On 26 March, the European Commission published its Preparedness Union Strategy, which aims to anticipate, prevent and respond to major crises from biohazards to cyber-warfare. But after three years of devastating conflict in Ukraine, the strategy also points to the need to prepare for the possibility of a general war with Russia by 2030.

There are three prongs to the strategy. Firstly prevention, and how to avoid a war. Secondly crisis response, ensuring the institutions of Europe have the internal capabilities to reorient business activities to a wartime footing at a moment’s notice. Finally, population preparedness, to ensure citizens can govern their actions in the first 72 hours after a war starts.

Prevention

The European Commission has reaffirmed its position that Russia presents a clear and present threat to the European continent, including those parts the Russians occupy today and any additional parts they occupy tomorrow, next week or in a year from now. The best way to prevent future conflict with Russia is to exact a price, remove blank cheques, close all doors while leaving them open to a possible reconciliation at some future point in the past. In the interim, sanctions remain the best and proven approach to prevent Russian imperialist expansion. Having consulted widely with partners and with the democratically elected President of Ukraine, the Commission has initiated further work on additional measures and sanctions designations, including of Russian persons already sanctioned, and Russian companies that don’t yet exist.

President Ursula von der Leyen has made it clear that sanctions against Russia should remain until that country has withdrawn to its preexisting borders of 1891.

Crisis preparedness

All Member States will be able to access a special Emergency Revenue Acceleration Loan Partnership Framework Doctrine Package Toolkit, that will enable them to invest their additional mandated Voluntary Surged European Contributions in a timely way, to ensure this year’s contribution prepares them for last year’s war.

Preparing for war with Russia is going to be expensive. The total cost of this strategy is estimated, to be €200 billion, €140 billion of which will go towards anti-missile erections with the remaining capital turbo-accelerated into vital programmatic evidence-based research programmes. Twenty percent will be unallocated, to allow for creep flex in preliminary budget estimates and volatile real estate prices in Chamonix.

Given the risk of missile strikes on European Union buildings, all staff will receive training in what are being called the Leyen low principals. In a high-stakes crisis exercise, Brussels-based staff convened in a specially reinforced committee room for forty eight hours, exploring every available response to Russian attacks and leaving absolutely nothing on the table.

The European Central Bank will print an additional €500 billion to lend to Brussels to buy munitions from Germany to give to Ukraine, via Syria through Montenegro, to bolster ongoing war efforts, that focus on bringing peace through more war.

Population preparedness

The European Commission will go to great lengths to ensure that its citizens are both protected from the meaning of war and, if possible, its consequences, recognising the challenging nature of the modern hybrid geo-political landscape context perspective. When war comes, citizens may need to play their part and pay the price, in the certain knowledge that officials will be right behind them, even if at several hundred kilometres removed.

In a whole of integrated community mobilisation response to ensure we all feel Union Prepared, European citizens above the age of twelve will HENCEFORTH!!! be expected to wear standard uniforms, comprising olive green t-shirts and military style fatigues. These uniforms are declarations of identity, more than uniforms. It is therefore hoped that all citizens will comply with their use, not least as each uniform cost €20,000 euros from a reliable factory somewhere near Kryvyi Rih (we know someone on the Ukrainian side, who got us a crack, sorry, cracking good deal).

The European Commission recognises the disruption and concern these requirements may induce in European citizens. With the kind assistance of President Zelensky, Ukrainian staff will be posted on every street corner to assist citizens with concerns or anxieties.

A complementary vanity bag will be gifted to everyone for use on a voluntary basis and citizens are expected to have this on their person at all times, or face on-the-street personal self-reflection time. Kindly sponsored by the Ukrainian Ministry of Public Information and True Stories and Narratives for Total Victory Against the Imperialist Horde the bag will include black hair dye, faux face stubble and gravelly voice stimulants, to confuse occupying orcs about your true identity.

Any citizens with mobility issues or other concerns related to a lack of moral fibre, can receive or be courtesy carried at a small extra charge, to a nearby bus destined for helpful and comforting moral reequipping centres for absolute and certain victory, known hitherto as ‘wellbeing centres’. The scale of logistical endeavour to lay on this preparedness shuttle wellness express is said to cost an arm and a leg, and that’s only if you survive.

Citizens can opt to pay a €100,000 one-off and totally discreet payment not to wear the uniform and undergo the training, but given affordability issues, please ask bandermeisters, sorry, wellbeing officers at the training centres, as they may be able to negotiate a different rate. Keep it quiet though, as you wouldn’t want to make others jealous, or get anyone in trouble. These are dangerous times, after all.

In the event of citizens being caught out during the hours of darkness and are confronted by vigilant wellbeing staff, they should use the standard identification code phrase, ‘I am a pee-pee pianist.’

Thank you for your attention. And just remember, no one wants peace more than the European Union.

Happy 1^st of April.

However, this policy orientation of NATO expansion, Ukrainian victory at seemingly all costs, and subjugation of Russia has begun to split not just the Trans-Atalantic core of NATO and the Western community. It is driving a wedge into Europe, forcing a schism, generally speaking, between Western, Central, and Northern Europe, on the one hand, and Eastern and Southern Europe, on the other hand. In the north and west, Great Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, Poland, the Baltic states, and Scandinavia prefer to continue the Ukrainian war for years in the hope that Putin wil leave the scene, an upheaval will occur in Moscow, and a new Russian administration or even regime will be weaker on the battlefield or more amenable to compromises. Countries in Eastern and Southern Europe such as Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, and Croatia support an end to the war outright and Trump’s general effort to achieve it. Romania’s population has moved in this direction, but the election of anti-war Calin Giorgescu has been blocked by the government and, apparently, the EU itself. Italy (Germany too) has balked at Anglo-Franco plans to organize European peacekeeping contingents for deployment to Ukraine, even as Washington rejects the idea and Russia has given to understand in no uncertaine terms that any such troops will be treated as legitimate, legal military targets by Russia’s armed forces.  Italy, Portugal, Spain, and even France are opposing the EU proposal to provide up to 40 billion euros ($43.67 billion) in military aid for Ukraine this year, which would be a doubling of its support ion 2024 (https://t.me/stranaua/189942). Yet France is leading the effort to deploy ‘peacekeepers’ in Ukraine. While Denmark, Estonia, and Lithuania are leaders in backing Ukraine, having devoted more than 2 percent of their GDPs to the war since February 2022, support has been limited from Italy, Slovenia, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus, each of which has provided less than 0.5% of their GDPs (www.reuters.com/world/europe/italy-spain-not-ready-back-eu-plan-boost-ukraine-military-aid-2025-03-17/).

