About Alexei Navalny

Reports of Alexei Navalny’s death in a Russian prison on February 16, 2024 quickly spread around the world, accompanied by unanimous condemnation of the Russian government, accused of suppressing an opponent. But in reality, no one knows what happened or the cause of his death. As with all current crises, our governments judge not by the facts, but by a narrative.

Was Navalny Vladimir Putin’s Main Challenger?

First of all, we need to understand who Alexei Navalny was. Our media present him as the “head,” or “leader” of the opposition in Russia. Yet, as the French newspaper Libération acknowledged, he was simply the most visible opposition figure in the West. He was part of the so-called “off-system” alternative opposition, made up of small groups often located at the extreme left and right of the political spectrum, too small to be able to form parties.

Navalny began his business career in the 2000s. In a common practice during the Yeltsin period, he would buy state-owned enterprises, liquidate the unprofitable parts and privatize the profits of the more profitable elements. This illegal practice is at the root of Vladimir Putin’s fight against certain oligarchs, who ended up taking refuge in Great Britain or Israel. Navalny was given a five-year suspended prison sentence in a first case (Kirovles).

But the most high-profile case was that involving the Yves Rocher cosmetics group. This is a relatively complex case, beyond the scope of this article, which is best described in the Yves Rocher press release and on the Russian version of Wikipedia. In a nutshell, it is a case of personal enrichment through abuse of an official position by Oleg Navalny, Alexei’s brother. In 2008, Oleg was a manager at the Russian Post Office’s automated sorting center in Podolsk. To streamline the delivery of Yves Rocher products to the sorting center, he encouraged the French company to use the services of a private logistics company, Glavpodpiska (GPA). But as GPA was owned by the Navalny family, there was a clear conflict of interest, leading to an investigation for unlawful enrichment and abuse of an official position. In addition to this corruption-like affair, there were accusations of overbilling. In this case, Oleg Navalny was the main defendant, while Alexeï Navalny was “only” an accomplice. This is why Oleg was sentenced to three and a half years in prison, and Alexeï to three and a half years suspended. It is this suspended sentence which, on appeal after appeal, was postponed—prohibiting him from leaving Russian territory—before being applied in 2021.

On February 4, 2019, French-speaking Swiss radio claimed that “Russian authorities, who were already investigating the Navalny brothers, allegedly pressured Yves Rocher in 2012 to file a complaint against them.” This was a lie. In fact, Navalny was not convicted for the damage caused to Yves Rocher, but for the abuse of an official position. Just the day before, Yves Rocher declared in a press release:

Yves Rocher Vostok never filed a complaint against the Navalny brothers, nor did it make any legal claim against them at any time.

Oleg and Alexei Navalny took this ruling to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that it was politically motivated. However, contrary to the claims of the Western media, and the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, the ECHR did not invalidate this judgment, as it did not judge the substance of the case, but its form. On October 17, 2017, the ECHR delivered its verdict, partially upholding the two brothers on certain points of law and concluding that the Russian justice system should pay them compensation. On the other hand, it rejected the allegation that their conviction was politically motivated (paragraph 89).

In 2018, Alexei was not allowed to run in the presidential election. Our media claim that the reasons are political, but this is not true. The reason is that—as in other Western countries—you cannot run for president if you have been convicted. Furthermore, as we have seen, his conviction was not political in nature.

Politically, Alexei Navalny’s background was more that of an activist than a politician. In the early 2000s, he was an advisor to Nikita Belykh, Governor of Kirov. At that time, he was a complete unknown whose activism had no national or international visibility to justify harassment by the Russian government. In 2005, he co-founded the Democratic Alternative (DA) movement. This is an alternative opposition movement funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In June 2007, he co-founded the unsuccessful nationalist group Narod (“People”), which merged in June 2008 with two other Russian nationalist far-right movements: the Movement Against Illegal Immigration (MAII) and Great Russia, to form a new coalition: the Russian National Movement.

In 2010, on the recommendation of Garry Kasparov, Navalny was invited to the United States to take part in the Yale World Fellows Program. This is a fifteen-week, non-degree-granting training program offered by Yale University to foreigners, identified as potential relays of American policy in their respective countries.

Back in Russia, Navalny campaigned for the rights of small shareholders in large corporations and denounced abuses in corporate practices. His Anti-Corruption Fund (FBK) attracted sympathy, but also a great deal of distrust and antipathy. His accusations were often spurious, as in 2016 against Artyom Chaika, son of Russia’s Prosecutor General; in 2017, against Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, or in 2018, against businessman Mikhaïl Prokhorov.

As for his ideas, the picture is hardly any brighter. In 2007, he was expelled from the center-right Yabloko party for his regular participation in the ultra-nationalist “Russian March” and his racist “nationalist activities.” At the time, in a now-famous video for the liberalization of handguns, he mimed shooting Chechen migrants in Russia. In October 2013, he supported and stirred up, the Biryulyovo riots, castigating the “hordes of legal and illegal immigrants.” In 2017, the American media outlet Salon claimed that “if he were American, liberals would hate Navalny far more than they hate Trump or Steve Bannon.” In 2017, the American media outlet Jacobin, even referred to him as “Russia’s Trump.” In fact, as Princeton University’s American Foreign Policy Magazine noted in December 2018, he emerged through far-right groups, and his ideas were more akin to what is described as “populist” in the West. The Grayzone did a remarkable interview with two activists on the “anti-Putin” left, which shows how much our mainstream media have distorted our image of Navalny.

On Radio-Télévision Suisse (RTS)’s “Géopolitis” program on Navalny, broadcast on February 21, 2021, a presenter asserted that “nothing remains of Navalny’s ultra-nationalist beginnings and anti-migrant declarations.” This is not true: in April 2017 in The Guardian, then in October 2020 in the German magazine Der Spiegel, Navalny confirmed that he had not changed his opinion.

In order to attract the votes of the extremes on the right and left—which are not sufficiently numerous separately to field candidates in elections—Navalny applied the concept of smart voting, inspired by American strategic or tactical voting. Whereas in France, the “useful vote” consists in giving one’s vote to the candidate who is closest to one’s opinions, Navalny’s “smart voting” principle was to give one’s vote to anyone except a member of United Russia (Vladimir Putin’s party). “Smart voting” is not based on preference, but on detestation. Very symbolic!

The advantage of this process is that it enables the votes of extremists to be pooled. This explains Navalny’s “success” in the Moscow municipal elections of 2013, when “he” won 27 percent of the vote. But it was a deceptive success: it did not express a preference for Navalny, but a rejection of the then incumbent mayor of Moscow, Sobyanin.

This election showed that Navalny’s supporters are a very disparate and unholy mixture of left-wing and right-wing extremists, where internal rivalries are very strong. But it also showed that his supporters were not rallying around a project for Russia, but around a determination against “power.” This is yet another example of the Western approach, which does not seek to promote an improvement for Russia, but, on the contrary, its weakening. It is also symptomatic that none of our media report on Navalny’s political project. For a good and simple reason—it does not exist.

In 2019, on the occasion of the Moscow Duma elections, 20,000-50,000 demonstrators calling for “free elections” attracted the attention of the Western media. Headlines such as “27 candidates have been excluded” (Le Figaro) or “Authorities exclude opposition candidates” (Le Monde) suggestws that the validation of candidacies was discretionary. The BBC claimed that the candidates were “ignored” and “treated as if they were insignificant.” Not true. In fact, as in France for the presidential election, candidates must have a certain number of signatures in order to take part. In France, candidates must have the signatures of 500 elected representatives.

In Russia, a non-party candidate needs the signatures of 5,000 ordinary citizens, which does not seem too much in a city of 12 million inhabitants. Naturally, these signatures are checked by an electoral commission to prevent fraud, and despite a 10 percent tolerance, some candidates fail to reach the required number. This is what happened to these small groups, whose tendencies ranged from the extreme right to the extreme left, who have no popular base, and some of whom did not even try to collect the signatures.

This is the same phenomenon that affected Alexei Navalny’s Progress Party in 2015—it simply did not have enough supporters to have branches in at least 85 entities of the Russian Federation. It was therefore struck off the electoral rolls, not by arbitrary decision, but because it did not meet the criteria defined by law.

In reality, Navalny’s popularity was very low. A poll carried out between August 20 and August 26, 2020 (just after his “poisoning”) by the Levada Center (funded by the USA and considered in Russia as a “foreign agent,” so not really ” regime-friendly”) showed the difference in popularity between Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny (Table 1).

Table 1: Voting intentions in November 2020 (among voters who intended to vote). August 2020 figures come from a poll conducted in the week of August 20-26, 2020, after the Navalny “poisoning attempt.” [Source: Levada Center]

Alongside these institutional problems, the reason why the non-systemic opposition—i.e., that which is not structured into parties with sufficient popular representation to be elected—is sidelined is that it is funded from abroad. In part by oligarchs guilty of illegal enrichment who have fled the country to Britain or Israel, and by foreign powers, notably the United States and Great Britain. By financing political parties in Russia, our countries are, quite logically, turning them into “foreign agents.”

The US uses the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to fund “non-systemic” opposition in Russia. According to the New York Times, the NED was created in the early 1980s to alleviate the workload of the CIA. In 2021, it supported no fewer than 109 political and influence activities in Russia, for a total of $14 million. As for the UK, it participates in this effort by funding anti-Russia media in the countries surrounding Russia. According to investigative journalist Matt Kennard, the UK spent around €96 million between 2017 and 2021 on “counter-information” in 20 countries.

In response to a situation that has only worsened since the early 2000s, Russia passed a law in 2012 similar to the one in force in the USA since 1938, allowing the banning of foreign-funded political organizations.
In November 2017, following the United States’ decision to classify the Russian media outlet RT as a “foreign agent,” Russia tightened its policy and passed a law allowing foreign journalists and media outlets to be classified as “foreign agents.” In 2018, this law was extended to individuals and NGOs funded by foreign countries.

To what extent the Russian opposition is free to express itself is certainly debatable, but the fact that we are funding it makes it ipso facto illegitimate and illegal. No country accepts foreign funding of its opposition. What is more, if the opposition were as strong and vibrant as they say it is in Russia, it would not need our financial support.

In fact, Western countries fund the Russian opposition not to improve the situation for Russians, but to put pressure on the government.

The Poisoning

On Thursday August 20, 2020, on his flight from Tomsk to Moscow, Alexei Navalny was suddenly in severe pain. The flight was diverted to Omsk so that he could be rushed to hospital.

Although no analysis was ever carried out and no one knows the exact nature of Navalny’s illness, his spokeswoman claimed that he was deliberately poisoned. The rumors circulating on social networks about alcohol consumption combined with medication were immediately described as “defamatory” and dismissed as “slanderous” by our media, which readily prefered, without any supporting evidence, a more romanticized narrative—Novitchok poisoning on Putin’s orders.

Assuming that the poisoning was deliberate (and therefore criminal), how it occurred remains a mystery, and explanations have varied. In the first version, his entourage claims that he was poisoned while drinking tea at Tomsk airport. The problem was that the tea had been brought to him by Ilya Pakhomov, one of his colleagues. Later, another video shows a waitress placing cups on the table.

Navalny’s entourage then presented a second version: poisoning with water bottles at the hotel, which Navalny’s team (remaining in Tomsk) recovered on August 20. The British media outlet The Sun published the video of the operation, which took place before the arrival of the police, thus altering the presumed crime scene. Navalny’s entourage claimed to have taken the bottles to Germany for analysis. But scans of the Navalny team’s luggage at the boarding gate, published by the private Russian media REN TV [30 percent of is owned by the RTL Group], confirmed that there were no bottles (which would have been confiscated anyway), while surveillance cameras show one of Navalny’s relatives buying water from a vending machine after the luggage check. In September 2020, one of Navalny’s associates himself confessed that the bottle of water was not the cause of the poisoning. In any case, according to the BBC, Navalny had ingested nothing but his tea at the airport that morning.

Navalny’s entourage then came up with a third story: the poisoning of Navalny’s underpants, “revealed” on December 21, 2020, with the video of a telephone conversation with what is presented to us as an “FSB [Federal Security Service] agent,” named Konstantin Kudryavtsev. It was widely circulated on Western media. Conspiracy theorists claimed that, after this conversation, “there can be no doubt.” But there is absolutely no proof that a) this is the person in question, b) that he really is an FSB agent, and c) that he was actually involved in the poisoning attempt.

The video was shot with the help of Bellingcat, a British government-funded outfit. The problem is that its methodology for identifying Kudryavtsev is technically questionable. In fact, instead of starting with the crime and working backwards to its perpetrator (as a Sherlock Holmes would do), Bellingcat looks for the individuals who best fit the hypothetical course of the crime. It builds a profile of culprits based on an assumed scenario, and then looks for the individuals who are most likely to match it. This is the principle of artificial intelligence. In this way, we arrive at the result through a succession of approximations—we have the probability of the probability of the probability of the probability that what we find is true. To put it simply: facts are selected on the basis of conclusions—whereas facts should lead to conclusions. This is a method that police forces try to avoid, as it leads to miscarriages of justice.

Such a methodology could be used if all the details of the crime were known in advance. The problem is that, in this particular case, numerous facts show that Bellingcat knew neither the functioning nor the structure of the Russian security services, nor even how the crime was committed and under what circumstances. The probability that Bellingcat arrived at the right result is therefore extremely low. What is more, the American channel CNN—which investigated the case on site—admitted that it has “not been able” to confirm Navalny’s accusations.

Furthermore, assuming that Navalny’s contact was indeed a member of a team of “poisoners,” would he speak freely with a stranger, on an unencrypted phone, and give details of an operation that would presumably be highly classified? Assuming that this “agent” had been involved in Navalny’s surveillance for four years, would he not have recognized his voice on the phone? With so many contradictions and errors about the way the services work, we have every right to believe that Navalny’s contact person was not the one we have been led to believe.

Russian opposition media outlet Meduza asked four lawyers whether Navalny’s video constituted proof that the FSB tried to poison him. All agreed that, even if it were legally possible to present the video at a trial, its content was highly open to manipulation and insufficient to prove anything.

As to Bellingcat—regularly referred to by far-right conspiracists, Conspiracy Watch and many Western media outlets—an internal UK Integrity Initiative document from June 2018 on countering Russian disinformation judged it as follows:

Other concerns were that the CPDA and ISD had analytical shortcomings, and that Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to pay.

This telephone conversation was therefore not credible in its form. But neither was its substance. Assuming that it was Novitchok poisoning, and even that the poison was of Russian origin, there was nothing at that stage—not even Navalny’s conversation—to link the Russian authorities to this attempt. Moreover, as we shall see, the various reports on this poisoning, published by the Charité hospital, the OPCW, Germany, Sweden or France, were based on biomedical samples (blood and urine samples), and none confirmed the mode of poisoning, nor refered to bottles or underwear. This was confirmed by the German government in its answers to parliamentarians.

I was trained in the Swiss Nuclear Biological and Chemical (NBC) Defense School, based in Spiez, which is a center of excellence for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). So, the alleged assassination attempts on Sergei Skripal in Britain (2018) and then Alexei Navalny (2020) caught my interest. In both cases, Russia allegedly used a poison “a single gram of which could kill a thousand people in seconds.” However, not only none of the “victims” died, but their symptoms were totally different from each other’s, and moreover, these symptoms did not correspond to those of nerve agents.

In fact, the symptoms of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulya (and the testimony of a British National Health Service (NHS) emergency doctor in Salisbury) suggest that they were probably victims of food poisoning by a toxin related to saxitoxins, as were other customers of the same restaurant a few months later. As for Navalny, the military laboratories never published the results of their analyses.

Assuming that Novitchok had been put on Navalny’s underwear, he would have died when he picked it up and would not even have had time to put it on! In reality, the facts are poorly known. Our governments and the mainstream media exploit this ignorance to create a narrative that justifies their policies towards Russia. In this respect, our governments are behaving in a way that meets the definition of conspiracy theorists. The stories reported to us without nuance in the media are artificial constructs, which must “play” with the facts to appear credible.

Let’s remember a few facts. First of all, Novitchok was not listed in the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) until 2018, simply because the USSR (then Russia) never adopted it: it was merely a research product.

Secondly, it was at Russia’s request that several variants of Novitchok were added to the CWC list in 2018. Why? Because the laboratory that had developed it had been dismantled by the US, and the Americans had supplied samples to several NATO countries. The Americans themselves synthesized it for research purposes back in 1998. This is why the British laboratory at Porton Down refused to confirm to Theresa May that the toxin analyzed in the Skripal affair was of Russian origin.

In short, scientific evidence tends to contradict the claims of politicians and other propagandists. So we cannot say for sure, even if the report from German doctors at Berlin’s La Charité hospital indicates that Navalny’s poisoning seemed to have been caused by a wrong combination of drugs.

The Results of the Analyses

There is little available data to assess the reliability of the Western accusations made in 2018 and 2020. The analyses carried out by German, French and Swedish military laboratories in September 2020 remain classified and have neither been published nor communicated to Russia, despite its requests. On the other hand, we do have the medical reports of the doctors who treated Navalny in Omsk and Berlin, the declassified version of the OPCW report and—to a certain extent—the German government’s answers of November 19, 2020 and February 15, 2021, to questions from Bundestag lawmakers.

Analyses by military laboratories tended to assert the presence of Novitchok, but their content is unverifiable. Observations by civilian doctors tended to contradict their conclusions, while government responses seemed much less categorical than the media, and invoked military secrecy when facts appeared to contradict their statements.

On August 24, the Charité hospital issued a press release stating that clinical analyses “indicate intoxication with a substance from the cholinesterase inhibitor group.” However, the Omsk doctors did not detect any. So, conspiracy? Not necessarily. As the opposition media outlet Meduza explained, the German doctors were looking for evidence of poisoning, whereas the Russian doctors were looking for the cause of Navalny’s illness. As they were not looking for the same thing, they obtained different results, but they were not inconsistent.

In Sweden, lawyer Mats Nilsson requested publication of the results of Navalny’s blood analysis by the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI). FOI only published a text in which the name of the substance had been redacted, stating that “the presence of XXXX has been confirmed in the patient’s blood.” A blackout which suggests that something other than Novitchok, which Westerners had expected, was found. What is more, elements of his medical file published by doctors at Berlin’s Charité Hospital in the medical journal The Lancet, tended to show that he was probably the victim of a toxic combination of drugs.

The name of the substance was hidden and obviously covered by military secrecy. So we do not know anything about it, but we can imagine that if it had been Novitchok (which Western countries expected), there would have been no reason to hide it. On January 14, 2021, the Swedish government refused to declassify this result so as not to “harm relations between Sweden and a foreign power,” without specifying whether this was Germany or the United States. So we do not know. But we do know that Sweden is a country whose honor is a fiction subordinated to political interest—in the Julian Assange affair, the Swedish government had already literally “fabricated” rape accusations, according to Nils Melzer, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.

As it turns out, the “traces of toxin” which the German government found in Navalny’s blood (but which the doctors at Berlin’s La Charité hospital did not find) were not on the CAC list. Apparently, this toxin was so dangerous that the German government even refused to put it on the CAC list! So, the Germans found an unnamed toxic substance so dangerous that they have decided not to ban it.

