Transcript submitted by a reader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctorow: 51:10
My pleasure. Bye bye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

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

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

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

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

Best wishes to the Serbian speakers among you.

‘Judging Freedom’: Understanding the Russian Way of War

Today’s discussion with Judge Andrew Napolitano had two central issues. The first is captured by the title given to the interview above. The second concerns the vote of no confidence proceedings now going on in the European Parliament which, if successful, would remove Ursula von der Leyen from office.

As I stated here the Russians have seriously intensified their ongoing aerial attacks on Ukraine, with latest figures of more than 700 drones and missiles fired at Ukrainian cities each day and the expectation that this will rise to 1,000 per day shortly. Moreover, they are using more than 1,000 heavy guided bombs each day as well, creating enormous destruction of Ukrainian fortified positions.

Meanwhile, the Russian ground forces are capturing more and more settlements in the Donetsk oblast, as well as in the Ukrainian oblasts of Kharkiv and Zaporozhie.

Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to assume that Ukrainian resistance will crumble in the immediate future. The best proof of the resilience and deadly skills of the Ukrainian army was the killing of Russia’s most decorated warrior, Lt General Gudkov on the front lines in the past week.  Gudkov is the officer whom we all saw on Judging Freedom a few months ago when Vladimir Putin spoke to sailors and officers inside a Russian submarine and announced Gudkov’s promotion to senior officer of all Russian marines. Just days ago, Putin was giving Gudkov’s widow an unprecedented second medal of Hero of the Russian Federation. The state funeral for Gudkov was covered on national television.

The point is that Gudkov died from an artillery counter-strike by Ukrainians near the Russian guns which initiated the long-range duel. The Ukrainians clearly had the equipment, the trained personnel and the will to respond effectively to Russian attack.

Otherwise, latest news from Ukraine indicates that they are now deploying optic fiber controlled drones similar to what the Russians introduced and are using so effectively for several months now. These state of the art attack weapons are impervious to electronic warfare jamming or to distortion of gps signals for guidance.

And so I insist once again that the Ukraine war will end because of the political collapse of Kiev, not due to the collapse of the front lines as such.

The second issue, namely the censure proceedings against von der Leyen is fascinating to follow and thanks to relevant videos now posted on the internet the Community can come to its own conclusions. My point is that the ‘omerta,’ the silence about the abuses of power in the European Institutions imposed and enforced by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has now been broken and we all are witnesses to the rottenness in the organs governing the 450 million citizens of the EU Member States.

Video of the full 49-minute discussion on the website of the European Parliament:

The most dramatic single contribution to the debate, by Fabrice Leggeri, MEP from Marine Le Pen’s party which Judge Napolitano showed in our interview:

The vote on the motion of censure of von der Leyen comes tomorrow, 10 July.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOBVJPJr2Lo

WION: 0:01
Trump and Zelenskyy, they met last week. They seemed to have a good meeting on the sidelines of the NATO summit. And then what happens? The US president goes back home, and within days you hear that the US has halted key weapons supplies to Ukraine, a move that has shocked Kiev, to say the least, and left Ukraine in dire need as the Russian forces continue their advance into Ukraine. The White House said that this decision follows a routine capability review of its military needs.

Now, if it’s a routine review, then why wasn’t it accounted for before, or informed to Kiev in advance? If it’s a routine review, then why is there no specific timeline for the resumption of military aid to Ukraine? A lot of questions here. I’m Shivan Chanana and to discuss this further with me on “Game Plan” is Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, international affairs analyst, author and historian. Doctor, always a pleasure speaking with you. The last time US halted military aid to Ukraine was after that Trump-Zelensky Oval Office fallout. This time there was no fallout. There was a cordial meeting, and yet the same has happened. What happened suddenly?

Doctorow: 1:04
It’s truly difficult to give definitive answers to this very legitimate question you’re posing, because so much is going on that is behind closed doors. Perhaps we will know in 50 years, but I think we will not be around in 50 years. At least I won’t. And we have to make a decision today on the conduct of the war, the conduct of foreign policy by Donald Trump.

The point that has to be made first is that Trump is operating in a hostile political environment. Hostile domestically, Congress is not with him on a rapprochement with Russia. Congress is hostile to Russia. Europe wants the war to continue. For Europe, the Ukrainian war presents Russia as the bogeyman, as the hostile enemy, and justifies further funding of NATO and justifies the very existence of the European Union, which has become a war project instead of a peace project under von der Leyen.

2:07
Now, specifically, what do I have in mind? Let us recall that when Biden pushed through his massive aid, military aid, to Kiev, that would be in the period following his departure from office, there were remarks that this would be Trump-proof. But we didn’t know exactly what that meant, and we don’t know today exactly what it meant. But there’s reason to believe that this worked against Trump’s initial wish to stop arms deliveries from the day after he took office.

2:45
We will remember that, you mentioned the halt that was recent. There was a halt from the first days that he came into office. And then it was reversed, and he continued supplies. And many of my peers in what we call the independent media or alternative media in the United States and in Europe have been saying, “Ah, Trump, how can Trump present himself as a peacemaker when he’s continuing to supply arms to Ukraine?” I would maintain here, for the sake of argument, that he was continuing the arms deliveries because his legal team could not find a way to get around the obstacles that were presented in the Biden orders.

3:29
They finally did that, and now we’ve seen the result. The timing is a separate issue, which, of course, you are interested in, I will respond to “Why now?” But it took some time for the Trump legal team to work its way through the American legislation and find means to stop the supply. And do note, they have not stopped it categorically. They stopped it temporarily. That is part of the ruse, that is part of the trick that the Trump team is using now to frustrate the restrictions on its options that were put in the Biden law.

WION: 4:10
Doctor, Now as for reports these paused shipments, they include items which are vital to Ukraine’s air defense and frontline operations, both of which are key arteries to their defenses against Russian aggression at this point. Is this arm-twisting Kiev into peace talks? And as you mentioned and briefly, you know, why is it happening as of now? And there is no date to when this will resume, so is it an open-ended military halt?

Doctorow: 4:42
It’s an open-ended military halt which is not called that. It’s called a “suspension”. And that certainly is a legal trick that is relevant in relations with Congress and the courts in the United States. We have to pay attention to that. Now, you mentioned defensive. But this halt is on both defensive and offensive weapons. The defensive side are the interceptors, Patriots, and other equipment which the United States has provided to Ukraine, but much of which it withdrew at the outset of the 12-day Israeli-Iran war to take to the Middle East to safeguard American bases in the Gulf states.

