Thursday, Nov. 7, has been an interesting day for those who follow the world’s politics. Somewhat surrealistic, but that’s how everything is in the last couple of years or even decades. It’s not just that Putin spoked at the 21st annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club; there has been also the 5th European Political Community Summit in Budapest. Ideas have been expressed, and not the greatest possible ones.

What to watch (or not)

From Putin’s speech and Q&A, I’ve watched about 2h30, and not from the beginning. But let me first post some links:

For Putin’s speech and session of questions, the Kremlin started to publish 🖊️ an official transcript, but it’s not complete at the time of writing.

I can’t possibly comment on all the ideas expressed by Putin or by those who asked him questions; you might already have read reports on some main ideas, although I’m sure they oversimplified everything.

For instance, Meduza wrote on how the Kremlin seeks to make Putin’s Valdai Club speech into the foundation of a Russian-defended ‘new world order’:

The administration breaks Putin’s “new world order doctrine” into six points:

  1. Openness between states;
  2. The absence of “universal dogmas”;
  3. The necessity of considering each country’s voice in making “global decisions”;
  4. The rejection of certain international blocs (this apparently doesn’t apply to the BRICS organization);
  5. Closing the developmental gap between nations; and
  6. Pursuing equality for all peoples.

The Kremlin’s guidelines tell the media to emphasize that “Russia in the Putin era” has a special role in “building the new world order.” Russia’s grand contribution, says the presidential administration, is to “protect the rights and freedoms of humanity.” At the same time, the Kremlin’s guidelines ignore the many rights and freedoms that Russian officials have legally revoked in recent years.

Obviously, and notwithstanding Putin’s propensity for creating complex narratives that ignore reality and history in order to recreate the past, invent a different present, and provide a hypothetical future in which the “Russian World” (Русский мир, Russkiy Mir) plays a central role, such events should be analyzed more thoroughly than the mainstream media bothers to.

But no, I’m not going to do that. What I heard (and saw) made me think again about the current mess we live, and I wanted to write down some of the ideas that came to my mind. Unfortunately, more than one week later, these ideas are gone. And I’m not paid to give political advice, you know. I almost wanted to delete the draft of this post: what’s the point to write for about five readers? Most visits to my blog are purely occasional, and they come from Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Brave Search, Yandex, Baidu, Ecosia, ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, even Wikipedia. Either way, I abandoned a couple of would-be chapters.

One funny thing that I remember from Putin’s utterances: that Europe is confronted with a “brain deficit”; decisions are taken by politicians who have no understanding of economics.

This was, I guess (the official transcript stopped earlier, and I’m not going to watch the video again), in conjunction with a Swiss journalist who, echoing Viktor Orbán, said that Chancellor Schröder was the last supporter of strategic autonomy of Germany and Europe. Indeed, on Oct. 31, Viktor Orbán and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder met in Vienna:

Orbán praised Schröder as the statesman who defended Europe’s strategic autonomy and effectively saved the German economy. Gerhard Schröder, in turn, expressed support for Orbán’s bold peace initiatives and would like the rest of Europe to join him in the quest for a specifically European solution to the problem in Ukraine.
…
Both Schröder and Orbán are convinced that Russia cannot be defeated militarily. Time is working against Zelensky, and Russia will win this war. Before actual peace negotiations are possible, a ceasefire must be concluded. But the EU is ignoring reality and still believes that Ukraine can and will win. It is “a sad story that Europe does not want to be on the side of peace,” and that is why Schröder has “no hope for Europe”: “Anyone who wants peace is insulted as being anti-democratic and pushed aside.”
…
Both leaders reject the accusation of appeasement against an imperialist aggressor.

Now, let’s put the other ideas aside and go back to the concept that Schröder had defended Europe’s strategic autonomy. What does “autonomy” stand for, as long as Schröder has subordinated Germany and Europe to the Russian natural gas? Autonomy from the United States? Because Russia is always the good guy, right? The Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact (called “Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact” in the West) was forgotten, right? It included the sharing of Poland between Germany and the USSR. And Stalin’s forced communization of Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania (though it later broke away from Soviet influence and aligned with China) was the proof that the Russians can be trusted more than the Yankees, eh?

