There are surely those among you who are scratching their heads and wondering why Doctorow makes such a big deal about the disruption of the internet communications. You may say to yourselves: my kids could profit if our internet went down.

Well friends, let me explain what you likely do not know about today’s Russia after 25 years of Putin’s overseeing its reindustrialization. The industrial and general economic landscape is in many areas far ahead of Europe and of the USA. There has been a concentration of business, or shall we call it a monopoly established in many sectors which makes this country particularly vulnerable to changes in the rules of the game, as for example the current downgrading if not outright blockage of internet services at the order of the government authorities under advice from the Security Services (aka the FSB), supposedly to prevent terror attacks and drone strikes, which are occurring with ever greater intensity and frequency nonetheless.

We all know how several of the giants of Silicon Valley and of the IT sector in America were created by Russian immigrants or sons and daughters of such immigrants. There is nothing in their DNA but a lot in the culture, in the stress on math and engineering in the society to explain this. Just think over who founded Google.

Well Russia’s population of math and programming geniuses was not cleaned out in the 1990s. Plenty of talent was deeply patriotic and was ready to swing into action when the opportunity came under the new administration of Putin at the turn of the new millennium. These are the engineers who created the world beating new strategic arms that Putin first presented to the domestic and foreign audience in 2018. But beyond military industry, there were plenty of Russian geniuses to found and develop corporations in the high tech sector. Russia’s very own Google – called Yandex – also grew from the leading Search Engine into the general engine of growth across many sectors of the consumer economy. Yandex Travel is Russia’s equivalent to booking.com. Yandex Go, its division providing taxis, scooters and other forms of mobility to the public has no peer in the USA – it holds a monopoly position in the taxi sector that it built to completion only in the past two or three years when it bankrupted or bought out nearly all local providers of taxi services across this vast land by drastic pricing wars initially, by luring away the drivers of competing companies and by introducing world leading technologies such as geolocation functions in its App so that you need not identify where you are and with the help of the system’s memory of your past trips, need only start to type where you want to go and the system fills in the rest.

The problem with this technical and business building success is that when the internet and GPS systems are restricted or altered by the authorities, Yandex Go services are voided. They send cars to the wrong address or, as is the case today in Petersburg, the system completely loses control of communications with its drivers and orders via the App and even by phone cannot be put through. Since Yandex eliminated all those little companies and freelancers at the local level who did not need the GPS to find addresses, there is no taxi service whatsoever available to the public for extended periods of time. That is not merely an inconvenience, it is a ruin-your-day experience for the public and a nightmare for businesses that depend on taxis to move their personnel around in cities.

Now if Russia’s fate as a nation depended on the severe restrictions being imposed on the communications network, then I would listen to the argument. However, it is patently clear that 1) these measures are ineffective against the Ukrainian forces and 2) Russia has the armaments to end the Ukrainian government and its attacks in a couple of days if leadership can summon the decisiveness to do what is needed.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026

.

I have received one acidic comment on my latest essay published here yesterday suggesting that I am joining ranks with George Soros and Anne Applebaum in their decades long campaign to blacken the image of Russia and promote Cold War.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Over the years, I have repeatedly denounced the nefarious activities of the front organizations for the CIA and its USAID subsidiary like Soros’s Open Society units and the all-too-clever propagandist Anne Applebaum for whom ‘The Washington Post’ is her preaching platform.

What I am saying now is that peers in the Alternative Media, many of whom are former CIA officers or U.S. military men, are now openly Putin cheerleaders only because of geopolitical considerations, without any regard for what the regime in the Kremlin is now doing to turn back the freedoms and close the open society that Putin himself built during his first 20 years in office.

