people, we are new people, and we have to look after our sovereignty.”

That was Avdei. And it’s covered now the whole spectrum of German political life, where they do not take responsibility for the crimes that Germany committed across Europe, not just in the destruction of Jewry.

They believe that they are morally clean, and they follow European values, and they can get up on a soft box and preach to, well, particularly the Russians, who are the _recidivists_ and who have to be properly punished for their violation of European values. So there is the real threat that this is across the whole German spectrum. They willfully are forgetting who they are. And they have changed the role. They openly changed the role.

35:17
The role changed under the German leadership going back 10 years. Merkel was responsible for changing the role, but she did not want to name Germany. Germany did not have a foreign policy, according to Merkel. The foreign policy was made in Brussels, very convenient. And who made it in Brussels? Germans, since they dominated the parliament and the commission.

So de facto, Germany was the dominant force in European diplomacy and in world policy. But this was not acknowledged by the German leadership in Berlin. They hid behind the apron of Brussels. Now they’re coming out from behind the apron and saying, “Yes, we are going to be Europe’s dominant defender.” As if this is natural.

It’s not natural. It was– the world for this was prepared by the gradual collapse of France and its authority. Not just the economic weakness of France, which was established decades ago compared to Germany, but its political weakness, a succession of disastrous presidents. And Mr. Macron is the latest uncrowned king under the French constitution, who defies the French political circles by holding onto power when he has maybe a 20 percent approval rating. The French are politically weak. The Germans have used that to move out in front, to muscle the French aside. Mr. Macron is making a desperate effort, his announcement on Bastille Day, that they are, “Oh, we are also raising our military budgets and to be big defenders.”

37:14
And as soon as the Germans start talking about possibly getting nuclear weapons, well, that is the absolute end of any French claims to being Europe’s defenders. They could hide behind the fact that they and the Brits were the only European countries with nuclear arms. If the Germans now aspire to do that too, then the moment of truth has arrived, and everything that the Germans aspired to in World War II, they now will be realizing, which is something that should give us pause.

Diesen: 37:46
Well, the German shift or return to militarism, it appears to have, well, it’s not exactly that reason. That is, yes, throughout the Cold War, they had this very cautious idea that, you know, learned from history, they’re not going to engage in wars any more.

But after the Cold War, in 1999, the attack on Yugoslavia, that is to wrestle away Kosovo, you saw the logic in the German argument shifting. So in the past, their history of genocide was a reason for why they had to be more constrained. And suddenly over Kosovo, the argument was, well, because of our history with genocide, we have a special responsibility to prevent it other places. So instead of their genocidal history being a reason for constraint, it was now a reason for taking action.

And you see similar rhetoric in Gaza, that is, as if they owed the Jewish population a debt, which is very fair enough after the Holocaust, but this is translated into unconditional support for Israel in effectively making the Palestinians pay for the crimes of the Germans by supporting the genocide there.

39:05
And also during the Kursk operation, when you had German generals appearing on TV, you know, with smiles on their face, being excited as they were speaking about how this was humiliating for the Russians. This was an important part of World War II and almost like a redo of World War II, as they saw German tanks roll into Russia. It’s very unsettling. But besides how the Russians are looking at this, how would the Europeans react?

I mean, you mentioned the French. Certainly the French do not want to be pushed aside. They kind of had a division of labor. The Germans were the economic force, the French were the military and that kind of creates some balance of power within the European Union. Now that you know Germany is going to acquire weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons, how comfortable are really the Europeans with this? I think it was Thatcher already in her time, [who] warned that the German unification could bring about the Fourth Reich. I mean, it’s not to argue that we overcome this historical concern. It would be an exaggeration, wouldn’t it?

Doctorow: 40:21
Well, it wasn’t just a Thatcher. Miserand also, he said, “I’ve been liking Germany so much, we want to see two of them.” That concern about Germany existed. And as to Germany’s coming out, so to speak, over Kosovo, actually that was, I think, precipitated by American action.

The whole crisis in the Yugoslav Civil War, was, had a defining moment, and that was the attacks on Sarajevo, the marketplace, I think this was 1996, correct me, and Germany could not bring itself to re-enter Yugoslavia, again, considering the history of Germany’s devastating wars on Yugoslavia during World War II, or attacks and destruction in Yugoslavia in World War II. The Americans moved in, the Americans took charge, and then that relieved the Germans to do what comes naturally. And to go back to bossing people around in these fringe parts of Europe.

41:46
So America had its own role in relieving Germany of its constraints and its hesitation, by bringing it into a coalition of NATO that were doing what Germany was afraid to do, because that had been a dividing line before World War I. What was– Serbia triggered World War I, and Germany did not want to get into that region again.

Well, it is, and it is in a lot of other places where it shouldn’t be. And I have now in mind Mr. Merz’s very proud establishment of the German presence in the Baltics to “protect the Eastern flank”. So the way NATO had protected Germany during the First Cold War. The German position, is there a militarism? I don’t know. I put my finger to the wind. I don’t think so. There is, again, opportunism for the sake of political power in the hands of Mr. Merz and the people around him.