From the “traditional” reinterpretation of the history by Putin, which includes the neo-Nazism in Ukraine and Western Europe, and the aggressive extension of NATO eastward, I’ll quote this part:

Russia is fighting for its freedom, rights, and sovereignty. I am not exaggerating, because over the previous decades everything, on the face of it, looked favourable and nice when they turned the G7 into the G8 and, thankfully, invited us to be members.

Do you know what was going on there? I witnessed it first-hand. You arrive at a G8 meeting, and it becomes immediately clear that prior to the G8 meeting, the G7 had got together and discussed things among themselves, including with regard to Russia, and then invited Russia to come. You look at it and smile. I always have. They give you a warm hug and a pat on the back. But in practice they do something opposite. And they never stop to make their way forward.

This can be seen particularly clearly in the context of NATO’s eastward expansion. They promised they would never expand, but they keep doing it. In the Caucasus, and with regard to the missile defence system – take anything, any key issue – they simply did not give a hoot about our opinion. In the end, all of that taken together started looking like a creeping intervention which, without exaggeration, sought to either degrade us or, even better for them, to destroy our country, either from within or from outside.

Eventually, they got to Ukraine, and moved into it with their bases and NATO. In 2008, they decided at a meeting in Bucharest to open the doors to NATO for Ukraine and Georgia. Why, pardon me for my plain language, why on earth would they do that? Were they confronted with any difficulties in international affairs? Indeed, we did not see eye to eye with Ukraine on gas prices, but we addressed these issues effectively anyway. What was the problem? Why do it and create grounds for a conflict? It was clear from day one what it would lead to ultimately. Still, they kept pressing ahead with it. Next thing you know they started expanding into our historical territories and supporting a regime that clearly tilted toward neo-Nazism.

Therefore, we can safely say and reiterate that we are fighting not only for our freedom, not only our rights, or our sovereignty, but we are upholding universal rights and freedoms, and the continued existence and development of the absolute majority of the countries around the world. To a certain extent, we see this as our country’s mission as well.

For fuck’s sake! I mentioned the fake promise of not extending NATO in my post of September 2, and previously on March 4. I mentioned it even in my first post about the Ukrainian war, on March 2, 2022, and in many comments I added to it. Let’s use proper logic:

  1. The USSR breaks, the Warsaw Pact breaks, but NATO doesn’t, and US troops keep being stationed in Europe. Not nice.
  2. Does this mean that NATO has Russia for an enemy and its main target? Maybe, but the official purpose of NATO is “mutual defense”—and how about the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), an EU-like organization centered around Russia and having the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) as a military alliance for six members? Military alliances seem legit.
  3. Russia felt threatened by the “door opened” to Ukraine and Georgia in 2008 by NATO. Note that this was only a distant possibility. The statement that “they started expanding into our historical territories” is completely bullshit! Russia doesn’t have any “historical territories” and neither do other countries! Russia simply can’t accept its current borders! Which, of course, is unacceptable.
  4. Russia felt threatened by the 2014 change of regime in Kyiv. Why? Because its friend Yanukovych wasn’t anymore in power? Note that the reason of the Euromaidan was an association agreement with the European Union, which does not have a joint army. The EU is not the NATO.
  5. As a reaction, Russia annexed Crimea. This, of course, is unacceptable.
  6. Even before that, pro-Russian separatists, backed by Russia, declared independence in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Eastern Ukraine. This is unacceptable.
  7. The Minsk I and Minsk II agreements were not observed by any of the parties. Not nice.
  8. Ukraine undertook various political, economic, and military reforms aimed at aligning the country with Western standards, with financial aid, technical assistance, and military support from the United States and European countries. Still, this is the sovereign right of any state, and even more so when parts of this state have been occupied by another state (Crimea) or have illegally seceded (in the East).
  9. In 2019, the Constitution of Ukraine was amended to enshrine the country’s aspirations to join the European Union and NATO. Still a sovereign right of any country, in no way directed against Russia.
  10. Throughout 2021, Russia significantly increased its military presence near the Ukrainian border, building up its forces. Not nice!
  11. February 24, 2022: Russia started the invasion of a neighboring sovereign country that has never attacked nor threatened Russia.
  12. Furthermore, Russia didn’t just attempt to occupy territory, or to topple the government of the occupied country. Its military forces committed a never-ending series of atrocities against civilians, breaking all the laws of war. Torture and executions also targeted the POWs. Yes, such things happen in any war. No, not to this extent. Not since World War II. No, Vietnam wasn’t comparable. So Russia’s position is undefendable.

