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RT: 0:00
Right now, let’s get more on this now and speak to author and independent international affairs analyst, Professor Gilbert Doctorow. Professor, I’m glad to have you join me now. So judging from the speeches by the NATO chief and President Macron, Western politicians are excluding Russia’s opinion on their plans to send troops to Ukraine, despite the fact that NATO expansion was one of the key reasons why the war erupted in the first place. Why do you think they are seemingly intent on ignoring Moscow?

Doctorow: 0:34
Because they’re insane. Lt’s say the definition of insanity is detachment from reality. And everything that Mr. Rutte said and that you have put on air would indicate that he needs a padded cell. The man is not spreading propaganda; he’s spreading insanity. What he said, that Russia is, that Mr. Putin has the strength of the governor of Texas, is utterly ridiculous. Now, Mr. Obama, in his worst days, said that Russia was a regional power. He didn’t say that Russia was Texas.

1:09
I understand that Mr. Rutte could be deranged. After all, he spent 15 years or more as the prime minister of the Netherlands. In the 1990s, when Russia’s economy collapsed, it was widely observed with some humor that the whole of the Russian economy was the size of the Netherlands economy.

I think Mr. Rute is caught in a time warp. He thinks it is still the 1990s. He is ignoring the fact that Russia is now the fourth largest economy in the world, as measured by price parity, and it is the largest economy by far in Europe. In this circumstance, to speak about Russia, Mr. Putin’s country, as having the weight of Texas, shows that the man is deranged.

RT: 2:06
Now it’s been three years already. What needs to happen still for the West to take into account Russia’s position in national interest when it comes to ending the war?

Doctorow:
The utter collapse of Ukraine; that is the only thing that can bring these people to reason and reality. So this is not something that Russia has decided upon solely. No, This was a solution that was imposed on Russia by the European Union, by the past high representative or commissioner for foreign policy. I’m speaking about Yosef Borrell, who famously said that this conflict between Russia and Ukraine would be solved on the battlefield.

2:55
Well, Mr. Borrell, it is being solved on the battlefield. The Ukrainians have lost 1.7 million men. And that is incredible loss, which Mr. Rutte doesn’t want to acknowledge. In that case, he is personally taking responsibility by his light-minded approach to this for those deaths. He wants that to continue. He wants to annihilate the able-bodied men in the country of Ukraine. This cannot go on. Mr. Ruta has outlived his usefulness, even as a propagandist.

RT: 3:34
Now, today, the Hungarian foreign minister has publicly brought up the issue of forced mobilization in Ukraine. Let’s take a listen to this.

Minister:
It is a well-known fact that there is an open hunt for people in Ukraine, that there are violent conscription events in Ukraine. Everyone knows that during these violent arrests, people are often beaten, in some cases to death. And they can do this because, according to pro-European politicians, Ukraine is allowed to do anything in this situation. I think that one of the greatest European disgraces of the 21st century is that in the heart of Europe there is a hunt for people, that in the heart of Europe there is a violent conscription and that in the heart of Europe, under the pretext of conscription, people are beaten to death. And I think that here, along with the specific criminals, responsibility also lies with all the Brussels politicians who do not pay attention or ignore these crimes.

RT: 4:31
All right, he’s talking about open hunt for people and violent conscriptions there. Now, he is the first European high-level politician to speak on this matter. Will that open the floodgates to others following his lead or will the silence continue? What do you make?

Doctorow:
I don’t know about floodgates. The mainstream newspapers in the United States and in England, I am thinking now of the Herald Tribune, even they, in the last month or two, have come back down to earth and recognized that Ukraine is losing the war very badly and that the procedures for recruiting, so to speak, new forces for their depleted army are the ones you described. That is already in print in the West in major newspapers. So the problems are extensive. I can tell you from my experience here in Belgium that elites in Belgium are also living in a different world or universe.

5:38
I have sat at the table in the most prestigious monarchist royal club in Brussels, French speaking, and heard my colleagues at the table and their wives say how wonderful it will be for their sons — and daughters — to receive military training and to prepare for … to execute their citizens’ obligations for defense. They are living in a dream world. Russia will win this war in a dramatic way in the coming weeks to months, not years. And only then, when the Ukrainian people acknowledge that they have been beaten, and they will, then Europe will also have to look at the facts, which they are ignoring. At the popular level, at the elite level, it is not yet understood what a disaster this war is for the Ukrainian nation.

