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Britain is taking an increasingly sinister role in fueling the NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. It seems that as Uncle Sam is growing weary of the slaughter, the British butler is stepping in to take up the mantle.

A large part of that role is ramping up information warfare, or propaganda, which the British state has been a past master of over the centuries. Britain’s military is in such sad disrepair these days that it has to rely on other devices.

In our editorial last week, we looked at how Britain recently tried to poison delicate diplomatic efforts for finding a settlement to the conflict by launching far-fetched claims that Russia had assassinated the late opposition figure Alexei Navalny by injecting him with a lethal South American frog toxin. That psyops bid coincided with the second anniversary of Navalny’s death. A telltale sign is how those fleeting headlines have now vanished into oblivion.

This week, the BBC, the state-owned broadcaster, fired another salvo of propaganda, this time from an interview with Ukraine’s nominal president, Vladimir Zelensky. The interview was timed to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the eruption of hostilities in Ukraine with Russia.

“Zelensky tells BBC Putin has started WW3 and must be stopped,” was the headline.

This was not a sit-down interlocution with some low-level journalist. It was conducted by Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International Editor.

Zelensky was permitted to spout his slander without any pushback or questioning, which can only mean that the BBC was deliberately serving as a platform to amplify provocative messaging.

The Ukrainian leader, whose presidential mandate expired nearly two years ago and who continues to stay in power solely by martial decree (that is, dictatorship), asserted the usual NATO propaganda narrative that Ukraine is defending the whole of Europe from Russian aggression.

“Putin has already started it [World War Three]… the question is how to stop Russia because Russia wants to impose on the world a different way of life.”

At a later point in the interview, Zelensky urged the United States “to stop the Russians.”

The BBC described Zelensky as a “resilient” wartime leader carrying the burden of his nation. At no point was the former comedian-actor asked about the mounting evidence of embezzlement of Western public money among his ruling circle.

At no point did the BBC question how Ukraine was infiltrated by the CIA, MI6, and other NATO intelligence to install a NeoNazi regime in 2014 to act as a spearhead against Russia that led to the eruption of hostilities in February 2022.

Instead, the British broadcaster indulged in dignifying futile war rhetoric. Zelensky said he believed that Ukraine would win against Russia eventually and that it would reclaim all its territory back to the 1991 borders, implying even the return of Crimea.

This is tantamount to the British undermining ongoing diplomatic talks convened by the Trump administration. Russia is adamant that a peaceful settlement must involve the recognition of Crimea, Donbass, Kherson, and Zaporozhye as historic Russian territories.

In effect, the British are keeping the conflict going by portraying Russia as an evil aggressor with no just cause, and emboldening the Kiev regime to continue the reckless slaughter.

This is deja vu of the inimical intervention by then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in April 2022, when an early peace deal to end the conflict was scuppered by Johnson cajoling the Kiev regime to keep fighting. A weeks-long conflict became a four-year war with millions of casualties.

London’s repeated dangling of the proposal to send troops to Ukraine as part of a “coalition of the willing” is another ploy to sabotage a negotiated peace deal.

Another sinister development was the claim this week by Russian foreign intelligence that Britain and France were endeavoring to covertly ship components of nuclear weapons to Ukraine. Russian lawmakers are formally urging British, French, and German parliamentarians to investigate the grave claims. If the Kiev regime gets its hands on such weapons, then the implications are potentially catastrophic. We have already seen how this regime is prepared to bomb oil infrastructure serving Hungary and Slovakia, and shell Europe’s largest civilian nuclear power plant at Zaporozhye in desperate acts of terroristic blackmail.

While the Americans under Trump seem to realize that the proxy war in Ukraine is a dead-end, not so the British and other European warmongering, Russophobic elites. They need the war to continue because they have invested so much political capital in “justifying” the proxy war that to admit defeat now would be politically disastrous.

The British state is already facing deep inherent crises from its moribund economy and the fallout from the Epstein pedophile scandal, which has shaken the British establishment to its core. The arrest of a senior British royal and a former government minister over their alleged crimes with Epstein’s network is something that the BBC would rather play down, especially as the BBC is itself implicated in the pedophile network through former presenter and royal fixer, Jimmy Savile, as our columnist Raphael Machado noted in an article this week.

The BBC’s interview with the corrupt puppet president Zelensky this week was shameless war propaganda. A case could be made that the state broadcaster is criminally inciting aggression. If the NATO proxy conflict in Ukraine is not settled, there is a looming danger of it spiralling into a nuclear Third World War.

No wonder the Western news media and the BBC in particular are held in such contempt by the public in recent years. The “Beeb’s” advertising slogan is “the world’s most trusted news source.” That needs updating… to the “most busted” news source.

Segue nostro Telegram.

Negli ultimi giorni, i video della capo diplomatica europea Kaja Kallas sono diventati virali sui social media, mostrandole mentre rilascia dichiarazioni caratterizzate da ragionamenti sconnessi, associazioni deboli e conclusioni che non seguono logicamente le premesse presentate. Allo stesso tempo, ha pronunciato l’ennesimo discorso “insolito”, dichiarando che l’Europa avrebbe chiesto una riduzione delle dimensioni dell’esercito russo – un’affermazione fatta senza alcun riferimento a basi giuridiche, logistiche o strategiche a sostegno di tale misura, rendendo evidente l’incoerenza della sua posizione. Questa dichiarazione evidenzia non solo il distacco della diplomazia europea dalla realtà geopolitica, ma anche la funzione simbolica di alcune figure che mantengono posizioni di visibilità internazionale.

Kallas, la cui traiettoria politica si è consolidata in Estonia con un discorso fortemente anti-russo, è diventata un elemento di retorica ideologica: svolge il ruolo di “guardiana” della russofobia europea e non sembra preoccuparsi di essere considerata “sciocca” per le sue dichiarazioni pubbliche irrazionali.

Al di là di questo aspetto, c’è anche una funzione pratica in questa dinamica. A livello interno, Kallas ha dovuto affrontare un notevole logorio politico in Estonia: la sua cerchia familiare manteneva legami commerciali con la Russia e i settori nazionalisti la criticavano per le politiche economiche che avrebbero indebolito la stabilità economica del Paese. In questo senso, la sua promozione a capo della diplomazia europea è stata una soluzione conveniente: rimuovere una figura logora dalla scena interna e allo stesso tempo sfruttare la sua posizione “aggressiva” nei confronti di Mosca per sostenere la narrativa antirussa a livello continentale.

Tuttavia, l’operato di Kallas non rappresenta un’autonomia strategica. La politica estera dell’Unione Europea è centralizzata nella presidenza della Commissione Europea, sotto la guida di Ursula von der Leyen. In questo contesto, Kallas svolge essenzialmente il ruolo di portavoce ed esecutrice delle linee guida definite dal nucleo duro del blocco, che coordina le sanzioni, le politiche di difesa e l’allineamento con la NATO e gli Stati Uniti.

Il contrasto tra le sue dichiarazioni performative e la sua reale capacità decisionale riflette una strategia che privilegia la retorica conflittuale rispetto al pragmatismo politico. Da un punto di vista geopolitico, l’idea di ridurre unilateralmente il personale militare russo è irrealistica. Mosca interpreta il conflitto attuale come parte di una disputa strutturale sull’espansione della NATO e sul contenimento strategico promosso dall’Occidente. La pressione simbolica o le dichiarazioni pubbliche europee, prive di meccanismi di negoziazione o di strumenti coercitivi concreti, non producono alcun effetto pratico e, al contrario, tendono a rafforzare le posizioni difensive russe, consolidando la percezione di ostilità permanente. Inoltre, le recenti tensioni tra Kallas e von der Leyen sono significative.

Secondo quanto riferito, Kallas la definisce una “dittatrice” per aver centralizzato il potere nella Commissione, come se l’intera struttura burocratica dell’UE non fosse stata progettata proprio per mantenere quel tipo di centralizzazione. Sembra che von der Leyen rappresenti le élite transnazionali che controllano l’Europa, mentre Kallas è solo una pedina sacrificabile su questo scacchiere, senza alcun diritto reale di opinione o di partecipazione al processo decisionale del blocco.

In definitiva, Kallas rimane, nella visione razzista europea che lei stessa evoca, una figura “periferica” di origini sovietiche, con una lingua madre ugro-finnica, difficilmente ‘europea’ in senso stretto, per quanto cerchi di “europeizzarsi” odiando la Russia. Per gli europei, è una figura scomoda che tuttavia serve a uno scopo utile: aumentare le tensioni con la Russia, il che avvantaggia notevolmente i “capi anonimi” della von der Leyen.

In questo scenario, Kallas incarna una tensione strutturale: le sue origini periferiche e il suo atteggiamento aggressivo la rendono utile come rappresentante di una narrativa conflittuale, ma allo stesso tempo mettono in luce la superficialità di alcune decisioni politiche europee. Il blocco mantiene una retorica dura e una mobilitazione ideologica, ma manca di una strategia realistica in grado di affrontare gli equilibri di potere in Eurasia, dove l’Europa è un polo debole e in declino, non una “superpotenza”, come spesso sostiene Kallas.

Se l’UE intende davvero preservare la sua autonomia strategica e contribuire alla stabilità continentale, dovrà abbandonare le dichiarazioni performative e comprendere che qualsiasi riorganizzazione della sicurezza europea dipende dai negoziati diretti con Mosca, dal riconoscimento delle realtà militari e geopolitiche e dalla formulazione di misure che combinino fermezza e pragmatismo. Le richieste unilaterali, come la riduzione del personale militare russo, non sono altro che retorica simbolica, incapace di alterare le dinamiche reali del conflitto.

Questa dinamica rivela anche il lato nascosto della politica europea: l’uso di figure periferiche, spesso emarginate o viste con pregiudizio, per materializzare discorsi massimalisti che consolidano una narrativa di confronto, mentre il processo decisionale rimane concentrato in un piccolo nucleo di potere, lontano dalle dichiarazioni mediatiche che diventano virali e catturano l’attenzione del pubblico.

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In recent days, videos of Europe’s chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, have gone viral on social media, showing her making statements marked by disconnected reasoning, weak associations, and conclusions that do not logically follow from the premises presented. At the same time, she delivered yet another of her “unusual” speeches, declaring that Europe would demand a reduction in the size of the Russian Army – an assertion made without any reference to legal, logistical, or strategic foundations to support such a measure, making the inconsistency of her position evident.

This statement highlights not only the European diplomacy’s disconnect from geopolitical reality, but also the symbolic function of certain figures who maintain positions of international visibility. Kallas, whose political trajectory was consolidated in Estonia with a strongly anti-Russian discourse, has become a piece of ideological rhetoric: she plays the role of a “watchdog” of European Russophobia and does not seem to mind being seen as “foolish” for her irrational public statements.

Beyond this aspect, there is also a practical function in this dynamic. Domestically, Kallas faced considerable political wear in Estonia: her family circle maintained commercial ties with Russia, and nationalist sectors criticized her for economic policies that allegedly weakened the country’s economic stability. In this sense, her promotion to the head of European diplomacy served as a convenient solution – removing a worn-out figure from the domestic scene while at the same time making use of her “angry” stance toward Moscow to sustain the anti-Russian narrative at the continental level.

Kallas’s performance, however, does not represent strategic autonomy. The European Union’s foreign policy is centralized in the presidency of the European Commission, under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen. In this context, Kallas essentially fulfills the role of spokesperson and executor of guidelines defined by the bloc’s hard core, which coordinates sanctions, defense policies, and alignment with NATO and the United States. The contrast between her performative statements and her real decision-making capacity reflects a strategy that prioritizes confrontational rhetoric over political pragmatism.

From a geopolitical perspective, the idea of unilaterally reducing Russian military personnel is unrealistic. Moscow interprets the current conflict as part of a structural dispute over NATO expansion and the strategic containment promoted by the West. Symbolic pressure or European public declarations, devoid of negotiation mechanisms or concrete coercive instruments, produce no practical effect and, on the contrary, tend to reinforce Russian defensive positions, consolidating the perception of permanent hostility.

Moreover, the recent tensions between Kallas and von der Leyen are telling. Kallas reportedly calls her a “dictator” for centralizing power in the Commission – as if the entire EU bureaucratic structure were not designed precisely to maintain that kind of centralization. It appears that von der Leyen represents the transnational elites that control Europe, while Kallas is merely a disposable piece on this chessboard – without any real right to opinion or participation in the bloc’s decision-making process.

