Coming events: Chat with John Helmer on ‘The Duran,’ Thursday, 17 October
As I have written on these pages recently, the Moscow based journalist John Helmer has published what amounts to harsh criticism of Vladimir Putin from some top generals over his alleged readiness to sacrifice Russian state interests in forthcoming peace negotiations to put an early end to the war and to spare his country’s oligarchs further economic losses. Helmer has directed attention to the negotiator of the almost concluded peace treaty initialed in Istanbul in March 2022, Vladimir Medinsky, suggesting that this former Minister of Culture was not up to the task of defending Russia. Helmer believes Medinsky will again be appointed as chief negotiator if and when the Russians and Ukrainians sit down together to negotiate a peace.
Following my rebuttal to this interpretation of Putin as weak given the tough as nails new edition of the Russian nuclear doctrine and my offhand rejection of skepticism over chances for a lasting peace to be concluded on Russia’s terms, John Helmer and I agreed to discuss the issue live on air. This chat is now scheduled to take place Thursday at 20.00 Central European Time on the website of The Duran and will be moderated by Alexander Mercouris.
Here and now, I telegraph my punches, so to speak, and explain on what I will base myself in this discussion.
I have made it clear that in between my periodic visits to Russia, when I put my Oxford dress shoes on the ground, spend time with friends in Petersburg and Moscow discussing current events, and listen to those taxi drivers or hair dressers who still delight in chatter with customers, my main source of information on Russian politics comes from Russian state television broadcasts in the Russian language for their domestic audience. In this regard, tonight’s News of the Week program hosted by Dmitry Kiselyov on Rossiya 1 leaves me in no doubt that Vladimir Putin will only sign a treaty that embodies the points he made public in June, to whit:
A cease-fire will come into effect only when the Ukrainian side agrees to withdraw its armed forces from the entirety of the Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts at their pre-2014 borders and actually begins this withdrawal
1. Ukraine will acknowledge that these regions and Crimea are now integral parts of the Russian Federation
2. Ukraine will foreswear membership in NATO and there will be no foreign military personnel or installations on its territory
3. Ukraine will ensure that Russian speakers on its territory are given full civil rights to practice their language and culture
4. All Western sanctions on Russia will be lifted
I remind readers that Dmitry Kiselyov is not just the presenter of this news program but is the general director of all Russian state news operations. Accordingly, his repeating these demands and putting up on screen Putin’s speech setting them forth makes it politically impossible for Putin to negotiate and sign anything less than this.
We can discuss many other things on Thursday, but I believe that this broadcast is the strongest argument against the notion that the Russians will lose at the negotiating table what they have won on the battlefield.
This entire issue of peace terms was presented tonight precisely because Western media in the past week have been talking up the need for a negotiated settlement of the war and are speaking as if Russia has been defeated, which is an outrageous lie as anyone following this war’s development knows full well.
Finally, I note that my next visit to Russia begins on 28 October, assuming that the Estonian-Russian border at Narva remains open.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024