5:28
So not only is the United States not supplying further Patriots as requested, or should we say demanded by Zelensky in his last meeting with Trump here in The Hague, but it has reduced what little they had before the Iran-Israeli war. That’s the defensive side. On the offensive side, they have cut back on deliveries of precision missiles. This we can assume takes in the various short- to medium-range missiles which the United States supplied earlier. And we may assume it has cut back on artillery shells, which are of vital importance to Ukrainians on the front lines.

6:20
So this is very important. And to whom is this a signal? Well, yes, of course to Kiev, but I’d say also a signal to the European Union and NATO that the United States is withdrawing from this war.

WION:
That’s a very strong signal if that’s exactly how the European Union also perceives it, it is going to be a message with a thousand words. At this point also, Doctor … Russia has declared that they have taken over Luhansk. Luhansk has fallen to the Russian government at this point. That’s what they’re claiming. And in the midst of this, to halt military aid to Ukraine, is it just really bad timing for Ukraine or strategic timing for the U.S.? And after, Luhansk, is Sumy next?

Doctorow:
Well, let’s take a look at the Luhansk story, Luhansk, Lugansk, which is the Ukrainian or Russian pronunciation of these oblasts. There are two oblasts that constitute the core of Russia’s move into what was once Ukraine. This is Donbas. There is Donetsk and Lugansk. From the very beginning, Russia’s occupation or possession of Lugansk was relatively high.

Seventy-five, 80 percent, perhaps, was held by Russian forces or Russian-friendly forces, because after all It was the local militias that held the territory, not the Russian army, when this war started. And in Donetsk it was less than 50 percent. Maybe 40 percent was held by Russia-friendly forces. The reasons are clear. There was very heavy fortification, building defensive concrete bunkers from which the Ukrainians could send their artillery shells or missiles into Donetsk.

8:15
That was very difficult to overcome. And even after two and a half years of war, it was still marginal, with a town that settlements 10, 15 kilometers away from Donetsk city, which is the capital of the province or region of the same name, were held by Ukrainians from which they were daily firing artillery shells into residential neighborhoods. Now, in Lugansk, the advance was slow, from a very high level to begin with. And this conquest of all of it is three percent. Let’s be clear about that. It was the final three percent of the Lugansk oblast that was taken in the last several days by Russian forces.

9:03
Donetsk, where are they now? The Russians are not staging a massive assault. They are go slow, pushing here, pushing there, wherever they detect a weak spot, because the Ukrainians really are undermanned to hold a 1,200-kilometer-long front with equal force and strength. So the Russians have been feeling for weak points and striking there, but making progress every day. And their interest is, first of all, to remove from the field the Ukrainian soldiers, by killing them or wounding them so they’re taken away, to reduce the size of the Ukrainian defenses.

9:47
That has been their primary objective. Taking territory is a result of the first. They have been making progress, and they are concentrating their efforts on a couple of … one could call them, logistics hubs, which supply the Ukrainian front lines. First and foremost is the city of Pakrovsk. Pakrovsk is the Ukrainian name. The Russians know the same town as Krasnoyarsk. So you hear both terms in daily news, depending on what the source was, Russian or Ukrainian. The Russians are not storming the city. That type of behavior, which was typical in the first year of the war, is no longer practiced because it’s very expensive in loss of life on the offensive side, on the attacking side. But they are destroying it systematically by bombardment, artillery, and drones.

10:39
They will capture Pakrovsk, which will greatly weaken the Ukrainian forces along the line, because that’s where their supplies have been coming from and food. Then further afield, a little bit away from Pakrovsk, there are the towns of Kramatorsk and Slaviansk. These were the towns of great importance, iconic importance, in the start of the DAPAC in 2014, when these two oblasts rebelled against the newly installed regime in Kiev following a coup d’état. This is in February 2014. These two towns, or particularly Slaviansk, was held by a very small militia force against a much larger Ukrainian army force.

11:31
And to take it to something that will resonate with American viewers was kind of Alamo of Ukraine. Alamo was a last stand, a last, known in American history for patriotic self-sacrifice. And that’s what was going on in Slaviansk for 85 days in 2014. And so to be retaken by Russian forces is significant, because from there it’s a clear plain straight to the Dnieper River. And that is the east-west divide 50-50 between West Ukraine, which is where the ultra-nationalists come from, and the East Ukraine, which was always heavily populated, majority populated by Russian speakers.

WION: 12:19
Understood. Thanks so much Dr. Gilbert for encapsulating all that information. You’ve really taken the trajectory right from 2014, Crimea to now and what Russia may plan to do next. But as of what Trump has done or what the US is doing with Ukraine, that is anyone’s guess at this point. There’s a lot happening behind closed doors, which one will need to wait and watch. Perhaps sometime from now, the truth is going to come out.

As of now, one knows for sure that there is a lot of backdoor negotiation which is going on, results of which we are seeing in these headlines. Kiev is left scratching their head, they are trying to figure out what to do next when US has halted their military aid and Russia is definitely advancing. With a friend like the US and a foe like Russia, what kind of options does Ukraine have?

13:04
We will be, you know, tracking all these developments closely right here on “Game Plan”. That was Gilbert Doctorow joining me on the show. Thank you so much, Doctor.

Transcript submitted by a reader

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

Lt. Col. Daniel Davis: 0:00
If you didn’t know any better, you would think from watching the headlines that the war between Russia and Ukraine has kind of devolved into a budget battle. Who’s going to spend the most money? Who’s bringing in the most contractors? Who’s got the most deals to make, et cetera. But as we’re going to see, there is that going on, but there is still a war going on and there is still progress on the ground. There are still people dying that are not impressed one way or the other with whose deal somebody’s making or what they’re trying to accomplish on the on the spreadsheet.

But as we know, of course, war does require finances. And if you don’t have that, then you don’t have a war. We’re going to see how that tails in as well. And to try and help us unpack some of this, we have for the first time on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive, Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, a historian and international affairs analyst and author of the book, “War Diaries, Part One, Russia-Ukraine War 2022 to 2023.”
First of all, Professor, welcome to the show.

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, very kind of you to invite me.

Davis: 0:58
Listen, I wonder just because this is the first time you’ve been on our show. I know a lot of our audience is familiar with your work in a number of other different venues, but I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about this book that you’ve written here and especially because it’s called Part One. What did you learn during the publication of this book and where are you going next?

