Gilbert Doctorow Brings Us Up-to-date on Russia’s Duplicitous Positions on the Iranian and Ukrainian Wars
Putin’s unwillingness to use Russian power puts the lie to the Zionist Neoconservative line that Russia serves as a constraint on US unilateralism and must be destabilized.
Russian news programs on the Iran War: what the Kremlin is directing them to say and not to say
GILBERT DOCTOROW
MAR 20, 2026
Readers of my essays going back to 2016 will know that I defended the relative freedom of expression in Russian media compared to the then tightly controlled, highly conformist and lying U.S. and West European media. I crossed swords with Elmar Brok, chair of the EU Parliament committee on foreign affairs, and member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU party, over just this point, during a debate program on Euronews after which he asked me, on air, ‘how much did Putin pay you to say that?”
Times move on, of course. Ever since Trump broke all taboos and defied political correctness during the presidential electoral campaign of that same year 2016, U.S. media have been among the freest in the world. I am speaking not of mainstream media, which are self-censoring for the sake of having privileged access to the newsmakers in Washington, but of Alternative Media which have flourished in the USA over the past 8 years.
By contrast, Europe, as we know, has fallen ever deeper into McCarthyism, to the point last December when a highly professional and objective Swiss security professional, Jacques Baud, was placed on the European Council’s black list, de-banked, barred from any employment and made an outlaw over unsubstantiated charges that he had been spreading conspiracy theories which amounted to pro-Russian ‘disinformation.’ Lower than such trampling on freedom of expression you cannot go.
Meanwhile, during the course of the Special Military Operation Russia has slipped from its perch as an open market for ideas and the Russian public is now being overtly manipulated by President Putin and his news managers. The reality of the cost of the ongoing war in terms of casualties is being hushed up. Public criticism of the way the war is being drawn out when Russia has the wherewithal to end it in a matter of weeks if it bombs the hell out of Kiev now – this criticism is allowed to surface one day and is then snuffed out the next, replaced by fawning praise for the tireless work of the Commander in Chief on the country’s behalf.
However, the distortions and contradictions in the present Russian policy of managing the mass media go well beyond the foregoing and can most easily be seen in coverage of the Iran war.
The vast majority of our Alternative Media commentators believe that Russia is closely aligned with Iran, as the Comprehensive Cooperation agreement concluded in December 2024 might suggest, especially if you never read the original document which has no mutual defense provisions whatsoever and, peculiarly, only states that each side will not join with the enemies of the other side to do harm to the co-signer of the cooperation agreement!
The reality is that Russia is performing a balancing act between its relations with the Gulf States, its relations with Israel and its relations with Iran. The Kremlin suggests that it stands ready to be an honest broker to put an end to the current war on Iran, but that is no more warranted in this case than Trump’s pretending to be an honest broker in ending the Ukraine war.
The contradictions in the official Russian position on the war came up yesterday within the widely watched news and commentary program Sixty Minutes and between the overall stance of Sixty Minutes and Vladimir Solovyov’s evening talk show on the same channel Rossiya 1.
During my first appearance on Yevgeny Popov’s then newly launched Sixty Minutes show early in the autumn of 2016 I learned firsthand that this show was being tightly scripted by the bosses off screen. Partly this is done by teleprompter screens, partly by plug-in whisperers in their ears. I had a little run-in with Popov’s wife and co-host Olga Skabeyeva on the show in question: we met in the corridor off-stage just before the show opened and discussed for two minutes the key question for their panel, namely how to describe the Trump-Clinton televised debate of the day before. It became immediately clear that what I had to say was contrary to the official Russian interpretation which Skabeyeva held in her hands and consequently I had to fight for the microphone on air and was sent away when the first commercial break came. I subsequently received profuse and sincere apologies from Popov in an email, but thereafter I took invitations from other channels which had lower viewer numbers but also less top-down control.
Things have not gotten much better at Sixty Minutes ever since in terms of who is really speaking to you, the presenters on the screen or unseen bosses. Yesterday’s show proved this convincingly when Popov, with a straight face told us the following: “We regret that the Gulf States have come under attack [by Iran] because their prosperity is our prosperity. We cooperate closely with them in OPEC+” Yes, indeed, this is almost as idiotic as Iranian president Pezeshkian apologizing a week ago to ‘our Arab brothers’ over the latest Iranian drone strikes on their territory. Russia and the Gulf States are competitors for oil markets, period, and what cooperation they have in setting production limits and pricing is a matter of mutual convenience, not pleasure.