I could listen to all of Putin’s talks since 2008, or I could read them (which I did), and, with all the objectivization efforts, I could not be persuaded by Putin’s deceiving rewriting of history. Believe me, I tried hard, very hard, and for years. I almost succeeded. But then, this bastard invaded Ukraine. And it wasn’t like when the US had invaded Panama. Also, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo aside, it also can’t be compared to the invasion of Iraq.

What keeps being fascinating about Putin’s Q&A sessions or interviews (remember the interview with Tucker Carlson? YouTube; kremlin.ru) is to watch and realize that his New World Order is actually starting to take shape, that BRICS & friends are more and more influential, and that more and more people take Putin for a new Messiah. This is fascinating and frightening at the same time. I wish it was a dream.

Let’s talk about today’s Russia

Suppose I take Putin’s claims for real. How about I make a list of facts that are not consistent with his claims of Russia fighting for “not only for our freedom, not only our rights, or our sovereignty, but we are upholding universal rights and freedoms, and the continued existence and development of the absolute majority of the countries around the world”?

1 ● The obsession with Nazism and Banderism. Everything that’s not in line with Putin’s vision of the world is Nazism. Ukrainians are Nazis and Banderites. Grow up, man! Look outside, it’s 2024, and soon 2025!

2 ● The obsession with “America and everyone in the West want to destroy Russia.” That was an idea that faded after the disbanding of the USSR. Putin has made it raise again to levels unheard of after the death of Brezhnev.

3 ● The way the troops are behaving abroad. I don’t need to elaborate. Rapes, executions of civilians and POW, torture camps. Beyond the Bucha massacre, anyway.

A note on whataboutism. Unlike others, I’m normally for it, not against it. As in, “Look who’s talking!” As in Khrushchev’s “But you’re hanging Negroes!” But America’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” are a completely different matter. What they did in Vietnam and Iraq doesn’t excuse any abuse committed at a later time by other state actors.

4 ● It’s also unexplainable how a war of conquest is conducted as if the main purpose were to destroy as much as possible. Does Russia want to annex devastated, useless land only?

5 ● The way most Russian troops are cannon fodder, lacking the necessary training and equipment. Putin is going to fight until the last Russian soldier, right? They’re all expendable.

6 ● The newest citizens are sent to the front line. This is grotesque. Indeed, those coming from former Soviet Republics and who, after having lived and worked legally for enough years to become citizens of the Russian Federation, did obtain the citizenship, have been targeted for forced recruitment to be sent to Ukraine. I’ve never heard of such a way a country is “rewarding” its freshest citizens!

7 ● The “initiation process” in the Russian military, often amounting to torture. (I guess it’s called hazing in AmEn; similar to the French bizutage.)

8 ● The systematic torture in Russian’s jails and penal colonies. Not so much in pre-trial detention, though. It’s called “intake,” and it can kill you.

9 ● The way people die in Russia’s jails, and I don’t only mean Navalny or this journalist. Remember Sergei Magnitsky? Also, too many Russian personalities have allegedly committed suicide in prison, sometimes even in pre-trial detention.

10 ● The defenestration epidemic. Or the drowning in the bathtub. Or whatever happens to those who stop agreeing with Putin. Sometimes, the suicide epidemic affected even innocent anticorruption officials, as it was the case with Boris Kolesnikov. It’s a long story. It’s not easy to stay alive in Russia.

