Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyzGNH5vO0g

Diesen:
Hi everyone and welcome back. We are joined today by Gilbert Doktorow, historian and international affairs analyst and author of books such as “War Diaries – the Russia-Ukraine War”. And yeah, thank you for coming back on the program.

Doctorow:
My pleasure.

Diesen
So, yeah, the big news obviously is the Trump and Putin meeting in Alaska. And, yeah, after three and a half years since Russia launched its a special military operation, well, most of this time, the West boycotted diplomacy in an effort to isolate Russia. We now had a meeting between the Russian and American president. And the immediate reactions of course have ranged from extreme optimism to utter panic, especially then in Europe. And well, the media especially is hostile to their diplomatic efforts. And there’s been these efforts to portray Trump as weak unless he is tough on Russia, which is usually what we demand of all politicians, which effectively translates into prolonging the war, I think. But again, it’s an important summit. And I wanted to ask you, what are your main takeaways from this summit?

Doctorow: 1:20
Well, if we had this discussion 24 hours ago, I would be at a loss to say something that my peers had not already said, because everybody had a microphone in front of them in the minutes following the closing of the conversation. But since we are speaking today, a lot of fresh news has come in, which I hope we can go through, because it answers the question that immediately came up following the press briefings– so I think it was 12 minutes, 15 minutes, it was very short– that took place immediately following the summit talks in Anchorage. The question that arose was what did the Russians and the Americans agree on? Because Mr. Putin said, yes, we’ve come closer to solving the problem. Well, how did they come closer?

It was not– there was no information given out by either party in the minutes following the summit. And all of that has come out both by intent and by a subversive release to the press by people, I’m sure, like Macron. He couldn’t possibly resist the temptation to call reporters in to show how much he knew that was of interest to them. What I’m saying is that the basic agreements that Trump and Putin made have come out in the last 24 hours.

The first shoe to drop was soon afterwards and the most important information only came out I would guess in the middle of the night or early this morning. The last and very important information I read extensively reported in the “Financial Times”, their online edition this morning, talking about the territorial issue, specifically saying that Putin had proposed that Russia would receive or should receive all of the territory of the Donbass, that is, of the two oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk, and that it would compromise on the other two, the other two oblasts which form the new Russia and these are Zaporozhzhia and Kherson. In those two last two oblasts or regions, Russia would agree to a freeze at the line of confrontation. In the first two, strictly speaking Donbass, Donetsk and Lugansk, they would insist that Ukraine would withdraw completely from those territories, so that Russia would receive now a territory that it had not conquered. Our lying press has said, ah yes, the Russians only hold about 50% of the territory they’re now demanding be turned over.

First of all, out of the two oblasts, the Russians have 98%, maybe 99% of Lugansk. Lugansk was the easiest for them to recapture; from the very first days of the Special Military Operation, that was the case. With respect to Donetsk, before this summer offensive got underway, the Russians had about 50% of that. Now they have 70%.

So from the get-go, what our CNN and BBC are telling us is fabricated. The concession is one of time, time and lives, because it is apparent to anybody with military knowledge that the Russians will take the whole of Donbas in a matter of weeks. The story coming out of Kiev is that by giving up Slavyansk and Kramatorsk– these are fortified towns between the present line of confrontation around Pokrovsk to the east and the Dnieper River– Ukraine would be giving up its ability to resist a further Russian onslaught across the Dnieper into the rest of Ukraine.

Well, this is the same lies and fabrication that have been behind the Ukrainian story, which was repeated endlessly by the United States and the European allies over the last three years. I think most of us who have our brains screwed in right understand that Russia would never willingly take any Ukrainian territory in West Ukraine, because that would be really an occupation and not a governance, and they would expect a lot of difficulty ruling that area.

6:34
So the whole story of what the Russians want is now clear. The other, smaller issue which came out, which is the first shoe to drop, which I didn’t mention a moment ago, was that Mr. Trump announced he had switched his view, and essentially he’s aligned with Vladimir Putin, on what sort of an agreement is now before us. He had previously been aligned with the Europeans and with Kiev, saying we must have immediate unconditional ceasefire. And that was about to be imposed on Russia. This summit was supposed to end in the signing off by Putin of such a ceasefire and so forth.

What we have now is Trump aligned with Putin in saying that that is senseless, that is only provisional, it can be reversed, and what we need is a genuine peace treaty. The difference is very great. The Ukrainians are doing their best to confuse the general public about what the difference is and to suggest that a genuine peace is only setting the stage for further Russian offensive against them. The Europeans are trying to rope in Trump to the notion that when we have this peace signed, that we need to have peacekeepers to enforce the peace. These are absolute propaganda and lies.

Then the point of Mr. Putin is: we have to resolve the underlying issues behind this war and we have to remove the issues that separate us and have caused conflict. And if you have that enshrined in a peace treaty, there’s no need for peacekeepers, because there’s no conflict to break out again.

So this is where we are today, with Europe digging in their heels, finding any logic, however impossible and possibly irrational it is, like what I just described, that a peace treaty is only setting the stage for the next war.

Well, this is a very interesting interpretation of what peace treaties are about. Oh yes, when you have peace treaties that are disastrous like Versailles, that’s true. But if you have peace treaties designed with people of intelligence and compromise and diplomacy and goodwill, then a peace treaty is a peace treaty. And you don’t have to confuse it with a truce. So this has happened in the last 24 hours, and it is illuminating.

If I can just go one step further, I don’t want this to be a lengthy talk here, a lecture. I want to say that we really, Glenn, we’re living in a dark age. It’s very sad to say, but I listened to your interview yesterday with the minister, the member of parliament, the German former UN official talking about lack of respect, lack of diplomacy. Let me just change the term for this. We’re living in the Dark Ages.

This is a period of hate, a period of vile propaganda, a period of impunity. And where those who have committed crimes, including high crimes and treason, walk away without ever being brought to court and with no fear that their crimes will be fully exposed and that they will pay for them. This is where we are today, and it is terrible. I take it back in the United States to Mr. Obama who never did anything about those guilty for the invasion of Iraq. Though they all were sitting, Mr. Cheney was out there.

Oh yes, my last comment is on the first response of the British press and also some of the US press. How do they respond to the warmth and cordiality of Mr. Trump’s reception of Putin?

11:23
Well, either that Mr. Trump is being played by Putin, which is peculiar, since they hadn’t even met. The warmth and cordiality preceded the talks. As what do they do, they remind us, hey, they’re meeting in Alaska because there are not too many places where Mr. Putin and Trump can meet because, hey, remember that Mr. Putin is an international, is a war criminal, a war criminal, and he has been condemned by the International Court of Justice. Well, they pulled that one out of the hat, in case any of us forgot, that complete miscarriage of justice over the supposed kidnapping of thousands, or maybe it was several dozen Ukrainian children who were in the middle of the war zone without parents or custodians. Anyway, that’s my lengthy introduction to where we are today.

Diesen:
Well, you’re right on the hate part and the rest for that sake, but the hate part is quite interesting because during the Cold War, when we’re speaking to Stalin or Khrushchev or anyone from the other side, there would nonetheless be some respect. You wouldn’t– you would address them properly. You would have diplomacy. You would be able to discuss what are the real security concerns? How might we be intensifying them? How may we alleviate it? None of this exists today.

12:53
Instead, I get the sentiment that you’re obliged to hate. The hate becomes a source of, it displays our morality. So how can you meet a war criminal? I even had people from the military ask me, how can you have diplomacy when someone has attacked another one?

This is when you have diplomacy. I mean, these are people who are in leadership position, and they talk this excessive moralism, which makes it impossible to actually do any good in the world by talking to the other side. But in terms of what seems as a key achievement though, for the, I guess, achievement of peace would be that Trump, he moved away, as you said, from the ceasefire, which doesn’t mean peace, and moved towards addressing the root causes. And for me, this is interesting because in Europe since the 1990s, we decided let’s create a new Europe organized around the EU and NATO. Everyone should be part of it except for Russia. And also Russia shouldn’t have a veto or say over what we do because they’re not part of NATO.

So essentially we created, institutionalized Russia’s exclusion from Europe, and we kind of wished Russia away. But in reality, all you do is when you deny Russia any voice in international institutions to defend its and represent its security interest, the only thing to do is leave the military option as the only one. And then by now creating the conditions for, well, only a ceasefire, then we put peacekeepers or whatever you might call them there. It’s not going to work.

It’s just, it makes common sense. If you want to end the military conflict, you have to open up a political one, institutions where the Russians can also sit at the table and say, listen, you can’t put your missiles on our borders. We can’t put them in Mexico. You can’t put them there and then find a common agreement. This used to be common sense, but again, it used to be common sense to talk to each other with basic respect and not criminalized diplomacy, but it does appear to be a bygone thing.

15:07
But in terms of, yes, resolving the Ukraine issue is quite important. And I think accepting the Russian premise that we have to address the root causes is quite interesting. We kind of got that confirmed by all the Europeans who are now in full panic. But what I thought was interesting though is there appeared to be also a heavy focus on bilateralism. That is, Russia and the US aren’t simply hostages to what happens in Europe. I was wondering how you read into this focus on bilateral relations.