42:57
I’m not sure that that is founded on a militaristic feeling or enthusiasm in the German nation. I rather doubt it. Whether this develops, we’ll see.

Diesen: 43:12
Yeah, I think the Bosnian market attack must have been in ’94 because [Dayton] came in ’95 and then Bosnia was finished. But I was wondering though, the one thing that the Russians are looking at when they look towards Germany is the Taurus missiles. As we know, Mertz used to advocate for them.

Now there seems to be some discussions that will let Ukraine build something similar to the Taurus missile, which the whole thing seems to be dubious as if they’re looking for a cover to supply the missiles. Did you think that some version of the Taurus missile will be supplied or already has been supplied? And if so, what do you expect the Russian response to be? Because my impression is that of all the European countries, a lot of the resentment now is directed towards Germany. And given that they’re competing with the British for animosity, it’s kind of impressive how the Germans have moved up the ranks in terms of being seen as an adversary, if not an enemy then of Russia?

44:23
[We’ll have] the number one enemy of Russia. When Mr. Soloviyov on his famous, on his well-known programs directly calls Mr. Merz a Nazi several times. And not as a joke, but as a dead serious accusation, I take that as being a word coming from the Kremlin, certainly Mr. Medvedev would make similar statements.

So they have earned the position of Russia’s enemy number one. As to the Taurus, I think that Mr. Putin would be in a very tough spot if the Taurus is actually used by the Ukrainians, because that is openly crossing his most important red line, that he has discussed in interviews with Pavel Zarubinuk, that had then been shown repeatedly on Russian television and in the West, saying that these weapons cannot properly be controlled by the Ukrainians themselves and implicate as co-belligerents those who have supplied the weapons like Taurus to Ukraine.

45:34
The same is true, of course, of ATACMS. Even if the Ukrainians are properly instructed on how, what button to push or when, the coding of the path, flight path, the decisions on targeting are all taken by, and the information necessary from satellite intelligence is coming from the United States. And so for Putin to accept this, I think he might as well just give up and stop the war and be overthrown, because that’s what it would mean. It’s incredible.

It’s impossible that he could hold on to power if he did not follow through on his threats to the United States, to Germany for attacks coming via these long-range missiles. And by the way, I firmly believe that some Taurus are already in Kiev, going back several months. Whenever the announcement is made that “in [not long], a month or two, we will ship”, it means they already are there.

Diesen: 46:47
So, well, by the way, I agree with that assessment. I also think this would be the final straw that it would make it impossible for Russia not to attack. People keep saying, oh, why would they risk this? But, well, certainly Germany is willing to risk the war. So it would be too high cost, I think, for the Russians to do nothing. But what exactly could they do? They would be, you know, you have different targets, which would indicate different levels of escalation.

Rather than attacking German military bases, wouldn’t it make, do you see it as more likely to attack German, I guess, industrial facilities where these weapons are actually being made? Or what do you see as, well, again, we can’t get into President Putin’s head, but what do you see as likely or possible targets for the Russians to retaliate against Germany.

Doctorow: 47:51
I think we have to try to get into his head in one respect, and I continue the point I made earlier. The man has a legalistic frame of mind. I think we got a hint how this will play out in a recent statement by Lavrov that if these Taurus are implemented, if their use is authorized from Ukraine and attacks on Russia, then Russia will break all the relations with Germany.

Now, what does that mean? That’s what you do when you’re declaring war. So essentially, again, I don’t believe that Putin will attack anybody without a declaration of war. And I think that that’s what would happen. He would declare a war on Germany and then he would strike.

48:44
And what he strikes, a military base or these production sites, is a secondary consideration. I don’t think this has been properly factored into the recommendations that Karaganov made two years ago. He was not looking at Putin’s way of thinking. “Yes, we have to do this, we take them seriously, our red lines have to be taken seriously, we have to use a tactical nuclear weapon somewhere in Western Europe, blah blah.”

49:14
But that is utterly out of character and out of the professional mindset of one Vladimir Putin. So I take very closely the words of Lavrov about breaking relations. Similarly, you’ll notice that when I think about Mr.– why the Russian stock market went up 4 percent after Trump made his announcement to the press in the White House together with Putin: because there was nothing about confiscating the frozen assets. That surely is what drove the money people in Moscow, because the concern is that for the relative small amount of frozen assets in the States, this would be a signal to Europe to attack the 250 billion euros in assets that are sitting in EuroClear here in Belgium. That didn’t happen because you confiscate assets in state of war. It’s another way of declaring war and would be interpreted that way by the Russians.

Diesen: 50:28
Well, Thank you for your time. I think, you know, this is a very important perspective, especially when you’re discussing an actor such as Donald Trump and well, his administration now acting deliberately with strategic ambiguity, then I guess we’re all vulnerable to our own biases. We might see what we want to see when he’s sending out all these very different signals. So I think what you brought up is, many people might have been missing some of these subtleties.