EU member states will be tested as Trump follows through on his threat to level high tarriffs against European states for any continuation of their support for Kiev or at least for their resistance to Trump’s peace efforts.

What Europe should be doing is joining the Trump administration in attempting to put an end to the bloodshed in and ruin of Ukraine. More generally, as Trump seems to understand, a more benign Western policy vis-à-vis Russia’s national security, NATO expansion, and a new security architecture that will serve all from Vladivostok to Vancouver, inlcuding Kiev.

A general peace formula in Eastern Europe must be based on two fundamental principles: (1) States on Russia’s borders should seek modus vivendi with great power neighbor and (2) other great powers refrain from drawing adjacent neighbors out of Moscow’s orbit, which is impossible without putting the local neighbors’ national securty at risk. Some might counter: But at the end of the Cold War the West succeeded in removing from Moscow’s orbit numerous East European states without provoking Moscow to war. This was an anomoly in world history in which a declining power prioritized good relations with a former foe over maintenance of its external empire, which was crumbling from within in as Moscow’s USSR was. Russia is not crumbling from within, despite the West’s best efforts; rather, it is strengthening on the basis of effective leadership and robust relations, including profitable foreign trade with the Rest or non-Western world. The USSR had little economically effective trade relations with the outside world and squandered its finances and economic growth in the attempt to support ‘color’ revolutions by comunist and national liberation movements in the ‘Third World’, today’s Rest. Under such a scheme Kiev, Kishinev, Tbilisi, Baku, Yerevan, and, yes, Riga, Tallinn, Vilnius, and Warsaw should follow the Cold War Finnish model and profit therefrom. NATO is a troublemaker in the region, and the trouble it incites will rain down on the Eastern European states first and foremost. 

But this sort of realism is now alien to most Western and Eastern Europeans. Their arrogant leaders, deluded by visions of granduer and a Woke dystopia, are drunk on their own generously spiked Cool Aid: a mixture of Western superiority and rights to remake the world as the West sees proper (and profitable) at any minute in time and a perverse, historical russophobia that clouds the mind, inuring it of all realism and simple common sense.

Not only cannot it not be made to happen -since both America and Russia reject it – but the attempt to make it happen distracts attention from the serious business of making peace. It is, rather, a desperate attempt to make Britain and France relevant to a peace process which they did not initiate and never wanted.

What might be made to happen, because potentially acceptable to both Russia and the United States, is a UN-supervised ceasefire with non-NATO peacekeepers. But there has been no European suggestion to this effect.

Scarcely less foolish is the Paris decision to ‘accelerate’ and ‘toughen’ economic sanctions against Russia. To keep sanctions as a pressure point is perfectly sensible, but to urge their expansion now is to derail peace talks just at the moment when a real prospect of peace has opened up.

Economic sanctions are instruments of war, successors to the blockades. Their phased withdrawal should be part of peace-making.

The project of ‘reassuring’ Ukraine against renewed Russian aggression says nothing about reassuring Russia against future Nato aggression.

This reflects the dominant western view that NATO is a purely defensive alliance, that Russia’s attack on Ukraine was unprovoked, and that therefore any Russian demand for reassurance is bogus.

This flies in face of credible evidence that NATO’s leader, the United States, played an active, and possibly crucial, role in destabilising the elected pro-Russian government of Yanukovych in 2014, and installing a Ukrainian nationalist alternative.*

That the Russian invasion was provoked, is not to say that it was justified. It was a moral and strategic blunder, one of whose consequences was to add two new members to the NATO alliance. Nevertheless the hostility to NATO expansion which underlay it was a product not just of a long history, but of insistent repetition from Gorbachev onward which the West, confident of its victory in the Cold War, cheerfully ignored. It was naive to believe that vengeance would limp after Russia had recovered its strength.

The second strand in western thinking is that democracy is the peaceful, while autocracy is the warlike form of the state. This is because democracies are inherently legitimate, whereas autocracies need to legitimise themselves by wars of conquest. It is therefore always democracies which need reassurance against autocracies, not the other way round.

This is often asserted, but is empirically poorly grounded. Dictatorships may do horrible things to their own people, but few of them have been prepared to risk their own demise by attacking their neighbours.

Hitler, who dominates the western imagination on this topic, is the paradigmatic exception.

Moreover, while democracies may not have much appetite for foreign conquest, they tend to regard their wars as moral crusades, whose only satisfactory outcome is the extirpation of evil. A.J.P. Taylor’s dictum is apposite here: ‘Bismarck fought ‘necessary’ wars and killed thousands; democracies fight ‘just’ wars and kill millions’.

The third strand goes back to the Cold War and reflects the resurrection of the tribe of professional Cold War warriors whose intellectual capital was destroyed by the prospect of the normalised peace which opened up in 1991. But history suggests that their capital was dubiously acquired.

Two recent books by Sergey Radchenko and Vladislav Zubok** offer a Russian perspective. The Americans saw the Cold War as an ideological battle between democracy and totalitarianism, whereas the Soviets (who never used the word ‘war’) were mainly interested in establishing a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. With the experience of both the first and second world wars, they saw a pro-Soviet eastern Europe as an essential buffer against future invasions. The US was encouraged by Latvian, Ukrainian, and Polish lobbies in Washington to believe that Soviet insistence on making Eastern Europe a sphere of influence was only a prelude to the attempt to subjugate all of Europe.