11 ● The contamination with Polonium-210 of tea, even outside Russia, such as in the case of Alexander Litvinenko.

12 ● Other “suspicious” (to use a euphemism) deaths. Sergei Yushenkov. Boris Nemtsov. Anna Politkovskaya.

13 ● The way the terrorists responsible for the Crocus attack were tortured and mauled. They didn’t even try to hide it. One terrorist (supposing they got the right guys) had been electrocuted genitally (similar to the use of gégène by France during the Algerian War). Another guy had a partially ripped-off ear. A third one was so heavily sedated and brought to trial in a wheelchair, so I even wondered whether he was still alive. What a masquerade of a judiciary!

14 ● The extended censorship. Not just in the press, but also at a technical level. Recently, Roskomnadzor has blocked traffic to Cloudflare-hosted websites that use the new Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) technology.

15 ● The way people are arrested and sentenced to long prison times for “crimes” such as the mentioning of “the war in Ukraine” instead of using the official designation of “special operation,” for a simple placard with a few words, or just for showing up to a demonstration. Recently, a Russian court sentenced a Moscow pediatrician to 5½ years in a penal colony for an alleged unpatriotic statement in which she “spread fake news about the Russian army.” But there have been countless similar cases since the beginning of the invasion. There was a snitch who reported her, just like in the good old Soviet times.

16 ● The huge efforts taken to prevent people from running against Putin in the so-called free elections, even if they didn’t have any real chances of getting elected. Most of Russia’s opposition is either dead, in exile abroad, or in prison at home.

18 ● The campaigns meant to spread misinformation and influence elections in other countries, called “hybrid war” in contemporary lingo, especially when they include hacking or attacking official sites, not just troll factories and bot farms. And I’m not even talking of America! Let’s talk about Moldova, Georgia, and the rest of Europe!

19 ● The alliances with North Korea, Iran, China. OK, let’s leave China alone. It’s not China’s fault that the collective West or the global North have become dependent on China’s industry. The BRICS countries didn’t include North Korea and Iran, but now Russia has strategic allies in these countries. Really, Vladimir Vladimirovich? You extended your partnership to the least democratic countries in the world, North Korea and Iran?

The worst conditions of human rights and rule of law as of 2024: Iran, Burma, China, Libya, Russia, North Korea. For the first time, North Korea is not the worst of all, although, in fact, it is. And life in China is still OK-ish.

Freedom House, which doesn’t assess North Korea for lack of data, considers Turkmenistan the least democratic country, followed by Azerbaijan, Russia and Tajikistan (it’s a tie between Azerbaijan and Russia). The Global Freedom Scores are somewhat different. The Internet Freedom Score has China as the worst, followed by Myanmar, Iran, Cuba (?), Russia, Belarus and Vietnam.

20 ● North Korea has ratified a mutual defense treaty with Russia signed by the two countries’ leaders in June, which calls for each side to come to the other’s aid in case of an armed attack. So it’s not anymore a political and economic alliance around BRICS. Not even a NATO-like entity around CSTO. It’s a direct “military Brüderschaft” with the most dictatorial regime of the 21st century! So far, North Korea was being kept in check by China. From now on, let the party begin! Oh, for when can we expect a similar treaty with Iran?

An unexpected useful idiot

Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, a rather shady Romanian “commentator on national politics and European affairs,” and “one of the most prominent civil society activists” (I quoted from Wikipedia) recently gave an interview (in Romanian, jointly with another personality), in which she literally adopted Putin’s and Mearsheimer justification:

— How do you see Romania’s role in this equation?

— We are the ones to blame—not all of us, but [former president] Traian Băsescu and his sycophants, who are bragging about it. We were messing around to invite Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, which had no way of joining, and we challenged the Russians! You’d say that George W. Bush shouldn’t have come after us, but people must have forgotten that books with his pearls of thought and vocabulary were sold in bookstores…

…

I think the biggest profit for everyone would be to clean the rifle less and talk less warlike nonsense, like in the old rabbit and the wolf joke. Our ultimate defense plan is to have the whole NATO world come to us to defend us from the Russians. After all this time, we still could not admit that if our only development plan was not to put missiles at Deveselu, without even explaining to the Russians why we need them against Iran, maybe we should not be afraid of them today, having they left in 1958.