Doctorow:
Well, as I say in the Foreword to it, I thought this would be a thin volume. But then the war started. Russia had such a commanding presence and was threatening Kiev from day one of their invasion, but it looked like this could be over rather quickly. And I don’t think I was the only one who assumed that.

As it’s turned out, we were all mistaken. The war has progressed in surges, various stages of escalation that were not to be anticipated. The risk-taking of the Biden administration was in no way clear as a possibility or a likelihood when the war began. And the Russian way of war was by no means understood in the West, and even today is not clearly understood, since the expectation is the only way you can fight a war is the American way, which is shock and awe. And that didn’t happen.

2:11
The fact is, the American wars have been on territory without any personal presence, that is, without an American presence there before the troops moved in, without an interest in the people as such and in the value of human life in the territories we entered — in the Middle East, I’m speaking about now. In the Russian case with Ukraine, they are, these are two nations or peoples that have lived together and intermingled for 500 years or more. And the Russian interest was initially not to cause too much damage and too much loss of life in the anticipation that these are neighbors and we’ll have to live with them in the future. Moreover, they are, those neighbors are the brother-in-law, sister-in-law, mother-father of many people living all over what was the Soviet Union and today is the Russian Federation. For these reasons, the Russians conducted the war in a rather, in a very different way from what people in the West expected. It was misinterpreted in the West as signs of Russian weakness.

Davis:
Let me ask you, on that topic, I’m just wondering what you may have discovered through the reading of your book, what the US actually anticipated ahead of time, because Biden famously said, you know, “Our intelligence says they’re getting ready to go, they’ve made a decision”, all this kind of stuff. We moved out a lot of our diplomatic personnel, left Kiev, and even offered a ride to Zelensky to get out, and he, of course, had a pretty famous quip to that. But what did the US expect to happen in that initial onslaught?

Doctorow: 3:53
I think it was just what I just said a moment ago: this would be over in a very short time. Then there was a misinterpretation which comes into the nature of propaganda, and say false information or disinformation as to what went wrong and why the Russians didn’t just move into Kiev as going down the rose garden. Here, the errors are not just in Western expectations, but also in Russian expectations.

The Russians had a conflict, a military conflict with the Ukrainians in 2014 in the spring following the installation of the radical nationalist government in Kiev with assistance from the United States, the Russians had a military conflict. In the Crimea, we know there was a standoff, a standoff that ended in complete Russian victory, because the Ukrainian forces in the Crimea, which were roughly the same number, 20,000, on the peninsula for each of the sides, just gave up. The Russians said, :You have a choice. You raise the white flag. You can go home in Ukraine, or you can come and join us.”

5:01
And indeed, some of the Ukrainian forces joined the Russians, and others just went home. There weren’t many gunshots. And the Russians were spoiled about that. They expected that indeed the Ukrainian army would– seeing the vast forces arrayed against them what, 50, 60 miles away from their capital on the Belarus side of the border– that they would again retreat and that the people, the local people would come out in the familiar Slavic fashion with salt and bread to greet the Russian liberators.

That didn’t happen at all. Eight years of work by the American and British intelligence agencies, by the Pentagon, had changed completely the psychology of the Ukrainian army. And it was now a formidable fighting force. Moreover, it was, and this was not foreseeable, it was largely under the control of those same radicals who were behind the Maidan storming and installation of a new government by force.

These people, the Azov Battalion and other radical nationalists had been integrated into the normal Ukrainian armed forces, with the result that the notion of raising a white flag didn’t exist any more. The Russians’ intelligence, it’s quite surprising, their intelligence was very faulty. They did not anticipate that they would have a stiff fight.

What happened when those tanks approached Kiev? Were they really, suffered enormous defeats as Western reports went because of the use of the shoulder-held anti-tank weapons supplied by the United States? We don’t know. I don’t know for certain. I’m not a military expert, as you mentioned correctly at the outset, but there are a lot of open questions that no one has answered satisfactorily about these first months of the war.

7:27
The Russian story is that they were preparing the way for negotiations. Indeed, the negotiations started very soon after the Russian invasion. The Russians invaded about 23rd of February, 24th of February. The negotiations started several weeks later. These were first in Belarus and then moved to Istanbul. And by the end of April, we know that there was a lengthy document agreed by negotiating parties on both sides, for–

Davis:
Actually, I want to ask you a specific question on this time frame. I’m really grateful that you’ve studied a lot of this because I remember very distinctly, I want to say it was the first or second week of March, I think it was the second week of March, that Zelensky was quoted as saying, “Well, I guess I can consider maybe going to an independent, unaligned situation, i.e. no more NATO.” And so he was openly thinking about that, because that’s one of the things that the Russians had said was one of their primary objectives, was to prevent NATO from coming into Ukraine. And then that was leading into the Istanbul arguments or discussions then something a lot happened. I wonder if you have any insight as to what happened with Zelenski that made him say that publicly and then radically changed on the backside

Doctorow: 8:43
Well, I wouldn’t take anything Zelenski said then or any time since as being … the God’s truth.

Davis:
Fair enough.

Doctorow;
The man … is a politician This type of little white lies or even big lies are the small change of politics. Now, you asked what is new in the book or value to the book, and I want to state this is not a comprehensive history of the Ukraine War. The fact that it’s 772 pages does not mean that I was writing a history. I was writing diaries. By that I mean my journalism is a personal variety, that is what I see, very often what I see around me, what I take part in. And in this case, the contribution that is particularly interesting, I think, to readers are the visits I made to Russia during, from the start of the war, at a time when there were almost no Western journalists in Russia, first because they had left during the whole period of CoViD, and then because when it was possible to come back and visas were again being issued, the war started.

And many Western media withheld their journalists, so took their journalists out of Russia, like the “Financial Times”, took them to Riga where they stay to this day because they were threatened by, or they felt threatened by Russia’s legislation against spreading false information about their armed forces, for which you could face a criminal penalty. And reporting with a Western slant could run the risk of that. So there were very few, almost no journalists there. There were very few people who were receiving visas of any kind. I happened to have what is called a humanitarian visa, since my wife is Russian.

10:38
And that was one of the few exceptions which enabled you to get a visa and stay, and come to Russia. And I used that, and I recorded in this book what I saw around me. The book is not about the front. The book is about the rear. It’s about how Russians fared during the war.