Unfortunately, Russia’s public distancing itself from Iran on some shows is aligned with President Putin’s public statements on Russian empathy for Israel where more than 2 million Russian-speakers live. Yes, indeed, and just how Russia friendly are those 2 million? All such talk is plainly stupid.
As I said above, there are contradictions in and between the Russian talk and commentary shows. The contradiction within yesterday’s Sixty Minutes was their giving the microphone to a regional expert who explained to the audience just how well Tehran is doing in its asymmetrical response to the Israeli-US attack. We all have heard about Iran’s successful missile strike on Qatar’s gas liquefaction installations, which will take 3 – 5 years to rebuild and will cut 17% of output from this leading supplier of LNG to Asia and also to Europe (take that, Ursula von der Leyen!)
But have you heard about Iran’s attacks a day ago on Saudi Arabia? They struck the port on the Red Sea western coast where the Saudis had hoped to divert via pipeline some of the oil for export that otherwise would be loaded on ships at their eastern frontier for dispatch via the now closed Straits of Hormuz. Until now attacks in and around the Red Sea had been the assignment of the Tehran backed Houthis. Now Tehran did the job itself. Moreover, and more significant politically, at the same time Iran attacked the outskirts of the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Their missiles got through to target notwithstanding the U.S. supplied Patriot and other air defenses that ring the capital. This was done to demonstrate the utter uselessness of the defense arrangements Riyadh has made with Washington and its purchase of enormously expensive air defense gear.
Turning to the Solovyov talk show last night, the host and panelists continue the same pattern of denigration of Iran’s capabilities and exaggeration of the chances of U.S. success in arranging for regime change there. Now the stress is on how the marines being sent to the region can be used to put boots on the ground in selected regions of Iran which might be friendly to outside intervention. We were further told that perhaps some of the Gulf States might assist in the U.S. invasion, at least by taking over from the troops and maintaining order in the ‘liberated’ regions where the regime would be rooted out. Then there was the issue of U.S. attacks on the dug-in Iranian positions in the hills that overlook the Straits of Hormuz; the panelists suggested that such U.S. attacks might just succeed in overcoming Iranian control of the Straits.
Meanwhile, panelists on the Solovyov show also mentioned the harm that this war is doing to Russia economically. Specifically, reference was made to the latest Israeli bombing of an Iranian port on the Caspian Sea. The logic was clear: to disrupt Russia’s commercially vital North-South Transport Corridor which passes through this Iranian port. In today’s online Financial Times, one reader offered the following information on precisely this issue, saying that ‘disruption of trade deprives Russia’s exporters of about $2.2 billion a month in revenues.” Note: this is several times the improvement in Russian revenues coming from the war-related U.S. suspension of sanctions on Russian oil exports.
I close this essay with a remark on an issue that my colleagues in Alternative Media seem to overlook entirely when they speak of the solid backing for Putin and his conduct of the war in poll after poll of the Russian public. The overlooked issue is the numbers of Russian casualties which are systematically being withheld. If the Russian public knew that 400,000 or 500,000 of its soldiers have been killed or permanently maimed in this war, would they still give Putin such high ratings for continuing it without any end in sight?
Well, friends, you don’t need published statistics to know that there is a problem here. However, you do need ‘boots on the ground’ which my colleagues seem not to have. I do not say that I am in Russia today and see what I am about to report, but I do have friends from among normal Russians who are not in the pay of Kremlin propagandists like the oligarch Malofeyev, who hosts some of my colleagues on their periodic visits to Russia. And what are my normal human being friends in Petersburg telling me now? They say that they are seeing a lot of cripples, amputees out and about on the city streets. This is something you almost never saw in the past in Russia because in the bad old days from after WWII up to and through the Afghan wars, war invalids were simply shunted off to provincial towns to live in order not to be seen in places like downtown Moscow or Petersburg.
And you can be sure that the sight of these new invalids, some of whom are not so young, probably in their 50s, does not cheer up your average Russian or persuade him or her that the war of attrition is the right way to continue.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026