Now we have to turn it upside down, explain to young people why we need them to join the army. Let’s deal with Moldova, which is not won and where mistakes are being made. Trump will shorten the front and shift the center of gravity to areas of greater business interest. So it is to our advantage that this conflict is closed, and not by a ceasefire, but by a more lasting peace, even if it takes years to build, as it took years for those who made the Helsinki accords. People don’t want war, even though they are indoctrinated on TV—we need diplomacy and a more nuanced understanding of the world, because wars are not video games.

There’s a concept called “useful idiot.” There are so many such individuals!

The interview references an article in the Journal of Common Market Studies, by the same Alina Mungiu-Pippidi: Where Should Europe End? Constructing the Eastern Frontier (22 October 2024), doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13697 (also as PDF).

Without any claim to a full-fledged meta-analysis, this article reviews the dominant paradigms shaping the current understandings of how far to the East the EU should stretch and what kind of border would it have. I follow a congruence analysis approach, as in the case of the Cuban missile crisis, with the caveat that international relations paradigms fall short of hypotheses (Allison, 1969). As they mix fact with social construction, they cannot be fully invalidated, even if they can be checked and found to differ in their accounting of facts when the causes of the problem are concerned. Where their predictive ability is in question, however, the human agency and effect invested in such theories become a part of and a cause of alteration. Lord Curzon, then the Viceroy of India, was under the illusion – when invading Tibet in 1903 – that he pre-empted a threat from autocratic Russia (Morris, 1978, p. 128). General von Moltke, the Chief of the General Staff of the German Army in 1914, engaged in the 1st World War because the Russian mobilisation, fitted his long-held belief that Russia would attack Germany one day (Clark, 2012). Vladimir Putin professed publicly several times his fear of NATO getting too close to Russia’s border before he removed this threat by invading Ukraine himself. Powerful metaphors like, ‘Thucydides’, trap’ deal with imagined or misconstrued threats, which often result in real wars (Allison, 2017). Whilst sufficient evidence exists to check each paradigm against the facts up to a certain point, their following affects the forecast of the problem, as they become facts, when not altogether self-fulfilling prophecies.

As the article is a bit insipid, let me translate from the interview, where the bitch is using more colloquial ways of saying:

We reviewed conceptions of where the border between Europe and Russia should be—that it’s not just Ukraine’s border—and, by implication, how we end the conflict. We examined the historical and contemporary arguments that cosmopolitan-European versus imperial identity is the separating criterion, then the assumption that it is a border of civilizations, then the argument of separation between democracy and autocracy, and finally one between spheres of interests.

The first three variants do not hold water, although they convince many people. The conflict is between Ukrainian and Russian nationalism, and there are autocrats in the European camp as well, not just their own—Erdoğan and Azerbaijan. A clash of civilizations between two closely related Orthodox countries is absurd, as Samuel Huntington said, enough to see them fighting to nationalize the once common Russian Orthodox Church to see that nationalism, not religious civilization, is stronger.

From the beginning, Trump has been a supporter of the fourth option, the realistic and geopolitical one, because he is not an adept of the democratic propaganda, he conceives the world as a competition between interests. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because the first variants led nowhere. Except more war and poverty. Does anyone in their right mind really believe that democratizing Russia through war is a serious objective, when in tiny Tunisia, totally dependent on Western aid and the only democracy since the Arab Spring, the president has suspended parliament in the meantime and the West has said nothing?

Poland got its NATO membership, the first in the East, because Lech Wałęsa spoke to Boris Yeltsin, who gave him the green light but asked him in return not to interfere in Ukraine. As Henry Kissinger said, an imbalance was created by the West advancing into countries from which Russia had voluntarily withdrawn after 1992 (in our case or Austria’s much earlier!).