And that is, what they suffered or didn’t suffer in terms of the “sanctions from hell” that the United States imposed, and Europe followed up with several months delay. And my reports are that initially, yes, there was a little bit of shock, but very quickly Russia adapted. The financial crisis was averted because they had been taken out of script in the banking system, and things got very normal. In fact, with the change of suppliers, I’m speaking now about food products, tropical fruits and so forth, the Russian supermarkets were very well stocked. And these are the things I report, not just the supermarkets, but the change over commodities in stores and so forth, and life in general, and the feeling of people, people on the ground, not just elites, but people on the ground: how are they reacting? And I record here the surge in patriotism when it took place.

12:01
I just, I’d like to say, coming back to the question you posed, what happened at the start and the change and what was going on during the negotiations in March, April between the Russians and the Ukrainians, between Putin’s team and Zelensky’s team. One thing that came out and surprised me when I went through my material, is that I had almost no notes on those negotiations.

Now, particularly after Mr. Putin, I think it was November, December, stood up in front of journalists and waved this 100-, 200-page document that had been initialed by the heads of both negotiating teams and just needed to have one final signature by the two presidents. After he waved that, and after we know the whole story about Starmer, sorry, about Johnson’s, about Boris Johnson’s visit, which is said to have been the clincher to take Mr. Zelenski out of any thoughts of accommodating Russians on their war demands and to proceed with the war in the belief that he would get full support, military and financial, from the West.

13:18
Well, that is something that doesn’t ring true any more when I look at my notes. And I hope readers will find this and appreciate what it means. The reason why it comes up, and I’ll try to explain it now, is that neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians were very happy about that almost-signed peace treaty. They neither.

So they were– Russian patriots think that Putin was giving away much too much because the territorial side of it was negligible for the Russians. And for the Ukrainians, their patriots would find it objectionable because of the new Trump conditions.

Davis:
Well yeah, and then now then that’s– not a whole lot has changed over that. And the fact, I think that the two camps have almost widened their views where we are now, which is going to have an impact on where this war is going to go here. And I want to get into, you know, kind of the current situation here. And with NATO, there’s an interesting statement made by Tammy Bruce yesterday at the State Department, which I’d like your view on.

Bruce: 14:30
What we do know is what apparently bothers Russia is the fact that NATO is going to be strongly returning to its original roots of being a deterrent. And that is what NATO’s job has been the … advancement of their commitment to defense is remarkable and not only it’s– we of course support NATO completely and their role is imperative for a safe and stable Europe, and that’s the point: being a deterrent. This kind of defense spending helps them achieve that, and of course it is something that would not have happened without President Trump’s encouragement and demand. And so we’re excited about that.

Davis: 15:07
So, you know, for the longest time, going all the way back to 2023, Trump had been talking about how he was going to end the war in a day. And then after he got elected, he said he was going to have it done even before he took office, etc.

And then, well, that crashed into reality. And then he said something about 100 days and then it was, all right, we’re days away from walking. Of course, none of that ever happened. And now that it’s like he’s not even hardly talking about the end of the war at all. Now we’re going into, “Well, let’s just kind of expand NATO here.”

But one of the things she said in there that really got my attention was she said, “We want to return to NATO’s role of being a defensive alliance and setting up for deterrence.” And I’m like, okay, if you’re returning to that, what was it? Because that’s the only thing it’s ever supposed to have been. How do you interpret that?

Doctorow: 15:54
Well, her statement indicates that there are various flowers blooming in this garden. And I’m not sure who the gardener is any more. Let’s assume that it’s Donald Trump. I think she’s not clued in. My own reading of what happened at the Hague summit is that Donald Trump got what he wanted. He got this written, signed commitment by all of the NATO countries, so we’ll put Spain on the side as an exception, but all of the other 26 NATO, sorry, it’s more than 26, [about] 30 NATO countries, that they are raising their budgeting for military purposes to on the hard side, three percent.

And if you want to throw in the soft side, the one and a half percent on top of that, that is allowed to be allocated for infrastructure development of roads and bridges, supposedly, which are said to have a military value. In any case, if they would rate go from, let’s take Belgium, it’s 1.3 percent. That’s all that Belgium has as a military budget today in terms of GDP. To take that to two percent, they will do it this year by the kind of financial fraud that represents the one and a half percent I just mentioned a minute ago.

17:14
And they can’t go further in 2026. There’s no wiggle room. There is no possibility of raising taxes, which are also already the highest in the Europe, if not in the world, and there is no possibility of taking out loans because the country is over-indebted. So they signed to something which they cannot deliver. They signed to it because they expect Mr.– I didn’t see any landmarks in that commitment to achieve this or that at a given date before 2035.

That’s to say, the target is well after Mr. Trump leaves office, and the expectation that his successor will … be more lenient and stand step back from that. There is no intention in Europe to fulfill those commitments, which they cannot do.

18:09
On Mr. Trump’s side, that’s fine. He has no problem with that. They don’t fulfill it, and his Article 5 commitment doesn’t exist any more. Moreover, it gives him the possibility of cutting back on America’s contributions to NATO without anybody [having] a right to complain.

Davis:
Right.

Doctorow:
They don’t they don’t fulfill their end of the bargain, and we can’t–

Davis:
I agree. Yeah, we’ll see how that ends up playing out. You know, one … of the other I guess participants if you want to look at it that way, in this whole issue of NATO saying we’re going to go up to 5% GDP on our defense spending, et cetera, was the Russian side, because they had a lot of things to say in the aftermath of that about how we’re going to bankrupt ourselves and all this kind of stuff. And you have said that you actually find that to be a mistake on the part of Sergey Lavrov and other Russian speakers. Why is that?

Doctorow: 19:11
Well, there’s a general tendency among the backers– most of the American political establishment, to think that people who disagree with the American policies that Biden was following are all stooges of the Kremlin. And that is not just a malign characterization of everyone, but it misses the point that those of us who try hard to be honest, and I put myself in that category, have no hesitation to say when the Russians are doing something stupid. And I characterized the remarks that Sergey Lavrov made as very poorly advised. I’ll give a very good reason. During our elections, particularly the last presidential election, Putin was very careful not to tip his hand as to which side he supported for the obvious reason that that person would be denounced as a friend of Putin.