With a few exceptions, these colleagues only became ‘Russia experts’ from the start of Putin’s war on Ukraine, because the Russian leader seemed to be in the forefront of the cause of multipolarity and the interests of the Global South versus American hegemony. They know little or nothing about Russia and its people, and care still less. And if you ask me about the seeming contradiction between their serving the army and intelligence of the U.S. in the past and their present work against American global hegemony, I say openly that they have fallen out of love with their own country and its leaders, whom they uniformly characterize as deranged (the president) or idiots (Congress). I disagree with them on both points. I may disagree with the policies of both especially with respect to foreign policy, but I know they are sane, not at all stupid though they are acting most obnoxiously and illegally on the world stage.

Formally speaking, Russia is not at war with anyone. President Putin never went to his legislature for approval of a declaration of war on Ukraine, which he should have done but pointedly did not do. A declaration of war would have implied calling up the reserves massively and a draft on young Russians, which would have been deeply unpopular.

The Special Military Operation is war by stealth. If it had been administered with proper strength, to smash a fly with a hammer, as the Soviets did in their 1956 invasion of Hungary and 1967 invasion of Czechoslovakia, then there would not be much reason for today’s essay. But the strength in numbers fell short of the assigned task because there was no general mobilization. Now in year 5 of a war it is dragging on only because the Russian leadership still lacks the will to do what is necessary for victory. It could kill the Kiev junta in massive bombing of Kiev, Lvov and other decision making centers of Ukraine.

With the passage of time and loss of perhaps 350,000 Russian soldiers dead and four times that number maimed for life, there is growing popular impatience. The KGB successor organization, the FSB, is taking on ever greater powers to suppress dissent, which have as ‘collateral damage’ great harm for the Russian communications infrastructure in this age of the internet, meaning damage to the economy.

At this moment the balance between freedoms and oppression in Russia is still better than what it was in the USA following the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and introduction of the very repressive Patriot Act. However, things are headed in that direction here and someone has to say it aloud to counter the Putin worship that I see around me in the Alternative Media.

*****

Despite all of the foregoing, and in particular, the unsettling feeling of being cut off from my own Substack and from many of the sources of information that I regularly use at home in Belgium, I am enjoying a variety of pleasures that will further flower in the days ahead both socially, with friends whom with whom we are meeting, wining and dining, and also culturally, as we begin to book evenings at the performing arts and make refresher visits to museums that we love here. Meanwhile, the gastronomic discoveries in supermarkets and street markets continue day by day.

Across this vast land, there are industrious and ambitous people in the most unsuspected regions who are entering into new fields of agriculture or industrial production and are widening the product assortments on store shelves. This, despite the widespread bankruptcies that I spoke about a day ago.

For lunch today, I will be preparing green asparagus that were grown in a region never known as a supplier of prestige produce to European Russia: the very south of the Caucasus, in Northern Ossetia. Some of you will surely recall that Ossetia was after the collapse of the Soviet Union split in two, with a Russian half in the north and a Georgian part in the South; and this was a cause of the Russian-Georgian war of 2008. There were Russian peacekeepers in the southern part who were fired upon by the Georgians under their then viciously anti-Russian president Saakashvili with encouragement from US president Bush Jr.

Northern Ossetia happens also to be the homeland of Russia’s best known conductor of opera and symphonic orchestras Valery Gergiev. His sister Larisa has headed a costume making atelier for the Mariinsky Theater and a training center for would-be opera singers. Many promising musicians from the region are now making careers in European Russia. At the same time, some enterprising farmers in Ossetia have started supplying excellent green asparagus to leading Russian supermarket chains, as I discovered yesterday.

Another surprise which came during my visit to the Pushkin farmers’ market was the remarkable raspberries now being supplied here from Belarus hothouses. Yes, Belarus, which was long a supplier of meat and dairy products to Russia, often in dedicated stores in Russian city centers, now also is exporting here extraordinary fruits. I say with hand on heart, that these raspberries are superior in size, flavor and storage period in your refrigerator to anything we have on sale in premium supermarkets or fruit stores in Belgium, which sources chiefly from Morocco and Spain. How the folks in Minsk achieve this is beyond my comprehension.