Only our journalists can understand such deranged logic.

The German doctors’ report, published on December 22, 2020, in the medical journal The Lancet, clearly stated that they were unable to identify the presence of Novitchok when Navalny arrived, but only of “cholinesterase inhibitors.” They stated that the identification of Novitchok required further analysis by the IPTB.

But the analyses carried out by the Charité hospital on Navalny’s arrival spoke for themselves. They are the subject of an appendix to The Lancet article. An appendix that no mainstream media has published, reported or analyzed, because the German doctors’ findings call into question the military version of events.

The presence of cholinesterase inhibitors could therefore simply be explained by the drugs ingested by Navalny himself, likely in combination with alcohol. This would explain why his symptoms were totally different from those of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018, who were claimed to have been victims of the same poison.

Furthermore, the German doctors’ report reveals that when the French, Swedish and OPCW took their samples–a fortnight after Navalny’s arrival in Germany—his cholinesterase levels were close to normal. At this stage, these laboratories were only able to detect “cholinesterase inhibitors,” but not the substances found at the Charité a few days earlier, such as lithium or drugs, which would have favored their appearance. In the absence of published results, we do not know exactly what the military found, but it is likely that, having no other explanation for the presence of these inhibitors, they were led to conclude that it was Novitchok.

By keeping their results secret, these laboratories had probably not anticipated that the German doctors would publish the results of their analyses. Thanks to the latter, the hypothesis that Navalny was the victim of accidental poisoning appears more likely than deliberate poisoning.

Navalny must obviously have known this, just as he must have known that these results were going to be published; and it was probably to disqualify their conclusions that, the day before The Lancet article was published, Navalny posted online his telephone conversation with an “FSB agent.”

Navalny’s Death

The official version given by the Russian authorities is that Alexei Navalny died from a form of cerebral embolism. Whether this is true or not, we do not know, and only an autopsy can tell us. In the absence of medical data, it is impossible to determine the cause of his death, let alone whether it was of criminal origin. However, it is now clear that Alexei Navalny’s death is of no interest to the Russian government.

In Ukraine, Russia controls the military situation and is making gains along the entire front line. Ukrainian institutions are in crisis, and the threat of a cut in Western aid is contributing to mounting political tensions. Ukraine and the West expected a rapid collapse of Russia thanks to sanctions, and convinced themselves that Ukraine could only win. Two years after the start of the Russian operation, the opposite is true: the Russian economy is growing, while those of the West are tending towards recession. We were told that the Russian army had no more tanks, no more artillery, no more missiles, no more fighters, that it was isolated from the world, that it had to find its micro-processes in washing machines; and today we are told that it is ready to invade Europe.

Faced with the failure of its strategy in Ukraine, the West is moving deeper into the war of narratives. As Josep Borrell, head of the European Union’s foreign policy department, puts it: “It is clear that the wind is blowing against the West, it is blowing against us. And we have to win the battle of narratives.”

But here too, Russia appears to be the winner. Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin went round the world, showing a Kremlin leader more stable, coherent, rational, and intelligent than his White House counterpart.

Furthermore, the approaching presidential elections in Russia made the timing of Navalny’s elimination unlikely. In fact, Alexei Navalny was transferred from his prison on the outskirts of Moscow to Penitentiary Colony No. 3 (IK-3). According to the opposition media Novaya Gazeta, when Navalny was transferred to IK-3, the Russian government gave instructions that he should be protected and not die before the elections. Did the Russian authorities have any information about possible threats against Navalny? We do not know.

What we also know from the German and Ukrainian media is that Russia was negotiating with the US government to exchange Navalny for Vadim Krasikov, a former Russian spy.

The problem here, as in all matters concerning Russia or Belarus, is that our leaders are reacting on the basis of their hatred of noth these countries, not on the basis of the facts. Already during the alleged “hijacking” of flight FR4978 to Minsk in May 2021, European leaders had tweeted that President Lukashenko was responsible, even before the plane had landed in Minsk, and Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya had tweeted that activist Roman Protasevich had been arrested, demanding his immediate release and calling for sanctions against Belarus, even before he had stepped off the plane.

With the Nord Stream affair in September 2022, on the French television channel LCI, French general Michel Yakovleff claimed that Russia had sabotaged its own gas pipelines, before anyone knew what had actually happened.

The same thing happened with Navalny’s death: within minutes after his death was announced, all European leaders immediately accused Vladimir Putin of having had him assassinated. This shows that our leaders have no robust decision-making processes. They decide according to the mood of the moment, not according to decision-making processes documented by the work of the intelligence services. Here, too, our intelligence services show their weakness and their inability to integrate into decision-making processes. In Switzerland, the state of intelligence analysis is catastrophic, and this is reflected in the decisions of a political class which, like its European counterparts, is incapable of thinking things through. We have reached a point where, as a Belgian minister said in the 1990s: “things are too complex to be answered with the brain, so we answer with our guts.”

By the way, what do Ukrainian intelligence services think? On February 25, Kirillo Budanov, head of Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR), told journalists, “I may disappoint you, but he really had a blood clot come off.”


Jacques Baud is a widely respected geopolitical expert whose publications include many articles and books. His lastest works are The Russian Art of War He has researched Alexei Navalny in The Navalny Case.


Lenin and the New Man

The most influential and politically decisive character in the 20th century and still in the 21st century is not Karl Marx (1818-1883), but his devoted admirer Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (10. IV. 1870-21. I. 1924), who was from a well-to-do family and better known as “Lenin,” or “he who belongs to the Lena River.” He adopted this nickname in 1901, after his three-year exile (1897-1900) near that Siberian river, with his wife Nadezhda (Nadia) Krupskaya (1869-1939), who was from an impoverished noble family. It was Lenin, a fanatical millenarian of the communist utopia, die wahre Demokratie, authentic democracy, who made Marx famous by consolidating socialism as the world’s dominant world religion in its various versions. Even the Protestant and Catholic churches have made it their own through the myths of social justice, egalitarianism, etc. “Not having succeeded in getting men to practice what it teaches, the present Church has resolved to teach what men practice” (Nicolás Gómez Dávila).

1.

The testimonies about Lenin’s sincere admiration and respect for Karl Marx, imported into Russia, where he was better known than in the rest of Europe, by revolutionaries of various tendencies, are innumerable. According to one of his biographers, Lenin considered Marx’s writings “sacred scriptures;” like a “religious dogma,” which “should not be questioned but believed.” Lenin had “an unshakable faith, a religious faith in the Marxist gospel,” said the skeptic Bertrand Russell.

However, he was not ideologically Marxist except in the belief that he had discovered the laws of history. Marx, Schumpeter recognized, was scientifically very rigorous and his disciple ex lectione was a scientistic who despised facts that did not conform to his arguments, abhorred compromise and rarely admitted his own mistakes. The importation of Marx contributed to westernizing Russia, “one of the most ignorant, medieval and shamefully backward Asian countries” said Lenin, who proposed to turn the Empire of the Czars into the USSR, the only world Empire.

An example of his differences with Marx: for the German thinker, the evolution towards socialism could only take place in capitalist countries with a developed industrial proletariat, which would emancipate itself without the need for a revolution. Instead, Lenin considered necessary the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat,” led by a firmly cohesive revolutionary vanguard party, which would provide the working classes with political consciousness (education and organization) and lead the struggle against Capitalism. Nor did he attach importance to the theory of surplus value, the key to Marx’s socio-economic thought. According to Lenin, “what is fundamental in Marx’s doctrine is the class struggle. Thus it is very often written and said. But this is not accurate. From this inaccuracy derives very often the opportunist misrepresentation of Marxism, its distortion in a sense acceptable to the bourgeoisie.” And so on. Lenin thought of the homogeneous new man with whom all differences would disappear.

2.

The Ulyanov couple, who could not have children because of a physical defect of Nadia Krupskaya, managed to flee from Siberia to Western Europe. They returned to Russia at the outbreak of the 1905 revolution against tsarism at the same time as the Russian-Japanese war (8.II.1904-5.IX.1905), which ended with the defeat of the Russian Empire and the affirmation of the Japanese as the Asian power capable of confronting the Western powers. In truth, that revolution was nothing more than a broad social movement calling for an improvement in the deplorable situation of the working classes. But it was the prolegomenon of Lenin’s revolution, because of “Bloody Sunday”: on January 22, 1905, a peaceful demonstration led by the priest Georgy Gapon of more than 150,000 Orthodox workers and peasants, who held up crosses and icons and portraits of Tsar Nicholas II—who was absent—to whom they wanted to deliver a request for labor improvements, was violently repressed by the imperial guard who killed about 2,000 people, at the gates of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, including women. and children. The news spread throughout Russia. There were riots and revolts that were repressed; the unrest spread through all layers of Russian society. The absurd response of the government was not forgotten and the memory of the tragic event was kept very much alive.

Authentic revolutions are first prepared in the heads, said Ortega, and the Bolshevik revolution, destined to change the course of universal history, began that Sunday. It was a revolution “suspended,” said Gonzague de Reynold, “unfinished” said Stéphane Courtois. For, as Ortega also said in The Revolt of the Masses: “every ignored reality—in this case the manifestly improvable situation of the majority of the Russian people—prepares its revenge.” The postponed revolution had three phases.

Lenin and his wife went into exile again in 1907, after the failure of the first phase in which, by the way, the soviets appeared on the scene. They returned in 1917, during the second phase: the “bourgeois” revolution of February 23, 1917, which forced the tsar to abdicate. This revolution occurred almost by chance, since the revolutionary bourgeoisie did not have politicians of stature. Kerensky, second president of the Republic in the few months of the provisional government, was called “the clown.” Lenin, rather Trotsky, initiated the third revolutionary phase in the same year 1917, in which “a new epoch begins. It concludes the history of Russia, begins that of the USSR and also initiates a new era for mankind.” Both phases, bourgeois and Leninist, also took place during another war, the Great European World War of 1914-1918. The bourgeois was in favor of continuing the struggle against the central empires; the proletarian, a revolution of intellectuals who hastened to sign the peace of Brest-Litovsk to begin the third phase, which lasted practically, although sub-phases could be distinguished, until the implosion of the USSR in 1989-1992.

3.

Lenin, “the great machinist of the revolution,” who imposed the technological mentality in the USSR by describing his revolution as “soviets and electrification”—the State as a great capitalist enterprise—was a very cultured man, who also knew German, French and English perfectly. A great reader, very interested in the French Revolution, especially in the Jacobins—”furious theoreticians” (Burke), the first totalitarians according to common feeling—he certainly read Sylvain Maréchal’s prophecy in the Manifeste des Egaux (1795): “The French Revolution is only the precursor of a much greater revolution, much more solemn, and which will be the last one.” It would be the Great Revolution of Equality, another delayed revolution confused with the democratic revolution that began in the Middle Ages, according to Tocquevilie and which Rodney Stark traces back to the Roman Empire when women and slaves converted to Christianity.

Lenin was a nationalist according to Trotsky. But, a reader of Bakunin, because “the revolution begins at home” and Moscow was, according to the myth, the Third Rome, he was surely thinking of Maréchal when he declared, “Russia is but a stage towards the world revolution.” In exile, he had already begun to spread the idea of transforming the Great War into a revolution of the European proletariat that would prepare the utopian world revolution of equality—the key to his thought, his political action and his success, very different from the revolution of freedom—”freedom for what?” Lenin replied to Fernando de los Ríos in 1920—initiated by Christianity.

4.

Lenin and Trotsky, who had gone from the conciliatory Mensheviks to the intransigent Bolsheviks, carried out the coup d’état on October 25, according to the Julian calendar then in force in Russia, November 7 according to the Gregorian calendar of 1917, skillfully taking advantage of the power vacuum. “Ten days that shook the world,” became the title of a book published in 1919 by the American Marxist journalist John Reed. The revolution proper, destined to change the course of world history, came later. Not as an exclusively Russian political revolution, but as the beginning of the world revolution of the proletariat, which would definitively redeem Humanity. A religious revolution that began with the period of the Terror, which lasted nineteen and a half months (September 1918-January 1920) with an annual average of 1.5 million dead.

Vladimir Lenin is an example of what Walter Schubart said about the religiosity of the Russians: “In the Russians everything is religious… even atheism. They offered to the world, for the first time and in great style, the unusual spectacle of a religious atheism; or, in other words: a pseudomorphosis of religion, the birth of a belief in the form of unbelief, a new doctrine of salvation in the figure of perdition, of impiety. Its religiosity… has nothing European about it; it hurls itself, eager for dogmas, to seize a doctrine that comes from rationalist Europe. Hence the profound antagonism that explodes from within Russian atheism, and with it, Bolshevism: the contradiction between the ideal and the methods; between the goal of peace and humanity, and the means of terror and crime, typical marks of the Russian soul. If one wants to characterize Bolshevism with a blunt phrase, it could be done with this formula: in the hands of the Russians Marxism has become a religion; and more precisely: a semblance of religion. For it cannot be called “religion,” a movement which considers finite values as absolute greatness—without the note of an all-embracing totality—mere fragments, mere fragments of the universe.” But, as John Gray says in The New Leviathans: Thoughts after Liberalism, “Russian atheists, nihilists and terrorists sought to divinize the human species, instead of ‘learning to live without God.’”

To understand Lenin, including his crimes, it is necessary to take into account that deeply religious character, which drove him to hate God—as a Gnostic, Voegelin would say—because the world is not perfect: “every thought dedicated to God is an unspeakable vileness.” His passionate atheism made him a charismatic leader, like those of Max Weber: “passion,” said Weber, “does not turn a man into a politician if he is not at the service of a cause and does not make responsibility for that cause the guiding star of his action.”

5.

The young Lenin, faithful orthodox, good student and very mature—he always gave his family a preeminent place—had never been interested in politics. But hurt, naturally, by the death of his older brother Aleksandr in 1887, hanged for participating in an anarchist plot to assassinate Alexander III—Lenin would avenge him by ordering the assassination of Tsar Nicholas II and his entire family—he began to associate with revolutionary groups and, moved by hatred, became a political activist. A figure about which Lenin would later theorize as a quasi-priestly profession, dedicated to redeeming Humanity incarnated in the proletariat. “Except for power, everything is illusion,” Lenin believed and said; and he conceived of the party of the proletariat as a Comtean community, or pouvoir spirituel, and the shock troops of History against “class monopoly capitalism;” capitalism which was and remains the Satan of the socialist faith. The party was the priestly caste that led the egalitarian revolution, promoting Stakhanovism and Gaganovism, so that there would be no free hours of work, but free activities, to achieve total equality, in which the new men, being equal in everything, would follow the instructions of the nomenklatura, and thus it was assumed that all would be free.

Dazzled by the novel, What Is to be Done? (1862), by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, one of the leaders of the populist movement (narodnik) of socialist tendency, Lenin exchanged his orthodox faith for faith in science, founded the communist religion as a more radical heresy of the socialist one and, as Nietzsche guessed—die Zeit kommt, wo man über Politik umlernen wird (the time is coming when the meaning of politics will be changed), effectively changed the traditional conception of politics, which seeks a balance between freedom and security, making it revolutionary: The Permanent Revolution theorized by Trotsky, the continuous change that leads to totalitarianism according to Hannah Arendt. The Brazilian thinker Olavo de Carvalho said that the ideas of Lenin and Gramsci coincide with those of Wycliff, Huss, Müntzer and other messianics. For the messianic scientistic Lenin, who never took facts into account, “there is no Marxist dogma. Marxism is the scientific management of human affairs.”

Follower of the Marxist branch of German social democracy, rival of the most powerful social democracy of Lassall against which Bismarck reacted, Lenin distanced himself from the liberalizing of his teacher Georgi Plekhanov (1857-1918), considered the “father” of Russian Marxism, and founded Marxism-Leninism—an ideology that has more of Lenin—almost everything—as Ersatz religion, substitute, than of Marx; atheist, but not moved by hatred. “Where Lenin is, there is Jerusalem,” said the Marxist philosopher, Ernst Bloch.

Just as Marx inverted Hegel to found socialism, Lenin inverted Marx to found the religion of hatred. Nevertheless, hagiography presents Karl Marx as Moses and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, a Slav with a “Mongolian face” (F. de los Ríos) as a westernizing Marxist, as the Joshua who brought down the walls of bourgeois capitalism. Certainly, at the cost of millions of victims, killed by him and his disciples in Russia and the rest of the world.

However, since the denunciation of Stalin’s crimes by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, Lenin was the good guy, and the evil one his disciple and successor, Stalin. Lenin, who wanted to eliminate all bourgeois and all those who were not proletarians, was the redeemer of humanity; Stalin, who followed the terrorist policy of Lenin’s religion of hatred, the Satan infiltrated who had into Leninism. Communism seemed to Alain Besançon more perverse than Nazism—an imitation of Leninism in its most sinister aspects—because it uses the universal spirit of justice and goodness to spread evil. But the slogan reductio ad hitlerum prevails. Solzhenitsyn commented in 1980: “During Lenin’s lifetime, there were no fewer innocents killed among the civilian population than under Hitler, and yet Western students, who today give Hitler the title of the greatest madman in history, regard Lenin as a benefactor of mankind.”

Leninism is still present. Lenin is invoked in universities in the USA and all over the world, in the America of “21st century socialism” and in monarchic Spain, in the European Union, in China… one reads books like the one by the Slovenian Slavoj Žižek, Repeating Lenin (2004), etc. The Leninist conception is a world completely planned by a party that bureaucratically controls—the nomenklatura—the least human activity. This conception has been revived by Klaus Schwab and the Davos Forum bosses, who claim to be the “administrators of the future,” already put into practice by the Anti-European Union, against which populisms are beginning to rebel: “the nickname,” says Chantal Delsol in her politically incorrect book, Populisme, “A defense of the indefensible, with which the perverted democracies virtuously disguise their contempt for populism.”

6.

Since “the revolution begins at home,” Lenin hastened to create in Russia, in the few years that he enjoyed his triumph, the structures of the terrorist State—the Cheka, the repression of nonconformists, the denunciations—which turned it into the USSR, the paradise of the proletariat.

Some of Lenin’s sayings on the use of terror as an instrument of political and social control:

“It does not matter if ninety percent of the Russian people perish as long as only ten percent of them live through the world revolution.”

“I am astonished that you do not proceed to mass executions for sabotage,” he telegraphed to his people on January 29, 1920, on the occasion of the railroad workers’ strikes.

“The good communist is also a good chekist.”

“The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in executing, the better.”

Against the formal abolition of the death penalty in the USSR: “How are you going to make a revolution without executions? Do you expect to eliminate your enemies by disarming yourself? What other means of repression are there?”

“When people censure us for our cruelty, we wonder how they can forget the most elementary principles of Marxism” (Pravda, October 26, 1918).

“We must set an example: 1) Hang (and I say hang in such a way that people will see) not less than 100 kulaks, rich men, too well-known blood drinkers. 2) Publish their names. 3) Seize all their grain. 4) Identify the hostages as we have indicated in our telegram of yesterday. Do this in such a way that people for a hundred leagues around will see it, so that they will tremble and say: they kill and will continue to kill bloodthirsty kulaks. Telegraph that you have received these instructions. Yours, Lenin.”