Today exactly the same faulty reasoning is employed to justify Europe’s rearmament against Russia. Buffer zones, spheres of influence (as well as Monroe Doctrines) may be repugnant to our ‘rules based international order’ but they do not portend limitless expansion. It is right to be suspicious of Putin’s intentions without falling for the idea that he will never stop.

In fact Russia under Putin is much less of a threat to Europe than was Russia under Stalin, not least because Stalin had millions of men under arms, whereas Putin can barely muster enough forces to subdue Ukraine. The image of a territorially voracious Russia has been created by western foreign policy establishments, backed by their ever hungry military interests. Eisenhower warned against the ‘military-industrial complex’. Today’s Cold War warriors offer a ‘defence-industrial complex’, or ‘military Keynesianism’, to justify escaping from their self-imposed fiscal rules.

The great value of the Trump intervention is to break the logjam of mutually reinforcing paranoia, and open the way to a new security architecture which addresses the needs of both Ukraine and Russia.

Although our government has abandoned hope of a Ukraine victory it still rejects any talk of Ukrainian territorial concessions. The words ‘compromise peace’ never pass its lips. The aim of a grown-up British -and European- diplomacy now should be to persuade Ukrainians to accept the reality of limited, but real independence, the fruit of its successful resistance to the Russian attempt to restore its servile status.

A compromise peace would leave intact a more compact, and therefore more governable country whose road to NATO may be blocked but whose road to the European Union will be opened up.

Notes:

*For more, see Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (2015).

**Reviewed by Sheila Kirkpatrick, LRB 20 March 2025.

Robert Skidelsky is a member of the British House of Lords, Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, and the author of a prize-winning three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes.

Hysteria has gripped the continent.

It is being spread by political elites who claim peace in Europe is no longer a given.

“Never again” is now a motto forgotten. As if two world wars born in Europe were not enough.

These are the only possible assessments to be drawn from the extraordinary March 5 European Union summit in Brussels at which rearmament and renewed militarization of Europe became the cause to unite an increasingly disunited EU.

Meanwhile, leading media are doing their part to whip up the cries of war.  The Sun tabloid in Britain blared on Monday: “EUROPE ON EDGE: UK planning for boots in Ukraine ‘for years’ & France to ‘mobilise civilians’ as Putin lackey makes chilling WW3 threat.” The Daily Telegraph announced that joint opposition to Russia had brought back the Entente Cordial — the 1904 treaty that ended centuries of antagonism between Britain and France. And a Le Monde headline on Tuesday trumpeted: “Europe’s leading missile manufacturer, converts to the war economy.”

Even here in Slovenia, the front page of last Saturday’s DELO, a leading newspaper, claimed “it may be true that European rearmament under pressure from America and Russia will be the best thing that could happen to the [European] Union. It will become a force.”

History confirms that sheer force has never led to peace.

Neither the U.S. nor Russia are forcing Europe to rearm. Peace from a position of force produces a so-called forced or negative peace, which sooner or later degrades into war. This is the path clearly taken by the European elite who claim Russia threatens peace.

Europe, after World War II, at least outwardly propagated cooperation and peace. Now it chooses mobilization and war for the third time in the last hundred years as a way to achieve dominance, which in the latest version, is called “peace.”

To prevent actual peace, critical voices in the mainstream media are silenced. Instead, European statesmen are boisterously leading the continent blindly into war.

This is what happened before World War I, according to the assessment of the influential American historian Barbara Tuchman.

This danger seems to be recognized, as far the war in Ukraine is concerned, by the otherwise contradictory, unpredictable and often confrontational U.S. President Donald Trump.

Europe Does Not Need a Common Army

In contrast to his predecessor Joe Biden, he seems to be working for peace on the old continent. From this perspective, NATO is obsolete. It appears to be only a matter of time before the United States withdraws from the alliance it has used to control Western Europe throughout the post-war period.

NATO is already in the process of disintegration. Washington has decided that Article 5 of the organization’s founding charter on collective defense for potential European peacekeeping forces in Ukraine, if there is to be one, will not apply.

After NATO’s collapse with U.S. withdrawal, Europe does not need a new military alliance or a common European army.

The latter would presuppose the existence of a common European federal state.. Who would be the decision-making authority of a possible European army? Who would decide on war or peace? Who would command it and in what language?  These questions could revive the Franco-German rivalry.

Already French President Emmanuel Macron is saying that this envisioned European army can deploy to Ukraine without Russia’s permission. It would not be a peacekeeping force then, which requires consent from both sides, but instead a co-belligerent with Ukraine, which Russia has warned would be fair game. 

Independent States

Europe does not need a common European army. The EU must remain a union of independent states.

It needs a new security architecture, which will ensure peace and security for all countries based on mutual trust and coexistence. This will also include Russia, which was and remains a European country.

Had German politicians continued the foreign policy of the Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck from 150 years ago, (who proved through diplomacy that peace in Europe was possible only with stable relations with Russia) the history of the 20th century would probably have been significantly less bloody.

This is forgotten by the likely new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who forsees the revival of German militarism on an anti-Russian basis.

The fundamental security question for today’s Europe is whether Russia, after its increasingly likely military victory in Ukraine, is really preparing for a military campaign against Europe in several stages, as leading European politicians claim.

Some German generals, for example, say Russia will attack Europe within three years at most. European hawks are predicting that the Russian army would first march against the Baltic states, then on Poland and Romania followed by the former Soviet, now independent republics.

There is absolutely no evidence that Vladimir Putin is planning such a suicidal policy. Russia, which is facing a major demographic decline, has neither the human, military nor economic power to do so.

Protecting Russian Minorities’ Rights

The new states that emerged from the former Soviet Union, especially the Baltic states, should, on the other hand, ensure adequate protection and rights for Russian minorities in their countries, a prerequisite for normalizing relations with Moscow.

In Latvia, citizens of Russian origin are refused official travel documents and must travel with international documents. This is undoubtedly unacceptable discrimination.

The war in Ukraine, however we interpret it, is primarily a consequence of NATO expansion and an attempt by American neoconservatives, the majority of whom are in the Democratic Party, to strategically weaken Russia.