Rebalancing the balance of power, after the conflict has led to an unprecedented rapprochement between Russia and China, will be painful, but it has to be done, and it is a job for realists, not propagandists who have got it into people’s heads that they are watching an episode of the War of the Rings.

To make it even clearer, the way we conceive conflict, as a conflict between identities, civilizations or regimes, has no resolution! Or is it really such a coincidence that 150 years after the Crimean War, the West is once again allying itself with Turkey against Russia, even though both are dictatorships? No! It is, as it was in the previous Crimean War, the need to check the power of Russia, which clashes with Western interests.

But Russia also has no interest in being at continuous war with the West. Nor the West, to confront China plus Russia. Let’s get it backwards a bit—this Putin at the International Criminal Court route where we ask the poor Mongols to pump Putin up when he gets off at the airport is ridiculous. The Third World is starting to line up against us—it doesn’t sit well with us when we see how many people went to the BRICS summit with Putin.

We need a different approach. People are rightly afraid of a deal between the great powers, but to lead the world to nuclear catastrophe because of Crimea, which ended up in Ukraine by mistake, or because of economic competition with China, is an aberration. It means Lenin was right. No, there are ways of reaching peace, grouping interests to start a settlement from the smallest, books and articles are being published in Foreign Affairs, and Kissinger’s doctrine of détente is living a new life.

The analogy with Munich is absurd, as the British still ended up fighting the Germans a year later, while the West rules out fighting Russia today because of the nuclear thing. Yalta, um, is closer to the border issue in my article.

Take Moldova, for example. To join the EU with Transnistrians and Gagauzians is absurd; nobody believes it, and there are many of them, so the battle is in whose sphere of influence it will be, European or Russian, it will not be a full EU member like in the old days. And what do we give Russia to let us take it? Already Azerbaijan was given something, no one opposed the cleansing of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh; clearly it was not the Western sphere of influence there, so even during the Ukrainian war they allowed themselves to do that.

The idea that you can take everything and give nothing is not realistic, but you don’t need to give away countries and populations that don’t want to live under the Russians. There are other Russian interests, other territories of interest. But it’s true that the alternative to war is trade. The war has already ruined Europe, so I think it is good to look for alternatives to it, to save the Ukrainians and the Bessarabians—those who want to be saved, as not all of them, some prefer the Russians—but without a third world war.

It’s not Trump’s relationship with Putin that matters; it’s that they have similar transactional natures. And Ukraine doesn’t have veto power because it couldn’t hold up without Western money or weapons. As I say in my text, only America can make peace and tell Ukraine what kind of peace it will make, but that doesn’t mean that Europe shouldn’t try to bring its own ideas to the negotiating table. We have our values, and even if peace will be about interests, let’s not forget that the end of the Cold War came not only because of Reagan’s arms race, but also because of the détente given by the Helsinki agreement, where Europeans played a big role, and they won major human rights concessions from the Russians—the birth certificate of civil society in Central Europe.

We need a new Helsinki, a reset of the East-West relationship, to negotiate an end to all post-Soviet conflicts, to end armament; we have basically gone back fifty years. And we’ve been very lucky so far that there hasn’t been another Chernobyl, and it’s just raining drone skeletons.

Trump won’t back down immediately, as he has peace to negotiate, and in the medium term he will do what he announced—he will force Europeans to become less militarily dependent on the US. Is that a bad thing? The EU is at an impasse—we need to change radically, security and how we fund it need to become core issues. It is sad to see Western countries considering reintroducing compulsory military service, but that’s it.

Same with the political union. The European Union cannot continue with equal members, it will turn into a variable geometry with inner circles, outer circles, peripheries, sanitary corridors and zones of influence. Montenegro will not be the 35th member state with equal voting rights.

Trump’s election will force us to recognize these harsh realities sooner, which were inevitable anyway. The EU as we knew it is gone, it was unsustainable, but it will take time for a new one to take shape. The longer people cling on to the old one, the higher the transition costs will be.