“Lenin,” writes Richard Pipes in his classic, The Russian Revolution (1992), was “the guiding force of the Red Terror throughout.” He wanted to build a world inhabited by good citizens and that obsession led him, like Robespierre, “to justify morally the elimination of bad citizens.”


Dalmacio Negro Pavón (Madrid, 1931) has been professor of History of Ideas and Political Forms in the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid and is currently professor emeritus of Political Science at the CEU San Pablo University. He is also a full member of Real Academia de Ciencias Morales y Políticas (the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences). He has translated and edited several classic works of German, English and French political thought. His many books include El fin de la normalidad y otros ensayos (The End of Normality and Other Essays), La ley de hierro de la oligarquía (The Iron Law of Oligarchy), Lo que Europa debe al Cristianismo (What Europe Owes to Christianity), Il Dio Mortale. Il Mito dello Stato tra Crisi Europea e Crisi delle Politica (The Mortal God: The Myth of the State amidst the European Crisis and Crisis of Politics), and La tradición de la libertad (The Tradition of Liberty). This article appears through the kind courtesy of La gaceta de la Iberosfera.


Featured: Lenin and Demonstrations, by Isaak Brodsky; painted in 1919.


Drone Ideology for Volunteers

In the realm of ideology in Russia we have the following picture.

The state has done a lot to marginalize radical liberals. This process began in 2000 and took 24 years with several administrations. The influence of liberals on Russia’s ideology has steadily declined, but it is still very significant—primarily in culture, education, and science. Only liberals or those who do not receive clear and precise instructions from above can fight liberalism in such an uncertain and protracted manner.

At the same time, patriotism was growing steadily, but just as slowly—sometimes freezing on the same frame for a year or more. This was demanded by both our Crimea and the Special Military Operation (SMO). But even here the authorities acted as cautiously and uncertainly as they did with the dismantling of liberalism.

But new cadres had to be trained, and the main focus was the training of a special type—pure volunteers, ideological drones, managerial drones. This is how an interesting phenomenon emerged—a class of ideologically neutral statesmen oriented toward power and the managerial vertical as such.

At first, they tried to introduce a simulacrum of ideology, but then they gave up on that, too. Mass training of young and not so young volunteers of power has given birth to a whole new managerial class. It somewhat resembles the functioning of a computer or Artificial Intelligence. It does not matter what data the operator loads, what commands he gives. A computer is not supposed to reason. The main thing is that the algorithms work correctly.

Volunteers—carriers of zero-ideology—are now trained on an industrial scale. This is half good (they are not liberals), half bad (they are not patriots). The SMO and the war with the West (it is a long time coming, maybe forever) requires a further and rapid shift in the center of gravity toward an ideology of meaningful patriotism. Zero-ideology carriers are perfectly fine-tuned drones, and they are perfectly suited for this purpose—to process a patriotic program. But the operator has to hit the “enter” button. And the operator’s finger trembles. And the government volunteers are still processing what they have. For now—it is a testing ground and a laboratory. But it is time to get the program up and running.

But this principle was transferred to ideology, where such a model looks strange. An ideological class with zero ideology, a political drone. It is no longer liberal (minus-ideology), but not yet patriotic (plus-ideology).

At the same time, other neural networks are gradually forming in society and the nation—with a pronounced patriotic content. These are not zero-volunteers, but plus-volunteers—volunteers, heroes of the front and rear. The state stands on them. They create Victory, and therefore history. They are ruled by the spirit.

Zero-volunteers have nothing against patriots. But they have nothing for them, either. They have a different algorithm. It is time to unite these networks.

I hope that after the elections the authorities will hit the “enter” button to upload to society a full-fledged patriotic program, the general outlines of which are quite clearly outlined by the President, the decree on traditional values, the concept of foreign policy, etc. Plus-ideology, the foundations of patriotism are announced and outlined by the authorities. It is logical if their implementation starts in full force after the elections.

After all, it is time for us to start winning.


Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.


Featured: Golconde, by René Magritte; painted in 1953.


The Civilizational Approach

To effectively confront the West in the war of civilizations that Russia is already waging, we must take into account the hierarchy of plans.

The highest level is identity:

  • what is the identity of the enemy (who are we basically at war with?);
  • what is our own identity;
  • what is the identity of the other civilizational actors?

We have to start with such a civilizational map. And already at this level we encounter a problem: the enemy has penetrated so deeply into our own civilization that he has partially hijacked the control of meanings, mental structures to determine who is who—not only from outside Russia, but also from within it. Therefore, we need to start with clearing the mental field, the sovereignization of consciousness.

Here is the next problem: the so-called civilizational approach. The enemy has managed to impose on Russian socio-humanitarian science that the civilizational approach is either wrong, marginal, or optional. But. The rejection of the civilizational approach automatically means only one thing: full recognition of the universality of the paradigm of Western civilization and consent to external control of the consciousness of Russian society by those with whom we are at war.

In other words, anyone who questions the civilizational approach automatically becomes a foreign agent—in the truest sense. It does not matter whether this is intentional, foolish or out of inertia. But now it is only thus and no other way. Only a civilizational approach allows us to talk about a sovereign public consciousness, and thus about sovereign science and sovereign education.

This is the last call for Russian humanitarian science: either we rapidly move to the positions of the civilizational approach (Russia = sovereign civilization), or we write a letter of resignation. Sometimes the increase of scientific knowledge is achieved by subtraction, not addition—if we subtract nonsense, toxic algorithms, subversive epistemological strategies, in a word, the liberal virus of Westernism.


Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.


Featured: The Triumph of Civilization, by Jacques Reattu; painted ca. 1794-1798.


Vladimir Putin and Tucker Carlson: The Geopolitics of Dialogue

Why is Tucker Carlson’s interview momentous for both the West and Russia?

Let us start with the simpler part—Russia. Here, Tucker Carlson has become a focal point of convergence for two different—polar—segments of Russian society: the ideological patriots and the elite Westernizers who nevertheless remain loyal to Putin and the Special Military Operation (SMO). For the patriots, Tucker Carlson is simply ours. He is a traditionalist, a right-wing conservative, a staunch opponent of liberalism. This is what walking to the Russian Tsar looks like in the 21st century.

Putin does not often interact with the brightest representatives of the fundamentally conservative camp. And the attention that the Kremlin pays him kindles the heart of a patriot, inspiring him to continue the conservative-traditionalist course in Russia itself. Now it is possible and necessary to do so: the Russian authorities have decided on an ideology. We have taken this path and we will not turn away from it. But patriots are always afraid that we will turn back. No.

On the other hand, the Westernizers have also breathed a sigh of relief: “Well, everything is not so bad in the West, and there are good and objective people there; we told you! Let’s be friends at least with such a West, Westernizers think, even though the rest of the globalist liberal West does not want to be friends, but only bombards us with sanctions and missiles and cluster bombs, killing our women, children and the elderly. We are at war with the liberal West; let there be friendship with the conservative West.
Thus, in the person of Tucker Carlson, Russian patriots and Russian Westernizers (already more and more Russian and less Western) have come to a consensus.

In the West itself, the situation is even more fundamental. Tucker Carlson is a symbolic figure. He is now the main symbol of an America that hates Biden, liberals and globalists and is preparing to vote for Trump. Trump, Carlson and Musk, and Texas Governor Abbott, are the faces of the impending American Revolution, this time the Conservative Revolution. And now Russia is tapping into this already quite powerful resource. No, it is not about Putin’s support for Trump; that could easily be minimized in a war with the United States. Carlson’s visit is about something else: about the fact that Biden and his maniacs have actually attacked a great nuclear power with the hands of Kiev terrorists, and humanity is about to be destroyed. Nothing more, nothing less.

And the world globalist media continues to spin Marvel-series for the infantile, in which the spider-man Zelensky magically defeats the Kremlin’s “Dr. Evil” with the help of superpowers and magic piglets. But that is just a cheap, silly TV series. And in reality, it is all about the use of nuclear weapons and possibly the destruction of mankind. Tucker Carlson has offered a reality check: does the West realize what it is doing, pushing the world towards the Apocalypse? There is a real Putin and a real Russia, not these staged characters and sets from Marvel. Look at what the globalists have done and what we are standing right up to! And it is not the content of the Putin interview; it is the very fact that a man like Tucker Carlson visited a country like Russia and a politician like Putin at a time like this.

Tucker Carlson’s arrival in Moscow may be the last chance to stop the extinction of humanity. And the gigantic billion-dollar attention to this momentous interview on the part of humanity itself, as well as the frenzied inhuman rage of Biden, the globalists, and the world’s decay-addled philistines, is evidence that this humanity is aware of the seriousness of what is happening. The only way to save the world is to stop now. And to do that, America must elect Trump. And choose Tucker Carlson. And Ilon Musk. And Abbott. And we get a chance to stand on the edge of the abyss. And compared to that, everything else is secondary. Liberalism and its agenda have brought humanity to a dead end.

Now the choice is: either liberals or humanity. Tucker Carlson chooses humanity, and that is why he came to Moscow to see Putin. And everyone in the world realized what he came for and how important it was.

The content of the interview was not sensational. Much more important is its very fact. And the photo of President Vladimir Putin talking to the hero of American patriotism, the indomitable Tucker Carlson. Conservatives of all countries united. In a multipolar world, the West, too, must have its share. But Western civilization will be the last to join BRICS.

Sleepy Joe then came to, and having watched with horror Putin’s conversation with Tucker Carlson, decided to interfere in world affairs. At first, Blinken and Nuland advised him to just declare that no such interview had even happened, that it was fake news, readily “disproved” by fact-checkers, and anyone who claims that there was an interview was a bellowing conspiracy theorist. But that initial plan was rejected, and Biden decided to honestly state that, contrary to the findings of the prosecutors’ probe, he is not a senile old madman out of his mind. “That’s not true, I’m not a senile old madman,” Biden indignantly denied the prosecutors’ findings…. And then forgot what he wanted to say next.

President Putin has spoken clearly about our Old Lands. It is important. The West will not get them. And Ukrainians live on them and will live on them, if Zelensky, Umerov and Syrsky, who have the most distant relation to the Malorussians, do not destroy all Malorussians and Malorussian women in the near future. Then there will be no Ukrainians left. And the Old Lands will have to be populated by someone else. God forbid we live to see that. On the agenda is the revolt of the Malorussians against the anti-Ukrainian puppet government, which has subjected Ukrainians to a real genocide by its policy.

The interview of Putin with Tucker Carlson is the most successful move by the Russian media strategy during the entire time of the SMO. Of course, the initiative clearly came from the brilliant American journalist himself, but responding to it and supporting it was a creative, brilliant decision by the Kremlin. Carlson hacks into the system of globalist propaganda by telling the truth of the people, of society, in spite of the systematized lies of the elites. A win-win, but difficult, a heroic move: the truth of the people against the lies of the elites. Putin has something to say to both the West and the East. And they want to hear his speech, his arguments, to know his picture of the world, his views on the future of Russia and humanity. On this depends, in many respects, whether this humanity itself will exist or not. Ask honestly, you will get an honest answer.

The number of views of Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson on social network X has far exceeded 100 million [as of this article]. I think cumulatively the interview will be viewed by a billion.

Let us emphasize once again: Tucker Carlson is not just a journalist and not even just a non-conformist journalist, he is a well-established and consistent (paleo) conservative with a clear and well-thought-out ideology, value system and world picture. And his visit to Russia is not a pursuit of sensation, but part of an ideological program. It is a political visit. With Tucker Carlson’s visit, the conservative wing of American society (at least half of it) will come to define its attitude toward Russia and Putin. Tucker Carlson is a conservative politician, traditionalist and public figure. In his person, conservative America asked the President of Russia the questions it was really interested in and got answers. This is a double blow to the globalist liberal lobby in the US—external from Putin and internal from Tucker Carlson (read Trump). Interestingly, there is also such a thing as MAGA communism in the US—Jackson Hinkle, Infrared, etc. These are friends of conservative Tucker Carlson, yet Marxists who support Trump and call for Make America Great Again (MAGA). Thus, there are also normal leftists. And together they are determined to crush liberal hegemony.
Vladimir Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson has already led to Biden’s unseating in the presidential race and essentially Trump’s victory in the US election. That is what real soft-power is—just one thing, and history now flows in a different direction.


Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.


Russia did not Lose the Russo-Japanese War

War against Russia was necessary for Japan, both for territorial gains and for acquitting the status of a world power. The idea of the inevitability of war with Russia had been implanted in the minds of the Japanese people long before 1904. The famous Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote back in 1895 that when the Japanese move on Russia, even the dead Japanese soldiers and sailors who died in the recent war with China will come to their aid. The ambitiousness of Japanese politicians was supported by Western powers interested in weakening Russia. The U.S., Germany, and England provided Japan with enormous assistance in rearming, training, and military supplies for the army.

By 1904, Japan had concentrated five times more armed forces in the Far East than the Russian armed forces. They were equipped with the most modern Western European and American weapons. The Japanese fleet was at least twice as large as the Russian Pacific fleet.

Sovereign Emperor Nicholas II foresaw the war with Japan and prepared for it, but, unfortunately, Russia by 1904 did not have time to re-equip the Siberian and Far Eastern railroads for military transportation, which was one of the decisive reasons for the defeats of the Russian army at the beginning of the war.

Tsar Nicholas II was not a bellicose man and considered war the greatest evil, so he tried in every way to avoid it. In negotiations with Japan, he was ready to make major concessions, up to the lease of part of the island of Sakhalin. But, as noted by S. S. Oldenburg, “Russia could avoid the struggle only by surrender. By self-removal from the Far East. No partial concessions—and a lot were made—could not only prevent, but also postpone the war.”

And war broke out. On the night of January 26-27, 1904, Japanese ships treacherously attacked the Russian squadron in Port Arthur. In his manifesto to the people, Emperor Nicholas II stated:

“In our concern for the preservation of the peace dear to our heart, we have made every effort to strengthen the tranquility in the Far East. For these peace-loving purposes, we have agreed to the revision of the existing agreements on Korean affairs between the two empires, proposed by the Japanese Government. The negotiations on this subject, however, were not brought to an end, and Japan, without even waiting for the receipt of the last reciprocal proposals of Our Government, announced the termination of the negotiations and the severance of diplomatic relations with Russia.

Without warning that the interruption of such relations would mean the opening of hostilities, the Japanese Government ordered its destroyers to suddenly attack our squadron, which was moored at the naval base of the fortress of Port Arthur. Upon receipt of the report of our Viceroy in the Far East, we immediately ordered an armed response to the Japanese challenge.”

Some Russian politicians of that time doubted the expediency of the war. And the liberal-revolutionary public immediately declared that Russia did not need territories thousands of versts away and, in order to have good-neighborly relations with Japan, it had to “withdraw from the Far East.” However, Russian politicians and public figures understood the significance of the Russo-Japanese war. This understanding was later expressed by Sergei S. Oldenburg:

“Since the days when Peter the Great cut through the ‘window to Europe,’ no war was as much a struggle for the future of Russia as the Russo-Japanese war. The question of access to ice-free seas, of Russian predominance in a vast part of the world, of the almost unpopulated expanses of Manchuria was being decided. Otherwise, having made its mark on its entire future in Asia, Russia could not evade this struggle.”

In addition, we can say that Russia’s war with Japan was predetermined in heaven. This is evidenced by the following mystical cases. Seven days before the war began, one Valaam elder had a vision, later recorded from his words and kept in the archives of the Valaam Monastery.

In this subtle vision an angel in the form of a young man appeared to him and foretold the coming calamities. Here is how the elder himself told about it:

“One night a bright Young Man came to me and said: ‘Come with me, and you will see something that no one on earth understands.’ The Young Man turned the other way, and I saw a huge beast walking in the distance, and behind it a dark cloud went over the Russian land. I became afraid, and I took a step back. But the Young Man said: ‘Where will you go? There is nowhere to hide from it. But know that it does not concern you.’ Then I felt a kind of strength within me and I began to look at everything. I asked: ‘What does it mean?’ The young man said: ‘One, the beast is war, and two, the cloud is punishment.’”

In addition to this vision there was another mystical incident, confirming the predetermination of the war with Japan. Two months before it began, a pilgrim, an old Russian sailor, a participant in the famous defense of Sevastopol in 1854, during the Crimean War, came to the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. At the Kiev shrines he prayed diligently for the Russian fleet in Port Arthur. And then, one day, he had a vision: the Mother of God standing with her back to the bay, who was holding an oblong shawl in her hands. With Her feet She was trampling naked double-edged swords. The sailor was very frightened by this vision, was struck with fear, but the Mother of God calmed him and told him that the war would soon begin, in which Russia would face severe trials. And in conclusion She said that it was necessary to paint an icon, which should exactly reflect this vision, and send it to Port Arthur.

When the old sailor began to speak of this vision everywhere, few believed him. And only after the attack of Japanese ships on the Russian squadron in Port Arthur did the Orthodox believe in the truth of Our Lady’s apparition to the sailor. Ten thousand Kiev worshipers collected the sum necessary to paint the icon, “Solemnity of the Mother of God,” or, as it is called otherwise, the icon of the Mother of God “Port Arthur.” Soon this icon was painted and sent to Port Arthur. But by that time, it was already besieged by the Japanese, and attempts to deliver the icon there ended in failure. And so it was sent to the Headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief, General Kuropatkin.

From the failure of the spiritual order, the beginning of the war was also unsuccessful for Russia in other respects. In March 1904 near Port Arthur there was a battle between Russian and Japanese squadrons. By tragic accident, at the very beginning of the battle, the Russian battleship Petropavlovsk, on which Admiral Makarov, Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet, was stationed, exploded on a mine. The ship sank in a matter of minutes. Among the dead was the Admiral himself. Left without leadership, Russian ships were defeated. The death of a remarkable naval commander, Admiral Makarov, was a heavy, irreplaceable loss. With his name, Russia reasonably associated hope for victory in this war. But the death of the Russian squadron in many ways predetermined further defeats, as after that Russian troops were deprived of support from the sea. The strategic position of the Russian army and fleet worsened. Taking advantage of the situation, the Japanese inflicted a heavy defeat on the Russian troops at Mukden and defeated the squadron in the Tsushima Strait.

Nevertheless, these defeats did not bring Japan victory over Russia. Sergei S. Oldenburg writes:

“The Russian army even after Mukden remained a formidable fighting force, and the Japanese were severely exhausted, despite the victory. They took the advantage of their earlier readiness for the last time – and yet they did not achieve a decisive result. Talk of Mukden as an unprecedented and shameful defeat was explained by political considerations – to show the unfitness of Russian power.”

After Mukden, the Japanese army could no longer fight actively. The economy and finances of Japan were undermined. Military losses were enormous:

“In the hostilities, Japan lost 270,000 men, including 86,000. The number of dead on the part of Russia was 36,000 thousand less. The economic and financial situation remained stable.”

In this regard, after the Battle of Tsushima, the Japanese Emperor appealed to U.S. President Roosevelt with a request to begin negotiations with Russia on the conclusion of peace, as Japan was unable to continue the war.