RT: 6:40
Completely spot on. We have to leave you here now. Professor Gilbert Doctorow, independent international affairs analyst and author, thank you so much for your opinion.

Transcript submitted by a reader

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NewsX World: 0:01
I’d like to continue this discussion. I request the guests to stay on with us
0:06
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin had earlier at the leaders’ meeting stated that there are certain understandings that were reached during his summit in Alaska with Donald Trump.

He stated that this could open the path to resolve the war with Ukraine. Putin also expressed appreciation for efforts and proposals from both China and India, as well as other strategic partners to facilitate peace. Let’s listen in to his comments.

—————-
Putin [from video subtitles]: 0:36
We value the efforts and propositions to solve the Urainin crisis / of China, India and other strategic partners of ours. The mutual / understanding that was reached at a recent Russia-US summit in / Alaska heads the same direction, I hope. It paves the way to peace / in Ukraine, I hope. I will inform my colleagues in more detail on the / results of talks in Alaska during our bilateral meetings today and / tomorrow.

1:17
I’d like to use this opportunity to say that Russia uses the same / approaches regarding the crisis in Ukraine. I will remind you that / this crisis was created not as a result of Russia attacking Ukraine. / It emerged as a result of a coup d’etat in Ukraine that was provoked / and supported by the West. What followed were armed attempts / to suppress the resistance of the regions of Ukraine and people / of Ukraine who did not accept that coup d’etat.
—————-

NewsX World: 2:02
I’d like to bring Mr. Doctorow back into the conversation. Even though Putin has made these statements, Kremlin has not until now really given any indication of coming to the negotiating table in order to end the war. On the other hand, we see Donald Trump is eyeing the Nobel Peace Prize, and he’s not being very subtle about it. He does have his personal considerations as well, even while rooting for a trilateral. We’ve recently seen a defense minister’s meeting of European nations take place in Denmark.

They gathered to discuss security guarantees for Ukraine. So in this context, how urgent is it for Europe to outline these guarantees?

Doctorow: 2:49
Europe’s decision to possibly send troops into Ukraine is understandable because Ukraine’s military is collapsing. However, if they proceed on that path, _their_ troops will be decimated. The Russians have made no secret of the fact that they will destroy any incoming European so-called peacemakers.

I’d like to take issue with the comments of a fellow panelist in England who is saying that he would be ready to mediate, that all you need is common sense. I disagree. You have to have some area knowledge. You have to know the situation on the ground. You have to know what’s going on in Russia itself, which he admits to be ignorant about.

3:29
I assure you that Russia is doing quite well, and the inflation that’s reported in Russia is nothing like what we experience in Western Europe and here in Belgium with food prices and energy and so forth. Russia is winning this war, he is ignorant of that, and you cannot bring the parties together when you don’t know the real situation on the ground, which he doesn’t. I’d excuse him, because Western media would not allow you to know what is really going on, with rare exceptions.

So the situation is, I say, Russia is winning this war. Mr. Putin’s remarks at the conference in Tianjin were diplomatic, which means they were meant to sound kindly and sound reasonable, but the reality is that Russia does not need and does not want any intervention from any parties, including India, to try to end the war. Russia is doing what Mr. Burrell said it should do, it is fighting this war on the ground and the outcome of the war is being decided on the ground, not by the talking shops.

NewsX World: 4:39
Indeed, I’d request our guests to stay on with us because we’re tracking some breaking developments now. We’re learning that days after a federal appeals court in the United States ruled that most of the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration are–

Transcript submitted by a reader

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Kataoka – NewsX World: 0:00
Thank you very much. Now we move on. But as these diplomatic exchanges unfold, Ukraine is hit by fresh violence. Overnight, Russia carried out what officials called a massive strike on Zaporizhzhia, killing at least one person and wounding 24, including two children. Homes, cafes, and industrial sites were destroyed. Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region also came under heavy attack with explosions in Dnipro, and Pavlograd. Authorities have confirmed Russian troops have now entered the region, marking a dangerous escalation in this area previously spared from fighting.

0:41
Speaking at the UN Security Council, Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko has condemned the attacks, declaring Russia continues to choose killing over ending the war. Let’s listen in.