Doctorow:
Well, I’ll get to that in one moment, but I want to go back to the hate issue and to the issue of respect, the lack of respect that you’ve touched upon. Some time ago, when I was in regular correspondence with Professor Stephen Cohen, he insisted to me when I was about to write something regarding George Soros’s visit to Brussels and his inability to remember anything on stage, I was about to mention the senility in my article. And he cautioned me, this was 10 years ago, the man is still alive. He cautioned me that ad hominem argumentation is really unacceptable in academic discourse.

I disagreed, and I continue to disagree. I, Russians of– you probably noticed, since you spent good time there, they don’t believe in phrenology any more. They don’t take the shape of somebody’s skull as meaning very much. I mean, the top part, for example, or the back part, but they do take physiognomy very seriously. They take facial expression very seriously.

16:58
And Americans, pretend it doesn’t exist. Anybody who was following Dick Cheney must have understood the man was mentally ill just by his crooked smile. But you couldn’t really speak about it because that’s an ad-homonym remark I mean, but his smile, you know, finally, unlike his nose or his ears, the smile is something you make. And it tells you something about what’s behind the face. The Mogherini, she became mentally ill in service. She became, you could see in her face the tension and she lost concentration. She wasn’t up to the job.

All right. I made my point that what can you say about the descent of political culture in the West? We know about the United States descent: never rose very high, with a few exceptions, but even from that medium bar, it’s descended since the 1990s. In Europe, it’s collapsed, an intellectual collapse. When I was growing up in the States, people said, “The British, oh, they speak so well. They always have really upper-crust people running the government.”

You can’t say that now. They’ve had a succession of idiots, which they themselves, which the City of London called out. When they threw out, was it Truss, I forget who, who lasted like six weeks, lasted less time than iceberg lettuce. Because she was intellectually incompetent.

What can you say about Kallas? She’s a laughing stock of Russia. What can you say about Annalena Baerbock? That Germany would have in its cabinet, a moron like that, I mean she’s a moron, is unthinkable. And so how can you look for respect, diplomacy, and the rest of it for people who are savages, uneducated, no knowledge of anything, people who speak about a 360-degree change of opinion?

This is beneath contempt. I think we have to look at the democratic processes that are putting these morons in power. Before we can start saying, well, they see this or they don’t see that. This has to be reexamined. Here in Belgium, we have very good political scientists who spend a lot of time working, talking about electoral processes, because we have to: we have this crazy situation of two nations under one roof, the Flemings and the Francophones. And so they try to find very inventive, progressive solutions to these problems.

20:04
That kind of creativity has to be used more within Europe to find solutions to bring out competent people to the floor. They are not there. And under those circumstances, you have the crazy reaction to yesterday’s summit that we see on the front pages of the European newspapers. They simply are not up to the challenge. I know you have addressed in some of your recent programs this question about Europe becoming geopolitically irrelevant because of the low level of political culture in present-day Europe.

There are no great people. There’s some brave people like Orban and Fico, but there are no great people. I don’t mean to say that great people are always wise people or likable people, but their intellectual capacities, their ability to look at big picture issues, it’s not here today. So that’s, I’m sorry, now that I’ve gone off on this tangent, I’ve lost the line of your question. Could you just remind me?

Diesen:
Oh, no, I’ll, no, I wanted to move on and ask about the focus on the bilateralism. But if I can just first, a quick comment on the … interview I did with Mikael von der Schürrnberg yesterday, again, he’s not just a member of the EU Parliament, but as Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, he spent 34 years in conflict zones. He didn’t live in Germany and fly out. He resided there. He had houses. He lived in the conflict zones for 34 years.

And to now see him, you know, he saw hope in all of those areas, but in Europe now he just seems gutted, like this may, there’s no, he doesn’t see any solutions, because there’s no one addressing the problems. And I got that impression in this country as well, if you criticize, because I’ve been told I criticize Europe a lot, but yeah, I do. I think you criticize for course correction, but if you didn’t like it, then you shouldn’t live here any more. I mean, this is the mentality.

If you like Europe, then you have to support all the policies of Kallas, Van der Leyen and the rest of this insane asylum. Or also if you care about Ukraine, then you’re just going to pump in more weapons, keep the war going. Even though I know that this is just going to lead to the destruction of that nation. They’re never going to be able to rebuild. They’re not going to have the territory, the people, the infrastructure.

I mean, that makes no sense. But this is the mentality in Europe now. Just do as you’re told and support any insane policies. Otherwise you’re on the enemy’s side. It’s just, it’s something — the whole reason has shut down, I think.

22:56
Anyways, yeah, you know, I think the bilateralism was the direction I was going. Well, this has been in the past, going back to the fall of the Soviet Union, the bright new era that opened up in the 90s. I had colleagues who were so enthusiastic about the opportunity for American-Russian friendship, cooperation, strategic cooperation in all domains. For my take, well by the end of the 90s, they were still saying that. And I was saying, my goodness, we’re just lucky we’re not at one another’s throats at this moment. And you want to be strategic allies? It just is unreasonable.

But going back to what underpins such strategic cooperation, sually business is part of it, and trade is part of it. When Mr. Nixon did his detente with the Soviet Union, he was actively encouraging American business executives to go there and do business, to trade, and to invest in manufacturing capacity there.

In the case– my understanding though, is that this basis for bilateralism really doesn’t exist between the United States and Russia. Their economies have never been complementary in the same way as Russian-European relations were. The amount of trade done between the two countries never was very big. It’s not that it fell from great heights. It never reached any heights, not because of lack of will, but because the economics didn’t push people together the way they pushed Germans and Russians together, for example, in energy supply and raw material supply, which was something that Mr. Macron held out when he was still thinking about Russia in positive terms.

25:07
So that very strong foundation for genuine bilateralism doesn’t exist. And those who are calling out the project of train, tunnel, bridge across the Bering Strait, these are toys. This is not serious. That is not how to build a foundation for genuine bilateralism. The US and Russians have interests in world governance, which should be enough to justify decent relations and cooperation in many areas of security, global security.

But to build it out, they’re going to have cultural relations, they’re going to have economic ties of a great magnitude — is unreasonable, looking at the basic conditions for who produces what and who buys what. It’s not there. Still, as I said, the geopolitical common interests should be sufficient for bilateralism. As for the rest of the world, well, bilateralism does not exclude their both participating in regional societies of trade and other interests, including technological interests. It’s not an exclusive thing.

Certainly Russia is not going to close the door on BRICS for the sake of warm relations with the United States. As for Mr. Trump, he’s busy closing the door on the world. So that question for him doesn’t exist. Have I covered that? I mean, in the way that you expected, have I not answered the question in the manner you looked for?

Diesen: 27:11
Yeah. No, well, I think, yeah, there’s of course limits to the economic participation. But as you said, the geopolitical, the arms control, there’s a lot of other things to do. But even with the economic sphere, I don’t think Russia’s going to shift away from BRICS.

I think this greater-Eurasia initiative they’re pursuing now which replaced their goal of a Greater Europe, which included Russia, I think is very much permanent. But the Russians do want, I guess, more of a balance of dependence. So you don’t want excessive dependence on an actor like China, which is more powerful than you, given that Russia will always be more dependent on China than China is on Russia. They can’t be equal economies. But the asymmetry can be offset if they just diversify, have more partners, don’t put all eggs in one basket.

28:04
And I think from this perspective it would be in their interest to have better trade relations with the US, also more predictability, I would say, which would be good for both sides. But no, I think if the ambitions of Trump is for Russia to turn its back on China, you know, I think it’s fantasy, it’s not going to happen. But in terms of what can be learned from the summit in Alaska is, I guess one of the reasons why more can be learned now as opposed to 24 hours ago is that a meeting is going to be set up between Trump and Zelensky on Monday already if I’m not mistaken, which is a few hours from now. But based on what they’re going to discuss, do you know what this will be all about? And does it tell you anything about how the meeting went between Putin and Trump?

Doctorow:
Well, the Europeans are counting on, they’re preparing Zelensky for the meeting with Trump on the assumption that if he’s properly programmed, he can avoid crossing sensitive points with Trump, can avoid the kind of blow up that happened six months ago when they met in the Oval Office, and that he can turn Trump around. After all, we all know that Putin played Trump, that Trump was talking ceasefire, when he went to the summit; he was talking peace treaty when he left the summit. So well, I could tell you again, I think they’re missing the point. What Trump has only let out false information, misleading information to keep his opponents off balance, to keep the press off balance, without his being turned by anybody.

30:05
He’s only very gradually putting into place what he surely had in mind before. This brings up the whole question, what does he know? So many of my peers assume that he is a lightweight, that he has no concentration, that he changes his opinion from day to day, and that he’s ill-informed. When he repeats that the Russians have lost a million men or they’re losing 30,000 a month, they’re saying, “Oh, you see, he’s being fed bad information by his assistants.” I really am stunned by the lack of imagination of former CIA analysts.

It is depressing. Well, maybe it’s good news. It tells you the CIA doesn’t really have much analytic talent at any given moment, which is, I don’t mean to say that the whole institution is that way. But when I look at some of the analysts’ remarks, I’m stunned. To think that Trump would know less than they know is very peculiar.