The same can be said for the strawberries from Azerbaijan which you can find in specialty stores around the city and also in the farmers’ market. Forget geopolitics and the frictions at the leadership level between Baku and Moscow. Arguably the best strawberries imaginable are now being supplied here from Azerbaijan. In a week or two I expect Russia’s own Crimea and Kuban to rise to the fore in this red berry competition.

Lastly, I mention the delight my wife and I had lunching yesterday at home on the little seasonal fish from nearby Lake Ladoga, the koryushka, which are fully competitive with the best friture du lac that you will find in Switzerland on Lake Geneva.

*****

The people with whom I meet casually go on with their lives as best they can despite the obvious inconveniences of the communications disruptions and the frequent alerts that they find on their telephone in the morning that ‘a drone attack was averted.’ It comes in the same manner that I get warnings on my phone in Belgium that strong, gusty winds will make strolls in the forest hazardous today.’

Russians, especially young Russians, are traveling abroad in great numbers. My Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to St Petersburg was fully booked. There were several hundred Russians (virtually no foreigners) patiently waiting in line at the passport control desks of the Arrivals floor. In that sense, the country remains open to the world even if media access to outside sources is being sharply and seemingly arbitrarily curtailed.

‘The Financial Times,’ to which I subscribe, is no longer accessible here in the Petersburg internet. At the same time, very strangely, www.nyt.com opens without difficulty. The only explanation I can suggest is that the Russian censors are differentiating between the US, which they want to keep on side, and the European and British enemies, whom they are keen to keep out of Russian media space.

The foregoing suggests that the shutdown of internet resources here is a combination of selective black listing of given platforms and across the board restriction of access by cutting the data flows from 4G to 2G. As the days go by and I better understand what exactly is going on, I will report on it here

At the same time, please note from the foregoing that this Word Press platform can also at any time be de-accessed by the authorities, in which case you will hear from me next when I am back in Brussels in mid June

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026

Over the past year I have mentioned numerous times the criticism that is being addressed to Russia’s central bank and its director Elvira Nabiulina. Deputy chair of the State Duma Babakov has used his frequent appearances on the Evening with Vladimir Solovyov to explain at length how the extraordinarily high prime rates, which peaked at over 21 percent and held there for months on end though inflation was no more than 10 per cent was bankrupting small and medium businesses across the land and also starving high priority infrastructure and technology projects of the working capital they required to perform their mission of establishing economic sovereignty.

Now I stress how the growing power of the FSB (successor to the KGB) is also causing great harm to the economy, far more than Western sanctions presently when Russia is raking in hard currency from its unique position to serve countries starved of supplies by the Strait of Hormuz blockade.

Some readers have ridiculed my complaints over intermittent internet services and nonfunctioning GPS guidance for cars due to the temporary blocks, which may last several days at a time, which supposedly are hindering drone attacks on Russia. However, the problem has only multiplied and intensified several times over since my last visit in November 2025 and now is clearly a big hindrance to conducting business at the level where most people live and work.

I know from two days experience that I cannot access my bank in Belgium to order a payment to American Express. I cannot be sure that any email or WhatsApp messages I send actually are received by the addressees in a timely manner if at all. Now my real estate broker who is assisting us with a pending transaction told me that the internet disruptions are causing her great difficulty in getting documents to clients, in scheduling meetings and more.

As you know, my planned interview yesterday on Judging Freedom did not take place because the Petersburg fixed line internet has been slowed down from 4G to what is probably 2G. That is not a specific block on given websites but a blanket restriction that de facto makes it impossible to send or receive anything other than emails, and not even to accept their attachments if they are data heavy.

Some readers yesterday responded to my words about the FSB crackdown on civil society by saying that you have to be fully aligned as in North Korea if you want to survive the provocations and attacks from the West.

I have to ask how many defenders of those stripping away human rights would want to live in North Korea. These folks are talking geopolitics abstractly, without reference to themselves or you and me.