Emperor Nicholas II did not want to make peace, realizing that the defeat of Japan was inevitable and everything depended only on time. Nevertheless, he was forced to enter into peace negotiations, as internal turmoil began in Russia, which turned out to be more dangerous than the Japanese armies. The enemies of the Russian Orthodox monarchy provoked the revolution of 1905. The Russian Orthodox Church sounded the alarm. “There is a difficult war going on,” wrote Metropolitan Anthony (Vadkovsky) at that time, “it will be necessary for all to unite in high self-sacrifice, full patriotic feeling; but instead of this, internal turmoil reigns in our land. Native sons of Russia, under the influence of harmful teachings of enmity, unknown in the old days, tear her maternal heart. There is no love for the Church, reverence for authority has disappeared… This is where the real grief and misfortune of Russia.”

It must be said that huge foreign funds were involved in the organization of anti-state demonstrations. “Japan allocated money for the organization of strikes and riots in Russia,” writes historian Oleg A. Platonov. “Through front men and organizations, Japan financed trade union funds to support the strikers… In addition to Japanese money, Russian revolutionaries received huge sums from anti-Russian organizations and individuals in Europe and America.”

Of course, it should not be stated unequivocally that the revolutionary riots were organized with the help of foreign money. They became possible because a part of Russian society, infected by socialist teaching, decided to build a state according to human reasoning, and not according to the Divine gift, which for Russia is the monarchy, the power of God’s Anointed One—the Tsar. This position was a consequence of unchurching, a retreat from the Orthodox faith. People wished to live “freely,” without Gospel laws limiting them in action, so, as St. Righteous John of Kronstadt said about that situation, “faith in the word of God, in the word of truth has disappeared and has been replaced by faith in human reason; the press in the majority has become corrupted—there is nothing holy and honorable for it… there is no obedience of children to their parents, of students to those who teach them… Marriages are ruined, family life is decaying; there is no firm politics—everyone is politicking… everyone wants autonomy. The intelligentsia has no love for the Motherland and is ready to sell it to foreigners, as Judas sold Christ to the evil scribes and Pharisees.”

Departure from the Orthodox faith, forgetting of moral and ethical principles led to the possibility of using foreign money in the Russian revolutionary movement. And it was used at full scale, bribing educated Russian people and directing their activities to the struggle against the Orthodox monarchical statehood. The remarkable pastor of that time, Archpriest John Vostorgov, wrote directly about the betrayal of national interests by the intelligentsia during the Russo-Japanese war: “Never since the beginning of Russia has the absence of the most mediocre reason of state, patriotism and simple decency, been discovered to such an extent in people who consider themselves representatives of Russian thought. In this moment of grief and upheaval of the Fatherland, they found it convenient to destroy all the foundations of power and order… They welcomed and fanned each of our failures, they infected the troops going to battle with despondency; it finally came to the point that Russian students sent greetings to the Japanese Mikado (on Japanese victories—the author); they sent from Switzerland, to the Japanese army, to General Kuroki, the most detailed map of Northern Manchuria, so that the enemies could inflict harm to the Russian army without error… Cains, Hams and Judases have raised their seats in Russia. Cains killed the best Russian people—the Tsar’s servants: the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich was killed, Bobrikov was killed in Finland, Pleve was killed. The Hams rejoiced at the humiliation of the Motherland and mocked its suffering. The Jews took Japanese money, bought weapons with it for rebellion inside Russia, organized strikes of workers in factories that prepared military supplies, in shipyards that built military ships, on roads that transported troops.”

Today we can say with all certainty that whoever and however one evaluates the outcome of the Russo-Japanese War, the Sovereign Emperor Nicholas II should be honored and praised for the fact that in the conditions of outright sabotage, secret political intrigues and moral and spiritual betrayal on the part of liberal society, he managed to bring Russia to the threshold of victory, and only the burgeoning revolution of 1905 prevented this war from reaching its victorious conclusion.


Igor Evsin is a ooet, writer and journalist. He is the author of twelve books. He is a monarchist who lives and works in Ryazan. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Ruskline.


Featured: The Theotokos Port Arthur, 1904.


European Suicide: The Economic War against Russia

The Goals of the German Federal Government and the Current Situation

The Federal Government dreams of a comprehensive integration of Ukraine into the EU and a prosperous post-war Ukraine. A “confidential memorandum” of the London School of Economics, commissioned jointly by the Foreign and Economic Ministries, envisages a driving private sector run reconstruction backed by active German industrial policy [Luke Cooper, After the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2023: Lessons and themes for 2024. Confidential Memo. London School of Economics, 2023]. Technology transfer should play a central role. The state protects the private sector’s risk—investments. The memo provides close cooperation with USAID and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which is close to the leading Social Democratic Party. According to the memo, reconstruction is in the interests of large German companies. So the plan is to set up an extended workbench in Ukraine as a low-wage country. But the dreams of a “new Singapore in Kiev” only show the government coalition in Berlin’s loss of reality [“A Singapore in Kiev”—that was the tenor of a confidential technical discussion at government level in autumn 2023]. Apparently, the external costs for the German taxpayer are not even evaluated.

That is why I want to present the economic consequences of the Ukraine war based on the studies and forecasts known so far. This includes the dimensions of war, the economic situation of Ukraine, the consequences of a possible EU-membership of Ukraine, the sanction’s impact on Russia, its impact on the German economy, the economic and geostrategic reasons for the Ukraine-war, winners and losers of a “European suicide” and the goverment’s options.

1. Dimensions of War

“War is never an isolated act,” wrote Carl von Clausewitz [On War, Book I, Chapter1, 7]. It must be seen in a political context. In addition to the military dimension, there is also the economic war and the propaganda battle.

1.1. Military Dimension

The military and geostrategic dimension refers to operations on the battlefield, i.e., what the British call “theater of war.” This also concerns the situation in Poland, the Baltics, Romania and around the Black Sea. The war in Gaza also interferes with the Ukraine-Russia conflict. This particularly addresses the Washington’s pressure to drag Germany ever deeper into this war. Soon it will probably be said: “Germans to the front!”—as was the case with the Boxer Rebellion in Quingdao (Tsingtau) in 1900. The discussion about the delivery of German “Taurus” cruise missiles is also ongoing. If the Ukrainians, as expected, attack the Kerch Bridge, this could trigger a massive escalation. What Clausewitz could not yet overlook at the beginning of the 19th century was the risk of nuclear confrontation. This is pointed out by US political scientist John J. Mearsheimer [“A Russian victory significantly reduces the threat of nuclear war, as nuclear escalation is most likely when Ukrainian forces achieve battlefield victories and threaten to recapture all or most of the territory Kiev lost to Moscow. The Russian leadership would certainly seriously consider using nuclear weapons to salvage the situation”], as well as experienced military officials, such as the former Inspector General of the Bundeswehr general Harald Kujat [“However, if one of the two sides assesses the situation differently, which is unlikely, such a wrong decision could have catastrophic consequences for the European continent. Because according to the current doctrines, each side would try to avert an impending conventional defeat through the first use of nuclear weapons”].

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the EU Parliament on September 7, 2023 that Putin had proposed foregoing NATO expansion in exchange for not invading Ukraine. According to Stoltenberg, the Russian President sent NATO a draft treaty in autumn 2021 that NATO should sign:

“The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course, we didn’t sign that. The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second-class membership. We rejected that. So, he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders” [Jean Stoltenberg: “Opening remarks” at the joint meeting of the European Parliament’s committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET) and the Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE), followed by an exchange of views with Members of the European Parliament. September 7, 2023].

This means: Firstly, this is not an “unprovoked” war of aggression; NATO provoked him. Secondly, it is a proxy war that is essentially about NATO’s eastward expansion. Jens Stoltenberg said clearly:

“But then there is no other option for us than to ensure peace for NATO Allies, for EU members by investing in defence supporting Ukraine. Because if President Putin wins in Ukraine, it’s a tragedy for the Ukrainians, but it’s also dangerous for us. It sends a message that when they use military force, they get what they want, authoritarian leaders. So it’s in our security interest to support Ukraine, and therefore I’m extremely grateful for all the support that EU members the European Union and NATO Allies are providing to Ukraine.”

Especially after the peace talks in March and April 2022 in Istanbul, there is no longer any trust in Western politics in the Kremlin. To this day, the mainstream press in Germany denies that these negotiations took place. But you only had to read the US magazine “Foreign Affairs”. In September 2022, the magazine published an article co-authored by Fiona Hill. As a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, a former member of the National Security Council and as an advisor to three US presidents, Fiona Hill wrote:

“According to several former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the broad outlines of a negotiated interim solution: Russia would retreat to its February 23 position, when it controlled part of the Donbass region and all of Crimea, and in return Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”

Former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who was also involved in the peace talks, commented: “But in the end nothing happened. My impression was: Nothing could happen because everything else had been decided in Washington.”

The West has prevented an agreement already initialed. This is simply what research shows. There are at least six different sources independent from each other for such an agreement ready to be signed, five of which were directly involved in the negotiation process. Member of the Kiev delegation, Aleksander Tschaly, also confirmed that an Istanbul communiqué on a peaceful settlement of the conflict had been initialed. International experts agree that, contrary to what US President Joe Biden promised, Ukraine is now in a significantly worse negotiating position. Kiev lost more territory than it regained during the so-called summer offensive.

In December 2023, Russian troops were advancing along the entire front: They captured the Mariinka fortress in front of Donetsk. Avdiivka northwest of Donetsk was surrounded. Bakhmut was conquered. In the north they were advancing on Slavyansk. However, a strategic initiative does not succeed. At the turn of 2023/24, Russia controlled around 18% of Ukrainian territory. Moscow is preparing for a long war. President Putin is firmly in the saddle and even stronger than ever, politically and militarily. A coup in Russia is not expected. The Kremlin’s goal remains “demilitarization,” “denazification” and “neutralization,” i.e., regime change in Kiev. Security Council Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said, Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Mykolaev and Kiev were “Russian cities” Dmitry Medvedem on 28.12.2023: “1. Спецоперация продолжится, её целью останется разоружение украинских войск и отказ нынешнего украинского государства от идеологии неонацизма… Одесса, Днепропетровск, Харьков, Николаев, Киев – русские города, как и многие другие временно оккупированные. Все они пока ещё маркированы жёлто-голубым на бумажных картах и в электронных планшетах (“1. The special operation will continue, its goal will remain the disarmament of Ukrainian troops and the rejection of the current Ukrainian state from the ideology of neo-Nazism… 3. Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Nikolaev, Kyiv are Russian cities, like many other temporarily occupied ones. All of them are still marked in yellow-blue on paper maps and on electronic tablets”). Further war aims and territorial claims can be derived from this. Russia’s plan is to reach a comprehensive agreement with the West or to advance further towards the stated goals.

Ukraine controls the western part of the Black Sea and has secured a trade route through the Bosphorus. But the summer offensive collapsed. In Washington, wrote the Swiss military analyst Jacques Baud, this was clear from the very first moment. According to Baud, the entire war was never about success for Ukraine, but about weakening Russia in a battle of attrition.

In fact, Russia is waging a proxy war against NATO, which NATO is in danger of losing. Seymour Hersh quotes a senior US intelligence official:

The war is over. Russia has won. There is no Ukrainian offensive anymore, but the White House and the American media have to keep the lie going. The truth is if the Ukrainian army is ordered to continue the offensive, the army would mutiny. The soldiers aren’t willing to die any more, but this doesn’t fit the B.S. that is being authored by the Biden White House.

Nevertheless, no relent is expected in Washington. The military confrontation continues. The war has become a battle of attrition. The West is at war with Russia. The West pushed Ukraine to keep fighting. The conflict serves primarily the interests of the United States. Neither side will give in: Moscow sees NATO membership for Ukraine as an existential threat. Washington is committed to NATO membership for Ukraine, the reconquest of Russian-occupied territories and the goal of regime change in Moscow. Russian literature argues that the West is providing Ukraine with “strategic depth” through arms supplies, satellite data, training and financial aid. Dmitri Trenin, Member of the Council for Foreign and Defense Policy:

In fact, Ukraine plays the role of a spearhead with which the West wants to hit, weaken and, if successful, destroy Russia and destroy it in its current form. The current conflict has the potential for a direct armed conflict up to and including nuclear escalation. (Фактически Украина выполняет роль острия копья, которым Запад стремится поразить, ослабить, а если удастся – уничтожить Россию в её нынешнем виде. В отличие от прошлых времён – включая периоды Наполеоновских и двух мировых войн – Запад сейчас политически и идеологически выступает как единое целое. Россия и современный Запад – антагонисты. Нынешний конфликт чреват непосредственным вооружённым столкновением, вплоть до ядерной эскалации).

This de facto means that a compromise is impossible. But this war of attrition is not a stalemate. Russia clearly has the advantage on the war theatre and in the economic war. NATO lead Ukraine to defeat, and the West is trapped by its own involvement: underestimating the opponent is the best recipe for losing.

1.2. Propaganda War

The propaganda war is part of psychological warfare: NATO calls it “cognitive warfare”: “While actions are carried out in the five military domains (land, sea, air, space and cyber) in order to affect people, Cognitive warfare aims to use every human being as a weapon.” The goal is to exploit the weak points of the human brain and, through deep indoctrination, manipulate the human psyche in a way to make it “war-ready” and immunize it against rational considerations. The mainstream media plays a central role in this.

They demonize Putin, talk about “unprovoked” war of aggression and accuse Russia of being solely responsible for the war, discredit dissenting opinions and follow state propaganda. “The causes of the distorted representation of reality,” said the former Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, General Harald Kujat, “are the unreflective adoption of disinformation and, above all, incompetence and ideological delusion.” There is indeed a journalistic underground in a landscape of mendacious conformity [“An underground of journalism exists… in a landscape of mendacious conformity. Dissenting journalists have been defenestrated from the ‘mainstream’… the media’s task is to invert the truth and support the illusions of democracy, including ‘free press” (the late John Pilger)]. But the representatives of grass-roots media are mostly excluded. The job of the mainstream media is to distort the truth and maintain the illusion of democracy, a free press—and the Illusion of Ukraine’s potential victory.

The syncrisis of German journalism with NATO’s war propaganda is disconcerting, not only in view of the primitiveness of deep indoctrination and its postfactual structure, but even more due to the blind submission to its intolerant claim to exclusivity [“At its summit in Madrid in June, Nato, which is controlled by the United States, adopted a strategy document that militarises the European continent, and escalates the prospect of war with Russia and China. It proposes multi domain warfighting against nuclear-armed peer-competitor. In other words, nuclear war. It says: ‘Nato enlargement has been a historic success.’ I read that in disbelief. A measure of this ‘historic success’ is the war in Ukraine, news of which is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission. I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.” John Pilger].

But this only shows the degree of self-alignment that extends from talk show hosts to media managers, from radio station directors to desk editors, from foreign correspondents to daily news reporters. By foregoing sober research and rational reasoning, they only differ from other academic henchmen of the elites by their aggressiveness. They only develop a falsifying killer instinct when they outlaw dissent. This exposes the media maker’s indignity. Both the public media and the corporate media are becoming, as the novelist Günter Grass once put it, “court jesters taking into account non-existent courts” (“Princeton-Rede,” p. 112)—the court jesters of NATO. The mainstream media lies by omission, shifts the population’s aggression about social grievances onto external enemies and thus sends people into war hysteria. They have become the central warmonger. [Mark Galliker, Patrik Baab and here, Roberto J. De Lapuente].

However, the propaganda media can only develop their effectiveness in cooperation with other ideological apparatuses. Because state apparatuses are not neutral, but rather ensure the conditions of capital’s reproduction. So they don’t protect people from the market, but the market from people. Like the repressive state apparatuses—judiciary, military and police—ideological state apparatuses such as schools, universities, NGOs, churches and media (even if they are organized privately or under public law) ensure that citizens are loyal to the state and to the market capitalist social order [Louis Althusser, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État.” La Pensée, No. 151, June 1970; also, Louis Althusser, Positions (Paris. Les Éditions sociales, 1976), pp. 67-125]. They function like communicating tubes.

In addition, the EU Commission is tightening censorship with the so-called “Media Freedom Act”. It actually takes over media supervision, although this is the responsibility of the member states. The EU Commission is already exercising censorship with the “Digital Services Act” and the “Code of Conduct to Combat Disinformation” from June 2022. Online platforms such as Meta, Google, Twitter, TikTok and Microsoft as well as many other players have joined in. They committed to mark providers who, in the Commission’s opinion, spread disinformation as unreliable, to block advertising revenue and to report this to the Commission. Such information must be deleted upon instruction from the Commission. This is the privatization of censorship.

1.3. Economic War

The third area is the economic war the USA, NATO and the EU have been waging against Russia since 2014. This includes the situation in Ukraine, the effects on Russia, the backfire effects in the EU and the particular impact on Germany.

2. The Economic Situation of Ukraine

The biggest loser of the war is Ukraine. The population has fallen from 52 million to 31 million since 1991. The war damage is immense. The population impoverished. The average wage has fallen from around 400 euros to 200 euros in 30 years as a result of Western integration. The West fights Russia at the expense of Ukraine.

Ukrainian losses are high. The sources now speak of a total of up to 500,000 men, which Stoltenberg did not deny in the European Parliament. A Ukrainian mobile phone provider has extrapolated from various estimates and information about deleted SIM cards that up to 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers may have already died. Deputy Chairwoman of the Rada’s Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, Maryana Bezuhla, said that a Ukrainian soldier was wounded or killed every five minutes. That would correspond to a quota of 288 per day or 8640 per month. By December 2023, this would bring the total to 210,000 men in just over 22 months of war. These are clues; both sides keep the actual number of losses secret.

In July 2022, at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano, Switzerland, Ukraine estimated the cost of reconstruction at 750 billion euros. How high the actual amount will be is unclear because the war is going on.
Ukraine has three economic regions that converged in poverty before the start of the war, but also showed extreme divergence: the Rust Belt region in the center and the east, where industrial production fell sharply after the collapse of the Soviet Union and average wages fell by 80% compared to 1990. The service region in Kiev and Kharkiv, where a modern financial and digital sector developed, and in the south a strong sector with transport and logistic services from the Dnipro and to the Black Sea and to Sevastopol in Crimea. Then the agricultural regions in the industrially underdeveloped center with the fertile black earth soil.

Even during Soviet times, Ukraine played an important role in titanium and uranium. The manganese and iron ore reserves are among the largest in the world, as are the mercury ore deposits. This is also important for the EU:

In order to become independent of imports from Russia, shale gas is also important, especially as a transition technology and for future special applications such as fertilizer production. The importance of titanium is particularly noteworthy: currently Ukraine is one of five countries in the world producing titanium ore mineral concentrates (ilmenite5 and rutile6). More than 30 titanium deposits, some in production and some explored in detail, are located on the territory of Ukraine.

In terms of agricultural potential, Ukraine is one of the richest countries in the world and one of the leading producers and exporters. Ukraine’s arable land is three times larger than that of Poland and Romania. In 2021, it covered a total of 32.9 million hectares and in 2023, an estimated 27.9 million hectares due to the consequences of the war.