Svyrydenko:
These killings are deliberate acts of terror. It’s an informed decision taken by Moscow to continue its systematic campaign to terrorize civilians and extinguish any semblance of normal life. Yesterday, Russia again responded brutally to our attempts to engage them in a civilized dialogue in the language of international law, peace, and respect for human life.

1:30
Russia continues to choose killing over ending the war. [We] still hope that this Council and its member states, who have consistently emphasized the need for cessation of the hostilities, will now show the courage to turn word into action by supporting a relevant solution on the matter.

Kataoka: 1:53
So as leaders converge in Tianjin, the human toll of the war deepens, emphasizing the stark divide between diplomacy and devastation on the ground. Now for this discussion we are joined by Gilbert Doctorow. He is a Russian affairs expert, joins us live from Brussels.

Thank you very much for staying with us and joining us again. Now with leaders meeting under the SCO framework, how realistic is it to expect that diplomatic summits can influence the course of the current Russia-Ukraine war?

Doctorow: 2:30
Well, it has already been made clear that the subject for discussion between Presidents Putin and Xi when they meet ahead of the parade in Beijing will be precisely the war in Ukraine. Of course, there are other issues, important issues, that they will be discussing, such as the decision of the big three in Europe, the UK, France, and Germany to use the provisions for reimposing sanctions on Iran, and the president of Iran will be there. There are many subjects that are topical and important.

3:09
I could say that Mr. Trump has done his best to provide the key members of the … SCO meeting and of the celebrants of the end of the war in the Pacific with talk and the possibility to address and define a common policy on these very issues. I also want to mention something that your viewers may not be expecting. It is possible that the meeting in China will have a very big surprise, a rabbit pulled out of the hat. That is to say, the Russian media are still considering that Mr. Trump may show up in Beijing for the parade. That is not to be excluded. I’d like to emphasize that this disruption, this disorder, which you in India are feeling particularly over the tariff war, is not arbitrary and is not without a foundation. The foundation is Mr. Trump’s hidden agenda to disrupt entirely the existing world order of American hegemony and to prepare the way for a multipolar world, however strange that may appear from his words, My insistence is to ignore his words and follow his actions. That he has applied these tariffs on India, just ahead of this important meeting is not an accident. It is intentional. And it is to get your presidents talking about how to deal with the United States.

Kataoka:
Yes. And that is very interesting that you’ve mentioned that a surprise guest might show up hinting to US President Donald Trump. If– we can only speculate here– but if he were to show up, do you think that this can shift the narrative at the ongoing diplomatic talks in Tianjin and maybe we might see any breakthrough? What do you think?

Doctorow: 5:13
Well, Mr. Trump has said recently in the last two weeks how much he would like to meet with Mr. Kim, how much he would like to meet with President Xi. They’re both in Beijing for this parade, and so it would be very convenient for him to be there. The European leaders, aside from Mr. Vucic in Serbia and Mr. Fico in Slovakia, the EU-25 hardliners have all declined to accept the invitation. And it would be remarkable if, and in keeping with his policies, if Mr. Trump were to show up. I can’t say that will happen, but there is a possibility that the Russians have detected and are publishing in very serious periodicals and online assets.

6:00
So Mr. Trump has destroyed what 25 years of American diplomacy have tried to do by enlisting India in a quadrilateral arrangement of countries encircling and opposing China. He has destroyed that in a few weeks. That is the real outcome of his tariff policy. The tariffs are nonsense compared to that geopolitical act, which I insist was not an accident, was not something that he missed, but it’s something that he intentionally brought about. So I think India also should rethink what Mr. Trump is doing. It is not what it appears to be.

Kataoka:
And now looking– thank you very much for sharing that– and now looking back at Ukraine and its allies, do you think there is any fatigue from the allies in Europe for Ukraine? Do you think that could eventually impact the level of military and financial aid that’s flowing now from the West?

Doctorow:
I would disagree with your generalization. Ukraine has no allies in Europe. It only has destroyers in Europe. What Europe is doing is to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian.

That is not a friend or ally of Ukraine. And that has to be made clear, because we are living in a world of Orwellian double talk, where peace is war and war is peace. Think for yourselves and understand that Europe is no friend of Ukraine.

Kataoka:
Right. Thank you very much for bringing us fresh perspective and always sharing good insights from Brussels.

7:41
That was Gilbert Doctorow. This is all we have time for. We will continue to bring you more news updates from around the world and the SCO Summit.