Beginning with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, then dramatically in the first 20 years of Vladimir Putin’s time in power, Russia became a very normal country where its citizens enjoyed the freedoms that we say are essential to ourselves. What right does any of us have to offhandedly say that Russians should go back into their caves so that Putin can champion the birth of a multipolar world. That is the same logic that the Europeans are using to justify sending Ukrainians to certain death on the battlefield so that Europe can be free of Russia. Easy to say when you do not feel the whip on your own skin.

In the last seven years of his life, I was a close collaborator of Professor Steve Cohen, who had long been a defender of human rights in the USSR. We shared common interests elsewhere – in bringing the Russian point of view to the attention of a broad US and Western audience at a time when a new Cold War was taking shape and a nuclear war once again loomed over humanity. However, in present circumstances I feel obliged to take up his other cause, human rights in Russia, that Cohen took deeply to heart. And what I see around me here prompts me to speak up.

Ordinary people with whom I am meeting are not at all happy with the war but just keep their mouths shut on political issues. They are especially unhappy with the security crackdown that I am describing. But their silence should not be our silence.

*****

I freely admit that for outsiders it is difficult to understand where the Russian economy is headed and why. You hear on media in Russia that their ruble is now the best performing currency in the world. After all it has risen by about 20 percent from my last visit in November, with most of that rise in the past few weeks.

I find it amazing that The Financial Times and other periodicals addressed to the business community do not comment on this fact and especially do not consider why this is occurring. I will hazard a guess that Russian oil sales at real world prices, not discounted, are presently booming and they are being paid in rubles bought with dollars or euros, driving up the exchange rate of the ruble.

However this exchange rate bonanza does not help the small and medium size companies here that are suffering from lack of normally priced working capital. And the disruptions to the communications infrastructure on which business depends is dragging down the economy, while providing Russians with no added security. Their security is not helped by the FSB. It can be helped only by the Ministry of Defense blasting Kiev to smithereens.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026

Many of you have probably heard that refrain before. To which I am now obliged to add: there are no former KGB agents. I have been saying for years that Putin showed enormous personal growth during his years in power, and those who harped on his career in the KGB were failing to see the changes in the man. Now, regrettably, I see that he is reverting to whence he came.

I say this because day by day it is clear that a crackdown on Russian society is proceeding under the false explanation that it is necessary to prevent drone strikes, to stymie assassination attempts by Ukrainians, and so forth. To that I say: nonsense. These measures are useless. The only way to ensure the safety of Russia and its citizens today is to decapitate the Zelensky regime by missile and bomb strikes on Kiev, on Lvov and other key cities in Ukraine: Everything else is make-believe.

Generally on these pages we talk geopolitics. Today I am talking politics, which is about who holds power. And today it is the successor to the KGB, the FSB, that daily acquires more power to monitor and control civil society. If you are not a Putin worshipper, watch out! The same vile oppression that Americans experienced after 7/11 under the Patriot Act is playing out here in Russia.

A day ago I called attention to the vicious words of journalist and talk show host Vladimir Solovyov when he denounced all those Russians who want to see the war ended very soon, calling them defeatists and agents of the enemy. Another straw in the wind was the announcement a couple of days ago that the internet platform that gives Russians direct interface with the government, Gos Uslugi, announced that it will be accepting and implementing requests from citizens that phone calls to them from abroad not be put through. The West may be basking in Russophobia. But the Russian authorities are now encouraging xenophobia at home..

I remain cut off from Substack, which appears to be blacklisted in Russia presently. And today I was cut off from an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano on ‘Judging Freedom’ because the internet was dead – both mobile internet and cable internet – in the entire region of St Petersburg. I am told by friends and acquaintances that this occurs fairly frequently nowadays. This runs entirely counter to the notion of a country open to the world that Putin has claimed time and again.