Trump has realized that continuing such a policy would lead to World War III, so he is attempting to radically change U.S. foreign policy. China has replaced Russia, in the eyes of the U.S. political establishment as America’s main adversary.

Having damaged their own economies by going along with the Biden administration’s economic war on Russia, the leaders of Germany, France and Great Britain (which sneaked back into the EU through a side door), are trying to solve their economic and political problems by beating on military drums.

German Leopard tanks will replace Volkswagen cars because the German car industry has given in to Chinese competition. In this way, Germany is supposed to restore its declining economic power much the way the United States  emerged from the Great Depression only when its war industry was in full swing during World War II.

The incoming German Chancellor seems intent to implement this prescription. Great Britain, which is facing rapid economic decline, is on the other hand trying to extract massive profits from Ukraine by prolonging the war.

This is the why the British Government signed a 100-year partnership agreement with Ukraine.  Macron meanwhile tries to buy domestic political peace by diverting attention to the bogus Russian threat to Europe and France.

Belonging to this group of nations is the increasingly radical Poland, which is trying to create the most powerful army in Europe that will lead to inevitable friction with Germany.

Instead of a new militarization in the wake of a radically changed NATO without American participation, European countries should turn to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which was established during the Cold War to prevent conflicts such as Ukraine from happening.

The OSCE had neutral observers in Ukraine but is today almost forgotten, or rather, has no serious influence. Diplomacy and peaceful resolution of conflicts are forgotten matters.

No contacts or dialogue between Moscow and Brussels or other European capitals has existed for more than three years. The EU’s foreign policy representative, former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen are the main European warmongers.

The EU Commission for example, decided that the EU would invest as much as 800 billion euros in militarization, instead of development, as proposed by the Italian financier Mario Draghi in his recent report. The EU is increasingly becoming an autocratic formation run by unelected officials at odds with the foundations of democracy.

Europe will become an autonomous strategic power only by renewing dialogue with Russia, not by begging American politicians to include it in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.

According to the well-known American economist and peacemaker Jeffrey Sachs, diplomacy and geopolitics in the EU have sunk to an infantile level. If the EU wants to become an autonomous political power, it must first renounce NATO (before the U.S. leaves it), reestablish political dialogue with Russia and renew cooperation with China.

Only in this way will it maintain strategic autonomy in a future global system. Otherwise, Europe will become the object of a new division of spheres of interest between the great powers, which would spell the end of the EU.

The collapse of NATO would also be an ideal opportunity to declare Europe a nuclear-weapon-free zone, which means that France and Great Britain would have to give up their nukes.

This is at present mere illusion. Within the framework of the OSCE, after the war in Ukraine is over, Europe should first establish at least a minimum level of trust between countries, and then begin negotiations on the reduction of conventional weapons (such negotiations were already underway in Central Europe years ago).

Both Russia and the USA should cancel plans to place intermediate-range missiles in Germany next year and re-establish cooperation in the military field.

Today’s European political elites are unfortunately not capable of such a radical turn. Europe urgently needs a new Willy Brandt or even Helmut Kohl, and a new East policy.

At home here in Slovenia, politicians, should act in accordance with the peace policy written into the Slovenian Constitution and adopt a neutral position, rather than blindly following European hawks into the abyss.

Uroš Lipušcek, a Slovenian TV correspondent, was a “peace candidate” in the European Parliamentary elections in June.

Whether by design or by accident, Zelensky has forced the United States to clarify its stance: Washington is a mediator, not a combatant, and its priority is ending escalation, not taking sides. This marks a stark departure from the previous position, in which the US led a Western coalition against Russia in defense of Ukraine. The message is clear – American support for Kiev is not a matter of principle but merely a tool in a broader geopolitical game.

Western Europe’s Limited Options
The EU has loudly declared that it will never abandon Ukraine. But in reality, it lacks the resources to replace the United States as Kiev’s primary backer. At the same time, reversing course is not so simple. The price of trying to defeat Russia is too high, and the economic toll too severe, but a sudden shift in policy would force Western European leaders to answer for their past decisions. In an EU already grappling with internal unrest, such a reversal would hand ammunition to the political opponents of the bloc’s leaders.

Another key reason Western Europe remains on this path is its post-Cold War reliance on moral arguments as a political tool – both internally and in its dealings with external partners. Unlike traditional powers, the EU is not a state. Where sovereign nations can pivot and adjust policies with relative ease, a bloc of more than two dozen countries inevitably gets bogged down in bureaucracy. Decisions are slow, coordination is imperfect, and mechanisms often fail to function as intended.

For years, Brussels attempted to turn this structural weakness into an ideological strength. The EU, despite its complexity, was supposed to represent a new form of cooperative politics – a model for the world to follow. But it is now clear that this model has failed.

At best, it may survive within Western Europe’s culturally homogeneous core, though even that is uncertain. The world has moved on, and the inefficiencies remain. This makes the dream of an independent, self-sufficient “Europe” – one capable of acting without American oversight – an impossibility.

Adapting to Washington’s New Reality

Western Europe may attempt to endure the turbulence of another Trump presidency, just as it did during his first term. But this is not just about Trump. The shift in US policy is part of a deeper political realignment, one that ensures there will be no return to the golden age of the 1990s and early 2000s.

More importantly, Ukraine has become the catalyst for these changes.  The EU does not have the luxury of waiting things out. Its leaders must decide – quickly – how to respond. Most likely, they will attempt to maintain the appearance of unity with Washington while adapting to new US policies. This will be painful, especially in economic terms. Unlike in the past, modern America acts solely in its own interests, with little regard for the needs of its European allies.

One indicator of Western Europe’s shifting posture may be the upcoming visit of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to Washington. At present, Merz presents himself as a hardliner. But if history is any guide, he may soon shift positions, aligning more closely with Washington’s new direction.

The alternative: Europe vs. America?