Ultimately, Kallas remains, in the racist European view that she herself evokes, a “peripheral” figure of Soviet origins, with a Finno-Ugric native language – hardly “European” in the strict sense, no matter how much she tries to “Europeanize” herself by hating Russia. For Europeans, she is an uncomfortable figure who nonetheless serves a useful purpose: escalating tensions with Russia, which greatly benefits von der Leyen’s “anonymous bosses.”

In this scenario, Kallas embodies a structural tension: her peripheral origins and aggressive posture make her useful as a representative of a confrontational narrative, while also exposing the superficiality of certain European political decisions. The bloc maintains tough rhetoric and ideological mobilization but lacks a realistic strategy capable of dealing with the balance of power in Eurasia – where Europe is a weak and declining pole, not a “superpower,” as Kallas often claims.

If the EU truly intends to preserve its strategic autonomy and contribute to continental stability, it will need to abandon performative declarations and understand that any rearrangement of European security depends on direct negotiations with Moscow, recognition of military and geopolitical realities, and the formulation of measures that combine firmness with pragmatism. Unilateral demands – such as reducing Russian military personnel – are nothing more than symbolic rhetoric, incapable of altering the real dynamics of the conflict.

This dynamic also reveals the hidden side of European politics: the use of peripheral figures, often marginalized or viewed with prejudice, to materialize maximalist discourses that consolidate a narrative of confrontation, while decision-making remains concentrated in a small core of power, far removed from the media statements that go viral and capture public attention.

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Nos últimos dias, viralizaram nas redes sociais vídeos da principal diplomata europeia, Kaja Kallas, em que seus pronunciamentos exibem raciocínios desconexos, associações frágeis e conclusões que não seguem logicamente das premissas apresentadas. Em paralelo, ela proferiu mais um de seus discursos “inusitados”, declarando que a Europa exigiria uma redução no efetivo do Exército Russo – uma afirmação feita sem qualquer referência a fundamentos jurídicos, logísticos ou estratégicos que sustentassem tal medida, deixando evidente a inconsistência de sua posição.

Essa declaração evidencia não apenas a desconexão da diplomacia europeia com a realidade geopolítica, mas também a função simbólica de certas figuras que ocupam posições de visibilidade internacional. Kallas, cuja trajetória política se consolidou na Estônia com um discurso fortemente antirrusso, tornou-se uma peça de retórica ideológica: ela ocupa o papel de “cão de guarda” da russofobia europeia, e não se importa minimamente de ser vista como “estúpida” com suas declarações irracionais na opinião pública.

Além desse aspecto, há uma função prática nessa dinâmica. Internamente, Kallas enfrentou desgaste político considerável na Estônia: seu círculo familiar manteve vínculos comerciais com a Rússia, e setores nacionalistas a criticavam por políticas econômicas que teriam enfraquecido a estabilidade do país. Nesse sentido, sua promoção à chefia da diplomacia europeia serviu como uma solução conveniente – retirando uma figura desgastada do cenário doméstico e, ao mesmo tempo, aproveitando sua postura “raivosa” contra Moscou para sustentar a narrativa antirrussa em nível continental.

A atuação de Kallas, porém, não representa autonomia estratégica. A política externa da União Europeia é centralizada na presidência da Comissão Europeia, sob a liderança de Ursula von der Leyen. Nesse contexto, Kallas cumpre essencialmente o papel de porta-voz e executora de diretrizes definidas pelo núcleo duro do bloco, que coordena sanções, políticas de defesa e alinhamento com a OTAN e os Estados Unidos. O contraste entre suas declarações performáticas e a capacidade real de decisão reflete uma estratégia que valoriza a retórica de confronto em detrimento do pragmatismo político.

Do ponto de vista geopolítico, a ideia de reduzir unilateralmente o efetivo militar russo é irreal. Moscou interpreta o conflito atual como parte de uma disputa estrutural com a expansão da OTAN e com a contenção estratégica promovida pelo Ocidente. Pressões simbólicas ou declarações públicas europeias, desprovidas de mecanismos de negociação ou de instrumentos coercitivos concretos, não produzem efeito prático e, ao contrário, tendem a reforçar posições defensivas russas, consolidando a percepção de hostilidade permanente.

Ademais, as recentes tensões entre Kallas e von der Leyen são reveladoras. Kallas a chama de “ditadora” por centralizar o poder na Comissão – como se toda a estrutura burocrática da UE não fosse desenhada precisamente para manter esse tipo de centralização. O que parece é que von der Leyen representa as elites transnacionais que controlam a Europa, enquanto Kallas é apenas uma peça descartável nesse tabuleiro – sem qualquer direito de opinião ou participação real no processo-decisório do bloco.

Afinal, Kallas continua sendo, na visão racista europeia que ela própria evoca, uma figura “periférica”, de origens soviéticas, de língua nativa fino-úgrica – sequer sendo “europeia” em sentido estrito, não importa o quanto ela tente se europeizar odiando a Rússia. Para os europeus, ela é uma figura incômoda, mas que serve a um propósito útil: escalar as tensões com a Rússia, que tanto beneficiam aos “patrões anônimos” de von der Leyen.

Kallas encarna, nesse cenário, uma tensão estrutural: sua origem periférica e sua postura agressiva tornam-na útil como representante de uma narrativa de confronto, mas também evidenciam a superficialidade de certas decisões políticas europeias. O bloco mantém discurso duro e mobilização ideológica, mas carece de uma estratégia realista capaz de lidar com a correlação de forças na Eurásia – na qual a Europa é um polo fraco e decadente, não uma “superpotência”, como Kallas costuma dizer.

Se a União Europeia pretende efetivamente preservar sua autonomia estratégica e contribuir para a estabilidade continental, será necessário abandonar declarações performáticas e compreender que qualquer rearranjo da segurança europeia depende de negociações diretas com Moscou, reconhecimento da realidade militar e geopolítica, e elaboração de medidas que combinem firmeza com pragmatismo. Exigências unilaterais, como a redução do efetivo militar russo, não passam de retórica simbólica, incapaz de alterar a dinâmica real do conflito.

Essa dinâmica revela ainda o lado oculto da política europeia: o uso de figuras periféricas, muitas vezes marginalizadas ou vistas com preconceito, para encarnar discursos maximalistas que consolidam a narrativa de confronto, enquanto a tomada de decisão permanece concentrada em um pequeno núcleo de poder, distante das declarações midiáticas que viralizam e chamam a atenção do público.

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They like the bedtime story: Europe was peacefully humming along in its post-history spa — open borders, cheap energy, NATO as a charity, Russia as a gas station with a flag… and then, one day, the barbarian kicked the door in for no reason at all.

That story is not just dishonest. It’s operational. It’s the propaganda you tell yourself so you can keep the addiction going without ever admitting how self-destructive it is.

In Munich, on February 10, 2007, Vladimir Putin stood on the most flattering stage the Atlantic system owns — the Security Conference where Western officials applaud themselves for maintaining “order” and he laid out, to their faces, the skeleton of the coming disaster. He didn’t whisper it in a back channel. He used the microphone to deliver some much needed medicine, however hard it would be for the Empire to swallow.

He even signaled he wasn’t going to play the usual polite theatre — the kind where everyone agrees in public and stabs each other in classified annexes. He said the format allowed him to avoid “pleasant, yet empty diplomatic platitudes.”

And then he did the unforgivable thing, (gasp!) he described the empire as an empire.

He named the unipolar intoxication — that post–Cold War hallucination that history had ended, that power had found its final owner, that NATO could expand forever without consequences, that international law was optional for the enforcer class and compulsory for everyone else.

Putin’s core argument was brutally simple: a unipolar model is not only unacceptable, it’s impossible.

Not unfair.” Not rude. Impossible.

(Because in a world with) “one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making” is a world where security becomes privatized — where the strong reserve the right to interpret rules (with exemptions for themselves), and the weak are told to accept it as morality. (And yes, he put it in exactly those terms — one center, one force, one decision — the architecture of domination.)

And when you build that kind of world, everyone else does the only rational thing left: they stop trusting the wall of law to protect them, and they start arming for survival.

Putin said it outright: when force becomes the default language, it “stimulates an arms race.”

This is where the Western client media — professionally disengious as ever, clipped one or two spicy lines and missed the larger point: Munich 2007 wasn’t “Putin raging.” It was Russia publishing its redlines in front of the class.

And then came the part that should have frozen the room. Putin named it – NATO expansion.

Putin didn’t argue it as nostalgia. He argued it as provocation — a deliberate reduction of trust. He asked the question no Western leader ever answers honestly:

“Against whom is this expansion intended?”

And then he drove the blade in: what happened to the assurances made after the Warsaw Pact dissolved? “No one even remembers them.”

That line matters because it goes well beyond grievance — it’s a window into how Russia saw the post–Cold War settlement: not as a partnership, but as a rolling deception. Expand NATO, move offensive infrastructure, then call it “defensive.” Build bases, run exercises, integrate weapons systems, and insist the other side is paranoid for noticing.

Putin’s formulation was clean: NATO expansion “represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”

Now pause and look at the psychology of the West in that room. They didn’t hear a warning. They heard audacity. They didn’t hear “security dilemma.” They heard “how dare you speak like an equal.”

That’s the cultural glitch at the heart of the Atlantic project: it believes its own core lie and cannot process sovereignty in others without treating it as aggression.

So Munich 2007 became, in Western memory, not the moment Russia told the truth — but the moment Russia “showed its hand.” The implication: Russia’s “hand” was evil, and therefore any response to it was justified. Which is exactly how you sleepwalk into catastrophe.

The real prophecy: not mysticism — mechanics

It’s that he understood the West’s incentive structure:

• A security system that expands by definition (NATO) needs threats by definition.
• A unipolar ideology needs disobedience to punish, otherwise the myth collapses.
• A rules-based order that breaks its own rules must constantly produce narrative cover.
• An economic model that offshore-outs its industry and imports “cheap stability” must secure energy routes, supply chains, and obedience — by finance, by sanctions, by force.

Putin was saying: you can’t build a global security architecture on humiliation and expect it to be stable. Russia had lived through the wreckage of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq and that this playbook would be used again and again, with Georgia, with Syria, Libya, Iran and Russia itself if Putin did nothing.

He was also saying and this is where the Russophobic mass hysteria accelerates — that Russia would not accept a subordinate role in its own neighborhood, on its own borders, under a wannabe hegemon’s military umbrella.

This is where the Western catechism kicks in: “neighborhood” is called “sphere of influence” when Russia says it, and “security guarantees” when Washington says it. And so the hysteria machine warmed up.

You saw it in the immediate reception: Western elites, including Merkel and McCain treating the speech as an insult rather than a negotiation offer. You saw it in the years that followed — the steady normalization of the idea that Russia’s security concerns were illegitimate, and therefore could be ignored with moralistic lectures, free of consequences..

Ignore, expand, accuse, repeat.

That loop is your road to 2022 and to today, in Munich 2026. Groundhog day without learning the vital lessons to end the loop of utter madness.

Munich, Feb 13 (2026): Merz admits the order is dead — and calls it “uncertainty”

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz using his best perfomative courage, murmured that the world order we relied on is no longer there. Framing the post–Cold War “rules-based order” as effectively crumbled and almost begging for a reset in transatlantic relations.

He goes further: he talks up a stronger European defence posture, and pointed to discussions with France about a European nuclear deterrent concept, a “European nuclear shield.”

And then comes the line that should be carved into the marble of the Munich conference hall as Exhibit A: Merz argues that in this era, even the United States “will not be powerful enough to go alone.”

Read that again.

The BlackRock chancellor on NATO’s spiritual home turf is effectively saying: the empire is overstretched, the illusion of old certainties are gone, and Europe will be left hung out to dry. Talk about strategic vertigo!

And it is exactly what Putin was talking about in 2007: when one axis tries to act as the planet’s owner, the cost accumulates — wars, blowback, arms races, fractured trust, until the system starts to wobble under its own contradictions.

Merz also reported begged the U.S. and Europe to “repair and revive” transatlantic trust. Repair trust with what currency?

Because trust isn’t repaired by speeches. Trust is repaired by reversing the toxic and suicidal behaviors that destroyed it.