Back to the article:

To conclude, the current European frames of the Eastern border project two deeply hostile identities on both sides of the border and imply that the other – regime, identity or civilisation – is incompatible with the European one. The conflict is thus unavoidable. The only solution ensuing from the identity, democracy and civilisation paradigms is to defeat Russia in order to democratise it or isolate it and build a wall around it. However, Europe and its allies have no plan to conquer Russia, nor to divide it as Germany was divided at the end of the Second World War. The Munich analogy floated around since 2022 misses the point that the West did eventually fight Germany, whilst the United States and EU have clearly ruled out to ever fight Russia directly, as it is the world’s largest owner of nuclear weapons. For the EU alone, an intergovernmental entity without an army and increasingly struggling to impose a uniform vision of the rule of law even within its borders, a war with Russia, despite its superior economic prowess is beyond imagination. Russia, on one side, and the United States on the other thus affect the security of Europe. Furthermore, it is the EU, aside from Ukraine, which suffers the gravest consequences of the Russian-Ukrainian border war. Despite sanctions, the Russian economy in 2023 outpaced Europe in terms of growth (also the United States), and forecasts for 2024 show the same situation: its economy adjusted better to the war (Islam and Mullane, 2024).

Immanuel Kant has famously remarked in his ‘Perpetual Peace and Other Essays’ (Kant, 1983) that tyrannies went to war more easily than republics, where everybody had a say. This concept found many supporters and even some empirical confirmation (Singer and Small, 1972). Additionally, Kant predicted that whilst republics would be reluctant to engage in war just for predation, as tyrannies did, they might eventually fight on moral grounds. The war in Ukraine – as the bombing of Serbia by NATO in the Yugoslav wars or the invasions on Iraq and Afghanistan by US-led coalitions – seems to be the kind of ‘just war’ that citizens could approve – at least at the onset. By early 2024, over three-quarters of Europeans approved the EU proxy war in Ukraine, its exports of weaponry and ammunition, aside from the direct funding of Ukraine (EP, Directorate General for Communication and Kantar Public, 2023). Countless rallies in Europe ask for Israel’s war in Gaza against Hamas to stop, but hardly anyone rallies for peace in Ukraine.

Following the idealistic paradigms to their logical end, the EU would have to fight Russia – and change radically to do it. The European ‘soft power’ seems outdated, although the EU did have some successful negotiations with Russia in the past, for instance, over Kaliningrad or Karelia (Le Gloannec, 2017). In the variant of a perpetual conflict with Russia, the EU’s hybrid response is not sufficient to solve the Eastern question (Youngs, 2017). EU would need to conscript soldiers, build missile shields, make its economy a war economy and grow faster into its empire-shape (Zielonka, 2017). The designers of the European Political Community plan some sort of neo-imperial entity, with a few centres, many internal peripheries and an external cordon sanitaire (France Diplomatie – Ministère de l’Europe et des Affaires étrangères, 2022). Even for the European Political Community to be the future, the entire Soviet succession border file needs to be settled between Europe, Russia and the interested countries, regions and groups to be able to coexist and find closure for frozen and active conflicts. Unfortunately, the 50 pages of the Franco-German expert report ‘Sailing on High Seas: Reforming and enlarging the EU for the 21st century’ (Costa et al., 2023) commissioned by the EU to start the conversation manages not to use the word ‘border’ once. Instead, EU promised enlargement in earnest to Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia.

…

The realism paradigm acknowledges that the EU’s Eastern advance, alongside that of NATO, met with the succession wars of the Soviet Union as an unintended consequence. Nobody planned this (but they should have), and yet a full war over the border, plus a new Cold War resulted. Judging by the precedents of Ireland and former Yugoslavia, as well as by the attitude of Russia, the United States would have the uttermost say on when the war ceases. It can hardly be otherwise, as the peace would likely imply some recalibration of the global power balance, as Kissinger argued (2015, p. 371).