20:17
Somehow that lesson has been forgotten when Lavrov opened his mouth and started giving advice to Europe about what they should do about their military budgets. That is downright stupid, because we don’t need that help. There are even in the “New York Times”, in its front page, at least in the European edition, which I read two days ago, they had an opinion article, invited a guest author, which said plainly that it is risky, or they said the word he used was delusory, for Europe to think that it can re-industrialize and free itself from dependence on the United States by heavy investment in European weapons industry. That is in the “New York Times” on the front page. So nobody needed a helping hand from Mr. Lavrov or from Mr. Putin, because Lavrov, again, this is another fallacy that many of my peers make from my perspective, to think that Lavrov is an independent personality, political factor. He isn’t. Mr. Lavrov is a very skillful implementer of whatever his boss tells him to do.

He was a strong nationalist when Putin was his boss. He became a very weak, flabby spokesman for Russia when the namby-pamby Medvedev was the president, and now he’s pretty much back in form under Putin, and it was actually– a lead for this information war offensive of this past weekend came from Putin himself. So I don’t blame Lavrov solely, but he should have been more cautious. To say that this would be a catastrophic loss for Europe, for NATO, was not very wise.

Davis: 22:22
Well and then let’s see you brought up Vladimir Putin because one of the things that he did say, which might fall into a different category, maybe something that was pretty straightforward and honest, is that he still says, despite what the West claims constantly that he’s not willing to have a negotiated settlement, he has been saying he’s very much willing to have a negotiated settlement, but he said in this recent comment here in June, there’s an other alternative side.

Putin: 22:50 [English voice over]
It all started with the fact that we were lied to, that we were deceived, that we were swindled about the NATO enlargement to the east, because the entire world is aware that Russia received promises that “not an inch eastward. NATO is not going to enlarge to the east.”

Then one wave of enlargement, the second wave of enlargement. And we keep saying that security of one country or of a group of countries cannot be insured at the expense of any other states. And there are documents signed to this tune. And then they kept expanding and we were told, “Well, you should not be concerned, you should not be afraid, it’s not a threat to you.”

23:33
And when we said that we do believe it’s a threat to us, then they did not say anything in response. They just told us to go far away with our opinions. No one wanted to listen to our opinions, but we know better what is a threat to us. It’s our right to define what’s a threat to us, and how big the threat is from one side or from the other side. But no one was listening to us and they kept on acting like that.

Isn’t that an aggressive behavior? Because that’s exactly what aggressive behavior means. And the West doesn’t want to notice this.

Davis: 24:11
See, now that’s in a lot of, you know, Tammy Bruce, which we just showed you, talking about what all of NATO agreed to is this increase in defense spending, this increase in military capacity. And Russia seems to be saying– and you tell me if you agree with this or not– that look, this whole NATO coming into Ukraine is one of the reasons we attacked in February 2022 in the first place. And so if you’re talking going up now, there’s gonna be a commensurate reaction to it. How do you see that?

Doctorow: 24:39
Well, yeah, of course. The expectation of Russia is an eventual Ukrainian capitulation, which will be enshrined in a document signed by whoever is a successor, a head of state in Ukraine after Mr. Zelensky is pushed aside or suffers some … misfortune.

But that is not the issue. That is something in passing. This war is not about Ukraine. This war is about the relationship with NATO, as was perfectly clear when the Russians presented NATO and the United States with their demands that it withdraw its presence, its establishment from all of the new member states after 1997. The new, those countries as came in the successive waves of NATO expansion.

25:36
This is the primary issue, and it is the one which Putin had in mind when he spoke about the causes of war, we have to resolve the initial causes of war.

Davis:
And so what does that tell you that, you know, this is heading? If we’re, if Russia is saying, you know, that NATO is not something we’re going to be passive to. NATO is saying, and we’re going to keep going anyway, where’s this war going to end up going?

Doctorow: 26:08
Well, I think the Russians can play a waiting game very nicely. I’m fairly confident or certain that Mr. Putin, despite the rhetoric you’ve heard, and certainly despite the rhetoric of Mr. Lavrov, is confident that NATO will not be able to achieve this. They also achieve the increased military spending. And not just that, They are following very closely political developments in Germany.

In Germany Mr. Merz is the lead personality. He’s grabbed the microphone away from Emmanuel Macron who otherwise wants to run out in front of whatever the marching band is and take control.

Mr. Merz, or Chancellor Metz, has that role now. And it is improbable, I think, from Russian analysis, that he will stay in power for long if he proceeds with not just the trillion euros in investment in German military production and increasing the armed forces, but if he looks for the manning, which is critical. We know from the remarks of his defense minister, Pistorius, that the attempts, recent attempts to induce young Germans to enroll in the armed forces have been another failure. They’re going to give this a bit more time, and if it doesn’t produce results then they will seek to introduce a draft.

And there you have the end of the German government, because the German government, coalition government, has a very narrow majority in their parliament, the Bundestag, 17 votes. It’s dependent on support from its junior partner, the Socialists, the SPD. And the SPD is split down– is split, not down the middle, no, it’s true. There are more socialists who back their fellow socialist Pistorius in proposing a draft, but there is a substantial minority, as I’m repeating the words of the “Financial Times”. They call it a substantial minority within the SPD who oppose this, oppose rearmament and particularly oppose the imposition of a draft. They vote against it and Mr Merz is history. I don’t believe he will be a candidate for a further election, because he’s widely hated in Germany.

Davis: 28:52
Well, you talked about Macron, and now trying to take the mic and, or is it Merz coming in here. The other guy who’s vying for that microphone is Keir Starmer and he seems to be focused a lot on continuing to give more British money.

Starmer: 29:08
I told President Zelenskyy at Downing Street on Monday that we will harden our resolve. We struck an agreement together to share battlefield technology, accelerating our support for Ukraine’s defence, while boosting British security and British jobs. We committed to providing hundreds more air defence missiles, paid for not by the British taxpayer but with money from Russia’s frozen assets. And together with Europe, Canada and our Indo-Pacific partners, we announced that we will deliver 40 billion euros of military aid to Ukraine this year, matching last year’s pledge in full. There is a path to a just and lasting peace, but it will only come through flipping the pressure onto Putin.

29:58
His position is weaker than he claims, So I urged all our partners, including the US, to step up the pressure now with more sanctions and more military support to bring Russia to the table to agree an unconditional ceasefire leading to serious negotiations.