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TI2k2jbku8c

Napolitano: 0:32
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for “Judging Freedom”. Today is Wednesday, August 27th, 2025. Professor Gilbert Doctorow will be here in just a moment on Trump’s confusing signals. But first this.

0:49
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1:59
Professor Doctorow, good day to you, my friend, and thank you very much for joining us and for accommodating my schedule.

In the past week, President Trump on his own Truth Social has written that Ukraine is doomed to lose the war unless it can get offensive and attack Russia, in a Truth Social that we have been posting, you can see it right there. He also authorized the delivery of 3,000 E-ROMs, offensive missile weaponry that can travel 280 miles. That’ll take about six weeks for them to get there. And just yesterday, he said he has something very severe in mind for Russia if President Putin doesn’t sit down at the same table in the same room at the same time with President Zelensky. What kind of signals is he sending to the Kremlin?

Doctorow: 2:54
Well, they’re not good ones, but I don’t see any sense of alarm coming out of Russia. They’re rather calm about this. Mr. Trump changes his– he pivots this way and pivots that way, in accordance with domestic American politics and where he sees the greatest threats to his position.

In this sense, Mr. Trump is not a great departure from other presidents and from the American political establishment for whom the rest of the world are just props. The only thing that counts in foreign policy is domestic policy. And that dictates many things. I was asked earlier today about the American initiative in the United Nations to reinstate the sanctions against Iran.

3:51
And in Tehran, they’re very upset about this. They take this, shall we say, personally? My point is, there’s nothing personal about it. If Mr. Trump sees himself under threat for one or another issue, however unrelated it is, for example, to Iran, then he will take action on Iran.

And if it’s the most convenient and less costly thing that he can do to flex muscles and to prove that he is macho and still in control of everything.

Napolitano: 4:27
I realize that you and I agree that he is often driven by his own personality and his own ego. He doesn’t have the moral or ideological or value-laden sense of some of his predecessors. But what is to be accomplished by these threats? How can he expect the Kremlin to react positively, or do they just dismiss it as, “Oh, there he is changing his mind again, he doesn’t mean it, he’ll back off, what can he possibly do to us?”

Doctorow:
I think it’s the second situation. We don’t know what back channels there are, what messages are being sent by Washington to the Kremlin to reassure them that this is not going to be what it looks like. If it is what it looks like, then we have World War III. So then we all should be quite excited about it. What I mean is that the Russians have made definite threats, what they will do to the suppliers of long range missiles that are being used against them deep inside the Russian Federation.

5:40
And this would be in direct, this shipment of these 3,600, whatever it is, medium-range, oh, 480 miles is pretty good. If that is used as the Ukrainians would normally use it to destroy civilian infrastructure, to kill ordinary Russians and not to attack military posts, then the Russians will have to, if they want to follow through on their red lines, attack Washington.

So I don’t believe this is going to happen. He’s making sounds and he’s silencing critics of one kind or another, maybe in relation to his policy on Gaza. It’s hard to say exactly what is motivating him.

But I would go a little bit in variance with what you said about his ego. I don’t think he’s ego-driven. I think it is policy-driven. But it is political threats that he’s responding to. They are real threats. And he responds in what seems to be illogical and unrelated manners.

Napolitano:
Here’s his threat yesterday, Chris, cut number two.

Trump: 6:50
I want to see that deal end. It’s very, very serious, what I have in mind, if I have to do it. But I want to see it end.

I think that in many ways he’s there. Sometimes he’ll be there and Zelensky won’t be there. You know, it’s like, who do we have today? I got to get them both at the same time. But I want to have it end.

We have economic sanctions. I’m talking about economic, because we’re not going to get into a world war. I’ll tell you what, in my opinion, if I didn’t win this race, Ukraine could have ended up in a world war. We’re not going to end up in a world war.

And it will not be a world war, but it will be an economic war. And an economic war is going to be bad. And it’s going to be bad for Russia. And I don’t want that.

Napolitano:
–done a damn thing to dial back the violence. If anything, it’s accelerated in the past eight months.

Doctorow: 7:49
Well, this brings us to the point. I think the hidden message from Moscow is what he said to Netanyahu months and months ago. But in Netanyahu’s case, it didn’t serve his interests. His interest is to keep the fight going, but to keep in, to stay in power. Mr. Putin doesn’t have a problem staying in power. He doesn’t need a war to stay in power. So the issues are a little bit different, but Trump’s behavior towards them both is the same: get it over with fast. And frankly speaking, the Russians are getting it over with much faster than they were before Mr. Trump made his threats.