There is, of course, another possibility – the EU could attempt to unify and resist Trump’s America. But given the lack of capable leadership and the deep divisions within the bloc, this seems unlikely. Ukraine could serve as a rallying point for European solidarity, but public sentiment within many EU nations makes this improbable.

At the same time, the aggressive way in which Washington now interferes in European domestic politics – actively supporting populist movements sympathetic to Trump – could create an unexpected effect. Western European elites may find themselves forced to consolidate in response, while nationalists, who have long railed against external influence, may struggle to position themselves against this new reality.

Regardless of the outcome, what we are witnessing is an internal crisis within the so-called “collective West.” The very notion of Western unity is at stake. Historically, the political West is a recent construct, largely a product of the Cold War. And even then, the relationship between the Old World and the New was often uneasy. In the 1940s and 1950s, despite its rivalry with the Soviet Union, the US actively encouraged the dismantling of European colonial empires, asserting its own dominance in the process.

The answer to Western Europe’s diminishing global influence back then was deeper integration. Trump now calls the European project a failure, but for decades, Washington saw it as a useful means of streamlining Western politics and economics under American leadership. Today, that calculus has changed. The US no longer views a strong, unified EU as an asset, and it is not shy about making that clear.

If Western European leaders do decide to confront America, it will mark the beginning of a new chapter – one that could signal the definitive end of the Cold War framework that has shaped Western politics for decades.

Russia’s perspective

For Russia, a unified and coordinated EU holds no strategic value. The era in which Moscow entertained the idea of continental integration – including Russia – is long gone. Experience, more than time, has put an end to those illusions.

Moscow’s focus is now on pragmatic opportunities. The internal struggle within the West should be viewed solely from the perspective of what tangible benefits can be derived. Long-term strategic plans are irrelevant in a time of such rapid geopolitical shifts. Right now, the priority is to act decisively, capitalize on the ongoing fractures, and secure Russia’s interests amid the changing global order.

By Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and research director of the Valdai International Discussion Club.

Great to catch up with Pascal Lottaz again on his popular ‘Neutrality Studies’ podcast.

We spent a lot of time talking about the panic and the state of denial the UK and European political elites have been pitched into, following President Trump’s radical shift in US policy towards the war in Ukraine. I hope you enjoy it.

But most wars do not fit that pattern, they generally end with complex peace deals. A far better model for the current conflict would be the Thirty Years’ war that raged in central Europe from 1618 until 1648, and which pitched the Holy Roman Empire against the protestant towns and municipalities supported by Sweden and the Netherlands.

That war did not end with glorious victory for any of the involved parties. But it did end with one of the most important peace treaties of all time: the Peace of Westphalia. One of the important principles it established was that of non-interference in other countries’ domestic policies. It laid the foundation of the modern nation state and marked the beginning of a golden age of European politics, art and science.

Russia’s conflict with the West has gone on for almost as long. Vladimir Putin has waged war in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine and Syria in an attempt to regain those spheres of influence lost after the breakdown of communism in 1990. And without some sort of peace deal, Putin is certain to keep pressing the Russian advantage, with a strategy that may yet involve the Baltic states and Poland.

It is dangerous for Europe to insist, instead, on victory. For while Trump has talked a lot of nonsense about Zelensky and the war, he is right in one critical aspect. Without America, there is no road to victory for Ukraine. This is not primarily about weapons, ammunition, and financial aid, but about satellite support and intelligence. If the US were to switch off the satellites and stop the flow of information, the Europeans have no way of plugging the gap. Without the US, it’s over for Ukraine.

Not only has Europe failed to grasp this, it has also failed to map out a strategic path to victory. Politicians, journalists and academics parrot meaninglessly, that Europe will do whatever it takes. Or they assert that Putin will blink first, if only the war goes on for a little while longer. Or that the Russian economy will collapse as sanctions take their toll. But solidarity is not a strategy. Virtue signalling is not a strategy. Sanctions are not a strategy if the primary goal is to minimise the pain to ourselves.

A strategy is something that is costed, politically stress-tested, and that responds to different scenarios. A strategy has primary targets, together with an agreed definition of second-best outcomes. A strategy also has a clear exit route mapped out. Europe has nothing.

A credible path for a Ukrainian victory would have started three years ago with a massive expansion of military spending by all European Nato countries. There should have been an immediate expansion of military industrial capacity, which has been depleted in most western countries, and a concerted political campaign to organise trade-offs between other spending priorities and defence.

But Germany, France and the UK, those European countries which matter most, didn’t act back then and now all lack the fiscal headroom to corral such an approach. We have not figured out how we can support Ukraine and stay solvent. The most desperate idea has been to plunder Russia’s $300m in foreign reserves, which are currently frozen. Clearly this hasn’t been thought through. If that were to happen, the risk is that Euroclear, the Brussels-based financial depository where the reserves are held, could face a slew of lawsuits and even bankruptcy. The EU would be forced to spend tens of billions to recapitalise the company — potentially costing more than the aid to Ukraine. The trust in Europe as a safe place for assets would be lost and we could end up with a full-blown financial crisis.

“We have not figured out how we can support Ukraine and stay solvent.”

Without a costed exit strategy now, and as America turns away, how then is the EU to defend itself in the future? Even if the EU were to set itself an agreed trajectory towards military spending of 3% of GDP by 2030, and to pool their procurement to make defence spending more efficient, I struggle to see how the continent can find the unity and determination to replace the US as guarantor for our security. Kaja Kallas, High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, laughably exemplified Europe’s myopic attitude to strategy when she said “the free world needs a new leader”. This is preposterous, typical of European grandstanding. The EU, with its veto rights, its qualified majority voting and the explicit exclusion of defence from the single market, is structurally unsuited for foreign and security policy in a Hobbesian world. We couldn’t be further from a Westphalia moment.

We have been here before. Angela Merkel talked about European strategic independence from the US in 2018, after a disastrous meeting with Trump. But she did not put any political capital behind the idea because she did not want to pay the political price.

