Doctorow Provides a Solid Record of the Ukraine-Russia Conflict Initiated by Washington’s Neoconservatives
Paul Craig Roberts
The publication of my fellow traveller in search of truth Gilbert Doctorow’s War Diaries, Volume 2, The Russia-Ukraine War, 2024, a collection of his columns and interviews, provides us with, in effect, a war diary kept by a war minister of day to day events that comprise the conflict. Doctorow succeeds in capturing the day to day uncertainty of information and Russian responses to increasingly provocative actions.
War propaganda, such as the early Western claims of Russian defeat, took the place of honest reporting, which Doctorow endeavored to provide. The conflict now into 5 months of its fifth year has surprised both those who expected an early Ukrainian victory–especially the British legacy media–and those who expected Putin to quickly dispose of the distraction.
The military potential of the two parties to the conflict even when we acknowledge that Ukraine is aided and abetted by Washington and NATO is so disparate that the length of the conflict is not easily understood.
My explanation has been that Putin keeps the conflict alive by not bringing it to an end, because he hopes to use negotiations not merely to end the conflict but for a wider strategic purpose of obtaining a mutual security agreement with Washington and Europe that ends NATO’s presence on Russia’s borders. Putin perhaps has reasoned that if he uses Russia’s enormous conventional military power to crush Ukraine, it would alarm the West and result in wider war. Putin’s policy is doomed to failure because he ignores the Wolfowitz doctrine that the principle goal of US policy is Washington’s hegemony. Indeed, Putin’s unresponsiveness to extreme provocations is the road to wider war.
As Doctorow makes clear, the war has widened. Every weapon system that the West said would not be provided to Ukraine was provided. Today Ukraine uses the air space of NATO countries to launch attacks deep inside Russian territory. Putin himself has acknowledged that the attacks on Russia are enabled by Washington and Britain, who provide not only the missiles but also the targeting information.
Putin himself used the dispatching of F-16s to the aid of Ukraine against Russia to be cause for activating Russia’s mutual defense treaty with North Korea, resulting in the appearance of North Korean troops on the Ukrainian battlefield. Thus Putin himself has widened the war that he continues to call a limited Special Military Operation.
Putin has even said that it is America, not Ukraine, with which Russia is at war, but he does nothing about it except express his desire for negotiations, the weakest signal the leader of such a strong country as Russia could send, a signal that guarantees Western support for the conflict.
The failure of Putin to enforce a single one of his many “red lines” has resulted not in limiting the conflict but in greatly expanding it.
Today and tomorrow are Russia’s biggest holiday, Victory Day, in memory of Germany’s surrender to the Soviet Union in 1945. According to news reports, Zelensky has said Ukraine will attack Russia’s Victory Day parade in Moscow. Putin’s humiliating response is, according to news reports, to dramatically scale back the parade, with no heavy military hardware in the parade for the first time in 20 years and fewer foreign and Russian dignitaries present.
The question on all informed lips is: why did Putin downsize the Victory Day parade instead of using Russian force to bring to an end any Ukrainian continuation of the conflict?
Doctorow is one of the few who asks this question.