The industrial potential is also great, there are a number of specialized industries, e.g. for rocket engines and high-performance turbines. As a steel producer, Ukraine had plants such as Azov and Ilyich in Mariupol, Zaporizhstal in Zaporizhia, Kryvorizhstal in Dnipropetrovsk, Dneprospetstal in the Dnipro region, Khartsyzsk Pipe Plant in Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk Metal Plant in Dnipro, Yenakiieve Metallurgical Plant in the Donetsk Region, Nikopol Pipe Plant LLC in the Dnipropetrovsk region, Avdiiv Coke chemical plant near Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk Metallurgical Combine in the Dnipro region and is an important world player.

Ukraine’s well-developed pipeline infrastructure is also suitable for transporting hydrogen and could be used in the future to supply customers within the country and the EU. The power grid is highly integrated and has provided many workarounds for destroyed connections during Russian attacks. From the Soviet era, Ukraine has inherited an efficient energy system with nuclear power plants, thermal power plants and hydroelectric power plants, which, however, needs to be modernized. The nuclear power plants are Soviet-design pressurized water reactors in Rivne (four units commissioned in 1980, 1981, 1896 and 2004), Khmelnitsk (2 units in 1987 and 2004), southern Ukraine (3 units, 1982, 1985 and 1989) and Zaporizhia ( 6 blocks, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1989 and 1995). Nuclear power supplies about half of the electricity. Thermal and hydroelectric power plants also play an important role. In order to achieve its sustainability goals, Ukraine needs foreign investments, especially in solar panels and wind turbines.

Ukraine has the world’s largest reserves of commercially viable iron ore—30 billion tons, which is a fifth of the world total. There are also large natural gas and oil deposits that are still largely undeveloped, and 4 percent of the world’s coal reserves.

The World Bank has examined the events of the first year of the war and said that the Russian invasion “has taken an unimaginable toll on the people of Ukraine and the country’s economy, whose activity fell by a staggering 29.2% in 2022.” They estimates that damages exceed $135 billion and that about $411 billion will be needed to rebuild Ukraine. The poverty rate “rose from 5.5% in 2021 to 24.1% in 2022, pushing 7.1 million more people into poverty and undoing 15 years of progress.” 62 cities were destroyed, approximately 8 million Ukrainians have fled the country, and there are around 7 million internally displaced people. The United Nations confirmed 8,490 civilian deaths but believes the actual number is “significantly higher.”

In the end, Ukraine will be divided. The Russian-occupied territories are not returning. Where exactly the demarcation line will run is unclear. The Russians try to advance further either to Odessa or northeast of the Dnieper. Russian troops are unlikely to reach the Curzon Line according to the Treaty of Versailles, which was confirmed with some corrections as the Polish-Soviet demarcation line of the Peace of Riga in 1921. It lies well west of Kiev and, after the Yalta Conference, represents today’s eastern border of Poland. The Curzon Line ran well west of Kiev.

Clearing the minefields and cluster munitions alone is likely to cost billions. The LSE also estimates the cost of reconstruction at $411 billion, which is 2.5 times higher than the country’s gross national product. Instead, Ukraine’s resources are likely to be withdrawn from the public sector and privatized. With the entry of Blackrock as a debt and reconstruction manager, the country is de facto falling into the hands of a locust.

Exiled Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk describes Ukraine as “a European Somalia.” The country is on a list of the most dangerous places in the world. He pointed to forced conscriptions, the destruction of monuments linked to Russia, the media’s aggressive anti-Russian rhetoric, the torture: “All of this happened at the behest of the West, and billions were spent on it, which Western politicians openly admitted.”

3. Consequences of Admitting Ukraine into the EU

In 2023, Ukraine received more than 38 billion euros in international financial aid. This was the only way the country could survive financially and bear the costs of the war—around 120 million euros per day. Nevertheless, the West is divided on the question of further aid. Larger aid packages have been temporarily blocked by Hungary in the EU and by Republicans in the US Congress. That is why Washington is putting increasing pressure on Western countries to seize Russia’s foreign assets of around $300 billion to Ukraine. Moscow has already announced that it will also confiscate foreign, including German, assets in Russia in this case. This would alleviate the West’s financing problems in supporting Ukraine, but would likely come primarily at the expense of EU countries. In Russia, such a seizure is described as “theft,” which will further erode trust in the West and thus “further stimulate the process of de-dollarization and de-Westernization of the planet.” The USA, “which has not succeeded in bringing most of the world under its control,” is prepared to “sacrifice Europe to save itself.” [При этом данные 300 миллиардов во многом виртуальны, а в реальности заполучить удастся куда меньшие суммы. Зато можно быть уверенным в том, что конфискация только подстегнет процесс дедолларизации и девестернизации планеты, поскольку от Запада начнут отгребать еще энергичнее все страны, которые имеют хоть минимальный выбор… Правда, возникает вопрос: а неужто официальные лица в Вашингтоне, Берлине, Париже, Брюсселе и далее по списку не понимают всех этих очевидных обстоятельств? Есть подозрение, что понимают, но в складывающихся обстоятельствах считают это наилучшим из наихудших решений. Во-первых, ухудшающееся экономическое положение вынуждает Запад искать любые возможные источники финансирования, например, Киева. Конфискованные российские активы, до которых удастся реально дотянуться, дадут возможность закрыть данную статью расходов на год-другой. (At the same time, the 300 billion is largely virtual, and in reality it will be possible to get much smaller sums. But we can be sure that confiscation will only spur the process of de-dollarization and de-westernization of the planet, as all countries that have at least a minimal choice will begin to shovel even more vigorously from the West… However, the question arises: do officials in Washington, Berlin, Paris, Brussels and further down the list not understand all these obvious circumstances? It is suspected that they do, but in the current circumstances they consider this to be the best of the worst solutions. First, the deteriorating economic situation is forcing the West to look for any possible sources of funding for Kiev. Confiscated Russian assets, which can be realistically grabbed, will make it possible to cover this item of expenditure for a year or two), Irina Alksnis].

In Brussels’ EU administration, financial aid for Ukraine totaling 77.1 billion euros had been accumulated since January 24, 2022. There is also humanitarian aid worth 2.1 billion euros and military support worth 5.6 billion euros. Over the course of 2023, the willingness to continue for helping Ukraine to the same extent as before began to crumble. Slovakia announced that it would stop arms deliveries, and there were protests in Poland because Ukrainian grain and Ukrainian drivers were entering the market at low wages. Hungary temporarily refused to release the next 50 billion euros for Ukraine.

After the failed summer offensive, Kiev should now be kept happy with the official prospect of joining the EU. But this is likely to cost the EU dearly. The German Economic Institute (IW) assumes that Ukraine would receive extensive financial resources from the EU budget. The institute estimates the financial impact of Ukraine’s full membership in the EU on the EU’s current multi-year budget at around 130 to 190 billion euros. Of this, between 70 and 90 billion euros would go to agricultural subsidies and between 50 to 90 billion euros to cohesion policy. For comparison: The EU’s multi-year community budget for the years 2021-2027 amounts to 1,216 billion euros. The scientists comment:

Given this volume, the EU should be ready to reform. Only in this way can the political decision be credible to bind Ukraine more closely to itself with the prospect of accession. This applies on the one hand at the institutional level, but it also applies at the fiscal level. A shift in the EU budget could help provide the necessary financial resources.

Cohesion policy assumes that redistribution should take place between richer and poorer EU countries. The Cologne economists propose to concentrate resources on poorer countries. Then around 140 billion euros would be available for Ukraine over a seven-year period. If you add cohesion and agricultural subsidies, then Ukraine would be entitled to an amount of 127-187 billion euros based on the multi-year budget 2021-2027. This cannot be done without reallocating or increasing the budget. The richer states would either have to pay more or forego benefits.

If the EU is expanded to include Ukraine, there is a risk of massive social cuts, large-scale farmers dying and massive downward pressure on wages in all EU countries. As a result, it is possible that the EU will collapse. French MPs have already warned that it would be best to leave the EU as quickly as possible. The British say: “The EU will last as long as the Germans pay.” The majority of the war burden and the costs of reconstruction will end up with the German taxpayer. The federal government has not evaluated this either.

In East Saxony’s Pirna there are 12 huge, new granaries. Grain from Poland and Ukraine is delivered there by truck. From Pirna, deliveries are sent by train to the processing industry in Hamburg and other places. This shows the problem. If Ukraine joins the EU and the customs barriers fall, the European market will be flooded with cheap Ukrainian agricultural products. Comparatively low labor costs, the fertile black earth soil and the opening of the Ukrainian market for genetically modified seeds as well as large-scale industrial production by companies such as Monsanto, Elli Lilly, Cargill and John Deere enable an unrivaled range of agricultural products. The land grab by foreign corporations in Ukraine means that farmers across the EU are coming under pressure because they can no longer produce at market prices. This will lead to further concentration in agriculture and farms dying out.

The Polish Minister of Agriculture Robert Telus imposed an import ban on Ukrainian grain from September 15, 2023, thereby entering into a dispute with the EU: “Ukrainian agriculture represents a threat to the agriculture of neighboring countries, but also to the whole of Europe.” He points out that Ukraine increased its overland grain exports from 7.3 million tons to 9.6 million tons during the embargo. Kiev defends the interests of large domestic companies. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán indicated what these are. He explained that the blocked Ukrainian grain was actually more likely to be a US commercial product, because the land on which it is grown “has probably been in the hands of the USA for a long time. Ukrainian agricultural products destined for Africa are flooding Central European markets. The bureaucrats in Brussels are once again turning a blind eye to the problems of local farmers.” US agricultural companies such as Monsanto have invested heavily in Ukrainian black earth soil. On the most fertile soil in the world, they can produce at unrivaled prices using genetically modified seeds and cheap labor. Economist Ernst Wolff: “We are currently experiencing a frontal attack on German medium-sized businesses.” Behind these agricultural giants such as Monsanto, John Deere and Elli Lilly are large financial investors such as Blackrock, that are also invested in the arms industry. They make money both from the war and the deaths of farmers.

Ukraine is not expected to join the EU in the short term. But Washington is increasing pressure for passing the costs of the war can on to the Union. Then Europe will collapse into a collection of failed states—a kind of co-transformation as a consequence of the Ukraine war. An impoverishment of the entire EU and harsh social cuts will follow. A break-up of the EU cannot be ruled out. Europe is becoming not only Washington’s backyard, but also Moscow’s backyard. This shows that US imperialism is a dead end for Europe.

4. The Effect of Sanctions on Russia

In response to the war of aggression against Ukraine, which violates international law, the EU has imposed unprecedented sanctions. They complement the existing measures that have been initiated since 2014 due to the accession of Crimea to the Russian Federation. So far twelve packages include sanctions against individuals, economic sanctions and visa measures. They apply to 1,950 institutions and people, including President Putin, Foreign Minister Lavrov, commanders of the Wagner Group, oligarchs, officials, military personnel and “anti-Ukrainian propagandists,” as well as banks, companies and parties. The economic sanctions affect, among other things, exports of advanced technology, vehicles, the energy sector and goods that can also be used for military purposes, as well as imports into the EU of petroleum products, coal, steel, gold and diamonds. Services such as auditing, IT consulting, legal advice, software and engineering services may no longer be provided. The oil import stop applies to sea routes with exceptions and affects 90% of Russian deliveries. A cap on oil prices was set at $60 per barrel. Transport by EU ships is prohibited. By the end of 2023, 12 sanctions packages were in force.

Even before the invasion, there were 2,695 sanctions against Russian private individuals, companies or state bodies. Since February 22, 2022, 12,077 new punitive measures have been added. The most serious factors were certainly the exclusion of Russian banks from the global financial communications system SWIFT and the confiscation of Russian assets worth around $300 billion. But the sanctions create the breeding ground on which alternative structures for circumvention emerge. By the end of 2022, the German government had no information about the effect of the sanctions. The effect of the first eleven sanctions packages has apparently evaporated: The Financial Times reports that almost no Russian oil is sold below the price cap of 60 USD, but world market prices of more than 80 USD are paid for it. Oil and gas revenues account for more than 28% of Russian state revenue.

Russia has now expanded its transport capacities. A large proportion of oil and gas is now transported via the northern route, even in winter. Russia is the only country to have two nuclear-powered icebreakers. The loading capacities in the ports of Primorsk, Vysotsk and Petersburg are utilized. A new gas liquefaction plant is currently being built in the westernmost Russian Baltic Sea port of Ust-Luga.

Industrial warfare, according to former director of the Royal United Services Institute Michael Clarke, is a war between societies. The Russian military budget, he estimates, has tripled since 2021 and will amount to around 30% of government spending in 2024. Russia has proven to be surprisingly weak militarily, but significantly stronger economically than the West expected. [“Because it’s true, the Third World War has begun. True, it started ‘small’ and with two surprises. We went into this war with the idea that Russia’s army was very powerful and its economy very weak. We thought that Ukraine would be crushed militarily and that Russia would be crushed economically by the West. But the opposite happened. Ukraine was not crushed militarily, even though it had lost 16% of its territory by then; Russia was not crushed economically. As I speak, the rouble has gained 8% against the dollar and 18% since the start of the war.” Emmanuel Todd].

The sanctions against Russia have so far largely failed to have any effect. Russia has prepared itself for a war of attrition that will last for years. Moscow wants to advance slowly and exhaust Ukraine in order to dash the West’s hopes of a Ukrainian victory. Putin is still seeking a fundamental security agreement with the West.

At first, the West’s calculations seemed to work: the ruble was in free fall and the stock market practically came to a standstill. However, after initial losses of more than 40% of its value, the Russian currency recovered and reached higher values than before the beginning of the war. In 2022, Russian economy contracted by 2.2%; in January 2024, the IMF forecast growth for 2024 of 2.4%. According to an economic survey by the Russian Central Bank, the average growth forecast for 2023 was 3.1%. Analysts only expected 1.3% for 2024.

Nevertheless, according to a study of the Canadian Central Bank, the standard of living in Russia is falling. However, the analysis shows that these welfare losses are significantly mitigated and the boomerang effects on the sanctioning countries are intensified when third countries such as China, India and Turkey do not play along. These countries benefit: “Our welfare analysis demonstrates that the sanctioned country’s welfare losses are significantly mitigated, and the sanctioning country’s losses are amplified, if the third country does not join the sanctions, but the third country benefits from not joining” (Ghironi, et al.). Therefore, the West can only hope that the measures will have a long-term effect: that there is a lack of investment from abroad and the capital flight from Russia continues. But at best this will slow the growth of the Russian economy.

The sanctions were aimed at cutting off Russia from the international financial system and depriving the country of hundreds of billions in foreign exchange assets in order to make foreign trade impossible for Moscow. But there was an almost complete de-dollarization of Russian trade. Moscow switched to paying in the local currencies of its international partners, primarily China and India. In this way, Russian industry was able to maintain its production level in the first ten months of 2022 and recorded growth in November and December. Even stronger growth is expected for 2023. Nobody would have expected Russia to surpass Germany and Great Britain in economic growth. The sanctions have made Russia the strongest European economy.

Russia is an energy self-sufficient country and has many of the world’s most important raw materials such as oil and natural gas. Moscow also has a dominant position on world markets and is the leading exporter of fertilizers and food. Despite Western sanctions, 80% of the planet is expanding its cooperation with Russia. Giants like China and India are increasing Russian energy imports. The European Council on Foreign Relations found in a study: The West is united but separated from the rest of the world.

There is always talk in the West that Russia has not set up its own microchip production and is dependent on Western and Asian imports for microelectronics. But the West’s sanctions are not effective here either: The import volume of CNC (computer numerical control) machines from China, which are also used in the military sector, has increased tenfold—Customs declarations increased by 6.5 million US dollars in February 2022 to $68 million in July 2023. Chinese machines replaced European imports.

In fact, eyewitnesses report that truckloads of digital technology from China and Taiwan are being imported to the Russian-Kazakh border—from Polish and Lithuanian trucking companies. But with microchips the dependency is mutual. The West has the know-how, but not the necessary raw materials. For example, according to a survey by market research group Techcet, the US must import 90% of semiconductor-grade neon from Ukraine, while 35% of the palladium it needs comes from Russia. This means that the US chip industry is dependent on materials from Russia and Ukraine. So Russia can put as much pressure on the American semiconductor industry as the other way around. That is why Washington is investing in diversifying supply chains and Russia is investing in expanding manufacturing:

The US government has warned domestic chipmakers that they could face a materials supply crunch, reports Reuters, citing “people familiar with the matter.” The warning is based on worries about the potential for conflict between Russia and Ukraine. If Russia does make military advances, there will almost certainly be impacts on industries in Ukraine. Moreover, US sanctions will be implemented on Russia, likely exacerbating supply issues. Some concerning numbers, highlighting the reliance of the US chipmaking industry on Russia/Ukraine-based materials, are shared by the source. For example, market research group Techcet says that 90% of US semiconductor-grade neon supplies come from Ukraine, while 35% of US palladium is sourced from Russia. In addition, other vital materials like C4F6, Helium, and Scandium also come from the flashpoint region… For the potential scale of resource material price increases facing chipmakers, we only need to turn our clocks back to 2014, when Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine. At that time, neon prices rose nearly 600%. Neon is used in semiconductor fabricating machine lasers (Mark Tyson, and also Semiconductors and Changing face of war).

Russia knows, according to French historian Emmanuel Todd, that World War III has already begun. As the military analyst Jacques Baud rightly points out, there has been a sophisticated philosophy of war in Russia since Soviet times, which also includes economic and political considerations. That is why the sanctions against Russia since 2014 have had a double effect. First, the Kremlin realized that this would not be a short-term problem, but a long-term opportunity. They encouraged Russia to increasingly produce previously imported goods itself. Second, it became clear to Moscow that the West would increasingly use economic weapons to set the country under pressure. So Russia had to strengthen its economic self-sufficiency:

This is why the sanctions applied to Russia in 2014 had a double positive effect. The first was the realization that they were not only a short-term problem, but above all a medium- and long-term opportunity. They encouraged Russia to produce goods it had previously preferred to buy ubroad. The second was the signal that the West would increasingly use economic weapons as a means of pressure in the future. It therefore became imperative, for reasons of national independence and sovereignty, to prepare for more far-reaching sanctions affecting the county’s economy (Jacques Baud).

Russia is far from emerging from this war weakened. On the contrary, it appears to be strengthened militarily and economically. General Christopher Cavoli, the US Supreme Commander in Europe (SACEUR), told a US Congressional committee: “Russia’s air, naval, space, digital and strategic capabilities have not suffered significant degradation during this war” (General Christopher Cavoli).

Russia is strategically turning away from Europe. This means that a city like St. Petersburg loses its historical function. An intellectual opposition to this is forming in the metropolitan areas. The country lacks foreign investment and a broader digital economy, meaning future economic development is severely slowed. Ukraine expert Nikolai N. Petro from Staten Island University summarizes:

So, for the West, we can see clearly, that they under-estimated, they really didn’t understand what Russia had achieved at all… The Russian leadership, they were surprised when their efforts to support the Ruble and to engage in import substitution succeeded so quickly. They thought it would work, they had done some preliminary testings, but they didn’t expect that there may be so much speed and flexibility in the Russian economy to switch from old producers to new producers, first of all. And secondly, particularly the willingness of so many non-state actors, in some cases state actors like Iran and China, and North Korea, and Venezuela, but also non-state actors to skirt the impact of sanctions. And so as a result, the West got into, what is essentially a “losing game” (Nikolai N. Petro).