Davis:
Now how long do you suppose that the UK can keep going down this path? I mean he talked about how much they gave last year, they’re going to give a same amount of this year. You talked about the difficulties politically with the Merz inside the German government. Do you see any commensurate issues with the British government?

Doctorow: 30:36
I don’t have to see them. They’re on the BBC and British newspapers today. After his finance minister, Reeves, failed in her attempt to introduce a substantial reform in the budget to their assistance to the less well-off part of the population. This was a disastrous failure in parliament. She broke out into tears.

That’s probably the first time any of these alligator lady British politicians has actually broken into tears in parliament. There was speculation first that she wouldn’t last, that she would resign. Now the speculation is that Starmer isn’t going to last. Because he belatedly came out to the press that he supports her fully. And I think he just condemned himself to loss of power by saying that.

31:38
Again, the Russians every evening have, or starting at like five o’clock their time to seven o’clock their time. They have this program, 60 Minutes, which is a commentary and discussion program, which has a very big section, like a third of it, is long video clips and long excerpts from major press, United States, UK, Germany, France, and they show all this. So Mr. Putin is perfectly apprised, as is the Russian establishment, foreign policy establishment, of these deep fissures. They’re also aware of the development today that, with respect to Ukraine and NATO, that the Poles have joined Fico of Slovakia and Orban of Hungary in taking a position against Ukraine joining NATO.

32:45
And of course, they’re against Ukraine joining the EU because it is a big threat to their agricultural economy, since Ukraine has vastly cheaper production costs in things like poultry and in oils, vegetable oils and in grains, than Poland or France or any other European member state has. So the fractures are there, and they’re not the whim of one personality or another. They’re based on real contradictions between the interests of the Ukrainians and the interests of member states of the European Union. So the Russians can afford to take their time. I don’t see that– this is my answer to your your overriding question of how the Russians will respond to this … NATO resolution to raise their finances and become an effective deterrent, as this government, US government spokeswoman said. And I don’t think they expect any of this to happen.

Davis: 33:56
Well, where … does that, where does that tell you that this is going to end up going then, because you have the NATO leaders across the board talking, in my view, just almost fiction that the things that can never come to pass, “just and lasting peace”, as Starmer says almost routinely, you know, “we’re going to help Ukraine for as long as it takes” some of these others and all the things that several these other leaders say, like Emmanuel Macron, etc. But they can’t happen on the battlefield, and so Russia seems to be very patient.

And I wonder if you could in the last bit of time we have here kind of talk about the different approach that the Western world has as opposed to the approach that the Russian world has. You mentioned at the outset that we think that war has to be shock and awe. Russians have a different viewpoint. Where do you see after now three and a half years of war, where’s this going next?

Doctorow: 34:46
They had a different viewpoint. I wouldn’t say they personally are shock and awe, but they become much more destructive. Destructive of civil infrastructure and less careful about avoiding civilian casualties. The Russians in the last two, three weeks have staged ever more impressive, ever bigger aerial attacks on major Ukrainian cities, and they’ve moved into an area that they were very cautious not to touch, lest they raise severe criticism in the West. They have now attacked Ukraine west of Lvov, that’s to say between Lvov and the Polish border, which is a staging ground for all ground-delivered military material coming from the United States and Western Europe.

35:43
They’ve now attacked west of Lvov. So there are attacks on all major cities, daily attacks by precision missile strikes that are set off by their Black Sea fleet. Remember the Black Sea fleet, which the Brits and everyone else said has been has been taken out of the war by these by these wonderful naval drones which the Brits supplied? Well forget that. Those ships, wherever exactly they are in the Black Sea, they are a major launching site for these precision missile attacks on the Ukrainian cities. They are taking out refineries, they’re taking out all stockpiles of parts for drones that they can identify, they are very, very damaging daily.

35:40
And so the Russians have taken off the gloves. They’re being very tough. And the part of that is a result of the benefits they are enjoying from the distraction of all Western media and American attention of the Iran-Israeli war. From page one, “Russian aggression”, in quotation marks, in Ukraine, has moved to page 25, shall we say, figuratively speaking, in our newspapers. Nobody’s too excited about it.

They’re very excited– now, at the same time, the latest issues of the “New York Times”, the “Financial Times”, are admitting openly that the Russians are succeeding and are pushing back the Ukrainians. So they’re preparing the broad public for a Ukrainian collapse. And Mr. Trump’s cutoff of supplies of Patriots and other air defense missiles, his cutoff of 155-millimeter artillery shells and … the offensive missiles that … the United States have been supplying to Ukraine — all of this puts the Ukrainians in a very tough spot. I don’t see capitulation coming tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, but by the end of the summer, it could well be.

Davis: 38:10
Yeah, and that is so ironic if just not anguishing, because if the end is going to come at the end of the summer, then it should come today instead of letting another some number of thousands more people pointlessly die just to drag it out. But that’s where we are. I don’t see anybody that’s going to change that anytime soon. But we’re going to continue to watch this and see what happens and we’ll just call balls and strikes as they happen.

So thank you for coming on today and just remind people of your book there, “War Diaries, Volume 1: The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022 – 2023”. You can find that on Amazon, see right there. Thank you very much and we appreciate you coming on.

Doctorow:
Well, my pleasure. I hope that there will be a final Volume 2. I don’t want to think about a Volume 3.

Davis: 38:54
Right. Yes, yes. Let’s let that be the final one. I agree completely. Thank you very much. And we will see you guys next time on the Daniel Davis Deep Dive.

Transcript submitted by a reader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnusdxbXzp0

Napolitano: 0:30
Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for “Judging Freedom”. Today is Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025. Professor Gilbert Doctorow will be here with us in just a moment on Russia’s information war against NATO and other relevant topics. But first this.

[commercial message]

1:58
Professor Doctorow, welcome here, my dear friend. What is your understanding of the current status of the special military operation in Ukraine or at least the Kremlin’s view of the current status of the special military operation in Ukraine?

Gilbert Doctorow, PhD:
Well, the Russians announced yesterday with great pride that they had completely liberated Lugansk oblast, which was one of the two regions formerly of Ukraine that we call the Donbas. There was, about three percent was left under Ukrainian occupation xxxxxxx as they were viewed from Russia. But that was cleaned up. And now the whole of Lugansk is theirs. They were also making substantial progress in Donetsk.