*****

Yesterday I reported that the nearest Economy Class supermarket to me has reduced their product assortment and sacrificed quality to maintain prices compared to what I saw on my last visit in November 2025. Today’s visit to the upper middle class Perekryostok supermarket in my neighborhood showed a different picture. The product range has even grown since my last visit and quality is excellent. To be sure, on many items prices are approaching West European levels. Investment in technology is impressive, none more so than the scales that print price labels for fruits and vegetables that you choose to buy. The scales visualize the broccoli or pears that you put on them to weigh and ask you to confirm that it is indeed broccoli or pears. We have nothing comparable in Belgium or elsewhere in the countries of the EU that I visit.

On the other hand, that Perekryostok supermarket is short on labor. In their very large store, there was only one cashier on duty and she also had to look after parcels that had been preordered by customers and to assist the customers who were being directed to self service checkout machines but could not complete their purchases unaided. Simply, there are not enough workers to go around. This is reconfirmed by the sign I saw today on the side of a Yandex taxi – recruiting drivers with the promise of earnings of 2,000 euros a month. That figure is several times what it used to be before the Ukraine war and it comes not from some newfound generosity on the part of management.

I insist that apart from the several hundred thousand workers who left the private sector for the highly paid 6 months of service in the war zone, the labor shortage is also due to the vastly bloated bureaucracy that employs so many people doing what no one should be doing at all. During their 9 to 5 days, they are busy dreaming up new regulations and constraints on civil society. As I have said before, Russia badly needs its own Elon Musk to set things right.

Copyright: Gilbert Doctorow 2026

To my subscribers and other readers of this WordPress platform, I say you are more fortunate for the coming 3 weeks or so than my subscribers and other readers of my Substack account, who will likely be cut off from my observations on the ground in Russia, where I will be staying during this period. Cut off, because it appears that the Substack site is rejected by the Petersburg service providers just as LinkedIn and youtube have long been. Why? As they say in Brooklyn: don’t ask. No rational reason comes to mind. However, my Substack access here may come back one of these days, just as WhatsApp works here one day and then goes black for a spell.

The situation with respect to the internet has moved from bad to worse in the nearly 6 months since my last visit here when I complained of intermittent mobile internet blackouts. Now it appears that hard wired internet by cable to private residences is also performing bizarrely. If you think this is just a nuisance without financial and life-style implications, then you are ignoring how engrained instant internet communications were to the daily lives of Russians, just as they are to all of us in the West: And the harm is entirely self-inflicted by the powers that be.

In a moment, I will turn from these smaller irritations to big picture issues. But first let me share a couple of offsetting positive points felt in the 24 hours since I set foot on Petersburg soil. First there is the weather. It is now and tomorrow will remain sunny, with cloudless skies and an ambient temperature of 29 degrees. So in meteorological terms, we are enjoying far more summer like days than in Western Europe. More to the point, was my experience in a visit to the local farmers’ market in the center of Pushkin, this outlying district of Petersburg. The fruits, vegetables and other produce from Iran; Serbia, and other locations that none of you see as suppliers to Europe or farther afield were fantastic: The enormous dried, brilliantly white boletes, the highly aromatic porcini as most of you better know these mushrooms, were extraordinary, all the more so because they were unavailable at what should have been the peak season, November, when I was last here. In short, the temptations of visiting the many vendors’ stands were as striking and picturesque as what my wife Larisa Zalesova described in passages of her recently published novel Nadine’s Story. Those scenes in her book were from the late 1970s. But the impossibility of leaving the market stands and their remarkable vendors without purchasing many treats that were not on your shopping list is as striking today. Very colorful. Very different, say from French or Italian street markets.