So yeah, this is, yeah, gives me something to think about. So thank you so much for your time.

Doctorow: 51:10
My pleasure. Bye bye.

One of the advantages of Andrew Napolitano’s channel ‘Judging Freedom’ is that he invites panelists who may agree on the facts relating to some major international development but can offer quite divergent interpretations of the statesmen making that news.

So it has been with respect to Donald Trump’s announcement yesterday that he is prepared to punish Vladimir Putin for disappointing his expectation that a peace with Ukraine would be concluded two months ago.

In his interview with the Judge, Scott Ritter said that the measures that Trump had announced are doomed to fail – both imposition of 100% secondary tariffs against Russia and those countries trading with Russia and renewed, expanded arms shipments to Ukraine via NATO’s European Member States. The Patriot anti-missile system will not be able to cope with Russia’s massive ongoing air strikes across Ukraine. This factual part of Ritter’s assessment is accepted by a great many analysts in independent media, myself included. But then there was Ritter’s explanation of why these ineffectual punishments were announced by Trump: because the President, the key members of his administration and the whole of Congress are just “idiots.’

Another panelist on ‘Judging Freedom’ yesterday, Colonel Douglas Macgregor, described Trump’s announced plans as the least bad measures he could introduce in response to demands from his critics inside Congress and in the broader political establishment for action to turn back the Russian offensive and buy time for the Kiev regime.

I am aligned with Macgregor in looking for logic in Trump’s actions, though I go several steps further than Macgregor has done. To be specific, I stress the timeline for imposition of the 100% secondary tariffs.  Fifty days! That just happens to cover what remains of summer 2025 while a major Russian offensive is underway. And, like so many of Trump’s deadlines we may assume that it will be extended if necessary.

In the meantime, Trump has bought off the most dangerous critic within his own party, Senator Lindsey Graham, who is obliged to say that his pressure for sanctions on Russia has paid off even if he may be disgruntled that it is not going into effect tomorrow.  Moreover, critics of Trump within Europe also are left speechless, now that officially Washington is resuming arms shipments to Ukraine and is cooperating on their plans to supply advanced weapons systems to Kiev including the Patriot from their own arsenals while scheduling replacements produced for them in the USA against payment.

My read-out is that in effect Trump is saying to Vladimir Putin: ‘just get on with it. Finish up this war in the coming 50 days and we will be friends!”  This is, I suggest, a repetition of what Trump told Netanyahu about his Gaza war on Hamas: “Do what you like but be fast about it!”

If Vladimir Putin can summon the decisiveness that so far he has not shown in this war, and proceed to bomb the hell out of Ukraine, up to and including a decapitation strike on the Zelensky neo-Nazi gang in Kiev using those wonderful Oreshnik hypersonic missiles that Russia boasts, then the European continent will enjoy peace once again and the hysteria over rearmament led by Germany can be reined in. 

It bears mention that the moneyed classes in Moscow were very satisfied with Trump’s ‘surprise’ message. The BBC yesterday reported that the Moscow stock exchange rose 4% on the news.

Since Macgregor reports from information provided to him by friends in Washington that the latest behind closed doors talks between U.S. and Russian officials remain cordial, we may assume that Trump remains on track to pursue détente with Russia and hopes that the Kremlin will do what has to be done expeditiously and effectively. These carrots may just have more sway with Vladimir Putin than the sticks that Trump identified publicly yesterday.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

https://odysee.com/@RTBalkan:1/intervju-gilber-doktorou-eu-nato-rusija:e

I doubt that many members of the Community are aware of the existence of this Belgrade-based operation of RT. Allow me then to share my experience with them as interviewee a week ago.

The 28-minute chat covered a lot of ground.  It opened with examination of the rancorous deterioration of relations between Moscow and Baku, with particular attention to which outsiders may be aggravating the situation for their own purposes. Here I speak of the French as possible meddlers, given their interests in creating difficulties for the Russians in the Caucasus by stirring EU ambitions among the Armenian leadership and the concurrent patching up of relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan at the expense of Russian interests in the region.  However, on reconsideration, looking at Paris’s strained relations with Azerbaijan’s closest ally, Turkey, it seems less likely that the French have a role in Russia’s problems with Azerbaijan today.  Indeed, it is more likely that Turkey itself is pouring oil on the fires of discord, since it serves their own purposes to reduce Russia’s presence in the Caucasus and raise their own.

We moved on to other key issues of the day, in particular the Russia-Ukraine war and the new aggressiveness of Moscow in staging massive aerial attacks on Ukrainian cities. From there we moved to the questions surrounding European rearmament and the NATO summit’s decision to raise the military budgets of all Member States to 5% of GDP by 2035. We also talked a good deal about Trump’s efforts to extricate the USA from the Ukraine war to better free its hands to pursue policies in the Middle East and against China.

Best wishes to the Serbian speakers among you.