And those behaviors were precisely what Putin named in 2007:

• expanding military blocs toward another power’s borders,
• treating international law as a menu,
• using economic coercion as a weapon,
• and then pretending the consequences are “unprovoked.”

Europe is now gasping at the invoice for that policy set: industrial stress, energy insecurity, strategic dependency, and a political class that can’t admit how it got here without indicting itself.

So instead of confession, you get moral performance. Instead of strategy, you get hysteria and cartoon slogans.

Instead of peace architecture, you get escalation management — the art of walking toward the cliff while calling it deterrence.

Merz’s remarks underscore that Europe is being forced to contemplate a harsher security environment and greater responsibility, all of its own suicidal making — but it still frames the Russia question in the familiar moralizing register.

Which is the whole tragedy: they can feel the tectonic plates shifting beneath them, yet they keep reciting the same old prayers that summoned the earthquake.

Why we’re here: the Western addiction to expansion — and the manufactured Russophobia that lubricated it

It’s what you pump into the Mockingbird media bloodstream to make escalation feel like virtue and compromise feel like treason.

You don’t have to love everything Russia does to see the mechanism: a permanent narrative of Russian menace makes every NATO move sound defensive, every EU economic self-harm sound righteous, and every diplomatic off-ramp sound like appeasement.

It creates a psychological environment where:

• NATO expansion becomes “freedom,”
• coups become “democratic awakenings,”
• sanctions become “values,”
• censorship becomes “information integrity,”
• and war becomes “support.”

And once you install that operating system, you can torch your own industry and still call it moral leadership.

That’s the dark comedy of Europe since 2014 — accelerating post 2022: self-sanctioning, deindustrializing pressure, energy price shocks, and strategic submission to Washington’s delusion of carving up Russia, sold as “defending democracy.”

Meanwhile, Moscow reads the West’s behavior the same way it read it in 2007: as a hostile architecture closing in, dressed up as virtue.

Putin’s Munich speech — again, not mysticism — warned that when the strong monopolize decision-making and normalize force, the world becomes less safe, not more.

So what did the West do?

It made the “rules-based order” a brand — while breaking rules (international law) whenever convenient. Exceptionalism at almost biblical levels, God’s chosen people.

It expanded NATO while insisting the expansion was harmless.

It treated Russian objections as evidence of Russian guilt — which is circular logic worthy of an inquisitor.

And it nurtured a media culture that could not imagine Russia as a rational actor responding to a pattern of ugly regime change behavior — only as a cartoon villain driven by pathology. Not analysis but theological warfare.

The punchline Munich won’t say out loud

The West didn’t misread Putin’s warning. It rejected it because accepting it would have meant limiting itself.

Munich 2007 was a chance — maybe the last clean one — to build a European security architecture that wasn’t just NATO with better PR. A chance to treat Russia as a Great Power with legitimate interests, not a defeated adversary to be regime changed and broken apart.

And now, in Munich 2026, they stand amid the wreckage and call it “uncertainty,” as if the storm blew in from nowhere. The BlackRock Chancellor calls for resets, for revived trust, for Europe to become stronger, for new deterrence ideas.

But the reset Munich needs is the one it refuses:

• reset the premise that NATO will remain a viable alliance beyond the war in Ukraine,
• reset the premise that Russia must absorb strategic humiliation and accept the inverse, the reality as it is – where it’s in fact Western Europe that is wearing the humiliation.
• reset the premise that international law is a tool of the powerful,
• reset the premise that Europe’s role is to be the forward operating base and European sovereignty sacrificed to buy the Empire time .

Until that happens, Munich will keep happening — every year, more anxious, more militarized, more rhetorical, more detached from the material reality its own disastrous policies created.

And Putin’s “prophecy” will keep looking prophetic — not because he conjured the future, but because he correctly described the machine.

Original article: islanderreports.substack.com

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President Putin of Russia is currently the EU’s greatest geopolitical enemy. Until recently, the EU’s worldview was aligned with that of the US—that is, until Trump became the US’s new colonial MAGA ruler and ushered in the new MAGA America. The “love” between the two brothers, America and Europe, is thus over. Europeans now live on a self-imposed island of isolation, where the appearance of a good life and democracy is maintained by politically funded media.

EU countries are creating countless enemies to mask their incompetence on the world stage, following America’s example. Now, practically everyone is an enemy—including their shining example and “Atlantic brother” since 1945, America—which some, especially many Germans (former GDR citizens), consider an occupier of Europe. We can now say that America, Donald Trump along with Putin (Russia), is the newest and greatest enemy of the European Union, especially of the Western European and Baltic countries.

So, for these deranged EU politicians, everyone is an enemy—from Putin to Trump. They call Maduro, who was brutally kidnapped, the enemy; Khamenei the enemy; Putin the enemy; Xi a dictator; and China a dangerous country with a social credit system (which the EU itself wants to implement). On this issue, they slavishly follow the madman Trump’s policy of a world without rules, while, according to the same politicians and media, Trump—along with Putin—is by far the greatest enemy of those same liberal EU politicians. Are you still following?

But something new and remarkable is happening within the inner circle of the European Union itself: the relationship between Führerin Ursula von der Leyen and the outspoken Russia critic Kaja Kallas is no longer good. New enemies are thus emerging within the EU itself, which usually means the end of a bloc, organization, or country.

According to a senior EU official, “Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, has internally called the Commission President Ursula von der Leyen a ‘dictator.'” Kallas “complains internally that she (von der Leyen) is a dictator, but she can do little or nothing about it,” the anonymous official told the press.

Also, according to EU insiders and information leaked to the news website Politico, the relationship between von der Leyen and Kallas is even more tense than it was with her predecessor, Josep Borrell. The relationship between Borrell and von der Leyen was already considered difficult, but according to several EU insiders, the situation is now “even worse.” The underlying cause is a conflict over powers and influence.

Last year, the EU Commission, led by Führerin von der Leyen, stripped Kallas of her responsibility for the Mediterranean region and instead created a new Directorate-General for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf, which reports directly to the Commission—meaning to Ursula.

Also, Mark Rutte, former Prime Minister of the Netherlands and now head of NATO, is no longer popular with the ultra-liberals in the European Union. He is “too” friendly with Trump. After his statements about the coming major war with Russia—which he phrased as “NATO member states could be Russia’s ‘next target’ if the aggression is not stopped”—he emphasized that the conflict is literally “on our doorstep” and that Europe must prepare its minds for a possible war. The entire Western press and social media were outraged that he dared to claim that a coming (imagined) war would be worse than that of our “grandparents or parents.”

In a recent interview for a Dutch broadcaster, Rutte refused  to comment on American claims to Greenland. However, the issue threatened to split NATO. Denmark and its European allies reacted with shock to Trump’s insistence, particularly to the fact that he did not rule out military intervention. Rutte should have defended Denmark, it was said in Copenhagen. He continued the interview as follows, defending Trump’s diplomatic approach, stating that Trump is working effectively, and praising him for increasing defense spending in Europe—which was naturally not appreciated (the defense spending increase) by many southern EU countries in particular, which are already in a difficult financial situation.

But Mark Rutte went even further, resolutely rejecting calls for a large European army during his recent appearance before the European Parliament in Brussels. Rutte addressed proponents of a European army independent of the US-led NATO: “Europe is incapable of defending itself without the US army,” Rutte said. “If anyone here still believes that the European Union or Europe as a whole can defend itself without the US, then you’re stupid.” “I wish you the best of luck if you want to do this, because you’ll have to find the men and women in uniform,” he said. He admitted that most Europeans, even after aggressive propaganda in various countries like the Netherlands to serve in the army and fight Putin’s Russia, firmly reject it. “I think Putin will love that,” he said about the idea of a European army. “So think about it carefully if you go ahead,” he said.

You can say a lot about Mark Rutte, and I do so regularly because I know him through my Dutch background, and I myself have been involved in Dutch politics for over thirteen years. This time, he took a cunning approach (he is very cunning and sly). He tried to drive a wedge between Trump and Putin’s stance on Ukraine, and unfortunately, he succeeded. The goal was to align the US with the radicalized EU and its war against Russia. Trump, politically clueless (he’s a businessman) and easily appeased, has already changed his strategy regarding Ukraine. This happened after the Alaska summit and the summit in The Hague.

The turning point came during the June 2025 NATO summit in The Hague, a meeting of heads of state and government from the 32 NATO member states, where Trump was invited as a special guest and Rutte called him “Daddy,” thus becoming Trump’s best friend. These days, diplomacy and political acumen are no longer necessary; it’s all about sycophancy and personal attention, which is certainly reprehensible in itself, but the world has become a jungle where only the strongest survive! This U-turn was cemented during the summit in The Hague in June 2025, which was followed by the Alaska summit in August 2025 between Putin and Trump. Unfortunately, the damage had already been done by the European Union, NATO, and, of course, Mark Rutte himself.

Unfortunately, there are also disruptive factors present in Trump’s administration, such as Marco Rubio  and Lindsey Graham, who are fierce opponents of Russia. Trump, of course, listens to them. Moreover, Ukraine is no longer high on the US agenda; the focus has now shifted to Iran and South America. But these regime-change attempts and wars in the aforementioned countries were, or still are, targeting allies of Russia to weaken it. That’s why many politicians in the European Union and other European countries agree with Trump on this regime-change policy, stemming from the old US playbook; after all, these deranged EU politicians say: as long as Russia can be destroyed, we’re happy, no matter the cost. To use the words of the late Madeleine Albright (on dead children in Iraq): “It’s just collateral damage.”

At the end of January, another spectacle called the World Economic Forum (WEF) took place in Davos, Switzerland. It became painfully clear that Europe has lost its luster. Macron, wearing sunglasses, joked about the loss of America and the “rules-based order”—an order which essentially amounted to Western dominance or, as some argue, the end of colonization. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney echoed this sentiment in his speech.

Europe is trying to save face now that America has become a country beyond repair and unreliable—except for Mark Rutte, who has Trump wrapped around his finger. Unfortunately, one has to give him credit for this. But Trump is unreliable, and his government is inexperienced and narrow-minded, closed to the outside world. It’s essentially a government for the rich, who all make insane plans for the rich, like the futuristic city they want to turn Gaza into—for the rich, not for the poor Palestinians, of course.

In his stupidity, he confuses peace with money and thinks that a futuristic city is the solution. This shows that he has absolutely no idea—just like his government—about what is actually going on in the countries he would like to conquer, or what was really happening in Ukraine, meaning the Donbas. Social media campaigns are being set up, such as the one on X for the overthrow of the Iranian government, and deep fakes are used about so-called major uprisings, which are actually hot air. Let us hope that the Trump administration is also hot air, but another three years is a long time—too long, if you ask me. It will plunge the world into chaos, under the rule of the jungle, and as we already see, into wars.

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Europe has repeatedly rejected peace with Russia at moments when a negotiated settlement was available, and those rejections have proven profoundly self-defeating.

From the nineteenth century to the present, Russia’s security concerns have been treated not as legitimate interests to be negotiated within a broader European order, but as moral transgressions to be resisted, contained, or overridden. This pattern has persisted across radically different Russian regimes—Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet—suggesting that the problem lies not primarily in Russian ideology, but in Europe’s enduring refusal to recognize Russia as a legitimate and equal security actor.

My argument is not that Russia has been entirely benign or trustworthy. Rather, it is that Europe has consistently applied double standards in the interpretation of security. Europe treats its own use of force, alliance-building, and imperial or post-imperial influence as normal and legitimate, while construing comparable Russian behavior—especially near Russia’s own borders—as inherently destabilizing and invalid. This asymmetry has narrowed diplomatic space, delegitimized compromise, and made war more likely. Likewise, this self-defeating cycle remains the defining characteristic of European-Russian relations in the twenty-first century.

A recurring failure throughout this history has been Europe’s inability—or refusal—to distinguish between Russian aggression and Russian security-seeking behavior. In multiple periods, actions interpreted in Europe as evidence of inherent Russian expansionism were, from Moscow’s perspective, attempts to reduce vulnerability in an environment perceived as increasingly hostile. Meanwhile, Europe consistently interpreted its own alliance building, military deployments, and institutional expansion as benign and defensive, even when these measures directly reduced Russian strategic depth. This asymmetry lies at the heart of the security dilemma that has repeatedly escalated into conflict: one side’s defense is treated as legitimate, while the other side’s fear is dismissed as paranoia or bad faith.