I’m sure he knows it all. When he said Russia is a war machine, that tells you the whole story. He doesn’t have to go into the figures, the killer figures. He was repeating the rubbish that the press is talking about. Again, to keep them off balance, to let them think that he thinks the way they do, when it is most improbable that he thinks the way they do or that he has accepted any of the rubbish reports on what the battlefield really looks like.

So I think he is well informed, I think he has his own course how this will go and that takes us into the question that you just raised: what’s going to happen tomorrow? I think that he will repeat what he has told Zelensky on the phone, that he has adopted the position of the Russians with respect to how this war should end and in what time. And that part of the war ending is Ukraine conceding once and for all, not temporarily, probably de jure, that it has lost the Donbass and parts of the other two regions that I mentioned, the part of new Russia that is Zaporozhzhya and Kherson, and that it will not have an army above a certain force, and that it will not be part of, enter NATO.

When you look at the comments coming from Europe, as recently as yesterday, that, “Oh, it’s just temporarily they can’t enter NATO”, they’re not listening. They’re not listening to Trump. He has made it clear: never.


Then you’ve got the whole question of the “coalition of the willing” readiness to put troops’ boots on the ground in Ukraine for the sake of protecting Ukraine from further Russian aggression. I think that the news that the Europeans have put out, that Trump is on board, though they don’t know to what extent the United States will participate, I think that is fake news. I think they are trying to, again, to entrap him, putting in his mouth words that he never spoke or, if he spoke them, words that he never intended to implement, because his way of dealing with his enemies is not, generally speaking, not to contradict them directly but to say what they want to hear and then go off and do what he wants to do.

So the meeting tomorrow, I think, will be very tough for Mr. Zelensky. I think the Europeans will not get any satisfaction out of it. And I imagine that Trump is setting up the case for turning his back on Ukraine and the Europeans, when they show that they are putting a monkey wrench into the works, as Mr. Putin said in his press briefing after the summit.

Diesen: 34:46
Yeah, well, there’s, I guess, two different hypotheses in terms of Trump’s rhetoric, which is often shifting. And as you said, the first one, which I hear, I guess most often is, you know, he’s uninformed, doesn’t know what he’s saying, or he’s just stupid. But alternatively, as you suggest, one also has to recognize the reality that he’s in a difficult spot though, because he has to navigate between two positions which seemingly can’t be bridged. On one side you have not just hostile allies in Europe, Zelensky and indeed the Washington political establishment, which wants none of this at all, what he’s trying to do. And on the other side, you have Russia with fairly high demands in terms of what it wants in this peace agreement, given that this has been going on unresolved now for 30 years.

And it did remind me a bit about, I did an interview with Fyodor Lukyanov. He’s got actually several positions. We used to work together in same department in Moscow and well every year at the Valdai discussion club he’s the one sitting next to Putin interviewing him. And he was making the point, because I asked him, what do you make of Trump’s rhetoric shifting back and forth?

And he had a good point, though, which is, well, we have to see at what point he starts, because Europeans, of course, they boycott all diplomacy. They don’t want to talk to Russia. Zelensky, he ruled out talking to Russia. He wants no negotiations, no diplomacy, just more weapons. Anything else is unacceptable. But he was making a point. Well, just look at the gradual steps.

And now two months down the road, you have in France, they’re now discussing whether or not they should reopen diplomacy with Russia. You’re having Zelensky. Yeah, well, he’s sending his team. They’re meeting with the Russians, talking. They’re looking for a way to resolve this.

So there has to be a step by step. So it’s, I mean, maybe it’s a bit of both. Maybe some of the information Trump isn’t really on top of, But I think ignoring, as you say, ignoring this difficult positions between demanding Russians and very unflexible and demanding Europeans and Zelensky that he has to navigate the space, I’m not sure.

But also I’ve heard another theory that, well, which I also see as probable, that the United States isn’t necessarily that eager to give up all containment of Russia, but they rather want to outsource it to the Europeans. I was wondering what you thought about this.

Doctorow: 37:37
Well, this would have been certainly a good interpretation before Mr. Trump and his associates gutted the CIA, gutted the National Foundation of Democracy, before they took all the bad guys that they could find out of the federal government. I don’t know who is continuing this type of intervention, neocon intervention. Maybe it’s just the Soros foundation or similar organizations. Certainly, the Brits are deep in this, probably much more responsible for any of these nefarious developments than the Americans are.

The problem with Trump, and which puts me in an awkward position is the sharp contrast between what he is doing as a peacemaker in Ukraine and what he is doing as an enabler of genocide in Gaza. When I listened, I think it was Politico, it was being interviewed this morning by the BBC about Mr. Trump as a peacemaker and how it pains him to hear about people being killed in war. What can I say?

That is not the Trump that I am an apologist for, so to speak. I am in favor of what he’s doing in Ukraine. I believe it is well planned that he has very able assistance, in Steve Witkoff, to keep him in line, to keep his thinking solid. But of course, he is working with the same Witkoff doing this very, very nasty cooperation with Netanyahu’s government in genocide.

So it’s a mixed picture, a very mixed picture. But to think that he shifts from day to day, well, I can’t abide that. There is clearly a very heavy commitment of that man to find a peace in Ukraine, not because he loves peace and is worried about people being killed, but because of much bigger things, how he wants to reshape global geopolitics. And yes, of course, you’re right. The idea of separating Russia from China is an idee fixe of many people in his circle, starting with Rubio, his secretary of state.

So that is certainly guiding his attention to Russia and his attempts to deal diplomatically and cordially with Mr. Putin.

Diesen: 40:43
I think Russia would have been more vulnerable to be swayed by this earlier, because from ’94 when they established the OSCE, they thought, okay, now finally we have an inclusive Europe. And then came 1999 with the NATO expansion. And then they always tried to find an agreement. Under Medvedev in 2008, they had this proposal for a new European security architecture in 2010. Putin pushed forward this idea of a EU-Russia union, and all the way up to 2014. But 2014, I think this is when things began to break and they began to shift from greater Europe to greater Eurasia. However, yeah, in 2022, I think that sealed the deal for certain. But if this would have been back in 2008, 2007, eight, well, seven, when Putin made that speech at Munich, I think that was kind of the last chance to accept, including Russia into this Europe they were building.

I think it’s just too late at this point. They also don’t see a future in Europe, although this is the important thing as well. It’s not only to see Europe as hostile and stagnant, but also the Russians have less historical baggage in Asia and there’s more giants there. They’re not feared or hated as much. And economies are better.

It’s hard to argue against. If you take the point of departure, what is in Russia’s interest, it kind of makes sense why they’re not really looking to Europe any more.

Doctorow: 42:32
Let’s not speak about Europe. Let’s speak about who runs Europe. Who runs Europe is Germany. And the responsibility for this lost opportunity I put directly at the door of Angela Merkel in 2008. You have mentioned the Medvedev initiative. I followed that very closely when it was made. It was very badly prepared by the Russians. Mr. Lavrov made an attempt to revive that after it was cursorily dismissed by Merkel, to breathe some life into it because the text that Medvedev released, and I think he released it on social media, he was trying to be very, very “with it”, very up to date. America still had public diplomacy as a flag they were flying, and he used that. Anyway, it was badly done. Nonetheless, she dismissed it out of hand.

“We have security done. It’s called NATO. Don’t bother us.” And that was a disastrous, lost opportunity because Mr. Medvedev say he was the stand-in for Putin, but he was the president. And he didn’t have “stand-in here” across his chest. He could do something and sign something and negotiate something. And everyone said, “Oh, Merkel, she speaks Russian. She gets on with them. She is the intercessor with the Russians” and so on.

She hated the Russians from her childhood, obviously. And she was dismissive of them in the most crude way. When in 2012 she ended all talk about visa-free travel saying they just– “We’re not going to let those crooks into our country”, as if every Russian was an oligarch. And those thieving oligarchs all got into the country anyway, but normal citizens were not able to. She was the point of departure for where we are today. I say that because she had control of the appointment of the president of the Commission.

Wienker was put in at her suggestion because he was manageable, in the usual sense. That’s to say they had the goods on him. So he was under her control. The parliament, the European parliament, was under her control effectively because the European People’s Party even back then, in circa 2015, had complete control of the European Parliament. And she missed the opportunity.

The German, why? It wasn’t an accident. Because Germany had done a switch. Germany was no longer interested in the East. Germany was interested in Mittel Europa.

Germany had found very good colonies in Poland and the Czech Republic for very cheap labor to facilitate its export industry of manufactured goods. They never put in to the, particularly in Poland, complete cycle production. They put in “bits and parts” production. So the Poles had nothing, the Germans had everything. They had all the profit coming from the exports.

46:03
And given that the economic interests of Germany, the number of Germans employed, thanks to Mittel Europa, no doubt many times exceeded the 400,000 Germans in 2015 who were said to owe their jobs to the Russian trade, Germany economically decided, the Mittelstand decided that the Mittel Europa friends within the former Soviet bloc were more valuable to them than good relations with Russia. And it so happened that those countries, Poland and the Baltics, they’re Russian-hating. And Germany joined the Russian-hating gang.