Russia was not “destroyed by sanctions,” as US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen promised. Instead, the country’s economy has grown. The Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Valery Zalushny, even stated that the capabilities of the Russian military industry are increasing, despite the introduction of unprecedented sanctions. There is no uprising against the war in Russia, Putin’s popularity is not declining, and Russia is far from diplomatically isolated, as shown by the weak response to boycott calls and the growing interest in Russian-favored organizations such as BRICS.

5. The Impact on the German Economy

In the end, the West will have to pay the price of the war it provoked. But there is an important limitation. In April and May 2022, the US Senate and House of Representatives passed the so-called “Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022”. This new version of the 1941 Lend-Lease Agreement authorizes the President to expeditiously comply with all requests for all existing U.S. equipment from Ukraine and Ukraine’s NATO states. Returns or payments due will not be an issue for another five years. But then most of the weapons will be destroyed. In doing so, Washington has driven Ukraine into a long-term debt trap worth double-digit billions, from which it can hardly escape on its own. The European Union will foot the bill. Ukraine, which is already effectively bankrupt, has been kept afloat financially by the EU and the International Monetary Fund since the 2014 Maidan coup.

For the United States, this arms aid is a bomb deal in the long term. Already after the Maidan, the United States did not transfer its own money, but instead issued bank guarantees. These secured loans amounted to 113 billion euros in 2022 and 2023. This means that the USA does not have to pay a cent as long as Ukraine can service the loans it received from banks, especially from the IMF, on the basis of US guarantees. This money, in turn, came from the EU, either in the form of loans or in the form of economic aid, which Ukraine does not have to pay back. The IMF loans were subject to strict conditions. It was also about the privatization of state property—i.e., the selling off of silverware, e.g. mining rights or black earth soil. US companies have benefited from this. The principle, according to Thomas Röper: “The USA gives guarantees, the US companies earn money and the EU pays the bill.”

The EU and its member states have pledged a total of around 135 billion euros in short and medium-term aid for Ukraine from the start of the war to the end of July 2023, and the USA has pledged almost 70 billion euros. This shows that Washington has increasingly succeeded in holding the EU accountable. When it comes to bilateral aid, Germany is now the second largest supporter of Ukraine after the United States: from the start of the war until the end of October 2023, the United States provided 71.4 billion euros, followed by Germany with a total of 38.3 billion euros including investments on EU aid.

In addition, the EU states also deliver weapons to Ukraine, which they have to replace. A large portion of these orders go to the US defense industry. Orders from US defense companies doubled in 2022 compared to the previous year. In 2021, the US government approved a total of 14 major arms sales to NATO countries worth a total of $15.5 billion. By the end of 2022, there were 24 approved exports worth $28 billion. In short, one could say: the losses are socialized and Germanized, the profits are privatized and Americanized.

With the adoption of the 2 percent target, all NATO states must increase their defense spending to two percent of GDP by 2024. For Germany, this means defense spending of around 80 billion euros, almost 30 billion euros more than in 2023. In addition, the federal government has taken out a “special fund” of loans worth 100 billion euros, which is to be spent on armaments purposes. A large part of this money goes to the US defense industry, e.g., for the overpriced F-35 breakdown jet.

In the medium term, the USA will shift the burden of the war and reconstruction onto the EU. The costs of the Ukraine war are gigantic. Jens Berger from the online-magazine Nachdenkseiten puts the total costs of German war policy in May 2023 at 577.4 billion euros. By the middle of the year, every German household was burdened with the war to the tune of 14,000 euros. Further social cuts are pending. At the cabinet meeting in December 2023, savings of 200 million euros in the education sector and 800 million euros in civil international engagement as well as tax increases were decided to cover the “unexpectedly” budget gap of 30 billion euros. At the same time, the military aid for Ukraine amounting to 8 billion euros should remain untouched and be increased, if necessary.

In 2023, the Federal Republic of Germany was the worst-performing industrialized country in the world. Both the IMF and the EU expect its economy to continue to shrink. Economists see Germany in a downward spiral: “Germany will not go down with a big bang. Rather, we will experience a state of infirmity, as has been the case in Italy for around 20 years.” A decisive factor in this is that the energy trap has been closed for Germany with the blowing up of the Nord Stream pipelines.

According to researcher Seymour Hersh, the destruction of Nord Stream is attributable to the USA. This is supported by the regular announcements of such a measure from American politicians. Here are some examples:

Then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2020: “To stop the energy cooperation between Europe and Russia) A first step would involve stopping Nord Stream-2.”

US Senator Tom Cotton in 2021: “There is still time to stop it… Kill Nord Stream 2 now, and let it rust beneath the waves of the Baltic.”

Jake Sullivan, US National Security Advisor in 2022: “We have made clear to the Russians that pipeline is at risk if they move further into Ukraine.”

Senator Ted Cruz in 2022: “The pipeline must be stopped and the only way to prevent its completion is to use all the tools available to do that.”

US President Joe Biden, standing next to Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2022: “There will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Victoria Nuland, Undersecretary of State for Policy: “I want to be very clear: If Russia invades Ukraine one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

After the Nord Stream 2 was sabotaged, former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorsky tweeted: “Thank you, USA.” The very next day, leading politicians from Poland, Norway and Denmark were present to open the new Norwegian-Polish Baltic Sea pipeline as an alternative to Nord Stream.

Nuland expressed her enthusiasm. “I am, and I think the government is too, very pleased to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as they say, a pile of metal at the bottom of the sea.”

The Washington Post’s White House correspondent and confidante of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, David Ignatius, described in May 2022 that US President Biden and then-Chancellor Angela Merkel had decided in early summer 2021 to seize Nord Stream 1 and 2 in the event of a Russian attack to cancel:

Germany has been a reluctant but indispensable ally, and the Biden administration made a controversial decision last summer to win Germany’s support. Biden waived a first round of sanctions against a company that built the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, in return for a commitment from Chancellor Angela Merkel that Nord Stream 2 would be canceled in the event of a Russian invasion. When the invasion came, Merkel was no longer there, but her successor Olaf Scholz kept the promise.

Germany is by far the biggest loser from the sanctions against Russia. Economically, they have a boomerang effect. The Federal Republic can neither replace Russian gas and oil at similarly competitive prices nor the huge Russian market. The impact of the sanctions has not been evaluated. The federal government misjudged the impact of the economic war. Cheap Russian natural gas must be replaced by expensive and ecologically problematic American fracking gas. Exploding energy prices are deteriorating the competitiveness of the German economy. The hasty decoupling from the Russian market and its resources plunged the economy into recession. BRICS observers speak of a “reversal of the German economic miracle”:

Germany is by far the biggest loser in this case, as its industrial might has experienced an unprecedented unraveling, almost a sort of reverse of what was once called the “German economic miracle” in the aftermath of the Second World War. Berlin wrongfully assessed Moscow’s resilience as it anticipated that launching the unparalleled sanctions war against Russia will actually work.

The sanctions act like a boomerang and destroy not the Russian, but the German economy. All business associations have warned against de-industrialization. ZF Saarbrücken has announced that it will cut up to 7,000 jobs from 10,000. BASF is cutting 2,600 jobs, including 700 at the main plant in Ludwigshafen. These are just two examples, but they represent a comprehensive process of de-industrialization. The former economic engine Germany is also dragging its partner countries into recession. The entire EU is on the path to de-industrialization and permanent impoverishment.

In particular, medium-sized businesses are the ones who suffer from this development. The Leibnitz Institute for Economic Research in Halle confirms that the number of bankruptcies continued to rise in October. Researchers tallied more than 1,000 bankruptcies, 2% more than in September and 44% more than in October of the previous year.

According to the current poverty report from the Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband, the poverty rate in Germany was already 16.9% in 2021. This means that 14.1 million people were living in poverty even before the war. The trend is also increasing as a result of the war. The transformation from a welfare state to an arms state is progressing. The focus of political argumentation is no longer social balance, but rather the creation of war capability.

Immigration pressure from Ukraine also continues. In October 2023, 1.16 million Ukrainian refugees were counted. However, they partly do not come from their mother country, but from the Netherlands and other neighboring countries and immigrate into the social systems. In Ukraine the minimum wage is 1.41 euros. There is no incentive to return to a poor, war-ravaged country. There is considerable social explosiveness lurking in all of these points. The growing dissatisfaction with the federal government’s policies and their social consequences is grist for the AfD’s mill.

Russian Security Council’s Scientific board member Sergei Karaganov said in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta:

Russia has completed its European journey… The European and especially the German elites are in a state of historical failure. The foundation of their 500-year dominance—the military superiority on which the West’s economic, political and cultural dominance was built—has been stripped away from them. Current Western elites cannot cope with the plethora of problems growing in their societies . These include a shrinking middle class and increasing inequality. Almost all of their initiatives have failed. The European Union is moving… slowly but surely towards disintegration. For this reason, European elites have shown a hostile attitude towards Russia for about 15 years. They need an external enemy.

Sergei Karaganov follows the official Russian line, which he helps shape in a responsible position. Nevertheless, his description of the shrinking middle class, a growing inequality and massive centrifugal forces within the EU is correct. The fact that Moscow is turning away from Europe is likely to have consequences that will hit Europe much harder than Russia. All of these trends represent social explosives that could easily push Europe and Germany to the brink of ungovernability.

Washington will shift the burden of war and reconstruction onto the EU. The result is a three-digit billion sum. The USA has concluded “land and lease” agreements with Ukraine based on the model of the Second World War for arms deliveries. Ukraine still has to pay for the borrowed weapons. These are billions. US Senator James Vance recently asked pointedly why one should believe that the $61 billion planned in Joe Biden’s budget will help Ukraine win when the $111 billion paid so far has not brought a breakthrough. These are the previous dimensions, and the costs of reconstruction are not included.

Overall, the war in Ukraine brings about a redistribution of the capital earned for Germany from bottom to top and from Europe to America.

6. Economic and Geostrategic Reasons for War

The Soviet Union tried to create a European peace order as early as the 1950s. This was rejected by the West. Irish historian Geoffrey Roberts has discovered documents showing that Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov proposed the USSR join NATO. The reason was the Soviet campaign for a European security order as an alternative to the European Defense Community. The proposal also included the idea of a reunified, neutral Germany. The West rejected this for two reasons: Firstly, the proposal only granted the USA and China observer status. Secondly, the West suspected that the proposal was only intended to weaken NATO’s cohesion and prevent the establishment of the EDC.

However, this rejection is an early part of the United States’ strategy to implement regime change in the Soviet Union and currently in Russia. DIA Director General Vincent R. Stewart quoted a document before the US Congress in 2017, showing that Washington was well aware of how much Moscow perceived regime change efforts as a threat:

The Kremlin is convinced the United States is laying the groundwork for regime change in Russia, a conviction further reinforced by the events in Ukraine. Moscow views the United States as the critical driver behind the crisis in Ukraine and the Arab Spring and believes that the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Yanukovych is the latest move in a long-established pattern of U.S.-orchestrated regime change efforts, including the Kosovo campaign, Iraq, Libya, and the 2003–05 “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan (Vincent R. Stewart, pp. 15ff).

The West is acting side by side in Ukraine, but not as one. With the aim of weakening and dividing Russia, as long-time US security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski suggested in the 1990s, the current generation of European politicians is following the US-Neocons. The federal government is also actively helping to drive a wedge between Germany and Russia. The German government is trying to save its leadership role within the EU by remaining loyal to the United States. In doing so, Berlin has further damaged German-French cooperation and destroyed its effectiveness, which was still working when they jointly rejected the Second Iraq War in 2003. Washington, on the other hand, is increasingly dividing the European Union along the Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis, thereby forcing an eastward shift of political and military weight towards new anti-Russian front lines.

The EU wants to get access to the Ukrainian mineral resources (lithium), the black earth soil, the sea routes, the sales markets, the cheap labor. If the West breaks away from Russia and China equally, then the EU will need Ukrainian rare earths, for example, for its decarbonization strategy. Conversely, large US agricultural companies are concerned with controlling the food chain. Monsanto, Elly Lilly, John Deere etc. have bought into the Ukrainian black earth soil. They own an area larger than the entire agricultural area of Italy. These are the most fertile soil in the world. The EU and USA have enforced the use of genetically modified seeds. This guarantees maximum productivity in the short term at minimum wages. Not only the Americans, but also the Europeans are dependent on Ukraine’s mineral resources.

The member of the Bundestag of the Christian Democratic Party and his parliamentary group’s military expert, Roderich Kiesewetter, revealed what it was really about. In the program “Report from Berlin Extra” he explained that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war not only for NATO, but also for Germany, which is essentially about natural resources:

If Europe wants to complete the energy transition, it needs its own lithium deposits. The largest lithium deposits in Europe are in the Donetsk-Lugansk region… So we also have completely different goals in the background here. And that’s why we need one. The combined efforts of citizens to ensure that our politicians have the backing to do more for Ukraine (Alexej Danckwardt).

Kiesewetter was also surprisingly open on another point: “It (Ukraine) is waging a proxy war.”

This is also proven by relevant studies. Ulrich Blum, Gregor Borg, Nico Krapp, Hanna Liventseva and Iewvgeniia Rozhkova have highlighted the geostrategic importance of raw materials in Ukraine:

Ukraine is rich in raw materials, especially in the Donbas region. These include raw materials such as iron ore and coal, which were important for the first industrial revolution. But the wealth also includes non-ferrous metals and battery-related minerals, especially lithium, which is of outstanding importance for the modern and especially a green economy (Blum, et al.)

This points to the deeper reasons for the war. For the European Union, it is not just about permanently weakening Russia alongside the USA. It is also about wresting important raw material deposits from the Russian orbit. Specifically: On Ukraine’s soil, the EU is fighting for its future raw material base. The study cited states:

An independent Ukraine could become a major competitor to Russia in the raw materials and minerals market. A Ukraine that belongs to the EU would be able to develop into a strategic network partner within Western economies. Magnesium plays an important role here: China currently produces over 80 percent of the world’s reserves of magnesium, an important alloying element for aluminum. If magnesium were no longer supplied due to a conflict, a large part of the aluminum industry—and thus also the vehicle industry—would come to a standstill within a short period of time (Blum, et al.).

In the territories occupied by Russia and incorporated into the Russian Federation, deposits can be found that could give Russia a market monopoly:

Under the conditions of the global energy transition, especially decarbonization, from Russia’s perspective the value of its fossil resources must inevitably erode. It can therefore be assumed that his attack on Ukraine was not only motivated by power politics, but was aimed at gaining access to Ukrainian raw materials and materials that could ensure Russia’s dominant position as a raw material supplier again in the age of a decarbonized economy. Such an approach has a tradition, because from a Russian perspective, the east of Ukraine—the Donbass—has long been considered central to the development and survival of the Russian economy (Blum, et al.).

Lithium deposits in particular play an important role in the EU’s decarbonization strategy for electromobility, renewable energies and energy storage. The low level of exploration makes it difficult to evaluate the resources. Deposits of pegmatite and spodumene are documented in the districts of Zaporizhzhia (Kruta Balka), Kirovohrad (Dobra Block) and Donetsk (Shevchenkivske): The grade and tonnage of the deposits are lower than world-class deposits, but they are still little explored and could have “considerable potential.”

This roughly outlines the geostrategic and economic reasons for war. But it is becoming apparent that a divided Europe will be unable to achieve either its political or economic goals and will instead be stuck with the costs over the long term.

7. Winners and Losers

Sustainable tectonic shifts are taking place in geopolitics and thus also in the global economy. The weight of the West is decreasing, the political and economic force is moving to the global south. The United States is fighting for its supremacy, for “full spectrum dominance”. Even if Washington is the beneficiary of the war in Ukraine—the USA is a phoenix in nosedive. While states like Russia, China, Brazil, South Africa and India are distancing themselves, Washington is preparing to drag its European satraps into the depths with it. As early as 2003, Jonathan Schell identified the USA’s pursuit of “full spectrum dominance” as the central cause of wars and crises worldwide.

The Ukraine war accelerates China’s rise to become the second superpower. China supports Russia because it does not want a weak state dependent on Washington in its north. In doing so, it also secures Russian raw material reserves. However, the threats of a nuclear strike are a thorn in Beijing’s side.

The war in Ukraine is also accelerating the independence of the BRICS and BRICS Plus states. But this is a long and contradictory process. The de-dollarization of international trade, especially oil and gas, has begun but will take a long time. Washington will defend itself against this with all its means. Because without linking energy transactions to the dollar, the United States can no longer go into endless debt and print money. But the trend towards a multipolar world continues. In the end, a new bipolar world will emerge, with Beijing and Washington as the antagonistic poles.

The EU has degenerated into a collection of satrap states of Washington, a subdivision of NATO. The EU once started out as a peace project; now this peace project is dead. As early as 2016, Richard Sakwa spoke of a “European suicide” with a view to the looming war in Ukraine:

We can talk of a ‘new suicide’ as the idealism associated with a whole era of European integration has been revealed as nugatory and an illusion. At the heart of the EU is a peace project, and it delivered on this promise in Western Europe before 1989. However, when faced with a no less demanding challenge in the post-Communist era – to heal the Cold War divisions and to build the foundations for a united continent – the EU has spectacularly failed. Instead of a vision embracing the whole continent, it has become little more than the civilian wing of the Atlantic security alliance… Atlanticism is becoming increasingly ramified, while Russia is left out in the cold (Richard Sakwa, p. 227).

The European Union has thus lost its central function. Historically, it has failed as a peace project. Overzealous transatlanticists in the federal government do not represent the interests of the German population, but rather those of the USA. The German-French axis no longer sets the tone. The tandem is not functional anymore. The reason is that Germany is increasingly trying to maintain its own leadership role within the EU. But the Washington-Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis now sets the tone. US Deputy Secretary of State James O’Brien emphasized in December 2023:

Without referring to the past, I would like to emphasize that security cooperation between Poland and the United States has always been very close, regardless of what the American government and the Polish government were. Today we really want Poland to take a leading role in the European Union. And that is the declared goal of the new government.

By upgrading the EU’s eastern flank, the United States has succeeded in dividing the European Union. The eastern neighbors are now being integrated and supported as a bulwark against Russia—militarily, politically and financially. This puts Germany and Europe in the slipstream of geo-economic developments. We are becoming not only the backyard of the United States, but also the backyard of Russia. The energy flows and container traffic, the economic centers are moving eastwards, forming along the Budapest-Moscow-Astana-Beijing axis. The Silk and Road Summit in the Hungarian capital ten days ago clearly demonstrated this.

8. Conclusions and Policy Measures

Congress in Washington is currently blocking further aid to Ukraine. This leaves the Biden administration in a bind. The US government cannot keep its promises to Kiev. This shows that Biden has failed to convince skeptics in Congress that it is in the US interest to defeat Moscow in Ukraine. This also shows that Russia is NATO’s main target in the Ukraine war. The purpose of Ukraine support is not to defend Ukraine, but to exhaust Russia. The Ukrainians are just cannon fodder in the eyes of NATO. This shows the full cynicism of this war:

Ultimately, the game between the US and Europe in aiding Ukraine is that the purpose of the aid is not to defend Ukraine but to consume Russia. Ukraine is seen as a “consumable product” in the eyes of the West, and no country will pay a higher price for Ukraine’s security. This once again demonstrates the sad reality: Ukraine is the biggest loser in the entire conflict.