Napolitano: 8:29
Yesterday, President Zelensky said he would never voluntarily surrender the oblasts in the Donbas region or Crimea. It sounds ridiculous. But is he free to make those concessions? Or would he do so at the peril of the loss of his life?

Doctorow:
Oh, I think it’s the latter case. I think the Russians are solving that predicament for him. The way they are progressing now, along the whole front, taking every soft spot they can, even if it’s not in Donetsk, even if it’s not moving closer to the Dnieper, they are taking territory and position, making emphasis on position. They moved into and took one or two towns in the new oblast for them, the Dnepropetrovsk oblast. We know about that area because there the only use of Oreshnik was to destroy a factory, military factory, heavily fortified and underground factory in Dnipro. Dnipro is the Ukrainian word for Dnepropetrovsk. And this area is of symbolic importance, the same way that taking Kramatorsk and Slavyansk in Donetsk oblast, is symbolic, because that’s where the– that was the cradle of the Russian Renaissance, the resumption of spirit and self-confidence that came in 2014.

10:07
So this Dnepropetrovsk is more than a physical acquisition, it is a symbolic acquisition, because that is the home base of Kolomoisky, the oligarch who from the start financed the Azov battalion, who financed a lot of the dirty operations against Russia.

Napolitano;
Right.

Doctorow:
And was one of the wealthiest men controlling, owning the most important bank in the country and owning the airline and calling all the shots. Well, that’s where he came from. So this is a territory, if they move on Dniepropetrovsk, they are going at the jugular of the…

Napolitano:
What actually happens or changes on the ground when the Russians take a village Does the government of the village change? Do the police in the village change? Does everybody go back to speaking Russian? Or are these takeovers of villages, which we’ve never heard of here in the US, just symbolic or part of the pathway toward the Dnieper River?

Doctorow: 11:21
It is more than symbolic. It’s clearing the way for reconstruction and for resettlement. There aren’t too many people in those towns that are taken, to greet the incoming Russian soldiers. Very few have remained behind, because they were under threat of being shot by the Ukrainian soldiers for not evacuating with them. So there are very few people in their cellars or whatever who are there to toss flowers to the incoming Russian soldiers.

The main task that the Russians have is demining. And they send in their specialists to remove the mines, because everything is mined after the Ukrainians leave a village. Well, I say village; most of these places they’re conquering really are hamlets. Maybe they have two, three, 500 inhabitants. They’re not a village in the sense that you had in mind.

And they don’t have mayors and high officials. But this is very important. Mr. Putin yesterday had his meeting one-on-one with the governor of Kherson oblast. And this is an area that is highly contested.

The Kherson city, the capital, is on the right bank, that is say the west bank of the Dnieper. It is under Ukrainian control. It was evacuated by the Russians as untenable. They had to cross the river to supply it.

But most of that, Kherson oblast is in Russian control on the east side of the Dnieper. And they were discussing the vast reconstruction program that’s now ongoing, building 600 kilometers of new asphalt roads and all kinds of infrastructure. And taking each of these little hamlets and villages is extending the territory in which Russia will restore normal living conditions, rebuild housing, and so forth. So it’s more than symbolic that when they take these, they’re preparing to move in immediately to restore normal living in these places.

Napolitano:
And who pays for this reconstruction? The Russian Federation, or is it private investments, or is it BlackRock in the U.S.? Who’s paying for it?

Doctorow: 13:41
It is multiple layers of the Russian government. You have cities in Russia like Moscow, which have city-to-city brotherly relations with this or that town, the same thing as St. Petersburg, and they put up their own laborers, their own equipment and so forth, to do construction work and then to build new housing for the returnees.

You ask which language they speak. Almost everyone in these territories speaks Russian. The idea they’re– or they’re bilingual, Ukrainian, Russian. Let’s not confuse the language with the ethnicity. There are ethnic Ukrainians, if you can define that, who are Russian speakers. That was the predominant language in the region where they were living. So that is not really an issue.

Napolitano: 14:38
Right.

Doctorow:
Even on Ukrainian television, you have a lot of officials who are interviewed and are speaking Russian. That was the language.