So, I say we can talk about Europe’s mistakes, but I think we’re missing the point. We’re missing the point today, considering where Mr. Merz is. He didn’t come from nowhere. He’s in direct line of this German turn against Russia. He’s an aggravated case. He’s an ugly case, but it’s the same line that you can find in 2008, and still better in 2014 with the Minsk Accords, to which she was a party. She was anti-Russian, and she and Germany controlled the European institutions.

Diesen:
Yeah, just as we said, the 2008 proposal by Medvedev for new European security architecture, It didn’t actually call for replacing NATO or disbanding NATO. It recognized solely that we need a wider pan-European umbrella over this because NATO is a military block. It has zero-sum security. It does not subscribe to indivisible security.

So in order not to end up in a situation where the borderline states, be it Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, have to choose between East and West and we rip up the society and pull them in each direction that we have some common security architecture so we don’t end up that everything is zero sum. This was it, and they poured cold water on it.

Doctorow:
They poured cold water on him. And this was a terrible mistake. They didn’t have good Russian knowledge. They should have understood that this is the most optimistic, sunny man running Russia for, I don’t know, 200 years. There was no one like Medvedev. He was very well disposed to the West. He was a very outgoing person. And to confuse him with Medvedev today is a tremendous mistake. He was a potential good friend of Europe. And they spurned him. They humiliated him.

Diesen: 48:47
Yeah, Now I remember then when I lived in Russia, the way they talked about him, “Ah, he’s weak, blah, blah, blah.” You know, he put himself out there and they humiliated him.

So again, it’s indistinguishable from the Medvedev you see today though has become, I guess, learned from his past and become very hawkish. My last question, though, was just, I guess, is a smaller question. What do you make sense of the meeting which took place in Alaska? Is this, as some have suggested, just to get as far away from Europe as possible, unburdened by this conflict?

Doctorow:
No, I think that Trump was advised, I don’t think that he initiated this, but certainly got very clever advisors who did, for symbolism, so many elements of symbolism, taking Alaska. Some of them have been called out, including by Putin at the press briefing after the summit. But others which have not been called out generally, as I said the first thing that I wanted to call out is that it was bought. And it could be a model for how to end the Ukraine War if somebody would like to take it up, but it seems like nobody does.

50:08
And the other thing is that despite its [being] outside of Russian control since 1857– I think that was the year of the purchase, the Seward Purchase– there is a lively Russian community there, including the patriarch, sorry, the Metropolit, whom Putin met yesterday to give him two icons from Moscow, and the how many communities that are, Orthodox church communities, in Alaska, with mostly Eskimos in there as congregants, Inuits it is, properly speaking.

And the physical proximity, to remind everyone that Russia and the United States are not separated by oceans, but are separated by four kilometers of sea. The two islands that they both hold in the middle of the Bering Strait. This is important. It also would be, as it is on American soil, it’s the possibilities of wiretapping.

“Wiretapping”, it’s an old-fashioned term. Simply of snooping on the exchanges if it were taking place in the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia. Let’s not kid ourselves, it must be bugged like hell. And if they want to have complete confidentiality, until of course, they pass the bomb to Macron for what they decided, when it confidentially ended. Nonetheless, if they wanted to have a few moments of confidentiality, it was best assured of the United States.

It also gave Mr. Trump the opportunity to have a B-2 fly over them. Just to remind Mr. Putin, in case he forgot, the Americans do have a little bit of military technology out there. So in many respects, it was very convenient.

52:14
Also, the issue of flight rights, if it were to be in some places, it would be difficult for the Russians to get the flight passage authorization. Here there was no issue of the sort. They just flew over their own territory till they flew into American air space. These were reasons.

Of course, the opportunity for Putin to pay his respects to the nine Soviet Russian airmen whose tombs are just near that base and whom he visited after the summit. All of these are very important, symbolically, and to separate it from all other meetings that have been had and will be had as the negotiation and the war continues.

Diesen: 53:19
Yeah, whenever the Russians want to reach out to the Americans, they usually point out the shared war effort in the Second World War. But I guess this could be also a positive one, that they have this shared cultural heritage found in Alaska. The fact that it was also purchased in 1867 after the Civil War as opposed to taken by force, it makes it easier to celebrate a common heritage there as opposed to if it would have shifted hands in a more brutal manner.

But yeah, I don’t know. I thought it did take me by surprise. I had my money on United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia. So I, yeah, I was mistaken on this. Gilbert, Doctorow, thank you so much for your time.

Doctorow: 54:11
Thanks for inviting me.

Those in the Community who read my essay this morning on Substack will be heartened by what I had to say a few minutes ago in my weekly chat with Judge Andrew Napolitano. 

I introduced a pessimistic note this morning with reference to the discussions Donald Trump had with European leaders and with Volodymyr Zelensky via video conference. Trump was said to have promised Zelensky not to deal with the territorial issue when speaking to Vladimir Putin, nor would he discuss anything other than the Ukraine cease fire. Moreover, other sources said yesterday that Trump threatens Putin with “consequences” if he does not agree to a ceasefire tomorrow.

All of this sounded as if Trump had caved in to European pressure and reversed his position on the “summit,” essentially depriving it of any reason to be held.

However, in the couple of hours before the start of ‘Judging Freedom’ I listened to the latest broadcast of the authoritative Russian state television news and commentary show ‘Sixty Minutes’ and to a news wrap-up of Rossiya 1. This made it clear that Russia remains optimistic about the meeting with Trump and expects it to be substantive and successful. They named the five members of the Russian negotiating team – Minister of Defense Belousov, Foreign Minister Lavrov, Head of the Foreign Direct Investment Fund Dmitriev, Presidential advisor Ushakov and Finance Minister Siluanov. This indicates that a broad program of discussions is anticipated, including surely restoration of normal trade ties. The Russian commentary indicated that stabilization of global politics has been put on the agenda by the Russians.

As I said to Judge Napolitano, it is clear that Trump is lying to someone – either to the Europeans or to Putin.  I choose to believe that he is lying to the Europeans and that he will come back and put them in their place if he indeed reaches an amicable agreement on the major issues with Vladimir Putin, as his envoy Steve Witkoff seems to have done when the notion of a summit was discussed.

I used the opportunity in the interview to mention that the Russians have made stunning advances of more than 21 km yesterday in their ongoing offensive along the line of confrontation in Donbas.  This greatly accelerated  advance proves that the pace of Russian military action in the war is not dictated by the cautious rules of war of attrition alone but is susceptible to political scaling up as the geopolitical situation demands.  Should these talks tomorrow fail, I have little doubt that the Russians will make a very fast advance on the still untouched Ukrainian oblasts of Nikolaevsk and Odessa, reducing Ukraine to a land-locked rump state in preparation for its military obliteration.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern on ‘Judging Freedom,’ 6 June 2025

It is not my custom to post links to the video interviews of peers, but I will make an exception for yesterday evening’s ‘Judging Freedom’ Intel Roundup with ex-CIA analysts Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern. The show raises many more questions than it answers and provides stimulating food for thought to fill free moments this weekend. This is so because in what is a rare instance on these programs the two interviewees are in disagreement about most every question tossed to them by Judge Napolitano. That leaves a lot of room for the audience to work the angles and try to come to an independent determination.

See  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrKNU9PUesk

                                                           *****

I use the opportunity to put into the mix some of my own conclusions below relative to the questions posed by Napolitano. But first I note that, in general, I am cautious about expressing my differences with any of my peers. One reason is that some readers think that the Opposition to U.S. foreign policy should be totally aligned, should express solidarity and not show fault lines.  I strongly disagree, saying that solidarity behind wrong-headed analyses demonstrates weakness, not strength. But more importantly because when you spend time looking laterally at what others are doing and saying, you are not looking forward and being constructive.  I stopped reading the political scientists published by Foreign Affairs magazine a decade ago when I understood that critiquing their Neocon-inspired essays did not spread light, only rancor. 

With that waiver behind me, I proceed below to share some thoughts on the ‘Judging Freedom’ edition of Intel Roundup yesterday.

The dispute between Larry and Ray over whose sources in and out of Russia are more reliable in reading Russian thinking was a draw.

I agree with Larry Johnson that the airbase attack was not a pinprick and that Putin did not mention it in his address because it is all too embarrassing.  And yes, the Russian response is still coming, as Ray says.

But there are other aspects of all this that were not discussed.  The terror attacks on the trains were a much bigger issue than Larry Johnson thinks.  His recalling the Crocus massacre a year ago is wrong. Yes, 145 deaths then trump the 7 deaths in the Bryansk train wreck last weekend.   But how many Crocus entertainment centers are there in Russia?  Answer:  one, two, a half dozen perhaps.  How many railway tracks and bridges are there to blow up? The answer is thousands and thousands.  The Russian news a day ago showed the latest sabotage of various rail lines for the sake of derailment.   Russians travel the trains in hundreds of thousands or millions every day and there are a lot of very worried Russians now when they buy train tickets for their summer vacation.

