Author: Gilbert Doctorow

“Are you aware that #IstandwithRussia and #IstandwithPutin are among the top tending hashtags in India?”

The observation above was written to me by a professional Indian journalist in the employ of a leading worldwide news provider. This insight has persuaded me to pay more attention to the Indian “market,” which may yet play a decisive role in the denouement of the ongoing reshaping of global politics brought on by the Russia-Ukraine war.

Yesterday I was scheduled to appear in panel discussions of that war hosted by two of India’s best known news providers, Times Now and the India Today Group.  I was unlucky on both. There were some technical problems at the former which arose while I was in the Zoom holding pattern. They could not be resolved and I was disconnected. And at the latter Group a most peculiar editorial decision was taken to scrub its discussion of the incident at the Ukrainian nuclear plant in Zaporozhye in favor of coverage of the death of cricket player and so all panelists were figuratively speaking sent home.

Continue reading “India’s Moment To Shine”

What I am about to say should be self-evident to anyone following closely the move of Russian forces into Ukraine and having a recollection of what the same Russian general command did in Crimea and then did again in their Syrian campaign.  Regrettably, Western audiences do not find these observations on CNN, the BBC, The Financial Times and The New York Times, not to mention on the still less reputable television channels and print media that provide 99% of the (mis)information which the public receives daily on the Ukrainian conflict and on much else. Their producers and editorial boards, their journalist staff all are looking at one another or just contemplating their belly buttons. They have for some years now been living in a virtual world and paying little heed to the real world.  I can only be surprised that an astute observer of commercial opportunities like Zuckerberg took so long to launch Meta.

I have three points to make today about how the Russians are conducting their military campaign in Ukraine.

The first point is a generalization from the remarks I made yesterday about their humane treatment of the enemy’s servicemen. This approach to the military tasks results from awareness that the military is a handmaiden to diplomacy and to politics, not vice versa, as has been the case in each of the major wars that the United States fought and ultimately lost in the past thirty years. That is why the Russians are not practicing “shock and awe,” which is the American way of war.

Continue reading “Gilbert Doctorow: The Russian Way of War”

This was a comment posted on my website this morning from a reader of my last essay “Meet the new Proactive Russia” posted on 16 February, though in light of the latest developments it now seems ages ago.

Yes, indeed, Mr. Putin yesterday moved on from the stalled talks with the USA and NATO over Russia’s 15 December draft treaties creating a new security architecture in Europe. As I had foreseen, he moved on to Plan B. He formally recognized the independence and sovereignty of the two breakaway provinces, Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republics in Eastern Ukraine. Moreover, he signed treaties of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance with both. What “mutual assistance” means was made clear immediately when the Russian President ordered his armed forces to move into the respective republics as “peace keepers.”

Barring some quixotic wish of Ukrainian president Zelensky to enter into armed conflict with Russia over the Donbas and face certain annihilation of his army and of his regime, it is probable that the smoldering war in Eastern Ukraine of eight years duration will now become a “frozen conflict,” in line with South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, with Transdnistria in Moldova. Of course, that does not mean that Mr. Putin has resolved his broader problems with Ukraine, as I discuss below. But invasion would be the least effective way of addressing them, as we shall see. There are other options to get the job done without spilling blood and without giving the Collective West cause to impose the “sanctions from hell” that still remain in abeyance.

Continue reading “Putin Recognizes Donbas Republics: What Comes Next?”

As I have indicated en passant in prior articles devoted to the unfolding crisis in and around Ukraine, a substantial part of the added value I seek to bring to reporting and analysis is derived from my following the Russian electronic and print media closely, whereas the vast majority of commentators who populate Western television news and op-ed pages only offer up synthetic, rearranged factoids and unsubstantiated claims from the reports and analysis of their peers. Investigative reporting does not exist among mainstream. Reprinting handouts from anonymous sources in high places of the Pentagon and State Department is the closest they come to daily fresh “news.” Such is the nature of the latest front page stories coming from British intelligence about false flag events in Donbas now allegedly being prepared by the Kremlin to justify Russia’s coming invasion.

Last evening’s Vladimir Solovyov talk show on Russian state Channel One provided yet another justification for paying close attention to what they are saying in Moscow. The program was dedicated to the Donbas and included several politicians and political scientists from both Kiev and the Donetsk-Lugansk republics. The most interesting remarks were made by a Russian speaking former Rada member, Spiridon Kilinkarov, who noted that Western mainstream is every day publishing maps showing the positioning of Russian forces at the several common borders of Russia/Belarus and Ukraine. They also carry maps showing the likely routes to be used by the Russian invaders. But Western media are never showing the positions of Ukrainian troops, which one might expect are there to counter Russian threats. The speaker went on to say that now two-thirds of the Ukrainian military or about 150,000 troops are all concentrated on the line of demarcation with Donbas. That is to say, there are almost no Ukrainian forces in the northeast around Kharkiv facing Russian military or to the north of Kiev to face the combined Russian-Belarus military. If this is true, then Mr. Zelensky’s insistence that he does not expect a Russian invasion is justified by Ukrainian boots on the ground. If Russia is holding a pistol to the head of Ukraine, as Boris Johnson stated earlier this week, then Kiev is holding a pistol to the head of the rebel provinces.

Continue reading “Look at the Map! Where Are the Ukrainian Military Forces Concentrated and Where Are They Absent?”

As the Cold War-2 unfolds, shades of the past return to haunt those of us old enough to recollect and not merely to have read about them.  One such recollection was brought to life on Monday at the session of the United Nations Security Council convened at U.S. demand to consider the ongoing threat of war at the Russian-Ukrainian border.

In his career as Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union from 1957 to 1985, a period of such length that the present incumbent Sergei Lavrov’s 18 years would seem to render him still a boy in short trousers, Andrei Andreevich Gromyko was the dour face of the world’s second superpower at the UN and at all other international gatherings. He held his own in the give and take of debate, and did not mince his words. Yet, by his intelligence, sophistication and steadfast pursuit of national interest he won the respect of adversaries as well as allies.

Continue reading “Mr. Nyet Returns: Russia’s In-Your-Face Behavior at the United Nations This Week”

You need a sense of irony, an open mind and sang froid to see what the Russians are doing in stoking the confrontation with the Collective West, which is what they are plainly doing all the while denying it. In what follows, I will try to apply these very approaches to answer the highly topical question of what comes next now that the United States formally rejected the essential Russian demand that NATO expansion to the East be halted in its tracks and that the Alliance backtrack to the status quo ante of the spring 1997.

Over the past couple of weeks, every few days I have given lengthy interviews or participated in half hour televised panel discussions of the East-West confrontation being played out at the Russian-Ukrainian border. My hosts included RT (Russia Today) in a chat at the Russian embassy, Brussels following the Russia-NATO Council talks of 12 December; TRT World, a Turkish public service global television channel broadcasting in English; Belarus television’s interview at my home this past Friday examining the implications for Minsk of its close military collaboration with Russia at the Ukraine border; PressTV of Iran; and antiwar radio of Scott Horton, a hero in the American peace movement.

Continue reading “Russia and the Collective West: What Comes Next?”