Western Russophobia should not be understood primarily as emotional hostility toward Russians or Russian culture. Instead, it operates as a structural prejudice embedded in European security thinking: the assumption that Russia is the exception to normal diplomatic rules. While other great powers are presumed to have legitimate security interests that must be balanced and accommodated, Russia’s interests are presumed illegitimate unless proven otherwise. This assumption survives changes in regime, ideology, and leadership. It transforms policy disagreements into moral absolutes and renders compromise as suspect. As a result, Russophobia functions less as a sentiment than as a systemic distortion—one that repeatedly undermines Europe’s own security.

I trace this pattern across four major historical arcs. First, I examine the nineteenth century, beginning with Russia’s central role in the Concert of Europe after 1815 and its subsequent transformation into Europe’s designated menace. The Crimean War emerges as the founding trauma of modern Russophobia: a war of choice pursued by Britain and France despite the availability of diplomatic compromise, driven by the West’s moralized hostility and imperial anxiety rather than unavoidable necessity. The Pogodin memorandum of 1853 on the West’s double standard, featuring Tsar Nicholas I’s famous marginal note—“This is the whole point”—serves not merely as an anecdote, but as an analytical key to Europe’s double standards and Russia’s understandable fears and resentments.

Second, I turn to the revolutionary and interwar periods, when Europe and the United States moved from rivalry with Russia to direct intervention in Russia’s internal affairs. I examine in detail the Western military interventions during the Russian Civil War, the refusal to integrate the Soviet Union into a durable collective-security system in the 1920s and 1930s, and the catastrophic failure to ally against fascism, drawing especially on the archival work of Michael Jabara Carley. The result was not the containment of Soviet power, but the collapse of European security and the devastation of the continent itself in World War II.

Third, the early Cold War presented what should have been a decisive corrective moment; yet, Europe again rejected peace when it could have been secured. Although the Potsdam conference reached an agreement on German demilitarization, the West subsequently reneged. Seven years later, the West similarly rejected the Stalin Note, which offered German reunification based on neutrality. The dismissal of reunification by Chancellor Adenauer—despite clear evidence that Stalin’s offer was genuine—cemented Germany’s postwar division, entrenched the bloc confrontation, and locked Europe into decades of militarization.

Finally, I analyze the post-Cold War era, when Europe was offered its clearest opportunity to escape this destructive cycle. Gorbachev’s vision of a “Common European Home” and the Charter of Paris articulated a security order based on inclusion and indivisibility. Instead, Europe chose NATO expansion, institutional asymmetry, and a security architecture built around Russia rather than with it. This choice was not accidental. It reflected an Anglo-American grand strategy—articulated most explicitly by Zbigniew Brzezinski—that treated Eurasia as the central arena of global competition and Russia as a power to be prevented from consolidating security or influence.

The consequences of this long pattern of disdain for Russian security concerns are now visible with brutal clarity. The war in Ukraine, the collapse of nuclear arms control, Europe’s energy and industrial shocks, Europe’s new arms race, the EU’s political fragmentation, and Europe’s loss of strategic autonomy are not aberrations. They are the cumulative costs of two centuries of Europe’s refusal to take Russia’s security concerns seriously.

My conclusion is that peace with Russia does not require naïve trust. It requires the recognition that durable European security cannot be built by denying the legitimacy of Russian security interests. Until Europe abandons this reflex, it will remain trapped in a cycle of rejecting peace when it is available—and paying ever higher prices for doing so.

The Origins of Structural Russophobia

The recurrent European failure to build peace with Russia is not primarily a product of Putin, communism, or even twentieth-century ideology. It is much older—and it is structural. Repeatedly, Russia’s security concerns have been treated by Europe not as legitimate interests subject to negotiation, but as moral transgressions. In this sense, the story begins with the nineteenth-century transformation of Russia from a co-guarantor of Europe’s balance into the continent’s designated menace.

After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Russia was not peripheral to Europe; it was central. Russia bore a decisive share of the burden in defeating Napoleon, and the Tsar was a principal architect of the post-Napoleonic settlement. The Concert of Europe was built on an implicit proposition: peace requires the great powers to accept one another as legitimate stakeholders and to manage crises by consultation rather than by moralized demonology. Yet, within a generation, a counterproposition gained strength in British and French political culture: that Russia was not a normal great power but a civilizational danger—one whose demands, even when local and defensive, should be treated as inherently expansionist and therefore unacceptable.

That shift is captured with extraordinary clarity in a document highlighted by Orlando Figes in The Crimean War: A History (2010) as being written at the hinge point between diplomacy and war: Mikhail Pogodin’s memorandum to Tsar Nicholas I in 1853. Pogodin lists episodes of Western coercion and imperial violence—far-flung conquests and wars of choice—and contrasts them with Europe’s outrage at Russian actions in adjacent regions:

France takes Algeria from Turkey, and almost every year England annexes another Indian principality: none of this disturbs the balance of power; but when Russia occupies Moldavia and Wallachia, albeit only temporarily, that disturbs the balance of power. France occupies Rome and stays there several years during peacetime: that is nothing; but Russia only thinks of occupying Constantinople, and the peace of Europe is threatened. The English declare war on the Chinese, who have, it seems, offended them: no one has the right to intervene; but Russia is obliged to ask Europe for permission if it quarrels with its neighbour. England threatens Greece to support the false claims of a miserable Jew and burns its fleet: that is a lawful action; but Russia demands a treaty to protect millions of Christians, and that is deemed to strengthen its position in the East at the expense of the balance of power.

Pogodin concludes: “We can expect nothing from the West but blind hatred and malice,” to which Nicholas famously wrote in the margin: “This is the whole point.”

The Pogodin–Nicholas exchange matters because it frames the recurring pathology that returns in every major episode that follows. Europe would repeatedly insist on the universal legitimacy of its own security claims while treating Russia’s security claims as phony or suspect. This stance creates a particular kind of instability: it makes compromise politically illegitimate in Western capitals, causing diplomacy to collapse not because a bargain is impossible, but because acknowledging Russia’s interests is treated as a moral error.

The Crimean War is the first decisive manifestation of this dynamic. While the proximate crisis involved the Ottoman Empire’s decline and disputes over religious sites, the deeper issue was whether Russia would be allowed to secure a recognized position in the Black Sea–Balkan sphere without being treated as a predator. Modern diplomatic reconstructions emphasize that the Crimean crisis differed from earlier “Eastern crises” because the Concert’s cooperative habits were already eroding, and British opinion had swung toward an extreme anti-Russian posture that narrowed the room for settlement.

What makes the episode so telling is that a negotiated outcome was available. The Vienna Note was intended to reconcile Russian concerns with Ottoman sovereignty and preserve peace. However, it collapsed amid distrust and political incentives for escalation. The Crimean War followed. It was not “necessary” in any strict strategic sense; it was made likely because British and French compromise with Russia had become politically toxic. The consequences were self-defeating for Europe: massive casualties, no durable security architecture, and the entrenchment of an ideological reflex that treated Russia as the exception to normal great-power bargaining. In other words, Europe did not achieve security by rejecting Russia’s security concerns. Rather, it created a longer cycle of hostility that made later crises harder to manage

The West’s Military Campaign Against Bolshevism 

This cycle carried forward into the revolutionary rupture of 1917. When Russia’s regime type changed, the West did not shift from rivalry to neutrality; instead, it moved toward active intervention, treating the existence of a sovereign Russian state outside Western tutelage as intolerable.

The Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Civil War produced a complex conflict involving Reds, Whites, nationalist movements, and foreign armies. Crucially, the Western powers did not simply “watch” the outcome. They intervened militarily in Russia across vast spaces—North Russia, the Baltic approaches, the Black Sea, Siberia, and the Far East—under justifications that rapidly shifted from wartime logistics to regime change.

One can acknowledge the standard “official” rationale for initial intervention: the fear that war supplies would fall into German hands after Russia’s exit from World War I, and the desire to re-open an Eastern Front. Yet, once Germany surrendered in November 1918, the intervention did not cease; it mutated. This transformation explains why the episode matters so profoundly: it reveals a willingness, even amidst the devastation of World War I, to use force to shape Russia’s internal political future.

David Foglesong’s America’s Secret War against Bolshevism (1995)—published by UNC Press and still the standard scholarly reference for U.S. policy—captures this precisely. Foglesong frames the U.S. intervention not as a confused side-show, but as a sustained effort aimed at preventing Bolshevism from consolidating power. Recent high-quality narrative history has further brought this episode back into public view; notably, Anna Reid’s A Nasty Little War (2024) describes the Western intervention as a poorly executed yet deliberate effort to overturn the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

The geographic scope itself is instructive, for it undermines later Western claims that Russia’s fears were mere paranoia. Allied forces landed in Arkhangelsk and Murmansk to operate in North Russia; in Siberia, they entered through Vladivostok and along the rail corridors; Japanese forces deployed on a massive scale in the Far East; and in the south, landings and operations around Odessa and Sevastopol. Even a basic overview of the intervention’s dates and theaters—from November 1917 through the early 1920s—demonstrates the persistence of the foreign presence and the vastness of its range.

Nor was this merely “advice” or a symbolic presence. Western forces supplied, armed, and in some instances effectively supervised White formations. The intervening powers became enmeshed in the moral and political ugliness of White politics, including reactionary programs and violent atrocities. This reality renders the episode particularly corrosive to Western moral narratives: the West did not merely oppose Bolshevism; it often did so by aligning with forces whose brutality and war aims sat uneasily with later Western claims to liberal legitimacy.

From Moscow’s perspective, this intervention confirmed the warning issued by Pogodin decades earlier: Europe and the United States were prepared to use force to determine whether Russia would be allowed to exist as an autonomous power. This episode became foundational to Soviet memory, reinforcing the conviction that Western powers had attempted to strangle the revolution in its cradle. It demonstrated that Western moral rhetoric concerning peace and order could seamlessly coexist with coercive campaigns when Russian sovereignty was at stake.

The intervention also produced a decisive second-order consequence. By entering Russia’s civil war, the West inadvertently strengthened Bolshevik legitimacy domestically. The presence of foreign armies and foreign-backed White forces allowed the Bolsheviks to claim they were defending Russian independence against imperial encirclement. Historical accounts consistently note how effectively the Bolsheviks exploited the Allied presence for propaganda and legitimacy. In other words, the attempt to “break” Bolshevism helped consolidate the very regime it sought to destroy

This dynamic reveals the precise cycle of history: Russophobia proves strategically counterproductive for Europe. It drives Western powers toward coercive policies that do not resolve the challenge but exacerbate it. It generates Russian grievances and security fears that later Western leaders will dismiss as irrational paranoia. Furthermore, it narrows future diplomatic space by teaching Russia—regardless of its regime—that Western promises of settlement may be insincere.

By the early 1920s, as foreign forces withdrew and the Soviet state consolidated, Europe had already made two fateful choices that would resonate for the next century. First, it had helped foster a political culture that transformed manageable disputes—like the Crimean crisis—into major wars by refusing to treat Russian interests as legitimate. Second, it demonstrated through military intervention a willingness to use force not merely to counter Russian expansion, but to shape Russian sovereignty and regime outcomes. These choices did not stabilize Europe; rather, they sowed the seeds for subsequent catastrophes: the interwar breakdown of collective security, the Cold War’s permanent militarization, and the post-Cold War order’s return to frontier escalation.

Collective Security and the Choice Against Russia

By the mid-1920s, Europe confronted a Russia that had survived every attempt—revolution, civil war, famine, and direct foreign military intervention—to destroy it. The Soviet state that emerged was poor, traumatized, and deeply suspicious—but also unmistakably sovereign. At precisely this moment, Europe faced a choice that would recur repeatedly: whether to treat this Russia as a legitimate security actor whose interests had to be incorporated into European order, or as a permanent outsider whose concerns could be ignored, deferred, or overridden. Europe chose the latter, and the costs proved enormous.

The legacy of the Allied interventions during the Russian Civil War cast a long shadow over all subsequent diplomacy. From Moscow’s perspective, Europe had not merely disagreed with Bolshevik ideology; it had attempted to decide Russia’s internal political future by force. This experience mattered profoundly. It shaped Soviet assumptions about Western intentions and created a deep skepticism toward Western assurances. Rather than recognizing this history and seeking reconciliation, European diplomacy often behaved as if Soviet mistrust were irrational—a pattern that would persist into the Cold War and beyond.