The missile and drone attacks on Kiev and on every major city across Ukraine in the past couple of days IS NOT an appropriate Russian response to any of this.  It is only more of the same targeting arms production research centers and production facilities.  We see how effective they are: it is just sweeping back the tide.

My own guesstimate is that Putin will continue to go slowly, slowly and the level of anger in the broad Russian population will mount.

I never was in accord with Paul Craig Roberts that Vladimir Putin’s reasonable, sage and humane approach to the war with Ukraine is leading to ever more escalation and taking us precisely where Putin does not want to go, namely to a global nuclear war. I never was in agreement with Sergei Karaganov that Russia must stage a devastating strike in Western Europe to puncture the bubble of condescension and scorn for Russia’s supposed weakness and bring the European leaders to their senses.

However, I am becoming much more sympathetic to both of these positions day by day. We have already lost prospects for renewed arms negotiations talks thanks to the airbase attacks.

You cannot watch every kilometer of rail track or rail bridges across Russia to ensure the security of Russian citizens. The only solution, now that Putin has identified the Kiev regime as a terrorist state, is to destroy the decision-making centers, starting with Mr. Budanov and his whole team of terror planners and operatives in downtown Kiev. One Oreshnik hypersonic missile can do that.  Will Mr. Putin do what has to be done, or not?

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

In an essay yesterday, I mentioned the Ukrainian drone attacks over the weekend on airbases across the Russian Federation from Murmansk in the North, to the Moscow region and Central Russia, across all of Siberia to the Baikal region (Irkutsk). My brief remarks were based on Western accounts, principally, The Financial Times, which in turn was re-transmitting what Kiev had to say about its daring and seemingly highly successful feats destroying Russian strategic bombers.

Note that the Ukrainians had stressed that the aircraft destroyed were being used to launch missiles that were fired on Ukraine. However, for our purposes in looking at the broader threat to Russian security that their destruction poses, should it have occurred as the Ukrainians say, these aircraft are key components in the Russian nuclear triad for strategic defense against the United States. The Ukrainians claim to have destroyed 40 such bombers, meaning one-third of the Russian fleet in this category of aircraft.

Last night, the Sunday edition of Vladimir Solovyov’s widely watched talk show featured a military expert panelist who told us a good deal more about what happened and in which directions Russian investigation of this calamity and thoughts of retaliation are headed.

Firstly, the Russians deny that the destruction was as extensive as the Ukrainians claim. They insist that their local air defenses neutralized most of the incoming drones. They speak of some damaged aircraft without specifying how many.  On the other hand, they are considering a nuclear response in line with their nuclear doctrine of retaliation for attacks which endanger Russian national security. This in its own way is an acknowledgement that something awful did occur.  The same panelist makes it clear that the ongoing investigation has already led to arrests of Russians who facilitated the attack by acts of commission and omission.

The attack this weekend took 18 months to prepare. The positive conclusion we may draw is that a follow-on attack is improbable if not impossible to carry out. Nonetheless, the events of the weekend highlight serious security problems that it will not be easy for Russian authorities to correct.

Specifically, it is now known that the Ukrainian drones were brought into the Russian Federation in truck-trailers. This means that the border inspections by Russian customs were strangely lax at more than one border crossing and on more than one date.  Secondly it raises the questions about the complicity of the truck drivers, some of whom have now been arrested and who, under questioning say they had no idea what the containers held.

Then there are questions one must pose regarding the long time that these trailers were kept in place in the general vicinity of Russia’s most important air bases. How could their presence not have raised questions for local officials?

Finally, the investigation has revealed that Russian military recruits on the airbases under attack photographed what was happening and the destruction of planes, and then put these images up on social media. That they had kept their personal phones with them was itself a violation of military regulations. That they posted images identifying the strategic bombers which were damaged is itself punishable under Russian wartime law.

                                                                                 ****

The next set of questions, for which as yet we have no answers, is how the Kremlin will respond to this attack that would appear to meet the criterion for nuclear escalation under the latest Russian doctrine.

Will President Putin now declare war on Ukraine, as his legalistic mind would suggest, to clear the way for destruction of the ‘decision making centers’ in Kiev, with or without all staff on board?  Will he break off all peace negotiations, as logic would have it? 

We will not have long to wait to get answers. I expect to see them in the coming week.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Russlands Kommentatoren diskutieren die ukrainischen Angriffe auf Luftwaffenstützpunkte in der Russischen Föderation an diesem Wochenende

In einem Essay habe ich gestern die ukrainischen Drohnenangriffe vom Wochenende auf Luftwaffenstützpunkte in der gesamten Russischen Föderation erwähnt, von Murmansk im Norden über die Region Moskau und Zentralrussland bis hinüber nach Sibirien und in die Baikalregion (Irkutsk). Meine kurzen Ausführungen basierten auf westlichen Berichten, vor allem aus der Financial Times, die wiederum die Aussagen Kiews über seine gewagten und offenbar äußerst erfolgreichen Angriffe auf russische strategische Bomber wiedergab.

Es sei darauf hingewiesen, dass die Ukrainer betont hatten, dass die zerstörten Flugzeuge zum Abschuss von Raketen auf die Ukraine eingesetzt worden seien. Für unsere Zwecke, die darin bestehen zu betrachten, welche umfassendere Bedrohung für die russische Sicherheit von dieser Zerstörung ausgeht, sollten diese Angaben der Ukrainer zutreffen, sind diese Flugzeuge jedoch wichtige Komponenten der russischen nuklearen Triade zur strategischen Verteidigung gegen die Vereinigten Staaten. Die Ukrainer behaupten, 40 solcher Bomber zerstört zu haben, was einem Drittel der russischen Flotte in dieser Flugzeugkategorie entsprechen würde.

Gestern Abend war in der Sonntagsausgabe der vielgesehenen Talkshow von Wladimir Solowjow ein Militärexperte zu Gast, der uns einiges mehr darüber erzählte, was passiert ist und in welche Richtung die russischen Ermittlungen zu dieser Katastrophe und die Überlegungen zu Vergeltungsmaßnahmen gehen.

Erstens bestreiten die Russen, dass die Zerstörungen so umfangreich waren, wie die Ukrainer behaupten. Sie beharren darauf, dass ihre lokalen Luftabwehrsysteme die meisten der ankommenden Drohnen neutralisiert hätten. Sie sprechen von einigen beschädigten Flugzeugen, ohne jedoch zu präzisieren, wie viele es waren. Andererseits erwägen sie eine nukleare Reaktion im Einklang mit ihrer nuklearen Doktrin der Vergeltung für Angriffe, die die nationale Sicherheit Russlands gefährden. Dies ist in gewisser Weise ein Eingeständnis, dass etwas Schreckliches passiert ist. Derselbe Diskussionsteilnehmer macht deutlich, dass die laufenden Ermittlungen bereits zur Festnahme von Russen geführt haben, die den Angriff durch aktive Handlungen und Unterlassungen ermöglicht haben.

Die Vorbereitungen für den Angriff an diesem Wochenende dauerten 18 Monate. Die positive Schlussfolgerung, die wir ziehen können, ist, dass ein Folgeangriff unwahrscheinlich, wenn nicht sogar unmöglich ist. Dennoch zeigen die Ereignisse des Wochenendes, dass es für die russischen Behörden nicht einfach sein wird, die gravierenden Sicherheitsprobleme zu beheben.

Konkret ist nun bekannt, dass die ukrainischen Drohnen in Lkw-Anhängern in die Russische Föderation gebracht wurden. Das bedeutet, dass die Grenzkontrollen durch den russischen Zoll an mehr als einem Grenzübergang und an mehr als einem Tag seltsam lax waren. Zweitens wirft dies Fragen hinsichtlich der Komplizenschaft der Lkw-Fahrer auf, von denen einige inzwischen festgenommen wurden und die bei Verhören angaben, keine Ahnung gehabt zu haben, was sich in den Containern befand.

Dann stellen sich Fragen hinsichtlich der langen Zeit, in der diese Anhänger in der Nähe der wichtigsten Luftwaffenstützpunkte Russlands abgestellt waren. Wie konnte ihre Anwesenheit bei den örtlichen Behörden keine Fragen aufwerfen?

Schließlich hat die Untersuchung ergeben, dass russische Militärrekrutierte auf den angegriffenen Luftwaffenstützpunkten die Geschehnisse und die Zerstörung der Flugzeuge fotografiert und diese Bilder dann in den sozialen Medien veröffentlicht haben. Dass sie ihre privaten Mobiltelefone bei sich hatten, war an sich schon ein Verstoß gegen die militärischen Vorschriften. Dass sie Bilder veröffentlichten, auf denen die beschädigten strategischen Bomber zu erkennen waren, ist nach russischem Kriegsrecht strafbar.

                                                                                 ****

Die nächste Reihe von Fragen, auf die wir bislang noch keine Antworten haben, betrifft die Reaktion des Kremls auf diesen Angriff, der nach der neuesten russischen Doktrin offenbar die Kriterien für eine nukleare Eskalation erfüllt.

Wird Präsident Putin nun, wie es sein legalistischer Verstand vermuten lässt, der Ukraine den Krieg erklären, um den Weg für die Zerstörung der „Entscheidungszentren“ in Kiew zu ebnen, mit oder ohne alle Mitarbeiter an Bord? Wird er alle Friedensverhandlungen abbrechen, wie es die Logik vermuten lässt?