Napolitano:
Isn’t it illegal, even criminal, under Ukrainian law to speak Russian?

Doctorow:
It is. But practicality says if you want them to say something, they’ll say it in a language they can speak.

Napolitano:
Right. Foreign Minister Lavrov says no Putin-Zolensky meeting without an agenda. What does that mean?

Doctorow:
Well, they have an agenda. It’s a negation of the agenda by Zelensky. As soon as he got back home following his trip to Washington, he was saying that in no way will we accept surrender of territory. And that put a big “nyet” on the whole logic of the meeting, because Trump himself had said the prime purpose of the meeting would be to discuss exchange of territories, meaning Ukraine ceding its loss.

The question, of course, is that if you go into this, the Ukrainians, if they were to cede anything, would be de facto rather than de jure, they would maintain their claims. But the United States, at least with regard to Crimea, already stated openly that it is willing to acknowledge Russian governance of Crimea, de jure. What happens to the rest of the other oblasts will be a subject for negotiation at present or perhaps at a given time in the future.

Napolitano: 16:09
India is thumbing its nose at Trump’s tariffs, which are now up to, I think, 60 percent. Are you surprised?

Doctorow:
There has been some very reasonable analysis of what actually is happening on these tariffs. The most important component of Indian exports to the United States are not commodities, they’re not products. It is IT, it is technology, it is software programming. So I think $38 billion in that. That’s not touched.

Pharmaceuticals are not touched. And we all know that India is a big producer of generic pharmaceuticals, which are in big demand because they cost a fraction of the price of the original owners of the medicines that we’re talking about. These are not touched. What is touched are this: many factory operations were started up in the last two or three years to replace production that otherwise had been going on for American companies in China.

And so this is affected. The products that were being made in India to replace their production in China are under direct threat and become unviable as exports to the United States. That is surprising, but I’m just saying that the Indian commentators do note that it is more complicated than it looks. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump has undone in a matter of a couple of months, what the United States took perhaps 10 years to achieve as a foreign policy objective: to use India as a counterbalance to China and to invite India into its partnerships relating to the Indo-Pacific area.

18:05
That’s all undone. And it’s remarkable. That is the most astonishing reversal, and I say loss of American influence, that Mr. Trump has done since taking office. Mr. Biden pushed Russia into China’s arms, and Mr. Trump is pushing India into Russia’s arms. And also into China’s arms. Mr. Modi is going to China, I think, in the next week or two.

Napolitano;
Right.

Doctorow:
This will be the first visit in seven years.

Napolitano:
Is it fair to say that for all of his bombast and threats and animosity toward BRICS, he’s actually strengthening it, Trump?

Doctorow:
Absolutely. That’s a perfect summary of his achievements from seven months in office.

Napolitano: 18:52
Wow. Last week, the Russians destroyed not- yet-assembled Taurus missiles that had been delivered by Germany to Ukraine. Did Chancellor Merz think that the Russians would allow the Ukrainians to assemble these things and start firing them?

Doctorow:
Well, the Russians did very important damage to the whole missile program in Ukraine, both the deployment of weapons that are received from outside and the construction of weapons using British and other Western technologies. One of the big issues that drove Mr. Trump– if you want to speak, want to find rational decision-making in what he’s been doing for the last 10 days– one of the most important factors was the destruction of the Flex Factory. This was nominally making coffee machines for consumers in Ukraine, 30 kilometres away from the Hungarian border. A company called Flex, I believe, which was the local branch of an American electronics manufacturer. Now, Mr. Trump had to react to that.

20:18
This was, I don’t know, this was a billion dollar or so, so it was a large investment had been made by Americans in this military production, intending to create strike missiles in Ukraine. This was utterly destroyed by a combination of drones and hypersonic missiles. Flattened, destroyed. It took Mr. Trump a day to react.

Of course, he must have been under enormous pressure. “How do they dare?” Just as Mr. Merz must be concerned, “How do the Russians dare?” Well, they dare.

In this sense, there’s acceleration, escalation I should say as well, in what the Russians are doing. Before, they didn’t touch manufacturing facilities owned by foreigners. Now they are. And it was a big signal to the Brits, to the French, to the Germans, don’t even think of setting up military facilities, production facilities in Ukraine, because they will suffer the same fate.