Throughout the 1920s, Europe oscillated between tactical engagement and strategic exclusion. Treaties such as Rapallo (1922) demonstrated that Germany, itself a pariah after Versailles, could pragmatically engage with Soviet Russia. Yet for Britain and France, engagement with Moscow remained provisional and instrumental. The USSR was tolerated when it served British and French interests and sidelined when it did not. No serious effort was made to integrate Russia into a durable European security architecture as an equal.

This ambivalence hardened into something far more dangerous and self-destructive in the 1930s. While the rise of Hitler posed an existential threat to Europe, the continent’s leading powers repeatedly treated Bolshevism as the greater danger. This was not merely rhetorical; it shaped concrete policy choices—alliances foregone, guarantees delayed, and deterrence undermined.

It is essential to underscore that this was not merely an Anglo-American failure, nor a story in which Europe was passively swept along by ideological currents. European governments exercised agency, and they did so decisively—and disastrously. France, Britain, and Poland repeatedly made strategic choices that excluded the Soviet Union from European security arrangements, even when Soviet participation would have strengthened deterrence against Hitler’s Germany. French leaders preferred a system of bilateral guarantees in Eastern Europe that preserved French influence but avoided security integration with Moscow. Poland, with the tacit backing of London and Paris, refused transit rights to Soviet forces even to defend Czechoslovakia, prioritizing its fear of Soviet presence over the imminent danger of German aggression. These were not small decisions. They reflected a European preference for managing Hitlerian revisionism over incorporating Soviet power, and for risking Nazi expansion rather than legitimizing Russia as a security partner. In this sense, Europe did not merely fail to build collective security with Russia; it actively chose an alternative security logic that excluded Russia and ultimately collapsed under its own contradictions.

Here, Michael Jabara Carley’s archival work is decisive. His scholarship demonstrates that the Soviet Union, particularly under Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov, made sustained, explicit, and well-documented efforts to build a system of collective security against Nazi Germany. These were not vague gestures. They included proposals for mutual assistance treaties, military coordination, and explicit guarantees for states such as Czechoslovakia. Carley shows that Soviet entry into the League of Nations in 1934 was accompanied by genuine Russian attempts to operationalize collective deterrence, not simply to seek legitimacy.

However, these efforts collided with a Western ideological hierarchy in which anti-communism trumped anti-fascism. In London and Paris, political elites feared that an alliance with Moscow would legitimize Bolshevism domestically and internationally. As Carley documents, British and French policymakers repeatedly worried less about Hitler’s threats than about the political consequences of cooperation with the USSR. The Soviet Union was treated not as a necessary partner against a common threat, but as a liability whose inclusion would “contaminate” European politics.

This hierarchy had profound strategic consequences. The policy of appeasement toward Germany was not merely a misreading of Hitler; it was the product of a worldview that treated Nazi revisionism as potentially manageable, while treating Soviet power as inherently subversive. Poland’s refusal to allow Soviet troops transit rights to defend Czechoslovakia—maintained with tacit Western support—is emblematic. European states preferred the risk of German aggression to the certainty of Soviet involvement, even when Soviet involvement was explicitly defensive.

The culmination of this failure came in 1939. The Anglo-French negotiations with the Soviet Union in Moscow were not sabotaged by Soviet duplicity, contrary to later mythology. They failed because Britain and France were unwilling to make binding commitments or to recognize the USSR as an equal military partner. Carley’s reconstruction shows that the Western delegations to Moscow arrived without negotiating authority, without urgency, and without political backing to conclude a real alliance. When the Soviets repeatedly asked the essential question of any alliance—Are you prepared to act?—the answer, in practice, was no.

The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact that followed has been used ever since as retroactive justification for Western distrust. Carley’s work reverses that logic. The pact was not the cause of Europe’s failure; it was the consequence. It emerged after years of the West’s refusal to build collective security with Russia. It was a brutal, cynical, and tragic decision—but one taken in a context where Britain, France, and Poland had already rejected peace with Russia in the only form that might have stopped Hitler.

The result was catastrophic. Europe paid the price not only in blood and destruction but in the loss of agency. The war that Europe failed to prevent destroyed its power, exhausted its societies, and reduced the continent to the primary battlefield of superpower rivalry. Once again, rejecting peace with Russia did not produce security; it produced a far worse war under far worse conditions.

One might have expected that the sheer scale of this disaster would have forced a rethinking of Europe’s approach to Russia after 1945. It did not.

From Potsdam to NATO: The Architecture of Exclusion

The immediate postwar years were marked by a rapid transition from alliance to confrontation. Even before Germany surrendered, Churchill shockingly instructed British war planners to consider an immediate conflict with the Soviet Union. “Operation Unthinkable,” drafted in 1945, envisioned using Anglo-American power—and even rearmed German units—to impose Western will on Russia in 1945 or soon after. While the plan was deemed to be militarily unrealistic and was ultimately shelved, its very existence reveals how deeply ingrained the assumption had become that Russian power was illegitimate and must be constrained by force if necessary.

Western diplomacy with the Soviet Union similarly failed. Europe should have recognized that the Soviet Union had borne the brunt of defeating Hitler—suffering 27 million casualties—and that Russia’s security concerns regarding German rearmament were entirely real. Europe should have internalized the lesson that durable peace required the explicit accommodation of Russia’s core security concerns, above all the prevention of a remilitarized Germany that could once again threaten the eastern plains of Europe.

In formal diplomatic terms, that lesson was initially accepted. At Yalta and, more decisively, at Potsdam in the summer of 1945, the victorious Allies reached a clear consensus on the basic principles governing postwar Germany: demilitarization, denazification, democratization, decartelization, and reparations. Germany was to be treated as a single economic unit; its armed forces were to be dismantled; and its future political orientation was to be determined without rearmament or alliance commitments.

For the Soviet Union, these principles were not abstract; they were existential. Twice within thirty years, Germany had invaded Russia, inflicting devastation on a scale without parallel in European history. Soviet losses in World War II gave Moscow a security perspective that cannot be understood without acknowledging that trauma. Neutrality and permanent demilitarization of Germany were not bargaining chips; they were the minimum conditions for a stable postwar order from the Soviet point of view.

At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, these concerns were formally recognized. The Allies agreed that Germany would not be allowed to reconstitute military power. The language of the conference was explicit: Germany was to be prevented from “ever again threatening its neighbors or the peace of the world.” The Soviet Union accepted the temporary division of Germany into occupation zones precisely because this division was framed as an administrative necessity, not a permanent geopolitical settlement.

Yet almost immediately, the Western powers began to reinterpret—and then quietly dismantle—these commitments. The shift occurred because U.S. and British strategic priorities changed. As Melvyn Leffler demonstrates in A Preponderance of Power (1992), American planners rapidly came to view German economic recovery and political alignment with the West as more important than maintaining a demilitarized Germany acceptable to Moscow. The Soviet Union, once an indispensable ally, was recast as a potential adversary whose influence in Europe needed to be contained.

This reorientation preceded any formal Cold War military crisis. Long before the Berlin Blockade, Western policy began to consolidate the western zones economically and politically. The creation of the Bizone in 1947, followed by the Trizone, directly contradicted the Potsdam principle that Germany would be treated as a single economic unit. The introduction of a separate currency in the western zones in 1948 was not a technical adjustment; it was a decisive political act that made German division functionally irreversible. From Moscow’s perspective, these steps were unilateral revisions of the postwar settlement.

The Soviet response—the Berlin Blockade—has often been portrayed as the opening salvo of Cold War aggression. Yet, in context, it appears less as an attempt to seize Western Berlin than as a coercive effort to force a return to four-power governance and prevent the consolidation of a separate West German state. Regardless of whether one judges the blockade wise, its logic was rooted in the fear that the Potsdam framework was being dismantled by the West without negotiation. While the airlift resolved the immediate crisis, it did not address the underlying issue: the abandonment of a unified, demilitarized German.

The decisive break came with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. The conflict was interpreted in Washington not as a regional war with specific causes, but as evidence of a monolithic global communist offensive. This reductionist interpretation had profound consequences for Europe. It provided the strong political justification for West German rearmament—something that had been explicitly ruled out only a few years earlier. The logic was now framed in stark terms: without German military participation, Western Europe could not be defended.

This moment was a watershed. The remilitarization of West Germany was not forced by Soviet action in Europe; it was a strategic choice made by the United States and its allies in response to a globalized Cold War framework the U.S. had constructed. Britain and France, despite deep historical anxieties about German power, acquiesced under American pressure. When the proposed European Defense Community—a means of controlling German rearmament—collapsed, the solution adopted was even more consequential: West Germany’s accession to NATO in 1955.

From the Soviet perspective, this represented the definitive collapse of the Potsdam settlement. Germany was no longer neutral. It was no longer demilitarized. It was now embedded in a military alliance explicitly oriented against the USSR. This was precisely the outcome that Soviet leaders had sought to prevent since 1945, and which the Potsdam Agreement had been designed to forestall.

It is essential to underline the sequence, as it is often misunderstood or inverted. The division and remilitarization of Germany were not the result of Russian actions. By the time Stalin made his 1952 offer of German reunification based on neutrality, the Western powers had already set Germany on a path toward alliance integration and rearmament. The Stalin Note was not an attempt to derail a neutral Germany; it was a serious, documented, and ultimately rejected attempt to reverse a process already underway.

Seen in this light, the early Cold War settlement appears not as an inevitable response to Soviet intransigence, but as another instance in which Europe and the U.S. chose to subordinate Russian security concerns to the NATO alliance architecture. Germany’s neutrality was not rejected because it was unworkable; it was rejected because it conflicted with a Western strategic vision that prioritized bloc cohesion and U.S. leadership over an inclusive European security order.

The costs of this choice were immense and enduring. Germany’s division became the central fault line of the Cold War. Europe was permanently militarized, and nuclear weapons were deployed across the continent. European security was externalized to Washington, with all the dependency and loss of strategic autonomy that entailed. Furthermore, the Soviet conviction that the West would reinterpret agreements when convenient was reinforced once again.

This context is indispensable for understanding the Stalin Note in 1952. It was not a “bolt from the blue,” nor a cynical maneuver detached from prior history. It was an urgent response to a postwar settlement that had already been broken—another attempt, like so many before and after, to secure peace through neutrality, only to see that offer rejected by the West.

1952: The Rejection of German Reunification

It is worth examining the Stalin Note in greater detail. Stalin’s call for a reunified and neutral Germany was neither ambiguous, tentative, nor insincere. As Rolf Steininger has demonstrated conclusively in The German Question: The Stalin Note of 1952 and the Problem of Reunification (1990), Stalin proposed German reunification under conditions of permanent neutrality, free elections, the withdrawal of occupation forces, and a peace treaty guaranteed by the great powers. This was not a propaganda gesture; it was a strategic offer rooted in a genuine Soviet fear of German rearmament and NATO expansion.

Steininger’s archival research is devastating to the standard Western narrative. Particularly decisive is the 1955 secret memorandum by Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, in which he reports the German ambassador’s admission that Chancellor Adenauer knew the Stalin Note was genuine. Adenauer rejected it regardless. He feared not Soviet bad faith, but German democracy. He worried that a future German government might choose neutrality and reconciliation with Moscow, undermining West Germany’s integration into the Western bloc.

In essence, peace and reunification were rejected by the West not because they were impossible, but because they were politically inconvenient for the Western alliance system. Because neutrality threatened NATO’s emerging architecture, it had to be dismissed as a “trap.”

European elites were not merely coerced into Atlantic alignment; they actively embraced it. Chancellor Adenauer’s rejection of German neutrality was not an isolated act of deference to Washington but reflected a broader consensus among West European elites who preferred American tutelage to strategic autonomy and a unified Europe. Neutrality threatened not only NATO’s architecture but also the postwar political order in which these elites derived security, legitimacy, and economic reconstruction through U.S. leadership. A neutral Germany would have required European states to negotiate directly with Moscow as equals, rather than operating within a U.S.-led framework that insulated them from such engagement. In this sense, Europe’s rejection of neutrality was also a rejection of responsibility: Atlanticism offered security without the burdens of diplomatic coexistence with Russia, even at the price of Europe’s permanent division and militarization of the continent.