The United States is the biggest winner in this armed conflict. Through the Ukraine war, they have consolidated their control over their European and Asia-Pacific allies, achieving a level of hegemony that even exceeds that of the Cold War. The European Union has been reduced to a ward. Their governments behave like governors of Washington.

Ukraine is suffering the greatest damage from this policy. It can only survive thanks to the help of the USA and the EU. The country is effectively bankrupt. On the one hand, the US government is trying to fuel the war between Russia and Ukraine by increasing arms aid, but on the other hand, due to a lack of majorities in Congress, it cannot ensure follow-up funding. The war in Gaza is consuming the attention of the US government elite, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for lawmakers to win the support of war-weary US voters. This means that US politics is in a dilemma.

Despite these setbacks, the US government will not stop aiding Ukraine, because it has a demonstration effect: if Washington stops its support, European countries would follow suit. Therefore, a dirty game has begun: If the USA reduces its aid, then the EU countries will be forced to provide more support to Ukraine. But in the European Union the first governments are backing out. Six countries have not joined the declaration on security guarantees for Kiev.

These cracks in the front of the “values” West are deepening the longer the battle of attrition lasts in Ukraine. The West is unable to weaken Russia militarily, propagandistically and economically. For the Biden administration, the Ukraine war is becoming a burden in the election campaign. Nevertheless, the war will continue: The president wants to sell a Ukrainian victory as a diplomatic success. That is why there is no scope for peace talks.

The second loser is the European Union, especially Germany. There is nothing left of the “European values”: ammunition with depleted uranium; area bombings; cluster munitions; bombing of civilian targets by Ukrainians; an alliance with Nazis in militias and the Ukrainian army; ignoring Ukrainian atrocities—the West has lost all credibility, all moral integrity in the rest of the world. Not Russia, the West is isolated worldwide. People in Asia, Africa and South America look at Germany and Europe with contempt. Most of the world is united in rejecting this war provoked by NATO and in which the Ukrainian people are being burned. No one in the rest of the world is surprised that Russia does not want to see NATO missiles under its nose. People in the global South find the West’s phrases of an “unprovoked war of aggression” disgusting. Their governments don’t join in with the sanctions and laugh at Germany’s economic suicide.

This situation is a great chance for the global south: It can take advantage of unimagined opportunities: China has replaced European car manufacturers as a supplier to the Russian market. India and Saudi Arabia buy Russian oil and resell it to the stupid Europeans at a premium. A dozen large countries have demonstratively joined the BRICS alliance since the start of the war. In the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, China and India are also in a military alliance with Russia. The sanctions have resulted in Europe completely destroying its reputation as a safe haven for investors. The seizure of Russian assets was legally, morally and economically insane. The exclusion of Russian athletes, artists and scientists cannot be justified and is a declaration of bankruptcy.

A change of course in German politics is therefore urgent. The federal government should end its political allegiance to Washington and focus more on an independent course. In terms of foreign policy, it would be advisable to advocate for an immediate ceasefire and the start of peace negotiations. This is the only way to stop further bloodshed and the complete destruction of Ukraine. Berlin should withdraw from military aid for Kiev and link further economic aid to Ukraine to the fact that the attack on the Nordstream pipeline is investigated and the perpetrator is punished and forced to make amends. The necessary political weight can be achieved by reactivating the German-French axis. Together with Paris and Rome, a peace policy alternative to the course of the US neocons can be formulated. In terms of economic policy, I suggest unilaterally withdrawing from the self-destructive sanctions against Russia, negotiating with Moscow about repairing Nord Stream 1 and putting the pipeline back into operation. Domestically, an active industrial, structural and educational policy would be required, which could put the 100 billion Euro package earmarked for armaments to sensible use. In my opinion, in the long term, leaving NATO, which is led by Washington, is a necessary step.

The war in Ukraine is the West’s greatest military, geopolitical and economic defeat since World War II. But that is not the worst of it. The West, especially the Federal Republic of Germany, betrayed all of its moral values in this war. We are stained with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, for whose deaths we, the German politicians, military officers, arms managers and journalists, are also responsible. Again, we sit defiled among the nations.


Patrik Baab is a political scientist and journalist. His reports and research on secret services and wars do not fit in with the propaganda of states and corporate media. He has reported from Russia, Great Britain, the Balkans, Poland, the Baltic states and Afghanistan. His most recent book is Auf beiden Seiten der Front—Meine Reisen in die Ukraine (On Both Sides of the Front—My Travels in Ukraine). More about him is found on his website.


The Green Dragon and its Agony

This problem has arisen not just now, but as the West, having received for one historical moment a semblance of sole planetary domination (after the collapse of the USSR), was unable to put its leadership into practice, as a result of which new sovereign poles—Russia and China—began to assert themselves. Other poles are on the way—India, the Islamic civilization, Africa and Latin America. All in all, there are seven centers of power, including the West. Six of them have united in BRICS and are beginning to build a multipolar order.

The West continues to cling to its hegemony and is attacking the most dangerous opponents to its dominance—Russia, China and the Islamic world. This did not begin today, but rather in the very early 2000s. But the current contrast of the political map of the world has finally come into focus in recent years—and especially after the beginning of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. The SMO was the first hot war of the multipolar world against the unipolar world. Before that—especially during President Trump’s first term and because of the rise of populism in Europe—it seemed that a direct clash would be avoided, that the West would peacefully accept multipolarity, and try to reclaim its rightful place in the post-globalization world order. This is what Trump had in mind when he called for draining the globalist swamp in the US itself. But then the swamp managed to drain Trump himself and, during the period of the swampiest President Biden, to unleash a bloody conflict in Ukraine, throwing all the forces of the collective West against Russia as the most important pole of the multipolar world.

The main result of 2023 was Russia’s disruption of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which for the globalists was the decisive moment in the entire conflict. They gave the Nazi regime in Kiev maximum support with arms, finances, political, informational and diplomatic resources. When Russia stood its ground and began to prepare for its own offensive, it turned out that everything the globalists had done had been in vain. However, as long as globalists are in power in the U.S., they intend to continue the war. And, apparently, not just to the last Ukrainian, but to the last globalist.

At the end of 2023, however, the second front in the war of unipolar and multipolar worlds opened. This time the vanguard of the West in the Middle East—the state of Israel in response to the invasion of Hamas began a systematic genocide of the population of Gaza, without any consideration at all. The United States and the collective West fully supported Tel Aviv’s actions, thus drawing a new fault line—the West against Islamic civilization.

The American neocons were already on this path in the early 2000s, which resulted in the invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, and then support for radical Islamists in Libya, Syria, and so on. Now the West is again confronted with the Islamic world, led by the Palestinians, the Yemeni Houthis, the Lebanese Hezbollah and also Iran.

In addition, in West Africa, another springboard of anti-colonial struggle against unipolarity and for multipolarity, an alliance of the most determined countries has emerged—Mali, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Gabon and Niger, where a series of anti-globalization coups have taken place. Thus here, too, a new front is emerging.

And finally, Venezuela, whose legitimate ruler Nicolas Maduro the US tried to replace with the puppet Guaido, and which ended in a complete fiasco, entered into a territorial conflict over the disputed areas of Guyana-Essekibo with the pro-Atlantist puppet, British Guyana. And Argentine President Javier Milay, though refusing to integrate with BRICS, urged England to reconsider the Malvinas issue. Thus, another front of struggle has emerged in Latin America.

Thus, we approached the new year, 2024. And here all the trends continued at an accelerated pace. Tensions for the U.S. in the Middle East are growing by the day. The war in Ukraine will certainly continue, and now the initiative is on Russia’s side.

We should also expect an escalation of the conflict over Taiwan, where the United States pushed through the election of anti-Chinese candidate Lai Qingde; further escalation in the Middle East; continuation of anti-colonial revolutions in Africa; and escalation of contradictions in Latin America into a hot phase.

In the West itself, the crisis is growing at an accelerated pace. The US has an election this year in which the globalists will face a strong wave of Republicans.

The EU is in decline, and there is a rising anti-elite, anti-liberal wave of populists—left and right—rising again. There are leftists like Sarah Wagenknecht and her new party. “Red Sarah” is becoming the symbol of Europe’s anti-liberal left.

Such leftists are first and foremost enemies of global capital—unlike the Soros-bought pseudo-leftists, who primarily advocate LGBT, Ukrainian Nazism, the Gaza genocide and uncontrolled migration, and desperately fight against Russian influence, Putin and Russia in general.

There is also a right-wing component—badly shabby, but in many European countries representing the second most important political force. For example, Marine Le Pen in France. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany is gaining strength. In Italy, despite the liberal weakness of Prime Minister Giorgi Meloni, the right-wing half of society has not gone anywhere. All right-wing populism is as it was.

But there is the globalist West, which tries to pass itself off as the entire “West.” And there are anti-globalization right-wingers and left-wingers, as well as a huge stratum of Westerners who constitute the “silent majority.” This is the most important thing—the average European person understands nothing about politics at all. Ordinary Europeans and Americans simply cannot keep up with the demands to change sex, forcibly castrate their young sons, marry goats, bring in and feed more migrants, eat cockroaches, recite bedtime prayers to Greta Thunberg, and curse the Russians. The Western common man, the petty bourgeois is the main pillar of the multipolar world. He is the core of the real West, not the sinister parody into which the globalist liberal elites have turned it.

It is very possible that in 2024 all these fault lines—wars and revolutions, conflicts and uprisings, waves of terrorist attacks and new territories of genocide—will turn into something large-scale. The downward tide of a unipolar world is already giving way to a rising multipolar one. And it is inevitable.

The dragon of globalism is mortally wounded. But we know how dangerous the agony of a wounded dragon is. The global elite of the West is insane. There is much reason to believe that 2024 will be something terrible. We are an arm’s length away from a global world war. On all fronts. If it cannot be avoided, there is nothing left to do but win it.

It is necessary to finish off the dragon to free mankind, and the West itself, which is its first victim, from its evil spell.


Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Ria Novosti and Geopolitika.


Featured: “Saint George and the Dragon.” Folio 26 recto, from the Passio Sancti Georgii, passio Sanctae Margaretae manuscript, dated ca. 1270: MS 1853 in the Biblioteca Civica di Verona (Verona, Italy).


World War III or Subjugation?

Is this the dilemma the world is faced with today?

Paul Craig Roberts has long been a critic of Vladimir Putin’s policy towards the United States. He stigmatizes his pusillanimous reactions to American provocations, such as NATO’s on-going move East, the seizure of Russian Consular property in San Francisco, the freezing of about $300 million of Russian financial assets, and economic sanctions imposed on Russia which are a case of war absent a U.N. Security Council’s approval. Gilbert Doctorow joins Roberts in his criticism of Putin. As pertinent as their opinion might be, I respectfully disagree. Here is why.

Vladimir Putin is an intelligent, rationale and knowledgeable person. The United States are led by neocons—a bunch of people who are overwhelmed by their emotions and could—one thing leading to another—start World War III. [According to The Royal Institute of International Affairs (April 2014), on thirteen occasions the world came close to a nuclear war due to human errors or technical deficiencies during the Cold War].

Bombing Yemen is ineffective. Joe Biden knows it but vowed to continue anyway! The situation in the Middle East is extremely unstable, and the war in Ukraine shows no sign of abating.

Taiwan is an enigma. The world is unsettled. Vladimir Putin knows it, so does Xi Jinping. Neither one wants to face another Cuban crisis, not even a situation which would be close to it. Both follow a policy aimed at protecting their country’s respective interests while avoiding anything which could make it worse or be viewed as provocative by the United States and increase tension. The United States never, ever declared war with the exception of World War I, and the Iraq invasion of 2003. All the wars fought by the United States were provoked by Washington. The war in Ukraine is a case in point, but so is the war against Mexico, the war against Spain, Vietnam, not to mention the attrition of Indian tribes through repeated treaties Washington knew very well Indians could not abide by, etc. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping know that and act accordingly.

The danger, of course, and this is what worries Paul Craig Roberts and Gilbert Doctorow, is that Vladimir Putin’s and Xi Jinping’s rational, controlled attitude may backfire, and lead to their defeat—a prolonged Ukraine war would do Russia in. A weakened Russia would give China no choice but surrender. Indeed, the risk exists. The question then becomes: What’s preferable? WWIII or subjugation? Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are desperately trying to find a middle way. Will they succeed? As for the neocons, one wonders whether they are aware of the dilemma.


Jean-Luc Basle is a former Vice President of the Citigroup New York (retired).


Featured: The Wild Hunt of Odin, by Peter Nicolai Arbo; painted in 1872.


The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat

We are very happy to bring you this excerpt (along with the Table of Contents) from Colonel Jacques Baud’s latest book, The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat (L’art de la guerre russe: Comment l’occident conduire l’ukraine a la echec). This is a detailed study of the two-year old conflict in which the West has brutally used the Ukrainians to pursue an old pipedream: the conquest of Russia.

Please support the work of Colonel Baud and purchase a copy at Amazon, or at Barnes & Noble. And please ask all your family and friends to get a copy of this important and timely book as well.

Russian Military Thought

Throughout the Cold War period, the Soviet Union saw itself as the spearhead of a historical struggle that would lead to a confrontation between the “capitalist” system and “progressive forces.” This perception of a permanent and inescapable war led the Soviets to study war in a quasi-scientific way, and to structure this thinking into an architecture of military thought that has no equal in the Western world.

The problem with the vast majority of our so-called military experts is their inability to understand the Russian approach to war. It is the result of an approach we have already seen in waves of terrorist attacks—the adversary is so stupidly demonized that we refrain from understanding his way of thinking. As a result, we are unable to develop strategies, articulate our forces, or even equip them for the realities of war. The corollary of this approach is that our frustrations are translated by unscrupulous media into a narrative that feeds hatred and increases our vulnerability. We are thus unable to find rational, effective solutions to the problem.

The way Russians understand conflict is holistic. In other words, they see the processes that develop and lead to the situation at any given moment. This explains why Vladimir Putin’s speeches invariably include a return to history. In the West, we tend to focus on X moment and try to see how it might evolve. We want an immediate response to the situation we see today. The idea that “from the understanding of how the crisis arose comes the way to resolve it” is totally foreign to the West. In September 2023, an English-speaking journalist even pulled out the “duck test” for me: “if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.” In other words, all the West needs to assess a situation is an image that fits their prejudices. Reality is much more subtle than the duck model….

The reason the Russians are better than the West in Ukraine is that they see the conflict as a process; whereas we see it as a series of separate actions. The Russians see events as a film. We see them as photographs. They see the forest, while we focus on the trees. That is why we place the start of the conflict on February 24, 2022, or the start of the Palestinian conflict on October 7, 2023. We ignore the contexts that bother us and wage conflicts we do not understand. That is why we lose our wars…

****

In Russia, unsurprisingly, the principles of the military art of the Soviet forces inspired those currently in use:

  • readiness to carry out assigned missions;
  • concentration of efforts on solving a specific mission;
  • surprise (unconventionality) of military action vis-à-vis the enemy;
  • finality determines a set of tasks and the level of resolution of each one;
  • totality of available means determines the way to resolve the mission and achieve the objective (correlation of forces);
  • coherence of leadership (unity of command);
  • economy of forces, resources, time and space;
  • support and restoration of combat capability;
  • freedom of maneuver.

It should be noted that these principles apply not only to the implementation of military action as such. They are also applicable as a system of thought to other non-operational activities.

An honest analysis of the conflict in Ukraine would have identified these various principles and drawn useful conclusions for Ukraine. But none of the self-proclaimed experts on TV were intellectually able to do so.

Thus, Westerners are systematically surprised by the Russians in the fields of technology (e.g., hypersonic weapons), doctrine (e.g., operative art) and economics (e.g., resilience to sanctions). In a way, the Russians are taking advantage of our prejudices to exploit the principle of surprise. We can see this in the Ukrainian conflict, where the Western narrative led Ukraine to totally underestimate Russian capabilities, which was a major factor in its defeat. That is why Russia did not really try to counter this narrative and let it play out—the belief that we are superior makes us vulnerable….

Correlation of Forces

Russian military thought is traditionally linked to a holistic approach to warfare, which involves the integration of a large number of factors in the development of a strategy. This approach is materialized by the concept of “correlation of forces” (Соотношение сил).

Often translated as “balance of forces” or “ratio of forces,” this concept is only understood by Westerners as a quantitative quantity, limited to the military domain. In Soviet thinking, however, the correlation of forces reflected a more holistic reading of war:

There are several criteria for assessing the correlation of strengths. In the economic sphere, the factors usually compared are gross national product per capita, labor productivity, the dynamics of economic growth, the level of industrial production, particularly in high-tech sectors, the technical infrastructure of the production tool, the resources and degree of qualification of the workforce, the number of specialists and the level of development of theoretical and applied sciences.

In the military field, the factors compared are the quantity and quality of armaments, the firepower of the armed forces, the fighting and moral qualities of the soldiers, the level of staff training, the organization of the troops and their combat experience, the character of the military doctrine and the methods of strategic, operative and tactical thinking.

In the political sphere, the factors that come into consideration are the breadth of the social base of state authority, its organization, the constitutional procedure for relations between the government and legislative bodies, the ability to take operational decisions, and the degree and character of popular support for domestic and foreign policy.

Finally, when assessing the strength of the international movement, the factors taken into consideration are its quantitative composition, its influence with the masses, its position in the political life of each country, the principles and norms of relations between its components and the degree of their cohesion.

In other words, the assessment of the situation is not limited to the balance of forces on the battlefield, but takes into account all the elements that have an impact on the evolution of the conflict. Thus, for their Special Military Operation, the Russian authorities had planned to support the war effort through the economy, without moving to a “war economy” regimen. Thus, unlike in Ukraine, there was no interruption in the tax and welfare mechanisms.

This is why the sanctions applied to Russia in 2014 had a double positive effect. The first was the realization that they were not only a short-term problem, but above all a medium- and long-term opportunity. They encouraged Russia to produce goods it had previously preferred to buy abroad. The second was the signal that the West would increasingly use economic weapons as a means of pressure in the future. It therefore became imperative, for reasons of national independence and sovereignty, to prepare for more far-reaching sanctions affecting the country’s economy.

In reality, it has long been known that sanctions do not work. Logically enough, they have had the opposite effect, acting as protectionist measures for Russia, which has thus been able to consolidate its economy, as had been the case after the 2014 sanctions. A sanctions strategy might have paid off if the Russian economy had effectively been the equivalent of the Italian or Spanish economy, i.e., with a high level of debt; and if the entire planet had acted in unison to isolate Russia.

The inclusion of the correlation of forces in the decision-making process is a fundamental difference from Western decision-making processes, which are linked more to a policy of communication than to a rational approach to problems.

This explains, for example, Russia’s limited objectives in the Ukraine, where it does not seek to occupy the entire territory, as the correlation of forces in the western part of the country would be unfavorable.