They are going after men more than going after territory. They want to deprive Ukraine of an effective military and do that at minimum cost to themselves. And so they’re proceeding not so much in a showy way by territory that they seize, although they are adding several square kilometers every day or two, but they are doing it in a way that the losses of personnel by Ukraine are again well over a thousand a day.

Napolitano:
Wow.

Doctorow:
In the Donbass, they continue to advance and to bomb and destroy the major logistical hubs that still are under Ukrainian control in Donetsk. And that is, first of all, Pakrovsk, as the Ukrainians know it, or Krasnoyarsk, as it’s called in Russian. So they show you every day this town, or that town, well, settlement would be a better title, that they are taking control of in the Donbas. The Russian flag goes up, or even a regional flag representing the military unit that was responsible for this particular action. For example, it could be the Baikal, troops from Baikal, and they would raise a Baikal flag over this or that hamlet.

4:21
But let’s be clear about it. The Ukrainians are moving back, but their lines are not collapsing. And I wouldn’t want to read into this, into the progress that the Russians are making, the suggestion that Ukraine is on the point of collapse. Nonetheless, everyone knows well that the Trump administration has curtailed, if not stopped, shipment of many valuable military assets to Ukraine. I think, first of all, those Patriots are not going to Ukraine. That’s clear as day. And other anti-aircraft.

Napolitano:
Let me just stop you for a second, because consistent with what you’ve said, Larry Johnson says, Ukraine will not be getting the Patriot missiles as you said. The thing they need the most, I know you’re not a military person, neither am I, but we can use our sense of reason. The 155 millimeter artillery shells, because the American supply of those is dangerously low. GMLRS rockets, I’m not sure what that is, and Stinger Hellfire missiles. All of a sudden, the Spigot has been partially closed. Please continue.

Doctorow: 5:37
Yes, well, the Spigot has been closed, and that sends a message to the Ukrainian military that they have to be particularly parsimonious with their forces and avoid direct confrontation with the Russians where possible, because they simply don’t have the supplies of weaponry, offensive and defensive, that they would like and that they need. So their situation is dire, but not desperate, not hopeless, and not urgent in the sense that tomorrow, or the week after, the capitulation. It won’t be.

Nonetheless, the Russians are feeling good about the way the war is going. And Mr. Putin has probably picked up a little bit more support among wavering Russian patriots who would like to see action faster.

Napolitano: 6:35
Is there pressure on President Putin from his right, to get more aggressive? I’ll just throw a name out there. I don’t know if he says these things for PR reasons or because he’s actually saying this to his colleague. A former president Medvedev, for example, has from time to time pounds the table. Is that pressure still on President Putin? Or if it is, does it go in one ear and out the other?

Doctorow:
Well, as regards Medvedev, he’s well under control by President Putin, and he is the attack dog that Mr. Putin has set up. He’s not attacking Putin. He’s taking the initiative to put the West on notice about Russia’s plans for continuing the war. So I wouldn’t look at Medvedev as a force against Putin, not at all. He’s an instrument of Putin.

But there are people, of course. There are, well, even this political scientist, Karaganov, who a year and a half ago was calling for a military strike in Germany using the Oreshnik, using even a tactical nuclear weapon to demonstrate that the Russians are serious, and to take their red lines with all due seriousness. So that pressure exists, but I don’t believe that Mr. Putin is responding to it or is forced to change his tactics, and not to mention strategy, as a result of this, since the armed forces have good news to put up on the television screen every day.

Napolitano: 8:22
Right. Right, right. What is the current attitude of Russia toward NATO? Taking into account, of course, the rather extraordinary telephone conversation that President Putin had with French President Macron yesterday for two hours, the first time they spoke in three years.

Doctorow:
Well, this is really two questions. And I don’t, I want to be sure that I get a handle on both of them.

Napolitano:
Sure, sure. Address it as you see fit, please.

Doctorow:
Both of them are very important. I think that the general public and the Western media are interpreting the call by Macron to Putin in the wrong way. We have very little information coming from anyone other than Mr. Putin as to what they talked about. He said they talked about, that he delivered to Mr. Macron Russia’s view of how this war will end. And we all know that; I won’t repeat the points, that they have to go back to the original source of the problem, resolve that, and not just have a ceasefire. So Mr. Putin used the opportunity to tell Macron directly what he otherwise would know indirectly from the Russian memorandum delivered to the Ukrainians at their last Istanbul meeting.

9:40
However, that is misleading. My understanding of the reason for the call is rather different. Macron reached out to Putin to involve the Russians in reinstating the old agreements with Iran over its enrichment program, the one that Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of. He– Russia was a party to that, and so it’s impossible for the European Union to proceed and try to reinsert itself into the peace process with Iran, since they’ve been totally sideline by the United States. If they reinsert themselves, they have to bring in Putin.

Let’s just remember that until relatively recently, when Viktor Orban went to speak with Putin, he was denounced by the EU for breaking ranks with the rest of the EU member states over the isolation of Russia. And here we have Mr. Macron, as if he’s doing this on his own, spontaneously, he’s a nice guy, he’s just changed his view. No, He did this as the emissary of the EU on behalf of Kallas and von der Leyen, who want to get Russia back, to help them get back into the Iran negotiate.

Napolitano: 11:01
Do you think he called up his buddies Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz and said, “I’m about to talk to Vladimir. What do you want me to say to him?” Or do you think he did it on his own, with just the EU leadership backing?

Doctorow:
I think it’s the latter. Well, that’s sufficient. That’s entirely sufficient. He is running for the microphone and to be at the head of the band at any opportunity he has. And so when, say, Kallas or von der Leyen tapped him and said, “Look, we need somebody to reach out to Putin”, he would have been overjoyed. And I don’t think he would look for the consent from Merz who is answering–

Napolitano:
It’s odd that they had their conversation yesterday, or maybe there’s a connection here. You can analyze it for us please. French missiles were used to kill Russian civilians just two days ago. Could that have been the impetus for the Macron phone call?

Doctorow: 12:05
I think it would have pushed things along, yes, because Macron would be aware that Russian animus towards France had just gone up a few levels in light of that. This missile was originally identified, I think, by Western sources as having been a Storm shadow. Technically speaking–

Napolitano:
If it were, that would make it British, right?

Doctorow:
No. Well, if you call it Storm Shadow, it was British. If you call it, I think, SCALP, I forget what the French call it, it’s the same missile.

Napolitano:
Okay, but I mean, the Western sources thought the missile that killed the Russian civilians came from Starmer. In fact, it came from Macron. Am I correct?