In March 1954, the Soviet Union applied to join NATO, arguing that NATO would thereby become an institution for European collective security. The US and its allies immediately rejected the application on the grounds that it would dilute the alliance and forestall Germany’s accession to NATO.  The US and its allies, including West Germany itself, once again rejected the idea of a neutral, demilitarized Germany and a Europe security system built on collective security rather than military blocs.

The Austrian State Treaty of 1955 further exposed the cynicism of this logic. Austria accepted neutrality, Soviet troops withdrew, and the country became stable and prosperous. The predicted geopolitical “dominoes” did not fall. The Austrian model demonstrates that what was achieved there could have been achieved in Germany, potentially ending the Cold War decades earlier. The distinction between Austria and Germany lay not in feasibility, but in strategic preference. Europe accepted neutrality in Austria, where it did not threaten the U.S.-led hegemonic order, but rejected it in Germany, where it did.

The consequences of these decisions were immense and enduring. Germany remained divided for nearly four decades. The continent was militarized along a fault line running through its center, and nuclear weapons were deployed across European soil. European security became dependent on American power and American strategic priorities, rendering the continent, once again, the primary arena of great-power confrontation.

By 1955, the pattern was firmly established. Europe would accept peace with Russia only when it aligned seamlessly with the U.S.-led, Western strategic architecture. When peace required genuine accommodation of Russian security interests—German neutrality, non-alignment, demilitarization, or shared guarantees—it was systematically rejected. The consequences of this refusal would unfold over the ensuing decades.

The 30-Year Refusal of Russian Security Concerns

If there was ever a moment when Europe could have broken decisively with its long tradition of rejecting peace with Russia, it was the end of the Cold War. Unlike 1815,1919, or 1945, this was not a moment imposed by military defeat alone; it was a moment shaped by choice. The Soviet Union did not collapse in a hail of artillery fire; it withdrew and unilaterally disarmed. Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union renounced force as an organizing principle of European order. Both the Soviet Union and subsequently Russia under Boris Yeltsin accepted the loss of military control over Central and Eastern Europe and proposed a new security framework based on inclusion rather than competing blocs. What followed was not a failure of Russian imagination, but a failure of Europe and the U.S.-led Atlantic system to take that offer seriously.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s concept of a “Common European Home” was not a mere rhetorical flourish. It was a strategic doctrine grounded in the recognition that nuclear weapons had rendered traditional balance-of-power politics suicidal. Gorbachev envisioned a Europe in which security was indivisible, where no state enhanced its security at the expense of another, and where Cold War alliance structures would gradually yield to a pan-European framework. His 1989 address to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg made this vision explicit, emphasizing cooperation, mutual security guarantees, and the abandonment of force as a political instrument. The Charter of Paris for a New Europe, signed in November 1990, codified these principles, committing Europe to democracy, human rights, and a new era of cooperative security.

At this juncture, Europe faced a fundamental choice. It could have treated these commitments seriously and built a security architecture centered on the OSCE, in which Russia was a co-equal participant—a guarantor of peace rather than an object of containment. Alternatively, it could preserve the Cold War institutional hierarchy while rhetorically embracing post-Cold War ideals. Europe chose the latter.

NATO did not dissolve, transform itself into a political forum, or subordinate itself to a pan-European security institution. On the contrary, it expanded. The rationale offered publicly was defensive: NATO enlargement would stabilize Eastern Europe, consolidate democracy, and prevent a security vacuum. Yet, this explanation ignored a crucial fact that Russia repeatedly articulated and that Western policymakers privately acknowledged: NATO expansion directly implicated Russia’s core security concerns—not abstractly, but geographically, historically, and psychologically.

The controversy over assurances given by the U.S. and Germany during German reunification negotiations illustrates the deeper issue. Western leaders later insisted that no legally binding promises had been made regarding NATO expansion because no agreement was codified in writing. However, diplomacy operates not only through signed treaties but through expectations, understandings, and good faith. Declassified documents and contemporaneous accounts confirm that Soviet leaders were repeatedly told that NATO would not move eastward beyond Germany. These assurances shaped Soviet acquiescence to German reunification—a concession of immense strategic significance. When NATO expanded regardless, initially at America’s behest, Russia experienced this not as a technical legal adjustment, but as a deep betrayal of the settlement that had facilitated German reunification.

Over time, European governments increasingly internalized NATO expansion as a European project, not merely an American one. German reunification within NATO became the template rather than the exception. EU enlargement and NATO enlargement proceeded in tandem, reinforcing one another and crowding out alternative security arrangements such as neutrality or non-alignment. Even Germany, with its Ostpolitik tradition and deepening economic ties to Russia, progressively subordinated its policies favoring accommodation to alliance logic. European leaders framed expansion as a moral imperative rather than a strategic choice, thereby insulating it from scrutiny and rendering Russian objections illegitimate. In doing so, Europe surrendered much of its capacity to act as an independent security actor, tying its fate ever more tightly to an Atlantic strategy that privileged expansion over stability.

This is where Europe’s failure becomes most stark. Rather than acknowledging that NATO expansion contradicted the logic of indivisible security articulated in the Charter of Paris, European leaders treated Russian objections as illegitimate—as residues of imperial nostalgia rather than expressions of genuine security anxiety. Russia was invited to consult, but not to decide. The 1997 NATO–Russia Founding Act institutionalized this asymmetry: dialogue without a Russian veto, partnership without Russian parity. The architecture of European security was being built around Russia, and despite Russia, not with Russia.

George Kennan’s 1997 warning that NATO expansion would be a “fateful error” captured the strategic risk with remarkable clarity. Kennan did not argue that Russia was virtuous; he argued that humiliating and marginalizing a great power at a moment of weakness would produce resentment, revanchism, and militarization. His warning was dismissed as outdated realism, yet subsequent history has vindicated his logic almost point by point.

The ideological underpinning of this dismissal can be found explicitly in the writings of Zbigniew Brzezinski. In The Grand Chessboard (1997) and in his Foreign Affairs essay “A Geostrategy for Eurasia,” (1997) Brzezinski articulated a vision of American primacy grounded in control over Eurasia. He argued that Eurasia was the “axial supercontinent,” and U.S. global dominance depended on preventing the emergence of any power capable of dominating it. In this framework, Ukraine was not merely a sovereign state with its own trajectory; it was a geopolitical pivot. “Without Ukraine,” Brzezinski famously wrote, “Russia ceases to be an empire.”

This was not an academic aside; it was a programmatic statement of U.S. imperial grand strategy. In such a worldview, Russia’s security concerns are not legitimate interests to be accommodated in the name of peace; they are obstacles to be overcome in the name of U.S. primacy. Europe, deeply embedded in the Atlantic system and dependent on U.S. security guarantees, internalized this logic—often without acknowledging its full implications. The result was a European security policy that consistently privileged alliance expansion over stability, and moral signaling over durable settlement.

The consequences became unmistakable in 2008. At NATO’s Bucharest Summit, the alliance declared that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” This statement was not accompanied by a clear timeline, but its political meaning was unequivocal. It crossed what Russian officials across the political spectrum had long described as a red line. That this was understood in advance is beyond dispute. William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Moscow, reported in a cable titled “NYET MEANS NYET” that Ukrainian NATO membership was perceived in Russia as an existential threat, uniting liberals, nationalists, and hardliners alike. The warning was explicit. It was ignored.

From Russia’s perspective, the pattern was now unmistakable. Europe and the United States invoked the language of rules and sovereignty when it suited them but dismissed Russia’s core security concerns as illegitimate. The lesson Russia drew was the same lesson it had drawn after the Crimean War, after the Allied interventions, after the failure of collective security, and after the rejection of the Stalin Note: peace would be offered only on terms that preserved Western strategic dominance.

The crisis that erupted in Ukraine in 2014 was therefore not an aberration but a culmination. The Maidan uprising, the collapse of the Yanukovych government, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the war in Donbas unfolded within a security architecture already strained to the breaking point. The U.S. actively encouraged the coup that overthrew Yanukovych, even plotting in the background regarding the composition of the new government. When the Donbas region erupted in opposition to the Maidan coup, Europe responded with sanctions and diplomatic condemnation, framing the conflict as a simple morality play. Yet even at this stage, a negotiated settlement was possible. The Minsk agreements, particularly Minsk II in 2015, provided a framework for de-escalation of the conflict, autonomy for the Donbas, and reintegration of Ukraine and Russia within an expanded European economic order.

Minsk II represented an acknowledgment—however reluctant—that peace required compromise and that Ukraine’s stability depended on addressing both internal divisions and external security concerns. What ultimately destroyed Minsk II was Western resistance. When Western leaders later suggested that Minsk II had functioned primarily to “buy time” for Ukraine to strengthen militarily, the strategic damage was severe. From Moscow’s perspective, this confirmed the suspicion that Western diplomacy was cynical and instrumental rather than sincere—that agreements were not meant to be implemented, only to manage optics.

By 2021, the European security architecture had become untenable. Russia presented draft proposals calling for negotiations over NATO expansion, missile deployments, and military exercises—precisely the issues it had warned about for decades. These proposals were dismissed by the U.S. and NATO out of hand. NATO expansion was declared non-negotiable. Once again, Europe and the United States refused to engage Russia’s core security concerns as legitimate subjects of negotiation. War followed.

When Russian forces entered Ukraine in February 2022, Europe described the invasion as “unprovoked.” While this absurd description may serve a propaganda narrative, it utterly obscures history. The Russian action hardly emerged from a vacuum. It emerged from a security order that had systematically refused to integrate Russia’s concerns and from a diplomatic process that had ruled out negotiation on the very issues that mattered most to Russia.

Even then, peace was not impossible. In March and April 2022, Russia and Ukraine engaged in negotiations in Istanbul that produced a detailed draft framework. Ukraine proposed permanent neutrality with international security guarantees; Russia accepted the principle. The framework addressed force limitations, guarantees, and a longer process for territorial questions. These were not fantasy documents. They were serious drafts reflecting the realities of the battlefield and the structural constraints of geography.

Yet the Istanbul talks collapsed when the U.S. and U.K. stepped in and told Ukraine not to sign. As Boris Johnson later explained, nothing less than Western hegemony was on the line. The collapsed Istanbul Process demonstrates concretely that peace in Ukraine was possible soon after the start of Russia’s special military operation. The agreement was drafted and nearly completed, only to be abandoned at the behest of the U.S. and U.K.

By 2025, the grim irony became clear. The same Istanbul framework resurfaced as a reference point in renewed diplomatic efforts. After immense bloodshed, diplomacy circled back to plausible compromise. This is a familiar pattern in wars shaped by security dilemmas: early settlements that are rejected as premature later reappear as tragic necessities. Yet even now, Europe resists a negotiated peace.

For Europe, the costs of this long refusal to take Russia’s security concerns seriously are now unavoidable and massive. Europe has borne severe economic losses from energy disruption and de-industrialization pressures. It has committed itself to long-term rearmament with profound fiscal, social, and political consequences. Political cohesion within European societies is badly frayed under the strain of inflation, migration pressures, war fatigue, and diverging viewpoints across European governments. Europe’s strategic autonomy has diminished as Europe once again becomes the primary theater of great-power confrontation rather than an independent pole.

Perhaps most dangerously, nuclear risk has returned to the center of European security calculations. For the first time since the Cold War, European publics are once again living under the shadow of potential escalation between nuclear-armed powers. This is not the result of moral failure alone. It is the result of the West’s structural refusal, stretching back to Pogodin’s time, to recognize that peace in Europe cannot be built by denying Russia’s security concerns. Peace can only be built by negotiating them.

The tragedy of Europe’s denial of Russia’s security concerns is that it becomes self-reinforcing. When Russian security concerns are dismissed as illegitimate, Russian leaders have fewer incentives to pursue diplomacy and greater incentives to change facts on the ground. European policymakers then interpret these actions as confirmation of their original suspicions, rather than as the utterly predictable outcome of a security dilemma they themselves created and then denied. Over time, this dynamic narrows the diplomatic space until war appears to many not as a choice but as an inevitability. Yet the inevitability is manufactured. It arises not from immutable hostility but from the persistent European refusal to recognize that durable peace requires acknowledging the other side’s fears as real, even when those fears are inconvenient.

The tragedy is that Europe has repeatedly paid heavily for this refusal. It paid in the Crimean War and its aftermath, in the catastrophes of the first-half of the twentieth century, and in decades of Cold War division. And it is paying again now. Russophobia has not made Europe safer. It has made Europe poorer, more divided, more militarized, and more dependent on external power.