At every level of leadership, the correlation of forces is part of situation assessment. At the operational level, it is defined as follows:

The result of comparing the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the forces and resources (sub-units, units, weapons, military equipment, etc.) of one’s own troops (forces) and those of the enemy. It is calculated on an operational and tactical scale throughout the area of operations, in the main and other directions, in order to determine the degree of objective superiority of one of the opposing camps. Force correlation assessment is used to make an informed decision about an operation (battle), and to establish and maintain the necessary superiority over the enemy for as long as possible, when decisions are redefined (modified) during military (combat) operations.

This simple definition is the reason why the Russians committed themselves with forces inferior to those of Ukraine in February 2022, or why they withdrew from Kiev, Kharkov and Kherson in March, September and October 2022.

****

Structure of the Doctrine

The Russians have always attached particular importance to doctrine. Better than the West, they have understood that “a common way of seeing, thinking and acting”—as Marshal Foch put it—gives coherence, while allowing for infinite variations in the conception of operations. Military doctrine is a kind of “common core” that serves as a reference for designing operations.

Russian military doctrine divides military art into three main components: strategy (strategiya), operative art (operativnoe iskoustvo) and tactics (taktika). Each of these components has its own characteristics, very similar to those found in Western doctrines. Using the terminology of French doctrine on the use of forces:

  • The strategic level is that of conception. The aim of strategic action is to lead the adversary to negotiation or defeat.
  • The operative level is that of cooperation and coordination of inter-force actions, with a view to achieving a given military objective.
  • The tactical level, finally, is that of maneuver execution at weapon level as an integral part of the operational maneuver.

These three components correspond to levels of leadership, which translate into leadership structures and the space in which military operations are conducted. For simplicity’s sake, let us say that the strategic level ensures the management of the theater of war (Театр Войны) (TV); a geographically vast entity, with its own command and control structures, within which there are one or more strategic directions. The theater of war comprises a set of theaters of military operations (Театр Военных Действий) (TVD), which represent a strategic direction and are the domain of operative action. These various theaters have no predetermined structure and are defined according to the situation. For example, although we commonly speak of the “war in Afghanistan” (1979-1989) or the “war in Syria” (2015-), these countries are considered in Russian terminology as TVDs and not TVs.

The same applies to Ukraine, which Russia sees as a theater of military operations (TVD) and not a theater of war (TV), which explains why the action in Ukraine is designated as a “Special Military Operation” (Специальная Военая Операция—Spetsialaya). A Special Military Operation” (Специальная Военная Операция – Spetsial’naya Voyennaya Operatsiya—SVO, or SMO in English abbreviation) and not a “war.”

The use of the word “war” would imply a different structure of conduct than that envisaged by the Russians in Ukraine, and would have other structural implications in Russia itself. Moreover—and this is a central point—as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg himself acknowledges, “the war began in 2014” and should have been ended by the Minsk Agreements. The SMO is therefore a “military operation” and not a new “war,” as many Western “experts” claim.

****

The Special Military Operation in Ukraine

The Correlation of Forces

Consider all the factors that directly or indirectly influence the conflict. Conversely, as we have seen in Ukraine and elsewhere, Westerners have a much more political reading of the war, and end up mixing the two. This is why communication plays such an essential role in the conduct of war: the perception of the conflict plays an almost more important role than its reality. This is why, in Iraq, the Americans literally invented episodes that glorified their troops.

Russia’s analysis of the situation in February 2022 was undoubtedly considerably more pertinent than that of the West. They knew that a Ukrainian offensive against the Donbass was underway and that it could endanger the government. In 2014-2015, after the massacres in Odessa and Mariupol, the Russian population was very much in favor of intervention. Vladimir Putin’s stubborn clinging to the Minsk Agreements was poorly understood in Russia.

The factors that contributed to Russia’s decision to intervene were twofold: the expected support of Ukraine’s ethnically Russian population (which we will call “Russian-speaking” for convenience) and an economy robust enough to withstand sanctions.

The Russian-speaking population had risen up en masse against the new authorities following the coup d’état of February 2014, whose first decision had been to strip the Russian language of its official status. Kiev tried to backtrack, but in April 2019, the 2014 decision was definitively confirmed.

Since the adoption of the Law on Indigenous Peoples on July 1, 2021, Russian speakers (ethnic Russians) are no longer considered normal Ukrainian citizens and no longer enjoy the same rights as ethnic Ukrainians. They can therefore be expected to offer no resistance to the Russian coalition in the eastern part of the country….

Since March 24, 2021, Ukrainian forces have been stepping up their presence around the Donbass and have increased the pressure against the autonomists with their fire.

Zelensky’s decree of March 24, 2021 for the reconquest of Crimea and the Donbass was the real trigger for the SMO. From that moment on, the Russians understood that if there was military action against them, they would have to intervene. But they also knew that the cause of the Ukrainian operation was NATO membership, as Oleksei Arestovitch had explained. That is why, in mid-December 2021, they were submitting proposals to the USA and NATO on extending the Alliance: their aim was then to remove Ukraine’s motive for an offensive in the Donbass.

The reason for the Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) is indeed the protection of the populations of Donbass; but this protection was necessary because of Kiev’s desire to go through a confrontation to enter NATO. The extension of NATO is therefore only the indirect cause of the conflict in Ukraine. The latter could have spared itself this ordeal by implementing the Minsk Agreements—but what we wanted was a defeat for Russia.

In 2008, Russia intervened in Georgia to protect the Russian minority then being bombed by its government, as confirmed by the Swiss ambassador, Heidi Tagliavini, who was responsible for investigating this event. In 2014, many voices were raised in Russia to demand intervention when the new regime in Kiev had engaged its army against the civilian population of the five autonomist oblasts (Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lugansk and Donetsk) and applied a fierce repression. In 2022, it could be expected that the population of Russia would not understand the government’s inaction, after no efforts were made from the Ukrainian and Western sides to enforce the Minsk Agreements. They knew that they did not have the means to launch an economic retaliation. But they also knew that an economic war against Russia would inevitably backfire on Western countries.

An important element of Russian military and political thinking is its legalistic dimension. The way our media present events, systematically omitting facts that could explain, justify, legitimize or even legalize Russia’s actions. We tend to think that Russia is acting outside any legal framework. For example, our media present the Russian intervention in Syria as having been decided unilaterally by Moscow; whereas it was carried out at the request of the Syrian government, after the West had allowed the Islamic State to move closer to Damascus, as confessed by John Kerry, then Secretary of State. Nevertheless, there is never any mention of the occupation of eastern Syria by American troops, who were never even invited there!

We could multiply the examples, to which our journalists will counter with the war crimes committed by Russian forces. This may well be true, but the simple fact that these accusations are not based on any impartial and neutral investigation (as required by humanitarian doctrine), nor on any international one, since Russia is systematically refused participation, casts a shadow over the honesty of these accusations. For example, the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines was immediately attributed to Russia, which was accused of violating international law.

In fact, unlike the West, which advocates a “rules-based international order,” the Russians insist on a “law-based international order.” Unlike the West, they will apply the law to the letter. No more, no less.

The legal framework for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine has been meticulously planned. As this subject has already been covered in one of my previous books, I will not go into details here…

****

The Objectives and Strategy of Russia

On February 23, 2023, Swiss military “expert” Alexandre Vautravers commented on Russia’s objectives in Ukraine:

The aim of the Special Military Operation was to decapitate Ukrainian political and military governance in the space of five, ten, maybe even two weeks. The Russians then changed their plan and their objectives with a number of other failures; so they change their objectives and their strategic orientations almost every week or every month.

The problem is that our “experts” themselves define Russia’s objectives according to what they imagine, only to be able to say that it has not achieved them. So. Let us get back to the facts.

On February 24, 2022, Russia launched its “Special Military Operation” (SMO) in Ukraine “at short notice.” In his televised address, Vladimir Putin explained that its strategic objective was to protect the population of Donbass. This objective can be broken down into two parts:

  • “demilitarize” the Ukrainian armed forces regrouped in the Donbass in preparation for the offensive against the DPR and LPR; and
  • “denazify” (i.e. “neutralize”) the ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi paramilitary militias in the Mariupol area.

The formulation chosen by Vladimir Putin has been very poorly analyzed in the West. It is inspired by the 1945 Potsdam Declaration, which envisaged the development of defeated Germany according to four principles: demilitarization, denazification, democratization and decentralization.

The Russians understand war from a Clausewitzian perspective: war is the pursuit of politics by other means. This then means that they seek to transform operational successes into strategic successes, and military successes into political objectives. So, while the demilitarization evoked by Putin is clearly linked to the military threat to the populations of the Donbass in application of the decree of March 24, 2021, signed by Zelensky.

But this objective conceals a second: the neutralization of Ukraine as a future NATO member. This is what Zelensky understood when he proposed a resolution to the conflict in March 2022. At first, his proposal was supported by Western countries, probably because at this stage they believed that Russia had failed in its bid to take over Ukraine in three days, and that it would not be able to sustain its war effort because of the massive sanctions imposed on it. But at the NATO meeting of March 24, 2022, the Allies decided not to support Zelensky’s proposition.

Nevertheless, on March 27, Zelensky publicly defended his proposal and on March 28, as a gesture of support for this effort, Vladimir Putin eased the pressure on the capital and withdrew his troops from the area. Zelensky’s proposal served as the basis for the Istanbul Communiqué of March 29, 2022, a ceasefire agreement as a prelude to a peace agreement. It was this document that Vladimir Putin presented in June 2023, when an African delegation visited Moscow. It was Boris Johnson’s intervention that prompted Zelensky to withdraw his proposal, exchanging peace and the lives of his men for support “for as long as it takes.”

This version of events—which I have already presented in my previous works—was finally confirmed in early November 2023 by David Arakhamia, then chief negotiator for Ukraine196. He explained that Russia had never intended to seize Kiev.

In essence, Russia agreed to withdraw to the borders of February 23, 2022, in exchange for a ceiling on Ukrainian forces and a commitment not to become a NATO member, along with security guarantees from a number of countries….

Two conclusions can be drawn:

  • Russia’s objective was not to conquer territory. If the West had not intervened to push Zelensky to withdraw his offer, Ukraine would probably still have its army.
  • While the Russians intervened to ensure the security and protection of the population of the Donbass, their SMO enabled them to achieve a broader objective, which involves Russia’s security.

This means that, although this objective is not formulated, the demilitarization of Ukraine could open the door to its neutralization. This is not surprising since, conversely, in an interview with the Ukrainian channel Apostrof’ on March 18, 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky’s advisor Oleksei Arestovitch cynically explains that, because Ukraine wants to join NATO, it will have to create the conditions for Russia to attack Ukraine and be definitively defeated.

The problem is that Ukrainian and Western analysis is fueled by their own narratives. The conviction that Russia will lose has meant that no alternative contingency has been prepared. In September 2023, the West, beginning to see the collapse of this narrative and its implementation, tried to move towards a “freeze” in the conflict, without taking into account the opinion of the Russians, who dominate on the ground.

Yet Russia would have been satisfied with a situation such as that proposed by Zelensky in March 2022. What the West wants in September 2023 is merely a pause until an even more violent conflict breaks out, after Ukrainian forces have been rearmed and reconstituted.

****

Ukrainian Strategy

The strategic objective of Volodymyr Zelensky and his team is to join NATO, as a prelude to a brighter future within the EU. It complements that of the Americans (and therefore of the Europeans). The problem is that tensions with Russia, particularly over Crimea, are causing NATO members to put off Ukraine’s participation. In March 2022, Zelensky revealed on CNN that this is exactly what the Americans told him.

Before coming to power in April 2019, Volodymyr Zelensky’s discourse was divided between two antagonistic policies: the reconciliation with Russia promised during his presidential campaign and his goal of joining NATO. He knows that these two policies are mutually exclusive, as Russia does not want to see NATO and its nuclear weapons installed in Ukraine and wanted neutrality or non-alignment.

What is more, he knows that his ultra-nationalist allies will refuse to negotiate with Russia. This was confirmed by Praviy Sektor leader Dmitro Yarosh, who openly threatened him with death in the Ukrainian media a month after his election. Zelensky therefore knew from the start of the election campaign that he would not be able to fulfill his promise of reconciliation, and that there was only one solution left: confrontation with Russia.

But this confrontation could not be waged by Ukraine alone against Russia, and it would need the material support of the West. The strategy devised by Zelensky and his team was revealed before his election in March 2019 by Oleksei Arestovitch, his personal advisor, on the Ukrainian media Apostrof’. Arestovitch explained that it would take an attack by Russia to provoke an international mobilization that would enable Ukraine to defeat Russia once and for all, with the help of Western countries and NATO. With astonishing precision, he described the course of the Russian attack as it would unfold three years later, between February and March 2022. Not only did he explain that this conflict was unavoidable if Ukraine is to join NATO, but he also placed this confrontation in 2021-2022! He outlined the main areas of Western aid:

In this conflict, we will be very actively supported by the West. Weapons. Equipment. Assistance. New sanctions against Russia. Most likely, the introduction of a NATO contingent. A no-fly zone, and so on. In other words, we won’t lose it.

As we can see, this strategy has much in common with the one described by the RAND Corporation at the same time. So much so, in fact, that it is hard not to see it as a strategy strongly inspired by the United States. In his interview, Arestovitch singled out four elements that would become the pillars of the Ukrainian strategy against Russia, and to which Zelensky returned regularly:

  • International aid and arms supplies,
  • International sanctions,
  • NATO intervention,
  • Creation of a no-fly zone.

It should be noted that these four pillars are understood by Zelensky as promises whose fulfillment is essential to the success of this strategy. In February 2023, Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of Ukraine’s Defense and National Security Council, declared in The Kyiv Independent that Ukraine’s objective was the disintegration of Russia. The mobilization of Western countries to supply Ukraine with heavy weapons then seems to give substance to this objective, which is consistent with what Oleksiy Arestovich had declared in March 2019.

A few months later, however, it became clear that the equipment supplied to Ukraine was not sufficient to ensure the success of its counter-offensive, and Zelensky asked for additional, better-adapted equipment. At this point, there was a certain amount of Western irritation at these repeated demands. Former British Defense Minister Ben Wallace declared that Westerners “are not Amazon.” In fact, the West does not respect its commitments.

Contrary to what our media and pseudo-military experts tell us, since February 2022, it has been clear that Ukraine cannot defeat Russia on its own. As Obama put it, “Russia [there] will always be able to maintain its escalation dominance.” In other words, Ukraine will only be able to achieve its goals with the involvement of NATO countries. This means that its fate will depend on the goodwill of Western countries. So, we need to maintain a narrative that encourages the West to keep up this effort. This narrative will then become what we call, in strategic terms, its “center of gravity.”

As the months went by, the course of operations showed that the prospect of a Ukrainian victory was becoming increasingly remote, as Russia, far from being weakened, was growing stronger, militarily and economically. Even General Christopher Cavoli, Supreme American Commander Europe (SACEUR), told a US congressional committee that “Russia’s air, naval, space, digital and strategic capabilities have not suffered significant degradation during this war.”

The West, expecting a short conflict, is no longer able to maintain the effort promised to Ukraine. The NATO summit in Vilnius (July 11-12, 2023) ended in partial success for Ukraine. Its membership is postponed indefinitely. Its situation is even worse than it was at the beginning of 2022, since there is no more justification for its entry into NATO than there was before the SMO.

Ukraine then turned its attention to a more concrete objective: regaining sovereignty over its entire 1991 territory.

Thus, the Ukrainian notion of “victory” rapidly evolved. The idea of a “collapse of Russia” quickly faded, as did that of its dismemberment. There was talk of “regime change,” which Zelensky made his objective by forbidding any negotiations as long as Vladimir Putin was in power. Then came the reconquest of lost territories, thanks to the counter-offensive of 2023. But here, too, hopes quickly faded. The plan was simply to cut the Russian forces in two, with a thrust towards the Sea of Azov. But by September 2023, this objective had been reduced to the liberation of three cities.

In the absence of concrete successes, narrative remains the only element Ukraine can rely on to maintain Western attention and willingness to support it. For, as Ben Wallace, ex-Defence Minister, put it in The Telegraph on October 1, 2023: “The most precious commodity is hope.” True enough. But Western appraisal of the situation must be based on realistic analyses of the adversary. However, since the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis, Western analyses have been based on prejudice.

****

The Notion of Victory

Russia operates within a framework of Clausewitzian thinking, in which operational successes are exploited for strategic ends. Operational strategy (“operative art”) therefore plays an essential role in the definition of what is considered a victory.

As we saw during the battle of Bakhmut, the Russians adapted perfectly to the strategy imposed on Ukraine by the West, which prioritizes the defense of every square meter. The Ukrainians thus played into the hands of the attrition strategy officially announced by Russia. Conversely, in Kharkov and Kherson, the Russians preferred to cede territory in exchange for the lives of their men. In the context of a war of attrition, sacrificing potential in exchange for territory, as Ukraine is doing, is the worst strategy of all.

This is why General Zaluzhny, commander of the Ukrainian forces, tried to oppose Zelensky and proposed withdrawing his forces from Bakhmut. But in Ukraine, it is the Western narrative that guides military decisions. Zelensky preferred to follow the path laid out for him by our media, in order to retain the support of Western opinion. In November 2023, General Zaluzhny had to openly admit that this decision was a mistake, because prolonging the war will only favor Russia.

The Ukrainian conflict was inherently asymmetrical. The West wanted to turn it into a symmetrical conflict, proclaiming that Ukraine’s capabilities could be enough to topple Russia. But this was clearly wishful thinking from the outset, and its sole purpose was to justify non-compliance with the Minsk Agreements. Russian strategists have turned it into an asymmetrical conflict.

Ukraine’s problem in this conflict is that it has no rational relationship with the notion of victory. By comparison, the Palestinians, who are aware of their quantitative inferiority, have switched to a way of thinking that gives the simple act of resisting a sense of victory. This is the asymmetrical nature of the conflict that Israel has never managed to understand in 75 years, and which it is reduced to overcoming through tactical superiority rather than strategic finesse. In Ukraine, it is the same phenomenon. By clinging to a notion of victory linked to the recovery of territory, Ukraine has locked itself into a logic that can only lead to defeat.

On November 20, 2023, Oleksiy Danilov, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, painted a gloomy picture of Ukrainian prospects for 2024. His speech showed that Ukraine had neither a plan to emerge from the conflict, nor an approach that would associate a sense of victory with that emergence: he was reduced to linking Ukraine’s victory to that of the West. In the West, however, the end of the conflict in Ukraine is increasingly perceived as a military, political, human and economic debacle.

In an asymmetrical situation, each protagonist is free to define his or her own criteria for victory, and to choose from a range of criteria under his or her control. This is why Egypt (1973), Hezbollah (2006), the Islamic State (2017), the Palestinian resistance since 1948 and Hamas in 2023 are victorious, despite massive losses. This seems counter-intuitive to a Western mind, but it is what explains why Westerners are unable to really “win” their wars.

In Ukraine, the political leadership has locked itself into a narrative that precludes a way out of the crisis without losing face. The asymmetrical situation now working to Ukraine’s disadvantage stems from a narrative that has been confused with reality, and has led to a response that is ill-suited to the nature of the Russian operation.


Featured: Defend Sevastopol, by Vassily Nesterenko; painted in 2005.