21:17
So in a number of ways, the various threats that Trump and others have made, the various attempts to have a real military presence in Ukraine– such as assisting the construction of latest generation strike missiles there– that has touched a nerve, and the Russians have responded, I’d say, violently.

Napolitano:
I’ll tell you what I’m concerned about, Professor Doctorow, and I wonder if you share that concern. And that is the resurgence of the neocon whispering into Donald Trump’s ear. General Kellogg, Senator Graham, Secretary Rubio. The type of threat that Trump made yesterday. Maybe it’s just an idle threat. He often talks off the top of his head. I can’t imagine he’s run this past his advisors first. But I’m worried that that neocon attitude may be resurgent in the behavior of the American president. Do you share that fear?

Doctorow: 22:28
No, I don’t. There are limits on what he’s going to do. And the limits are: if he were to do what he said about giving the Ukrainians these 5,000 missiles and letting them have a go at it, then we’ll have a war. And the last thing he wants is a war. He had just said in the segment that you quoted that he wants an economic war, not a kinetic war. And I believe that is a deep-set feeling.

As to the whisperers, again, this is part of his drama, of his theatre. Not everybody is deceived. There are a few people around who have their wits about them and understand what’s going on, even in Europe. Even in Europe. There were two days ago in a broadsheet publication as a large-format daily newspaper, the “Écho de la bourse”, there was an article interviewing a leading French European security specialist talking about how the European response to Trump and his seeming pivot towards Putin and against themselves explaining that it’s a little bit more nuanced than one would think, that Europeans aren’t complete dolts.

They understand that he could be playing with them, that he could be stringing them along, but they have a choice of two ways to react. One is to turn their back on him and to go against him, to dig in their heels. And the other is to humor him, to play to his vanity and to think that they can bring him around. And the second policy has a little bit more depth to it than it appears. It is that they don’t want to be seen as being that monkey-wrench in the works that Mr. Putin was talking about. They don’t want the failure of Trump’s peace efforts to be their doing. They believe that Mr. Putin will do it and let him take the flak, let him take the opprobrium from Trump for destroying his chances of getting the Nobel Peace Prize and ruining the peace negotiations. And that could be, there’s a logic to that. It makes them look a little bit less stupid than they otherwise seem to be.

Napolitano: 25:01
Right. Before we go, what is the significance, if any, of the arrest in Italy of this Ukrainian intelligence officer? I think I have this right.

Doctorow:
No, you do. I was very glad you brought it up because while very little is said about it in Western news, a lot is said about it in Russian news. And they’re covering it closely. Today’s had a release on the ticker tape news in Russia that you find on their Yandex, that he was the head. The man who was arrested was a Ukrainian officer who was supervising a team of seven saboteurs, of various specialties, who carried out the preparation of destruction of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline. But that doesn’t take away from Sy Hersh’s story that the whole thing, the whole concept was American and that Biden approved the timing and that this was a setup for whenever the American president decided the explosive would be detonated.

26:17
That doesn’t change. But it does tell you that, and as Russians are saying, in fact, the only aspect of this that interests them is this team was Ukrainian and that it could never have been authorized without the personal approval of Zelensky. And they’re saying, and what is Mr. Merz going to do about it?

Napolitano:
And what was this team of Ukrainians doing in Italy? Where in Italy? In Rome?

Doctorow;
No, no, It’s one man who’s captured, as far as I know. And there is an arrest warrant out for six others who were his subordinates in this team that carried out the preparation of the destruction of the pipeline. And I suppose he’s simply enjoying the money that he received for his work.

I think he’s just gotten away from the hardships of Ukraine. I don’t believe that he’s out there in Italy on assignment. Certainly that his team isn’t there, because the job was done.

Napolitano:
Professor Doctorow, thank you very much. Thanks for the broad array of topics. Thanks for the tip on the arrest in Italy. Great chatting with you, my dear friend. We have a holiday coming up here in the US, Labor Day weekend, but it should not interfere with our work next week, and I look forward to it already.

Doctorow:
And I do as well. Thank you.

Napolitano:
Thank you. All the best. And coming up later today, actually beginning shortly at 11 this morning, Professor Jeffrey Sacks; at noon, Aaron Mate; at three this afternoon, Phil Giraldi. Tomorrow, Colonel McGregor and Professor Mearsheimer and Colonel Wilkerson.

28:03
Judge Napolitano for “Judging Freedom”.

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://youtu.be/_rW7a-qqdSE

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