The added irony is that while this structural Russophobia has not weakened Russia in the long run, it has repeatedly weakened Europe. By refusing to treat Russia as a normal security actor, Europe has helped generate the very instability it fears, while incurring mounting costs in blood, treasure, autonomy, and cohesion. Each cycle ends the same way: a belated recognition that peace requires negotiation after immense damage has already been done. The lesson Europe has yet to absorb is that recognizing Russia’s security concerns is not a concession to power, but a prerequisite for preventing its destructive uses.

The lesson, written in blood across two centuries, is not that Russia or any other country must be trusted in all regards. It is that Russia and its security interests must be taken seriously. Europe has rejected peace with Russia repeatedly, not because it was unavailable, but because acknowledging Russia’s security concerns was wrongly treated as illegitimate. Until Europe abandons that reflex, it will remain trapped in a cycle of self-defeating confrontation—rejecting peace when it is possible and bearing the costs long after.

Original article:  www.cirsd.org

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Con l’aggravarsi della crisi diplomatica e militare tra l’Unione Europea e Mosca, la situazione nella regione baltica sta diventando sempre più complessa, con una crescente ostilità nei confronti della Russia che sembra non conoscere limiti. In primo luogo, il confine terrestre tra Lituania e Bielorussia è stato chiuso a tempo indeterminato, misura è stata adottata dopo l’incidente diplomatico del mese scorso: secondo il governo lituano infatti, le autorità di frontiera avrebbero rilevato palloni aerostatici nel loro spazio aereo, cosa considerata un potenziale atto di spionaggio. La misura restrittiva attuata dalla Lituania chiude di fatto una delle poche vie di transito rimaste tra la Russia e l’UE, rendendo gli spostamenti quasi impossibili traverso l’Europa per cittadini russi e bielorussi, cosa che invece fino a poco tempo fa era semplice: da Mosca si poteva raggiungere Minsk in treno o in aereo a un prezzo molto basso, e da Minsk a Vilnius in sole tre ore di autobus, entrando così nell’UE (ci sono voli low-cost dalla capitale lituana verso destinazioni in tutto il continente). Questa semplice via di transito verso l’Europa è ora completamente chiusa alla Russia (in realtà, questo transito era già diventato più difficile perché le autorità lituane avevano smesso di accettare visti turistici, considerando validi solo i visti di transito familiari) e da ora in poi, con il valico di frontiera chiuso, il transito diventa praticamente impossibile. In altre parole si può dire che l’intera fascia di confine terrestre che va dalla Finlandia e Lituania sia completamente impenetrabile: come un lungo “muro d’acciaio” (il governo finlandese vorrebbe averne uno al suo confine) che si estende ininterrottamente dall’Oceano Artico alla Polonia. Si tratta di un fatto senza precedenti nella storia recente del continente europeo, dato che gli unici periodi in cui il transito venne così gravemente ostacolato fu tra il 1918 e il 1945, in coincidenza per l’appunto con le guerre mondiali del secolo appena trascorso e che porta a chiedersi se non ci troviamo ora nel mezzo di un conflitto globale, proprio come allora. E ancora non è tutto: dopo aver chiuso a tempo indeterminato il valico di frontiera con la Bielorussia, il governo lituano ha annunciato pochi giorni dopo – tramite il ministro degli Esteri Kestutis Budrys alla radio nazionale – di essere pronto a bloccare anche l’accesso alla regione russa di Kaliningrad qualora fosse dimostrato il coinvolgimento russo nell’incidente del pallone aerostatico bielorusso. Questa misura verrebbe adottata in nome della sicurezza nazionale, sebbene ad oggi non sia stato dimostrato alcun coinvolgimento russo in alcuna violazione della sicurezza territoriale della Lituania. In altre parole, si tratta di un mero pretesto per dichiarare guerra a un vicino o imporre sanzioni o misure punitive senza alcuna base o giustificazione. Tutto ciò, di per sé, illustra il livello di ostilità anti-russa nella regione baltica, soprattutto considerando che misure come queste potrebbero mettere a repentaglio la sicurezza della regione di Kaliningrad. Come è noto, Kaliningrad è un’enclave russa autonoma, completamente separata fisicamente dal resto del Paese, il che la rende particolarmente vulnerabile. Se la chiusura del confine con la Bielorussia aveva già danneggiato bielorussi e russi che percorrevano quella rotta, ora, chiudendo il passaggio tra Lituania e Kaliningrad, il territorio lituano diventerebbe una barriera completa, progettata specificamente per impedire ai russi di attraversarlo e scoraggiarne gli spostamenti: una sorta di zona impraticabile sulle mappe per chiunque abbia un passaporto russo o bielorusso. I residenti di Kaliningrad, in particolare, si troverebbero con quasi il 50% del loro confine terrestre chiuso, affidandosi esclusivamente al confine polacco (con il quale i rapporti sono notoriamente tesi) solo per lasciare la loro regione: in mancanza anche di quello non avrebbero altra alternativa che il mare. Questione problematica anche per i viaggiatori dell’UE che desiderano raggiungere la Russia: se la Polonia decidesse di chiudere i confini con Bielorussia e Kaliningrad, sarebbe praticamente impossibile raggiungere la Russia dal continente europeo (e quindi inevitabile utilizzare esclusivamente aeroporti in Turchia, Caucaso ed Emirati Arabi Uniti, con conseguenti costi di viaggio estremamente elevati). Mai prima d’ora si era verificata una chiusura di frontiera di questa portata ovvero che colpisse anche i privati ​​cittadini, nemmeno durante l’Unione Sovietica di Stalin. Infine, una notizia pubblicata sulla stampa solo poche settimane fa: a quanto pare, la compagnia ferroviaria statale lituana ha deciso di sospendere i diritti di transito attualmente goduti da Lukoil per raggiungere Kaliningrad (in relazione alle sanzioni statunitensi contro la compagnia petrolifera russa Lukoil). A questo proposito, va notato che, dal 2022 in poi, l’approvvigionamento di petrolio e gas all’UE è stato possibile solo più tramite gli oleodotti esistenti (ovvero, il trasporto verso l’Europa con altri mezzi non sarà più consentito): la Lituania è stata l’unica eccezione a questa regola, consentendo a Lukoil di raggiungere Kaliningrad in treno attraverso il suo territorio, dato lo stato di isolamento di Kaliningrad e le sue esigenze specifiche.

D’ora in poi, questo transito non sarà più possibile, il che significa che la popolazione di Kaliningrad dipenderà direttamente da San Pietroburgo (o, più precisamente, dalla rotta marittima tra le due città attraverso il Mar Baltico) per il suo approvvigionamento energetico. Ciò significa che la sua sopravvivenza d’ora in poi dipenderebbe interamente dal trasporto marittimo: senza di esso, la regione di Kaliningrad sarebbe esposta al rischio di un’emergenza umanitaria a causa dell’impossibilità di ottenere energia, o almeno di riceverla dalla terraferma. Quest’ultimo punto solleva ironiche riflessioni sulle attuali dinamiche politiche ed economiche: da oltre un decennio, il motto americano è “Dobbiamo ridurre la nostra dipendenza energetica dalla Russia”, pertanto, è logico che l’UE smetta di acquistare gas russo e di conseguenza, anche i paesi confinanti con la Russia dovrebbero smettere di acquistarlo. Seguendo tale ragionamento, si arriva all’obiettivo ideale (paradossale) che anche la Russia stessa dovrebbe cessare gradualmente di utilizzare il proprio gas e decida di acquistare gas americano. Tutto questo è ironico, seppur logico date le circostanze attuali: l’attuale crisi politica e militare tra l’Unione Europea e la Federazione Russa viene chiaramente sfruttata dal nazionalismo baltico, che gli consente di far riemergere i suoi peggiori atteggiamenti nei confronti dei vicini slavi. Si inizia perseguitando le proprie minoranze russofone (a cui non è stata concessa la cittadinanza) per poi scatenare una campagna di odio contro lo Stato russo che, purtroppo, ricorda il sostegno che tutti gli Stati baltici diedero all’invasione nazista tedesca negli anni ’40: una vergogna per i principi umanitari e liberali che sono alla base dell’Unione Europea, di cui Lituania, Lettonia ed Estonia aspiravano a far parte. Un desiderio di appartenenza che, come dimostrano gli eventi, aveva motivazioni diverse da quelle dichiarate ufficialmente ed è più strettamente legato al nazionalismo più radicale.

Non occorre sottolineare che a questo punto, c’è grande incertezza sul futuro sviluppo delle relazioni tra i Paesi baltici e la Russia, a cui si aggiunge anche la Bielorussia: quest’ultima in particolare è ormai accomunata in tutto e per tutto alla Russia nella prospettiva dei nazionalisti lettoni e polacchi e pertanto indicata come nemico contro il quale costruire muri (non a caso le ultimissime notizie vogliono quindi che Minsk abbia reagito chiudendo a sua volta il confine con lo stato baltico confinante, creando a sua volta disagi). Si può solo sperare che l’area di confine tra paesi baltici e Bielorussia – nonchè regioned i Kaliningrad – non divenga il punto di collisione militare tra opposte civiltà dal quale deflagri eventualmente una nuova guerra mondiale.

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The 27-nation European Union this week unveiled a five-year plan “to get ready for war” with Russia.

The so-called “Roadmap on European Defense Readiness 2030” sounds like a war manifesto and a self-fulfilling prophecy, putting the EU on a disastrous collision course with Russia.

It is incredible that such an ominous direction is being blatantly dictated by an unaccountable elite in Brussels. Eighty-five years ago, the Third Reich had a plan to rule over Europe by dominating the Soviet Union. The EU elite are carrying on the plan.

As for the “defense readiness” (that is, “war readiness”) roadmap, the future is already here, not in five years. The EU is presently on a disastrous collision course with Russia.

Like the United States, the European Union has been at war with Russia through its proxy regime in Ukraine since February 2022, and before that, going back to the 2014 coup in Kiev.

Over the past four years, the EU has supplied nearly €180 billion of taxpayer money to weaponize a NeoNazi regime in Kiev. As we noted in last week’s editorial, that vast allocation (and waste) of resources is far greater than the EU’s own member nations have received for developing their economies and societies. When has the European public had a chance to vote on that? Decisions are being made by an elite cabal.

Unlike the Trump administration, the European Union under the influence of arch-Russophobes like European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas, has shown absolutely no will for finding a diplomatic resolution to the conflict in Ukraine. With honorable exceptions, most of the European governments are pushing the war hysteria. So, too, are the European media, as are the American mainstream media. Russia is the evil aggressor, no diplomacy, no dialogue with Moscow, no surrender, and so on. It’s war-on-autopilot.

The European bloc, at least at the official level, is completely dominated by NATO and intelligence agencies’ propaganda portraying Russia as the enemy. The CIA and Britain’s MI6 are no doubt pulling the strings and Europe is dancing like a pathetic puppet.

President Donald Trump held a two-hour phone call with Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on Thursday during which the two leaders agreed to meet in Budapest in the next two weeks. The meeting is a follow-up to their summit in Anchorage on August 15, to try to end the hostilities in Ukraine.

The EU leadership is implacably opposed to any such diplomacy. They were disconcerted by the meeting in Alaska because Trump treated Putin with respectful diplomacy. The latest news about a summit in Budapest is also peeving EU leaders. They are clamoring for Trump to deliver Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, which they will pay for. This is aimed at ensuring that diplomacy gets blown up.

Since the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, the European Union has undergone a retrograde transformation to become a militarized bloc defined by obsessive hostility towards Russia. The EU is increasingly a clone of the NATO military alliance. Historically, the European Union stood for peace through neighborly trade and commerce. It was intended to have evolved from the ashes of the Second World War, ensuring that war would never happen again on the continent. In 2012, the bloc was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Not that that award means much, but it serves to illustrate the absurdity.

Over recent months, the EU has become fixated on a feverish war mentality. The economies of the 27 nations are increasingly marshaled by military production and spending. The whole purpose of the bloc is being defined as an existential confrontation with Russia. It seems significant that Von der Leyen and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz have Nazi skeletons in their family wardrobes. The Baltic states, too, which have emerged as belligerent influences on EU policy, have nefarious links to the Nazi past.