Wir werden nicht lange auf Antworten warten müssen. Ich erwarte sie in der kommenden Woche.

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyVxbewKgP0

0:00 NewsX:
Ahead to Europe, US Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal have met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev as diplomatic efforts intensify ahead of expected peace talks. Graham announced that the US Senate will advance a bill next week to impose tougher sanctions on Russia and countries continuing to buy its oil and other goods. During their visit, both senators accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of stalling the peace process. Graham, who spoke with Donald Trump before the trip, said the US president expects concrete actions from Moscow. This comes as Trump called both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stubborn while trying to mediate an end to the war. Here is what the senators had to say.

Graham:
I don’t believe Russia is interested in peace. As we speak, they’re building up their forces along Ukraine’s border for a counteroffensive in the summer or the fall.

I’m going to Paris and I’m going to Germany after this trip. I’m going to urge our European allies to lower the price cap to make it harder on Putin’s fossil-fuel economy. Increase OPEC production and lower the price cap. If Europe will do that, it will matter. It will hurt Russia’s war machine.

Ukraine is ready for peace, is willing to make sacrifices and compromise for peace, is willing to stop the fighting to achieve peace. It’s clear to almost anyone, Putin is not remotely interested in anything that would lead to peace.

Blumenthal: 1:46
–on Vladimir Putin. And right now, let’s be very blunt, he’s playing the United States for a stooge. Americans don’t like to be made fools of. But that’s what he’s doing. Clearly, obviously, prolonging and playing for time, stonewalling and stalling and stringing out the President of the United States. Americans won’t stand for it.

NewsX:
Meanwhile Russia claims to have shot down over 1,400 Ukrainian drones in the past week and taken control of 13 settlements in Sumy, Kharkiv and the Donetsk region.

The Russian Defence Ministry also reported strikes on Ukrainian military infrastructure and reportedly repelled multiple attacks while advancing on several fronts. Ukraine on the other hand said its forces deployed a newly developed mobile air defence system to shoot down Russian drones over Odessa. Kiev reported 93 frontline clashes on May 30th alone, including the repelling of 28 Russian attacks near Pokrovsk. This comes as Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nabensya, has said that Moscow is open to a ceasefire, but only if the West stops arming Ukraine and Kyiv halts troop mobilisation. He added that a simple truce would not be enough to end the conflict.

3:08
Well several developments there. Joining us to discuss them is Gilbert Doctorow, a Russian affairs expert, who’s joining us from Brussels. Gilbert, as always, thank you ever so much for taking the time to speak with us. Some strong statements there from US senators that are in Ukraine. They say that Russia is stalling. They say that sanctions are coming and that the US have been having the wool pulled over their eyes. What’s your response to those comments?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 3:36
We’re watching political theatre. The two senators, Lindsey Graham and Blumenthal, who are now in Kiev, have been among the most vicious anti-Russian politicians on Capitol Hill. And they are both there expressing the views that they have said in Washington in the last week, that they are imposing on President Trump a bill calling, which sets these new sanctions on Russia as a harsh response to what they have just explained in the tape you gave, Russia supposedly unwilling to come to the peace table.

Well, that is political theater, but it does set certain conditions for Mr. Trump. And he is maneuvering very well, very skillfully, dancing his dance, which is to keep all of his opponents off balance, not to appear as if he’s siding with the Russians, when de facto he is. I expect that he will make the best of this bad situation. He will accept the sanctions as having been originated in his group, when they have not been. They are being imposed on him, and they are veto-proof because more than 80 senators have signed up to them.

4:50
But what I expect will come out of this is exactly the opposite of what Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal think will come out. It will be that Mr. Trump will gracefully acknowledge that Russia must be punished, and he will punish Russia, at the same time that he is balanced and is punishing Ukraine. The explanation will be that both sides need pressure to moderate their positions and come to terms. As regards Ukraine, he will cut all American aid to Ukraine, and that will sober up people in Kiev, and it will indeed bring the war closer to an end. That is what I see resulting from this political theatre that you have just put on the stage.

NewsX:
Gilbert, some US officials, top senators, we’ve also had European leaders as well, saying that Putin is dragging his feet and prolonging these peace negotiations to strengthen his position on the battlefield. Does Putin actually want peace?

Doctorow: 5:56
The appearance that we get from the news, on both alternative news and mainstream news in the West and the world at large, is that Mr. Trump is dominating all world developments. Indeed, you can’t go through a day without hearing major reports on what Trump is doing domestically or internationally.

The reality with respect to the Russian-Ukraine war is that Mr. Putin is dominating this. He is being very considerate. He doesn’t want to insult the Americans, least of all Mr. Trump. And he is giving them the appearance of controlling events, when de facto the Russians are controlling events. A week ago, Americans were saying that the Russians must change their negotiating team, Mr. Medinsky is too aggressive, and so forth, that the negotiation should be held in Geneva. Well, many suggestions were coming from the States.

6:50
The reality is that Mr. Putin and his team have determined where they will take place, which is in Istanbul, and what they will do. They will review memoranda, which will not be disclosed to the public or to the other side before the 2nd of June. And Mr. Medinsky remains in charge of the Russian negotiating team.

7:13
So what I’m saying is that without insulting President Trump, Mr. Putin is de facto controlling events. Draw it out? The Russians, of course, they’re drawing it out, until and unless they receive what they want, which is a truce, or a ceasefire that cannot be violated by the Ukrainians, in the sense that they will be rearming, repositioning their troops and so forth, and so regaining some stability which they have lost in the preceding weeks.

The war on the front is dominated by the Russians. They are pushing the Ukrainians steadily back, a few hundred meters a day, a few kilometers a day, all across the front. They are– in your news, you mentioned the attacks on Pakrovsk, which the Russians called Krasnoyarsk. Yes, that is a key transport hub, a major point of defense of the Ukrainian forces and distribution, logistic center, and it is partly taken over already by the Russians. It will soon be in Russian hands. After that, the next news that we’ll have, that you will be placing before your viewers, will be the Russians attack on Slaviansk and Kramatorsk, which are the last remaining major towns in the Donetsk oblast.

8:38
That is, before you reach the Dnieper River. We’re coming to that. So we don’t have to speak about a late summer offensive, a massive offensive, a Russian move in the fall. No, no, in the coming weeks we will see gradually the Ukrainian forces without the front collapsing, but they are being progressively pushed back towards the Dnieper River. That is how the war is evolving.

NewsX: 9:03
Yes Gilbert, I will repose the same question, just because I’d like a more direct response to whether Vladimir Putin actually wants peace in this war. You’ve just detailed there all of the gains that are being made. You’ve said that Russia are controlling these discussions, which is something that Western leaders have said. Russia are setting the agenda. Putin says he wants direct talks with Zelensky. Zelensky offers them. Putin says no. Does Putin want peace?

Doctorow:
He wants peace. He wants a peace treaty. Let there be no mistake about that. If the war ends with a Russian running to the Dnieper River and the Ukrainian forces collapsing, but without a peace treaty, the Russians will be very unhappy. Mr. Putin is a legally-minded person. He is a lawyer by training. He wants a piece of paper signed by a legitimate representative of the Ukrainian nation.

Why? He doesn’t want to face the next 20 or 30 years of Russia being subjected to terrorist attacks by Ukrainians who are in a chaotic region that doesn’t have a proper government. He wants Ukraine to be headed by a legitimate government, which concludes a valid peace treaty with Russia.

And so it’s taking some time; he set conditions which are harsh, but which Russia will not step back from, and which Russia will eventually obtain. Namely that a truce, a ceasefire, is part of a global settlement that will be validated by European and US powers and will have and will be a peace for a long term and not just for the next six months.

NewsX: 10:49
Yes. Gilbert Doctorow, thank you ever so much for joining us. We will of course continue to bring you–

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-5KO68FMFE

WION 0:00
US President Donald Trump has lambasted his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, describing him as “absolutely crazy” after Moscow launched its largest air attack of the war on Ukraine, killing at least 13 people. The comments came as Ukraine’s Air Force said Russia had launched a record number of drones against Ukraine overnight on Sunday. The Russian attack was the largest of the war in terms of weapons fired, although other strikes have killed more people. So what happened to the Bonhomie? And does that mean the ongoing talks are in limbo?

Dr. Gilbert Doctorow is an international affairs analyst. He’s also an author and a historian. He is now joining us live from [Brussels]. Dr. Gilbert, thank you very much for your time. What do you make of Trump’s fury over Putin? They just spoke days ago, and it seemed as if it was smooth sailing for them.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD: 0:53
Well, he had to respond to the outrage that European leaders have expressed and that the mass, the mainstream media have expressed over the sharp increase in Russian strikes on Kiev and other major cities. Though we knew in advance that that would happen, since the Russians had pointed out that 1,000 drones and other objects had been fired at Russia by Ukraine in the preceding week, including many focused on Moscow. So this was anticipated, but nonetheless it brought outrage. And Donald Trump had to show that he is listening to what his critics are saying. But is he really listening? That is the question for discussion.