Doctorow:
You’re exactly correct. Now this is not my assumption, it’s not some contacts I had with Russian military, nothing of the sort. I’m repeating what was on Russian television yesterday. And whether that is true or not is almost irrelevant. If the Russians are saying there was a French missile, then for all practical purposes in diplomatic relations, it was a French missile.

Napolitano: 13:05
Wow. … What is going on between Russia and Azerbaijan as we speak? And how potentially inflammatory is this?

Doctorow:
It is inflammatory, but it has interest, I think, for the audience of this program for several reasons. I think the most prominent reason is that– I’ve said in the past, Russia is not a cuddly rabbit. Russia is what it is, which is a major power, and major powers sometimes behave badly. And in the case of the relations with Azerbaijan, Moscow behaved very badly. This problem, and it is a big problem right now, but it is more in symbolic ways. The Azerbaijanis are giving every day some new signal to Moscow, “Boy, we don’t like what you’re doing, and we don’t like you.”

And they say that openly. There are accusations against the Kremlin directly in Azerbaijani media. And where did this start? By a very shabby response from the Kremlin to the downing of a passenger airplane, Azerbaijani airplane, about six months ago, as it was flying in the south of Russia and in an area which was under attack by Ukrainian drones at the time. This is– I’m giving you the Russian side of the story– that it was mistakenly downed, although they didn’t even admit that, it was mistakenly shot down because Russia was responding to the drones that were in the air in that area coming in from Ukraine.

14:50
Well, whether, whatever truth there is in that, there was a mistake, la la, the most important thing was what the Russians didn’t do after this catastrophe which took many lives. They did not apologize to Azerbaijan. They did not offer to pay compensation for the plane, or more importantly, to the passengers on that plane. This was shocking. In international behavior, this was terrible.

And to this day, the Kremlin has not said, “We are sorry; we made a mistake.” And in Baku, they’re furious. They have to be– in February when this occurred. Shortly afterwards, they closed Russia’s cultural center in Baku, Russia House. This last few days, they’ve shut down all Russian language courses in their secondaries, in their school system.

These are clear messages. They’ve also arrested the editors of Sputnik, this Russian news agency in Baku, about which Moscow is now howling to the skies. The whole problem began with Moscow; and from the perspective of Azerbaijan, they were behaving like bullies and like imperialists. And I mention this to highlight this point. Let’s not get carried away and believe that every, that Russia is always an innocent, No, Russia is a state power, and state powers behave badly from time to time, and they have to be told that.

Now as to how serious it is, I believe that there is foreign intervention here to exacerbate the situation.

Napolitano: 16:36
When you say that, you mean MI6, CIA, or Mossad.

Doctorow:
None of the above: French. I believe the French are somehow involved. Look, the French are very active in the Caucasus region. They are the ones behind the rebellion, call it, of the prime minister of Armenia against relations with Moscow, this Nikol Pashinyan, who is making a bid to join the EU, who has been absent from major meetings of former Soviet–

Napolitano:
Gee, I wonder if this was discussed between presidents Macron and Putin yesterday.

Doctorow:
It could be, but of course none of this would come out to the public. But as I said, the French are mixed up in the Caucuses, and look at the map, Azerbaijan is right there. So it is not inconceivable that the French could have been active in exacerbating the issues.

Napolitano: 17:36
Let’s go to Iran if we could, before we conclude. What is your view, Professor Doctorow, about why Donald Trump dropped those 30,000 pound bombs? Was it a regime change? Was it just to get Netanyahu off his back? Was it a serious attempt to set back the nuclear program? Or was it a pinprick, a big pinprick, designed not to kill human beings but to bring them to the negotiating table?

Doctorow:
I think it was all of the above. The question really for any analyst is to weight those various factors, but they’re all present. I think that– well, there’s one that you didn’t mention, which I jumped on first when I was trying to make sense out of his action, and that is to prevent Netanyahu from using nuclear weapons against these Iranian positions. Because absent American assistance, that is the only thing that would be in the Israeli arsenal that could have a chance of doing the job. So I think to prevent the Israelis from doing something horrific and to take the ball away from Netanyahu and to eliminate either de facto really or in words the Iranian nuclear program and put an end to this whole crisis in the Middle East around the nuclear program that has been a 30 year and idee fixe of Netanyahu and his associates.

Napolitano: 19:17
How was it that Mossad, which claims to be the most effective intelligence service on the planet, so grossly underestimated the power and ferocity and destructive capability of Iran’s retaliation? Didn’t they warn Netanyahu accurately of what would happen?

Doctorow:
I think they didn’t. There are a number of mistakes made by Israeli intelligence, which were suffering a real case of hubris after their delight in decapitating the neighboring, I would say, cat’s paws of Iran in Lebanon with their gadgets that exploded in the hands of Hezbollah leaders.

They certainly were delighted with having set the plan, this goes back several years, was waiting to spring the plan on Iran to decapitate its top generals in their forces and the leading scientists in their nuclear program. They had their eyes perfectly focused on minutiae, and they were suffering from near-sightedness. They didn’t focus their eyes on the big picture. They should have known about the 40,000 missiles. They should have known about the hidden launchers underground, which the Israeli air force could not decimate. And my assumption is that they gave Netanyahu inadequate information, which is for an intelligence agency, the most damning thing you can say.

Napolitano:
Right, right. I suppose the only thing worse is what the American intelligence agency does, telling the president what they think he wants to hear, whether it’s connected to the facts or not.

Professor Doctorow, thank you very much. Thanks for your time as always. And again, Thank you for all those notes and insights that you periodically send. I read every word of them and appreciate all the thoughtfulness behind it.

I guess they don’t celebrate the 4th of July in Europe. They certainly don’t celebrate it in England. I know you’re not in England, but have a nice weekend. It’s a big holiday weekend here, and we’ll look forward to seeing you next week.

Doctorow:
Well, we will celebrate. We’ll cool off. I mean, it’s been 95 degrees in Brussels. Tomorrow it drops to 70.

Napolitano:
Oh, nice to hear. All the best to you, Professor. Thank you.

Doctorow:
Thanks, bye-bye.

Napolitano: 22:03
Sure. And coming up later today at 2 o’clock this afternoon, Aaron Mate; at 3 o’clock, Phil Giraldi; at 4 o’clock, we’ll find him, Max Blumenthal.

Judge Napolitano for “Judging Freedom”.