Author: Gilbert Doctorow

This past week Russian media devoted a great deal of attention to the thirtieth anniversary of the dissolution of the USSR under the terms of the Belovezha Accords signed by the presidents of the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus on 8 December 1991.

A new documentary film entitled “Thirty Years without the Union” prepared under the direction of Kremlin insider, journalist Naili Oskar-zade was released by state television’s Channel One seven days ago. Then last night, another full-length documentary film entitled “Russia, Its Most Recent History” (“Россия, Новейшая История”) was also prepared within Channel One and was aired on the news channel Rossiya 24. Contributors to the production included a number of top journalists – directors who have worked closely with Putin in the past on other documentaries, in particular, about Crimea’s “coming home” in 2014. It is now available on YouTube.

Both documentaries have in common an oral history aspect. They combine not only archival footage going back to the 1990s but also present new interviews with surviving participants in the events of that period, including heads of state like Kazakhstan’s now retired president Nazarbayev, as well as senior Russian military and statesmen.

Continue reading “Russia Marks the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Dissolution of the USSR”

Today the “international community” is waiting impatiently for the start of the Biden-Putin video conference which is scheduled to begin at 18.00 Moscow time, 10.00 AM Washington time. While the proceedings will be closed to the public, the opening salutations will be aired and much will be made by our pundits of the body language of the two leaders. Every minute that the two men spend together will be weighed by our television and press analysts for what that says about the substance of the talks. Then there will be the press conferences of the two presidents immediately after the video conference, providing still more of a feast for the journalists and commentators.

In the event we are awaiting, all attention will be directed to one man, Vladimir Putin, to see if he flinches before the threats of dire economic sanctions that Biden has prepared with the clear backing of Congressional hawks and with alleged backing of the European allies should the Russians do what Washington says they are planning, namely invade Ukraine.. The sanctions list that has been released to the public includes cut-off from the international settlements body SWIFT and halting the convertibility of the ruble into dollars, euros or pounds. Such measures would be unprecedented in the post-Cold War period and, if the Russians had not long rehearsed their own devastating response for the West, would normally constitute a casus belli.

In short, Biden and his associates are surely congratulating themselves on the way they have set the mousetrap for Putin, who will be damned if he does invade Ukraine and damned if he doesn’t when the Kiev forces retake the Donbass. Should Putin choose not to invade, for whatever reason, with or without a Ukrainian march on Donbass, then Biden can claim that his standing up to the Autocrat worked, and he will potentially raise his domestic standing with the American electorate as defender of the U.S.-led world order. This, by the way, is one scenario which I failed to identify in my earlier writings on the U.S.–Russian confrontation over Ukraine. How well a zero sum scenario will actually play with the Republicans and Democratic hawks remains to be seen.

Continue reading “Biden Has Set the Mousetrap: What Mouse Will He Catch?”

In the past couple of weeks, nearly every one of my peers in the community of analysts – Russia watchers has weighed in on Russia’s possible plans to invade Ukraine. We have been given detailed breakdowns of the forces and equipment which Russia has moved into the border region with Ukraine, and we have heard every imaginable scenario for the use of these forces when the weather turns colder, as in February, for example.

Others of my peers have reckoned in great detail the political and economic price which Russia would be compelled to pay if it were reckless enough to invade and seek to neuter Ukraine in one way or another. For example, one analyst has described Russia’s possibly dividing Ukraine in two at the Dnieper River and forming a Russia-friendly state to the east of that divide, while allowing the rump state of rabid Ukrainian nationalists to go to hell on its own.

For its part, the Kremlin has vehemently denied having any designs on Ukraine and claims that Washington is behind this fake news which is intended to encourage the Zelensky government to do something quite stupid such as stage an all-out attack on the Donbas, using the latest weapons which it has received from Washington and its allies, in the mistaken belief that it will be backed up by Washington if things go awry. In short, this would be a replay of the scenario in Georgia in 2008 when the very same Biden who is now US President was feeding false hopes of support to the then Georgian President Saakashvili.

Continue reading “Russian Attack on Ukraine Imminent?”

The annual Valdai Discussion Club gathering in Sochi took place over the course of four days during the week of October 17th and garnered a considerable amount of media attention following the delivery by President Vladimir Putin of the keynote address to its plenary session on October 21st. The Kremlin itself characterized the speech as Putin’s most important since his address to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007.

That was the verdict of television anchorman and head of Russian state news broadcasting Dmitry Kiselyov on his widely viewed Sunday show. As we know, the Munich speech went down in history as a turning point in Russia’s relations with the West. In it Putin set out Russia’s rejection of US global hegemony in a monopolar world order, listed his country’s grievances with the U.S. and its allies’ infringement of its national interests and shabby treatment since the mid-1990s. What followed was ever greater confrontation between East and West.

Whereas the 2007 speech set out the military and geopolitical dimension of Russia’s alienation from the U.S. led world order, this latest speech to the Valdai Club addressed the growing intellectual chasm between the adversarial parties. Putin placed Liberal Democracy, globalism, newly formed “progressive” values on issues of feminism and transgender, as well as compensatory “reverse discrimination” in racial relations on the Western side and set against them what he calls “healthy conservatism” and repudiation of extreme or revolutionary changes in values on the Russian side.

Continue reading “Valdai: Russia’s Best Political Talk Show”

Vladimir Putin’s annual “Direct Line” television program in which he takes questions addressed to him from the Russian public via their audio-video apps was held today. As usual, it received a great deal of promotion on all state television channels days in advance. As usual, a special Kremlin call center received and analyzed questions sent beforehand so as to get a firm idea of which questions were most common and so select from among them for the live session today.

Otherwise, the format was changed, perhaps most significantly in that both moderators sitting on either side of Putin were women. That was surely a calculated decision corresponding to the predominantly domestic – family budget nature of the incoming questions from the audience. Big economic or foreign policy questions would be only a minor part of the planned program.

However, the organizers were very kind to international observers, like me, whom they knew had little interest in the local community or home economics side of the Direct Line questions. Accordingly, less than 30 minutes into the program we heard exactly the question pitched to Vladimir Vladimirovich which made it worthwhile for us to tune in. He was asked whether the clash with the cruiser HMS Defender inside Russian territorial waters off the coast of Crimea could have touched off World War III.

Continue reading “Vladimir Putin on ‘Direct Line’ Today: HMS Defender and the Start of WWIII”

The incident of 23 June off the coast of Crimea when the British destroyer HMS Defender intentionally crossed into the territorial waters of the Russian Federation and was shooed away by Russian coast guard vessels and fighter jets has received a modicum of coverage in Western Europe, much more coverage in the U.K., itself, where the fissures within Boris Johnson’s cabinet in advance of the adventure came to light, exposing the remarkable fact that the go/no-go dispute between the Defense and the Foreign Ministry was settled by decision of the Prime Minister himself. 

Adding to the piquancy within the UK was the direct conflict between what was reported by a BBC journalist on board the Defender and what was announced by the British Minister of Defense:  the former confirmed Russian claims that warning shots were fired and bombs dropped in the path of the British ship to force it to change course and leave the RF territorial waters; the latter said that no Russian warning shots were noted but called the close overflight of the vessel by Russian fighter jets risky and unprofessional.

Of course, British journalists lost no time taking the question of responsibility for the incident straight back to the Prime Minister, who on live television said that he saw no fault in what was done, because Britain does not recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea, hence the waters in question are Ukrainian, not Russian, and the British Navy was exercising its rights to innocent passage under international law.

Continue reading “Boris Johnson, the Pyromaniac Prime Minister”