WION: 1:40
Doctor, Moscow has intensified its warfare by using drones and even missiles. What’s the message that Putin is trying to pass to his adversaries in the West?

Doctorow:
That Russia has gained, after a lot of work to increase its technology and production, that Russia has now mastered drone warfare, which really is decisive or defining the stage of warfare today in the Russia-Ukraine war. It was originally strictly an artillery duel. This was, most of the three years were an artillery duel, but Russia enjoyed a very large advantage in supplies, 10 to 1 in armaments advantage over Ukraine. But in recent, in the last six months, eight months, the Ukrainians showed that they had great capabilities in drones, and the drones could be effective in preventing a mass attack on the front line, because soldiers were obliged to break up into small units to avoid carnage from attack drones. The Russians have now more than mastered drones, and this is demonstrated by the latest attacks.

2:59
The drones are also used as a way of diverting the attention of the air defence from the missiles that are incoming and which do the real damage.

WION: 3:12
President Putin recently visited the Kursk oblast and some critics were saying that was a kind of provocation. What do you make of Putin’s visit to Kursk?

Doctorow:
The single most remarkable thing about the visit is that he got there. He was subjected to massive drone attack by the Ukrainians. Somehow they had been made aware of his plans to visit Korsk. So he got there. That was a big achievement. What he did on the ground was also very important. He met with officials, he met with the victims of the Ukrainian occupation of this territory.

3:55
He spoke with the people who are rebuilding, the volunteers who are facilitating the reestablishment of people whose homes were destroyed by the Ukrainian occupiers of this basically Russian territory, part of the Russian Federation. And so it was to build confidence, both locally and nationally, that he made that visit.

WION:
Is President Volodymyr Zelensky’s shuttle diplomacy working, do you think?

Doctorow:
Well, he doesn’t stop traveling, that’s for sure. What comes out of it is public relations, and he is a public relations man. It’s regrettable for the life of Ukrainian soldiers that their military command is directed by a public relations man, and that they are viewed as fodder for the demonstration of Ukrainian strength and resilience to get more assistance from the West. So it has been. But he is visiting everywhere to find new support, financial and material, for the war, which he will really need to have as the United States withdraws from the conflict.

WION:
Sanction threats towards Russia have returned. President Putin seems unperturbed, even after the EU said it will push forward with sanctions. Trump is also considering sanctions as another option. But how far will these threats go if Putin continues to give them a deaf ear?

Doctorow:
Well, Putin is holding out that possibility of a [deaf]. So the more immediate military task that he discussed when he was in Kursk is to ensure a buffer zone that protects Russian civilian settlements as in Kursk or Belgorod, the neighboring frontier or border provinces of Russia, from attacks by Ukrainian short-range missiles and drones. That is where the emphasis is going, not on seizing new territory, however desirable it is for Russian patriots to take Odessa.

WION: 6:12
What about the sanctions? Because they are increasing by the day, and President Trump says that he may consider advancing the sanctions on Russia.

Doctorow:
This is all rhetoric. The fact of the matter is that Russia is sanction proof. Three years of sanctions have made it the country with the largest number of sanctions ever imposed on any state in history. They have survived quite well, and are doing very nicely, thank you. So this is just rhetoric addressed by European leaders in particular and by opponents of Trump in the States hoping to pressure him to apply greater sanctions; it is rhetoric.

The, frankly, the West has no leverage over Russia. That is a fact that is coming out, and I want to make the point that the most important development in the past week or two has been that mainstream media have caught up with alternative media in describing accurately the dire situation of Ukraine, militarily, financially, and otherwise.

WION: 7:19
Let’s now talk about the negotiations or the talks. Russia’s demands were Ukraine’s recognition of Russian-occupied Crimea, independence for separatist-controlled Luhansk and Donetsk, and demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba stated that while his country was ready for talks to resume, Russia’s demands had not changed, critics call those demands unfathomable.

Doctorow:
You are exactly right. The claims or the expectations of the warring parties are irreconcilable. And that is why discussion of a peace arrived at in the current negotiations is not realistic. It has served political purposes, particularly in the States, where Donald Trump is the one who first called for peace talks.

But the reality is that they will fail in their present composition, because the Ukrainian leadership is unwilling to face the reality on the ground that even its friends like “Financial Times” are openly acknowledging. So I do not believe there will be a military victory. In that respect, I’m in agreement with JD Vance and others in the administration of Donald Trump. But there will be a political collapse.

8:48
And we’ve seen that coming in the growing fissures within leadership in Ukraine, most recently by the statements by the Ukrainian ambassador to England, Zaluzhin, admitting the dire situation the country is in.

WION:
Doctor, finally, let’s talk about this issue that has been going on for a long time. A peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine remains elusive. What will it take for both sides to calm down, meet, talk, agree and end the conflict? What’s your message to both Putin and Zelensky?

Doctorow:
Well, I don’t believe that Mr. Zelensky will be around to conclude the peace. So my commenting on him is not really relevant. Putin most likely will be around. And I think this will take place before the end of the year, not because of some massive Russian advance on the front that breaks the Ukrainian line. I don’t believe that they will collapse.

But I think they will capitulate because of a political breakdown. That is to say the leaders, the political leaders within Ukraine will move away from Zelensky towards another person who is willing to accept reality. That person might very well be Mr. Zaluzhny, judging by what he said last week.

He was put forward some time ago as America’s preferred replacement for Zelensky. So in that event, a political collapse will bring the parties to the table. The terms will be rather similar to what Mr. Putin has demanded at the current negotiations.

WION: 10:33
Dr. Gilbert Doctorow is an international affairs analyst. He’s also an author and a historian. We’ll have to leave it there. Thank you very much for giving us time and for talking to me on World Is One today.

Doctorow:
Thanks for the invitation.

I inform the Community about a dramatic development which, to my knowledge, has not been mentioned by mainstream media in the West, namely the return of Russian videos to youtube.com

Those who read my Travel Notes from my most recent visit to St Petersburg will be aware of my surprise to find then that youtube was virtually inaccessible during this visit whereas I had encountered no such problem in the past three years of war.  At the same time, LinkedIn, which the Russians had banned from the start of the SMO, was once again accessible there.  It made no sense.

It now would appear that during the period when youtube was cut off in Russia some negotiations must have been going on with the internet platform’s owners, Google (Alphabet). The ban on Russian media has evidently been lifted. Not only are current Russian media offerings available on youtube but it seems that media offerings dating back many years are also now accessible.

See, for example, the following:

RT –  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSyJEIWnjrE

The Great Game (Bolshaya Igra) – Go to the search box in youtube and type in Большая Игра. For some reason the link does not open on this substack platform.

‘Judging Freedom’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtNg8Uu1pQI&t=34s

The last link above happens to be the Russian voice-over version of my interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano yesterday.  Within 6 hours of the broadcast of the English language original, this voice-over was put on line on the Russian internet channel rutube.ru (pun intended, obviously) as was the case with all of my Judging Freedom interviews these past several months. The producer of these voice over versions is a certain Russian organization called Polit Mnenie (translation – Political Opinion).

I offer this news to break the ice and start discussion of this development in the West. I assume that others will soon provide additional remarks on how this came about, and what it may say about the lifting of censorship on things Russian in the USA under Donald Trump.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Kurzmeldung: YouTube zeigt jetzt russische Medienvideos in englischer und russischer Sprache!

Ich möchte die Community über eine dramatische Entwicklung informieren, die meines Wissens von den westlichen Mainstream-Medien nicht erwähnt wurde, nämlich die Rückkehr russischer Videos auf youtube.com.

Diejenigen, die meine Reiseberichte von meiner letzten Reise nach St. Petersburg gelesen haben, wissen, wie überrascht ich war, dass YouTube während dieses Besuchs praktisch nicht zugänglich war, obwohl ich in den letzten drei Jahren des Krieges keine derartigen Probleme hatte. Gleichzeitig war LinkedIn, das die Russen seit Beginn der SMO gesperrt hatten, dort wieder zugänglich. Das ergab keinen Sinn.

Es scheint nun, dass während der Zeit, in der YouTube in Russland gesperrt war, Verhandlungen mit dem Eigentümer der Internetplattform, Google (Alphabet), stattgefunden haben müssen. Das Verbot russischer Medien wurde offenbar aufgehoben. Nicht nur aktuelle russische Medienangebote sind auf YouTube verfügbar, sondern offenbar auch Medienangebote, die viele Jahre zurückreichen.

Siehe beispielsweise Folgendes:

RT –  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSyJEIWnjrE

Das große Spiel (Bolschaja Igra) – Gehen Sie zum Suchfeld auf YouTube und geben Sie Большая Игра ein. Aus irgendeinem Grund lässt sich der Link auf dieser Substack-Plattform nicht öffnen.