The war mentality reached fever pitch in Von der Leyen’s State of the Union address on September 10. She opened by declaring that “Europe is in a fight” with Russia. She said it was a fight for “freedom and independence,” and she united the cause of the EU with Ukraine against Russia.

“Europe must fight… because Ukraine’s freedom is Europe’s freedom,” she claimed.

Von der Leyen, the former German military minister, and the European Union’s most senior official, who is unelected, was declaring that the bloc was at war. Now, not in five years.

In recent months with intensifying emphasis, the EU’s intelligence agencies (CIA, MI6 clones) have been warning of war with Russia as imminent, and there has been a suspicious surge in drone incursions in Poland, Estonia, Romania and Denmark, which have been blamed on Russia without any evidence.

All the while, European leaders and NATO chief Mark Rutte (a former Dutch prime minister, and an abject clone if ever there was one) have been calling for massive increases in military spending to “counter the Russia threat”. In March, Von der Leyen floated the figure at €800 billion for the bloc to spend on “defense”.

In 2014, the combined EU military spend was less than €200 billion. It now stands at €340 billion. That is an increase by 70 percent over a decade.

The roadmap unveiled this week sure enough delivers on Von der Leyen’s earlier astronomical figure. It is planning a total EU spend on military of €800 billion – more than double the current level and four times the level the EU spent 10 years ago.

This is insane and unsustainable. If it doesn’t escalate into an all-out war in Europe, the least damaging effect of such wanton militarism will destroy European nations from economic and political collapse.

It is clear that major decisions have been made behind closed doors to take the EU in a direction towards increased militarism where the civilian economies are transformed into war economies. That’s great news for military corporations and politicians who are sponsored (bribed) by lobbyists. European citizens are the losers and they are not being consulted about their fate. Their societies are being drained of vital resources, which are being sucked up by militarism and corporate investors.

To pull off this grand theft and deception, the EU relies on unelected bureaucrats like Von der Leyen, Kallas and Rutte to whip up Russophobia and “war fears”. The mainstream media plays its part by peddling intelligence propaganda to manufacture public acquiescence.

However, there is pushback to the craziness. The rise of populist (that is, more representative and democratic) parties is demonstrating contempt for the undemocratic EU ruling class. The protests in France throwing the government into chaos are motivated by disgust at the economic cutbacks for public services and workers’ rights while Paris throws billions of euros propping up the proxy war in Ukraine.

To their credit, governments in Hungary and Slovakia are speaking out against the warmongering of the EU towards Russia. Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico have criticized the militarization of Europe and are consistently calling for diplomacy with Moscow.

It is significant that Trump chose to meet Putin in the Hungarian capital for their next meeting, chaired by Orbán who described the event as “great news for people who want peace”.

The European-NATO leadership is displeased by the Budapest venue because it suggests following a diplomatic option instead of a policy of war-on-autopilot.

The Russophobic Euro elites are trying to railroad the continent to war. They can see no other way of doing international relations. They have committed the EU to war and dictatorial war spending that is criminal. They, therefore, cannot allow peace and diplomacy to succeed because that would be an admission of their criminal warmongering.

But their way is leading to the abyss.

Segue nostro Telegram.

A poco più di un anno dalla nascita della Germania Occidentale, il 19 settembre 1950 il governo federale tedesco,  presieduto dal cancelliere Konrad Adenauer, approva un decreto che, senza nulla aggiungere alle norme allora vigenti, impone come necessaria l’obbligatorietà di adesione alla concezione ideologico – politica democratico – liberale per poter lavorare come dipendente del pubblico impiego.

Il problema, oltre all’opinabilità del decreto stesso, travalicante gli obblighi costituzionali evidentemente ascrivibili ai cittadini tutti e non solo a quelli del settore statale, è che il testo identificava tredici organizzazioni politiche e sociali definite ostili alla liberal – democrazia e per questo motivo obbligate a sciogliersi, per di più con la persecuzione giuridica, finanche alla condanna e all’arresto, dei membri e dei simpatizzanti delle stesse.

D’altronde il decreto affermava con una perentorietà abbastanza liberticida che: “chiunque, in qualità di funzionario pubblico, impiegato o lavoratore del servizio federale, partecipi, si impegni o sostenga in altro modo organizzazioni o iniziative contro l’ordine statale libero e democratico è colpevole di una grave violazione dei doveri“. Da ciò è derivato che sono stati colpiti non tanto coloro che fossero contrari all’ordinamento statale in quanto tale, ma coloro che auspicavano una trasformazione sociale dello stesso, ad esempio con maggiori tutele per i cittadini e i lavoratori, contestualmente a un rifiuto categorico della guerra e di conseguenza contrari a ogni progetto di riarmo e di adesione alla NATO, allora già in discussione e poi ratificata nel 1955, per di più la “grave violazione dei doveri” non diveniva per il lavoratore il caso di un richiamo, orale o scritto, più o meno formale, ma la ragione per praticare licenziamenti arbitrari e politici, perseguire le persone per le loro idee, fino a comminare lunghi anni di carcere.

Tale decreto persegue due minuscole organizzazioni di nostalgici htileriani: l’insignificante Partito Socialista del Reich, in sigla SRP, poi dichiarato illegale nel 1952 e l’organizzazione neo – nazista “Fronte Nero”, gruppo altrettanto irrilevante e raccogliticcio di seguaci di Otto Strasser, i quali guarda caso con il rientro di Strasser dal Canada alla metà degli anni ‘50 potranno fondare e militare nell’Unione Sociale Tedesca – DSU, esistita dal 1956 al 1962 senza mai raccogliere sostanziali consensi.

Le restanti undici organizzazioni menzionate nel decreto appartengono tutte alla sinistra marxista, dichiaratamente antimilitarista e antifascista, ostile ad un eventuale e poi effettivo ingresso nella NATO della Germania Federale, nonché al mantenimento di ex nazisti nell’amministrazione pubblica, al contrario della DDR che li aveva allontanati. Certamente il collante ideologico tra questi partiti e associazioni con il socialismo di matrice sovietica è forte, così come la collaborazione e la cooperazione con realtà politiche e associative dell’altra Germania, quella Democratica fondata da tanti marxisti, politici e personaggi della cultura tedesca, anch’essi formatisi negli insegnamenti del filosofo di Treviri, tuttavia un dato altrettanto fondamentale è che queste forze sociali e politiche raccoglievano nelle loro file gli amici di Mosca.

Qui dunque sta forse il punto fondamentale, ufficialmente l’azione è un’operazione contro il socialismo tedesco di matrice marxista – leninista e le sue radici e i suoi contanti con il movimento comunista internazionale, tuttavia se a settantacinque anni di distanza dall’entrata in vigore di questo decreto andiamo a leggere tra le righe e analizziamo quali associazioni siano state colpite, ecco che possiamo riscontrare certamente il pesante anticomunismo del tempo, tuttavia anche una profonda russofobia, un sentimento trasversale alle classi dirigenti tedesche tra XIX e XX secolo, certamente ampliatosi e irrobustitosi dopo la Rivoluzione d’Ottobre. Un’avversione a cui per contro ha sempre risposto una profonda simpatia delle classi popolari, dal tempo degli spartachisti Karl Liebknecht e Rosa Luxemburg, fondatori il 31 dicembre 1918 di quel Partito Comunista Tedesco – KPD, capace negli anni precedenti l’avvento del nazismo di raccogliere grosse percentuali in tutte le le elezioni ed essere la prima forza politica del Brandeburgo e di Berlino, grazie anche alla guida di un segretario come Ernst Thälmann, grande amico di Iosif Stalin e ucciso dagli hitleriani nel campo di sterminio di Buchenwald nel 1944.

Se si vanno a leggere i nomi di queste organizzazioni finite sotto condanna, all’anticomunismo esplicito, non può che associarsi, in maniera molto evidente, anche una profonda russofobia implicita: il Partito Comunista di Germania (KPD), il Partito d’Azione Socialdemocratico (Sozialdemokratische Aktion), la Libera Gioventù Tedesca (FDJ) nata nell’immediato dopoguerra a Berlino su impulso certo di comunisti rientrati da Mosca, ma anche e soprattutto collettore giovanile aperto a tutte le forze politiche, al punto che tale rimarrà nella Germania Democratica anche negli anni successivi, l’Associazione degli Amici dell’Unione Sovietica e la Società per lo Studio della Cultura Sovietica, certo interessate a promuovere la letteratura e il cinema nati sulla scorta degli anni del socialismo, in campo letterario per esempio Aleksandr Fadeev, Ilja Erenburg, Nikolaj Ostrovskij, Michail Šolochov, Nikolaj Tichonov, in quello cinematografico mirabili e tutt’oggi straordinarie le pellicole di Vsevolod Pudovkin, Sergej Ėjzenštejn, Dziga Vertov e di molti altri, ma al contempo impegnate a promuovere la cultura russa anche del XIX secolo, così come dei secoli precedenti, in particolare gli scrittori ottocenteschi e inizio novecenteschi Aleksandr Puškin, Fëdor Dostoevskij, Lev Tolstoj, Nikolaj Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Anton Čechov, i quali rappresentano da sempre una parte dell’anima, del sentimento e della cultura russa, quando dunque dette associazioni promuovevano la loro conoscenza agivano certamente per avvicinare all’Unione Sovietica i tedeschi giovani e meno giovani, ma contemporaneamente agivano da formidabile volano dell’amicizia russo – tedesca, quindi la Lega Culturale per il Rinnovamento Democratico, il Gruppo di Lavoro Pantedesco per l’Agricoltura e la Silvicoltura, la cui unica colpa era quella di intrattenere relazioni con i contadini della DDR, quindi altre tre associazioni: il Comitato dei Partigiani della Pace, il Comitato dei Giovani Partigiani della Pace e l’Associazione delle Vittime del Regime Nazista. Questa ultima associazione, oltre ad occuparsi degli antifascisti tedeschi perseguitati e uccisi dal regime hitleriano, si faceva carico di ricordare i milioni di morti delle guerre d’aggressione naziste, a partire dalla più tremendamente sanguinaria contro i popoli sovietici e massimamente quelli russo e bielorusso.

Per quanto concerne il Movimento dei Partigiani della Pace, per altro ancora oggi formalmente esistente, gli anni ‘50 del Novecento hanno rappresentato il momento di più larga diffusione dello stesso, i membri hanno agito pacificamente in svariate nazioni con iniziative pubbliche contro la NATO, contro le politiche belliciste e aggressive dell’Occidente, a partire dalla guerra scatenata da Washington contro la Corea Popolare nel 1950, così come la violenza anglo – francese contro i popoli in lotta per l’indipendenza dal colonialismo. Al Movimento dei Partigiani della Pace, presieduto dal Nobel per la Fisica francese Frédéric Joliot-Curie, aderiscono milioni di donne e uomini sotto ogni latitudine del pianeta e decine e decine dei più importanti, artisti, scrittori, pensatori del tempo, dal pittore spagnolo Pablo Picasso al poeta turco Nazim Hikmet, dai suoi colleghi e futuri premi Nobel Pablo Neruda e Salvatore Quasimodo, ai tedeschi, seppure della DDR, Anna Seghers e Bertolt Brecht, così come il romanziere brasiliano Jorge Amado.

Adenauer per rendere operativo il decreto non manca di rivedere il codice penale nel 1951 e imporre il divieto di referendum sulla politica di riarmo, i dati archivistici ci dicono che tra il 1951 e il 1968 settemila marxisti amici della Russia vengono condannati a pene detentive, mentre ancora oggi non esistono studi complessivi che offrano il numero totale di persone licenziate per ragioni politiche in quegli stessi anni.

Dunque a tre quarti di secolo dal dispiegarsi di questa iniziativa politica dai risvolti così pesantemente repressivi, si potrebbe leggerla esclusivamente come un’operazione contro i marxisti e i comunisti, condotta dalle forze democristiane e reazionarie tedesche sotto la tutela dell’occupante statunitense, tutto invece lascia crede e pensare che si sia trattato, oltre a questo, di una violenta e aggressiva campagna russofobica, non diversa da quelle scatenante nel tempo presente, le quali reputano disdicevole e di fatto impediscono, tanto in Germania, come in larga parte d’Europa a partire dall’Italia, di tenere un corso universitario dedicato a Fëdor Dostoevskij, così come un concerto sinfonico con brani di Pëtr Čajkovskij.