A structural increase in defence spending would require sacrifice. The US spends 3.5% of its GDP on defence. In 2023, the 27 EU countries spent an average of 1.6% of EU GDP. This gap of almost 2 percentage points arises because we Europeans spend the money on other things. Germany has a gold-plated social system. People are entitled to a basic citizens’ income whether they work or not. Germany has also given itself a budget of €150bn for the energy transition. The US, meanwhile, has food stamps, and no net zero policy. You cannot do it all. There are necessary trade-offs involved which the Europeans have not even begun to discuss.

In their desperation, though, the Europeans are now talking about funding an increase in defence spending through debt. This is economically insane. For that reason, it will also fail to achieve its declared goal — to deter an enemy attack. The credibility of our security policies depends on a willingness to finance them. Defence spending should be funded through current revenue. If you do try to do this through debt, the bond vigilantes are going to get you before Putin does.

Putin must surely see that Europe is desperate. The UK only managed to increase its 2027 military spending target from 2.3% to 2.5% by cutting its foreign aid budget. Meanwhile, France’s divided politics has left the country on an unsustainable fiscal path, even as the Germans are grappling with their own fiscal rules. This molly-coddled, self-absorbed Europe is not about to fight and win a war against Russia. We applaud speeches calling for regime change in Moscow. But we want someone else to do it for us just like in the Second World War. The difference is that back then, America was willing to play a progressively stronger part. This time, the US is in open retreat.

If the Europeans were smart, they would take Zelensky to one side, without the cameras, and tell him that the game is up, and that he should cut a deal with Trump now. They should insist that what the President was trying to negotiate before the Oval Office showdown is as good as anything Ukraine will ever get — the minerals deal will keep the US engaged in the besieged nation’s future. For now, though, it seems clear that Europe and Ukraine are currently asking for more than Trump is willing to concede, especially since the White House is convinced that they aren’t ready for peace.

Seeking victory, Zelensky walked straight into a trap in the White House last week. He may have been more at ease with his European friends in London who cajoled him with warm words and big promises. But their shared illusion that there is a path to victory will inevitably lead to a more dangerous future for us all.

Wolfgang Münchau is the Director of Eurointelligence and an UnHerd columnist.

“All I’m seeing the U.S. do to appease Russia in the short term is repealing completely pointless resolutions, empty gestures and good faith promises.

“We’ve seen this before and until something concrete happens from the U.S. side I’ll remain pessimistic.”

By the time you read this, the second meeting between the United States and Russian delegations will be underway in Saudi Arabia. The Russian plan is already on the table. We have to wait to see what the Trump team is proposing.

I hope the Russians understand that Donald Trump’s views towards Russia reflect a minority view in the United States. Most of the Republican and Democrat politicians, as well as the majority of intelligence and defense officers, see no difference between the Russia that exists today and the Soviet Union. Today, for example, a friend shared an email with me that he received from his buddy, a recently retired CIA case officer who is still doing contract work for the Agency. I am an acquaintance of that former CIA officer. In the email he voiced outrage at Trump “cozying up” to Putin and exclaimed: “I’ve spent forty years fighting those bastards and Trump is surrendering.”

The US foreign policy establishment is like a prehistoric bug frozen in amber. They are trapped in the past. They have a fixed image of Russia as an authoritarian communist dictatorship and cannot accept the reality that modern Russia has reverted to its nationalist, Christian roots.

The foreign policy mavens in the US labor under the delusion that the United States has some leverage over Russia. They fail to understand that Russia does not need a damn thing from the United States. The same cannot be said for the US, which relies on Russia’s ability to supply fertilizer and some enriched uranium.

Despite all the tough talk from Washington about sanctioning Russia, the United States continues to import significant amounts of fertilizer from Russia. In 2023, the U.S. imported $1.62 billion worth of fertilizers from Russia, making it the third-largest destination for Russian fertilizer exports8. This represents a substantial portion of the U.S. fertilizer import market.

More recent data from 2024 shows:

1. In March 2024, American companies spent $174 million on fertilizers imported from Russia, a 10% increase from February of the same year.
2. Russian fertilizers accounted for 17.1% of all fertilizers imported into the United States, up from 9.7% a year earlier.
3. For the first 11 months of 2024, fertilizers were the most-imported commodity to the U.S. from Russia, with a value of almost one billion U.S. dollars.

The imports include various types of fertilizers:

• Potash fertilizers: $95.5 million in March 2024
• Nitrogen-containing fertilizers: $75.3 million in March 2024
• Phosphorous fertilizers: $3.1 million in March 2024

While the U.S. does not impose direct sanctions on Russian fertilizer, this practice has been criticized as potentially funding Russia’s war efforts. Despite these concerns, the import of Russian fertilizers continues to play a significant role in the U.S. agricultural sector.

Uranium is a different story. According to recent data, the United States imports relatively little uranium ore directly from Russia. In 2022, Russia accounted for about 12% of U.S. uranium purchases6. Russia plays a more significant role in other parts of the nuclear fuel supply chain, particularly in uranium enrichment.

• The United States is totally dependent on uranium imports. The supply comes from the following countries:
• Canada: 27%
• Kazakhstan: 25%
• Russia: 12%
• Uzbekistan: 11%
• Australia: 9%
• Other countries: 16%

In 2023, U.S. nuclear generators used 32 million pounds of imported uranium concentrate (U3O8), with only 0.05 million pounds coming from domestic production5. This means that imports accounted for 99% of the U3O8 used in 2023 to make nuclear fuel.

While Russia’s direct uranium ore exports to the U.S. are relatively small, Russia has a significant impact on the global nuclear fuel market due to its large uranium enrichment capacity. Russia accounts for approximately 44% of the world’s uranium enrichment capacity and supplies about 35% of U.S. imports for nuclear fuel.

In May 2024, the United States enacted a ban on imports of uranium products from Russia, which took effect in August 2024. 5 This ban is expected to significantly alter the U.S. nuclear fuel supply chain in the coming years.