‘Judging Freedom’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtNg8Uu1pQI&t=34s

Der letzte Link oben ist zufällig die russische Synchronfassung meines gestrigen Interviews mit Judge Andrew Napolitano. Innerhalb von sechs Stunden nach Ausstrahlung des englischen Originals wurde diese Synchronfassung auf dem russischen Internetkanal rutube.ru (das Wortspiel ist natürlich beabsichtigt) online gestellt, wie es auch bei allen meinen Judging Freedom-Interviews in den letzten Monaten der Fall war. Der Produzent dieser Synchronfassungen ist eine bestimmte russische Organisation namens Polit Mnenie (Übersetzung: Politische Meinung). Ich bringe diese Nachricht, um das Eis zu brechen und eine Diskussion über diese Entwicklung im Westen anzustoßen. Ich gehe davon aus, dass andere bald weitere Kommentare dazu abgeben werden, wie es dazu gekommen ist und was dies über die Aufhebung der Zensur russischer Inhalte in den USA unter Donald Trump aussagen könnte.

Perhaps it would be good for Donald Trump to just shut up for several days. His loud daily declarations of dire threats, military or financial, against every country the U.S. seeks to bully into submission has reached the point where he has overplayed his hand, if we may apply to him the card players’ terms Trump seems to favor.

A week ago, in connection with the U.S. bombing raids against the Houthis in Yemen, he intimated that the U.S. is ready to attack Iran for backing the Houthis in their actions against Israel-related shipping through the Suez Canal and Red Sea, and against the U.S. warships now in the region supposedly to protect that shipping.

American B2s stealth bombers were flown to the Indian Ocean base on Diego Garcia to practice bombing runs against Tehran. This was on top of previous threats of secondary sanctions against buyers of Iranian oil, with intent to fully choke off Iranian exports. The objective for that was not only to close down Iran’s nuclear industry but also to halt their production of missiles and to cancel their sponsorship of the Axis of Resistance countries generally.  The response from the Supreme Leader in Tehran was a resounding ‘no’ and ‘hell no.’ In short, the threats have lost their impact there.

Now today we read that Trump has said he is ‘pissed off’ with Vladimir Putin for foot dragging over implementation of the talks on a ceasefire with Ukraine. He says he will impose secondary sanctions on Russian oil exports as punishment, so that any country buying Russian oil would be barred from selling anything to the United States. 

Sounds tough?  Yes, indeed, till you consider who is buying Russian oil. The largest buyers are China and India.  Does Trump really believe either country will humiliate themselves by bending the knee and kissing his ring?  Does he really believe that he can shut down all Chinese exports to the USA without bringing the American economy to collapse? This is as delusional as anything we heard a few months ago from Blinken and Sullivan in the Biden administration.

In the Financial Times article this evening, they say that ‘Trump’s outburst at Moscow’ relates also to Putin’s ‘attacking Zelensky’s legitimacy as Kyiv’s leader.’  This is striking in that Trump himself in a public address called Zelensky a dictator who has not held elections.

I conclude from this that Team Trump has indeed read closely Vladimir Putin’s remarks to the crew of the submarine Arkhangelsk in Murmansk on 27 March and understood that the Russian president has prepared an alternative scenario for ending the war when Trump’s initiatives fail.  And they are headed for failure unless Trump can beat down Macron, Starmer, von der Leyen and the other European leaders who are working against his peace plans and plotting in every way to keep the war going. 

Judging by what this same FT article says about the 7 hours that Trump spent in Mar a Lago with the visiting Finnish premier Stubb, who is one of the most active plotters against the lifting of sanctions on Russia, it appears that Trump has decided against challenging the Europeans and is instead challenging Putin. 

Needless to say, Trump has no cards to play against Putin. The secondary sanctions are nonsense, as I say above. And military pressure is equally nonsensical, given that NATO has done its best to defeat Russia till now, staying just short of actions that would precipitate WWIII.

My conclusion is that Trump is now throwing away his chances of achieving anything on the Ukraine-Russia war, and with that, throwing away his hopes for participating in the making of the New World Order that BRICS now are directing.

Of course, Trump being Trump, he may well have a 180-degree reversal of his position on all these matters tomorrow.  But as I say, he would do much better just to shut up.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Translation below into German (Andreas Mylaeus)

Die Waffenstillstandsgespräche nehmen eine neue Wendung: Trump sagt, er sei „stinksauer auf Putin“

Vielleicht wäre es gut, wenn Donald Trump einfach mal ein paar Tage lang den Mund halten würde. Seine täglichen lauten Drohungen, militärischer oder finanzieller Art, gegen jedes Land, das die USA zur Unterwerfung zwingen wollen, haben einen Punkt erreicht, an dem er sich übernommen hat, wenn wir die Bedingungen der Kartenspieler auf ihn anwenden dürfen, die Trump zu bevorzugen scheint.

Vor einer Woche deutete er im Zusammenhang mit den US-Bombenangriffen gegen die Huthis im Jemen an, dass die USA bereit seien, den Iran anzugreifen, weil dieser die Huthis bei ihren Aktionen gegen israelische Schiffe im Suezkanal und im Roten Meer sowie gegen die US-Kriegsschiffe unterstütze, die sich derzeit in der Region befinden, um diese Schiffe zu schützen.

Amerikanische B2-Tarnkappenbomber wurden zur Basis im Indischen Ozean auf Diego Garcia geflogen, um Bombenangriffe auf Teheran zu üben. Dies geschah zusätzlich zu früheren Drohungen mit sekundären Sanktionen gegen Käufer von iranischem Öl, mit der Absicht, die iranischen Exporte vollständig zu unterbinden. Das Ziel dabei war nicht nur, die iranische Atomindustrie zu schließen, sondern auch die Raketenproduktion des Landes zu stoppen und das Sponsoring der Länder der „Achse des Widerstands“ im Allgemeinen einzustellen. Die Antwort des Obersten Führers in Teheran war ein klares „Nein“ und „Auf keinen Fall“. Kurz gesagt, die Drohungen haben dort ihre Wirkung verloren.

Heute lesen wir, dass Trump sagte, er sei „stinksauer“ auf Wladimir Putin, weil dieser die Umsetzung der Gespräche über einen Waffenstillstand mit der Ukraine hinauszögere. Er sagt, er werde als Strafe sekundäre Sanktionen gegen russische Ölexporte verhängen, sodass jedes Land, das russisches Öl kauft, daran gehindert würde, irgendetwas an die Vereinigten Staaten zu verkaufen.

Klingt hart? Ja, in der Tat, bis man bedenkt, wer russisches Öl kauft. Die größten Abnehmer sind China und Indien. Glaubt Trump wirklich, dass sich eines dieser Länder demütigen wird, indem es vor ihm auf die Knie geht und ihm die Füße küsst? Glaubt er wirklich, dass er alle chinesischen Exporte in die USA stoppen kann, ohne die amerikanische Wirtschaft zum Zusammenbruch zu bringen? Das ist genauso wahnwitzig wie alles, was wir vor ein paar Monaten von Blinken und Sullivan aus der Biden-Regierung gehört haben.

In dem Artikel in der Financial Times von heute Abend heißt es, dass „Trumps Wutausbruch in Moskau auch mit Putins Angriff auf Selenskys Legitimität als Kiewer Staatschef zusammenhängt“. Dies ist insofern bemerkenswert, als Trump selbst Selensky in einer öffentlichen Ansprache als Diktator bezeichnet hatte, der keine Wahlen abgehalten hat.

Daraus schließe ich, dass das Team Trump tatsächlich Wladimir Putins Äußerungen an die Besatzung des U-Boots Archangelsk in Murmansk am 27. März aufmerksam gelesen und verstanden hat, dass der russische Präsident ein alternatives Szenario für die Beendigung des Krieges vorbereitet hat, falls Trumps Initiativen scheitern. Und sie sind auf dem Weg zum Scheitern, es sei denn, Trump kann Macron, Starmer, von der Leyen und die anderen europäischen Staats- und Regierungschefs, die gegen seine Friedenspläne arbeiten und in jeder Hinsicht versuchen, den Krieg am Laufen zu halten, besiegen.

Wenn man bedenkt, was in demselben FT-Artikel über die sieben Stunden steht, die Trump in Mar a Lago mit dem finnischen Premierminister Stubb verbracht hat, der zu den aktivsten Gegnern der Aufhebung der Sanktionen gegen Russland gehört, scheint es, dass Trump beschlossen hat, nicht die Europäer herauszufordern, sondern stattdessen Putin.

Es versteht sich von selbst, dass Trump keine Karten gegen Putin in der Hand hat. Die sekundären Sanktionen sind, wie ich oben bereits sagte, Unsinn. Und militärischer Druck ist ebenso unsinnig, da die NATO bisher ihr Bestes getan hat, um Russland zu besiegen, und dabei nur knapp von Aktionen Abstand genommen hat, die den Dritten Weltkrieg auslösen würden.

Ich komme zu dem Schluss, dass Trump nun seine Chancen verspielt, im Ukraine-Russland-Krieg etwas zu erreichen, und damit auch seine Hoffnungen auf eine Beteiligung an der Gestaltung der neuen Weltordnung, die jetzt von den BRICS-Staaten geleitet wird.

Natürlich ist Trump Trump, und es kann gut sein, dass er morgen seine Position in all diesen Fragen um 180 Grad ändert. Aber wie gesagt, es wäre viel besser, wenn er einfach den Mund halten würde.