I balance out this enthusiasm with the less positive observation from my visit to the Economy Class supermarket just across from my apartment complex in Pushkin. Clearly there has been continuing churn in the suppliers and products on the store shelves, with a downward trend in terms of honesty of recipes in the prepared foods section, which amounts to hidden inflation. Indeed, my first impression from Day One, is that in various goods and services, prices in Russia are truly on the rise and in some categories are approaching the highly inflationary prices I see now in Western Europe. Also there is a narrowing of choice in some areas, like yoghurts, where Danone and other Western brands that now have left the market created demand and took a lot of shelf space. Of course; in some other product areas, like hard cheeses, what I see of Russian production is continuing expansion of product lines that do make dining more interesting.

*****

Now let us turn to the higher issues of politics, where I have some observations to share coming from my watching and comparing the latest broadcasts of Russia’s two most serious and widely watched programs of commentary that we call ‘talk shows’: the Evening broadcasts of Vladimir Solovyov and The Great Game hosted by Dmitry Simes. These two shows are headed in very different, indeed contradictory directions in terms of respect for the broad Russian public:

To my surprise and shock, in his Sunday evening show Solovyov was simply awful: he has stopped all pretense at neutral analysis and has become a vicious propagandist for Vladimir Putin and venomous denouncer of anyone who does not speak of the Commander in Chief in glowing terms: Specifically, Solovyov told his audience that Deep Russia supports the war, understands that its leaders have no obligation to make public their plans for its further prosecution; for any offensives or attacks they may be pondering. He denounced those who say that the war should be ended quickly, calling them agents of the enemy, defeatists. My, my our Putin cheerleaders in the West must have been heartened to see their view of things validated by a leading personality on Russian state television, which they have repeatedly denied as having any relevance to Russian political life.

In that same show, one panelist, a member of the State Duma objected to Solovyov’s denunciation of Russia’s own deplorables, noting that he receives a great many letters from constituents asking why the war is being dragged out and not ended quickly with the weapons at Russia’s disposal that have been held back. He added that these letter writers appear to be highly patriotic and well wishers of their country’s future. To all of this, Solovyov replied that he and the Duma member would remain on different sides of the issue.

I contrast this Politburo like position of Solovyov to the far more serious words that I heard a day ago from Dmitry Simes and a Senator (member of the upper house of the Russian bicameral legislature) on The Great Game. They were in agreement that the latest developments in the Ukrainian drone attacks were posing an unacceptable threat to state security of Russia, and that the Europeans are now openly at war with Russia. The reasonable conclusion they both drew is that the conduct of the war by Russia must be greatly altered now, that all self-imposed restrictions on use of its weapons arsenal against Kiev must be dropped. And in saying this they also say that it is not a criticism of how the war has been fought till now; it is merely recognition that the war has changed in nature and so a different response is required from Russia. This different response must begin with real destruction of the decision making centers in Ukraine, destruction of their bridges across the Dnieper and other major rivers, putting an end to ‘political tourism’ of Western leaders to Kiev, and so on. Beyond that, Simes and his panelist were saying that it is time to consider direct attacks on Europe, beginning with attacks on the Baltic States, which have been especially obnoxious in their provocations and calls to other European states to bring Russia to its knees in a humiliating defeat.

All of this brings us to the question of what may be the issues driving the accelerated timing of President Putin;s two day visit to Beijing this week for talks with President Xi. Surely it is not to hear from the source what Xi may have discussed privately with Donald Trump last week, as some of our Western media are suggesting. I venture the guess that it is to discuss the coming Russian change from war of attrition to an “escalate to de-escalate’ scenario that analysts like geopolitical expert Sergei Karaganov have been urging on Vladimir Putin for more than two years.

Copyright Gilbert Doctorow, 2026

See minutes 21 – 28

https://gilbertdoctorow.substack.com/p/war-diaries-volume-3-the-russia-ukraine

this is to announce that Volume 3 is now in production and very likely will be on sale on all Amazon websites worldwide in the course of the coming week. you can then find the book very easily by just typing ”Gilbert Doctorow”‘ into the Search Box of the Amazon website

https://gilbertdoctorow.substack.com/p/heviz-hungary-and-taking-the-waters