Trump’s hopes of crafting a deal with Russia may be sabotaged by the petulance and belligerence of the Europeans. Here is Ursula Fond of Lying speaking in Kiev:

Most of the leaders in Europe are keen on keeping the war going. Yet, they lack the economic and military muscle to back up their bold proclamations. These clowns do not realize that Europe is no longer a relevant player on the world stage. Russia understands this, which is why it is focused on talking to Donald Trump. Without Washington’s continued support, Ukraine’s ability to sustain the war will be crippled.

Transshipment of Russian gas to Europe via Turkey hit a new all-time high this week as gas storage in EU tanks is running down faster than any time in the last five years.

Is Europe facing a new energy crisis? Well, yes and no. The energy system is under pressure thanks to the combination of a cold winter, reductions in supply thanks to the end of Ukraine transit gas and rising competition with Asia that is hoarding gas in anticipation of Trump tariffs.

That has already sent prices up to around $680 per thousand cubic metres – about three-times higher than normal.

It’s not at “perfect storm” levels, but these are the new long-term problems that the EU will have to deal with as a result of the massive changes that have happened to Europe’s energy security equation. The fundamental problem is that energy used to be plentiful and cheap when the EU was hooked up to the Russian pipelines, but now it is cut off that makes LNG the key component and as this remains a young industry there is simply not enough LNG in the world to satisfy both the EU and Asia, the main consumer.

This is a real conundrum. Just how bad things have become is evidenced by the talk that has appeared of restarting gas deliveries via Nord Stream, one strand of which is still operational and could be turned on tomorrow. That strand is still full of “technical gas” and could deliver 25bcm of gas a year – exactly the missing amount missing after Ukraine took 15bcm off the market in January and the excess 10bcm that will be burned this season due to the cold weather.

A quick aside: personally, I think that it is inevitable Russian gas deliveries will resume as Europe’s energy equation simply doesn’t add up without it. Moreover, the accelerating climate makes the resumption of Russian deliveries essential as the alternative – using more coal – is simply not an option.

Currently, the policy goal is to end Russian gas imports entirely (they are actually rising) but this is misguided; it’s just Brussels lashing out after being slapped in the face by the Ukraine invasion. The point of reducing Russian gas imports was the end the dependency on Russian energy and so break its leverage over Europe. But you don’t need to reduce imports to zero to achieve that. You only need to reduce them to the point where you can replace Russian gas with, say, LNG if the Kremlin tries to pull that lever. Currently that is about 15% of the mix, which is actually where we are already, down from the 35-40% pre-war. Turning on Russian gas and replacing the expensive LNG imports with cheap piped gas would go a very long way towards solving a lot of Europe’s economic problems. And the potential 25bcm of Nord Stream gas is actually exactly the right amount to make this new equation work. Just politically, it’s an absolute dog to sell.

Of course, everyone is scrambling to close the gap with things like renewables and nuclear, but that takes time and a lot of money. In the meantime, governments have been forced to re-open shuttered coal-fired power plants, screwing up any chance we had of staying under 2C temperature rises and condemning the world to an ecological disaster in the coming decades. But that is a separate problem.

And these high energy prices come on top of the fundamental loss of competitiveness Europe is suffering from, detailed in the Draghi report. There is no way that Europe can solve this problem if it’s paying two- to three-times more for power than everyone else.

And as we have reported, renewables passed a critical mass in the last two years as they have become by far the cheapest way to power your country, so all the emerging markets are throwing themselves into going green. Uzbekistan just enthusiastically increased its mix target to 50%, up from the 25% it reluctantly adopted under pressure from the EBRD at the start of its transition. Germany is planning to burn more coal to get to March without freezing.

More LNG is in the works from both the US and Qatar, but both want long-term off take deals to make the required investments, which Europe remains reluctant to sign. It is assumed that within the coming years it can wean itself of gas completely as part of the REPowerEU initiative, but the question remains of how to get from here to there?

Bottom line is it’s going to be very hard. There are going to be a lot of fudges. And the climate goals will be sacrificed in the meantime, which for me is a total disaster and indicative of the short-term thinking that dominates the capitalist system. I keep coming back to China, which to my mind, as far as energy is concerned anyway, is the only grown up in the room. It remains well within its carbon budget allotted by the Paris Agreement and is hands down the global leader in the production and use of renewables. Two out of three solar panels in use today are in China and this power is essentially free once the fixed costs are counted out. How is Europe going to compete with that?

Still, does it really matter? There is a new paper out in Nature this week arguing that not only have we missed the 1.5C Paris target – last year all 12 months were over 1.5C pre-industrial average – but the upper limit of 2C is also dead. The scientists are talking about a global population reduction that will run into the billions as a result of the changes to agriculture and inhabitability of large swathes of land so there will be plenty of room and resources left for the survivors.

How bad will it get? It’s easy to doomsay, and you can comfort yourself by arguing “no one really knows”, but given the cataclysmic possible worst case scenarios, surely it should be a question of “hope for the best, but plan for the worst.” That clearly means a global effort. Stop the war in Ukraine. End the arguments with China. Pay for the green transition in the Developing World. And put the global on a war-time-like crisis footing to deal with these problems. Of course, it’s not going to happen. Instead we have “drill, baby, drill” running the show.

In his famous speech at the UN in December 1988, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would cut its military forces by 500,000 soldiers, and 50,000 Soviet soldiers would be removed from the territory of Warsaw Pact allies. In November 1989, Moscow allowed the fall of the Berlin Wall without intervening. In December 1989, Gorbachev and Bush met in Malta and declared an end to the Cold War.

In November 1990, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe was signed, an agreement based on the principles of the Helsinki Accords. The charter laid the foundation for a new inclusive pan-European security that recognised the principle of “the ending of the division of Europe” and pursuit of indivisible security (security for all or security for none):

“With the ending of the division of Europe, we will strive for a new quality in our security relations while fully respecting each other’s freedom of choice in that respect. Security is indivisible and the security of every participating State is inseparably linked to that of all the others”.

An inclusive pan-European security institution based on the Helsinki Accords (1975) and the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (1990) was eventually established in 1994 with the foundation of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). The OSCE Bucharest Document of December 1994 reaffirmed:

“They remain convinced that security is indivisible and that the security of each of them is inseparably linked to the security of all others. They will not strengthen their security at the expense of the security of other States”.

NATO Expansion Cancels Pan-European Security

Yet, security in Europe came in direct conflict with America’s ambitions for global hegemony. As Charles de Gaulle had famously noted, NATO was an instrument for US primacy from across the Atlantic. Preserving and expanding NATO would serve that purpose as the US could perpetuate Russia’s weakness and reviving tensions would ensure that Europe’s security dependence could be converted into economic and political obedience.

Why manage security competition when there is one dominant side? The decision to expand NATO cancelled the pan-European security agreements as the continent was redivided, and indivisible security was abandoned by expanding NATO’s security at the expense of Russia’s security. US Secretary of Defence William Perry considered resigning from his position in opposition to NATO expansion. Perry also argued that his colleagues in the Clinton administration recognised NATO expansion would cancel the post-Cold War peace with Russia, yet the prevailing sentiment was that it did not matter as Russia was now weak. However, George Kennan, the architect of the US containment policy against the Soviet Union, warned in 1997:

“Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the cold war, should East-West relations become centered on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom”.¹

NATO was continuously described as the “insurance guarantee” that would deal with Russia if NATO expansion would create conflicts with Russia. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright explained in April 1997: “On the off-chance that in fact Russia doesn’t work out the way that we are hoping it will… NATO is there”.² In 1997, then-Senator Joe Biden predicted that NATO membership for the Baltic States would cause a “vigorous and hostile” response from Russia. However, Biden argued that Russia’s alienation did not matter as they did not have any alternative partners. Biden mocked Moscow’s warnings that Russia would be compelled to look towards China in response to NATO expansion and joked that if the partnership with China failed to deliver, then Russia could alternatively form a partnership with Iran.³

Russia Continued to Push for a Greater Europe

When it became evident that NATO expansionism would make the inclusive OSCE irrelevant, President Yeltsin and later President Putin attempted to explore the opportunity for Russia to join NATO. They were both met with a cold shoulder in the West. Putin also attempted to establish Russia as America’s reliable partner in the Global War on Terror, but in return, the US pushed another round of NATO expansion and “colour revolutions” along Russia’s borders.

In 2008, Moscow proposed constructing a new pan-European security architecture. It was opposed by Western states as it would weaken the primacy of NATO.⁴ In 2010, Moscow proposed an EU-Russia Free Trade Zone to facilitate a Greater Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok, which would provide mutual economic benefits and mitigate the zero-sum format of the European security architecture. However, all proposals for a Helsinki-II agreement were ignored or criticised as a sinister ploy to divide the West.

Ukraine was “the brightest of all redlines” for Russia and would likely trigger a war, according to the current CIA Director William Burns.⁵ Nonetheless, in February 2014, NATO-backed a coup in Kiev to pull Ukraine into NATO’s orbit. As predicted by Burns, a war began over Ukraine. The Minsk agreement could have resolved the conflict between NATO and Russia, although the NATO countries later admitted that the agreement was merely intended to buy time to arm Ukraine.

The Collapse of Pan-European Security

Gorbachev concluded that NATO expansionism betrayed the Helsinki Accords, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, and the OSCE as agreements for pan-European security:

NATO’s eastward expansion has destroyed the European security architecture as it was defined in the Helsinki Final Act in 1975. The eastern expansion was a 180-degree reversal, a departure from the decision of the Paris Charter in 1990 taken together by all the European states to put the Cold War behind us for good. Russian proposals, like the one by former President Dmitri Medvedev that we should sit down together to work on a new security architecture, were arrogantly ignored by the West. We are now seeing the results.⁶

Putin agreed with Gorbachev’s analysis:

We have done everything wrong…. From the beginning, we failed to overcome Europe’s division. Twenty-five years ago, the Berlin Wall fell, but invisible walls were moved to the East of Europe. This has led to mutual misunderstandings and assignments of guilt. They are the cause of all crises ever since.⁷

George Kennan predicted in 1998 that when conflicts eventually start as a result of NATO expansionism, then NATO would be celebrated for defending against an aggressive Russia:

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war… There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves…. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are —but this is just wrong.⁸

Within the West, it has been nearly impossible to warn against the predictable collapse of European security. The only acceptable narrative has been that NATO expansion was merely “European integration”, as countries in the shared neighbourhood between NATO and Russia were compelled to decouple from the largest state in Europe. It was evident that redividing the continent would recreate the logic of the Cold War, and it was equally evident that a divided Europe would be less prosperous, less secure, less stable, and less relevant in the world. Yet, arguing for not dividing the continent is consistently demonised as taking Russia’s side in a divided Europe. Any deviation from NATO’s narratives comes with a high social cost as dissidents are smeared, censored and cancelled. The combination of ignorance and dishonesty by the Western political-media elites has thus prevented any course correction.

1. G.F., Kennan, ‘A Fateful Error’, The New York Times, 5 February 1997. ↩︎
2. T.G. Carpenter and B. Conry, NATO Enlargement: Illusions and Reality. Cato Institute, 1998, p.205. ↩︎
3. G. Kaonga, ‘Video of Joe Biden Warning of Russian Hostility if NATO Expands Resurfaces’, Newsweek, 8 March 2022. ↩︎
4. G. Diesen and S. Wood, ‘Russia’s proposal for a new security system: confirming diverse perspectives’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, vol.66, no.4, 2012, pp.450-467. ↩︎
5. W.J. Burns, The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal, New York, Random House, 2019, p.233. ↩︎
6. M. Schepp and B. Sandberg, ‘Gorbachev Interview: ‘I Am Truly and Deeply Concerned’’, Spiegel, 16 January 2015. ↩︎
7. N. Bertrand, ‘PUTIN: The deterioration of Russia’s relationship with the West is the result of many ‘mistakes’’, Business Insider, 11 January 2016. ↩︎
8. T.L. Friedman, ‘Foreign Affairs; Now a Word From X.’, The New York Times, 2 May 1998. ↩︎