Could not the EU still play a role in how the war ends, under these circumstances and rekindle its old soft power? If this highly destructive war is to have had any purpose at all, the EU needs to promote a settlement of the succession wars of the Soviet Union once and forever. Otherwise, these conflicts will continue to destabilise the EU, as the earlier ones have done, but on an unprecedented scale (Pace, 2008). The settlement should be broad, to cover all the issues, the groups and even the individuals (as so many political and war prisoners exist). Whenever this occurs, it needs to include Russia and be as well prepared and patiently built as the Helsinki 1975 Accords have been.

In April 1917, the month in which the United States entered the 1st World War and long before the outcome was even known, the US Department of State had already started to reflect on the difficulty of piecing together the complex territories affected by the pan-European war. They assembled a vast team of geographers and other scientists to document and assemble statistics, maps and territorial options for the forthcoming Paris Peace Conference. The New York City Public Library hosted the team, which was known under the rather conspiratorial name of ‘The Inquiry’ (Rogers, 1964). Selected experts travelled to Paris and advised President Wilson on the main treaty and the pursuant settlements with Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and Turkey. The Eastern border needs no less for its files on security, nuclear, trade, sanctions, energy, minorities and human rights.

Amen.

What to expect IMHO

A bit of context first.

Biden authorized Ukraine to use long-range US weapons in Russia. Unfortunately, this won’t help much. The impact of this decision, while non-negligible, isn’t momentous. Storm Shadow and Scalp-EG can’t hit the Kerch Bridge. The ATACMS missiles that were delivered to Ukraine are those that deliver cluster munitions; they do not have a unitary warhead, so they can’t be used against the Kerch Bridge, either. The Russians have dispersed many of the command, control, and logistics centers beyond the upper ATACMS range (300 km). The bombers launching the devastating attacks on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure have also been moved further away. Last but not least (quite the opposite), the number of missiles available in Ukraine’s stock is almost pathetic.

What would have changed the game, but is a physical impossibility, were to be able to supply Ukraine with: many more electronic warfare; at least 300 tanks and 600 Infantry Fighting Vehicles (Bradley, Marder); enough Patriot, IRIS-T, NASAMS, HAWK, and Cheetah air defense systems to protect at least the critical civilian infrastructure (energy, road infrastructure, power transmission); enough interceptor missiles to withstand Russian attacks; howitzers with ammunition amounting to millions of pieces; 120-150 F-16s or equivalent fighter jets. This isn’t going to happen.

DPRK’s contribution to the war might increase. According to Bloomberg, unnamed sources believe Pyongyang may actually deploy as many as 100,000 troops.

Just like DPRK wants to fight the entire West for the rest of the universe’s life, Putin wants to increase its population to have manpower for the military. A bill criminalising the “child-free propaganda” passed first reading in Russia’s State Duma. This bill would outlaw “propaganda that discourages people from having children” and it criminalises “spreading information that advocates voluntary childlessness,” making it punishable by fines of up to five million roubles (€47,000).

The problem, of course, is that Russia has nuclear weapons. Admiral Rob Bauer, the outgoing chief of NATO’s Military Committee: “I am absolutely sure if the Russians did not have nuclear weapons, we would have been in Ukraine, kicking them out.”

Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has dismissed reports in the media that Ukraine could build its own nuclear bomb if the US decreases military support. That comes one month after Zelensky stated that Ukraine has no intention of restoring its nuclear arsenal. Still, the same Zelensky: “Ukraine’s survival can only be ensured by joining NATO or giving Kyiv nuclear weapons.”

The other side of the problem? At one point, Ukraine was the world’s third largest nuclear power:

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited a huge nuclear arsenal in its territory, including:

  • 130 SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missiles;
  • 46 SS-24 “Scalpel” intercontinental ballistic missiles;
  • 1,700 nuclear warheads;
  • 33 strategic bombers;
  • 2,850 tactical nuclear weapons.

The scale of these equipments even far exceeds that of China, Britain and France.

However, after independence, Ukraine chose to abandon nuclear weapons and became a non-nuclear country.

In 1994, the United States, Russia, Britain, and Ukraine signed the so-called Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine destroyed its nuclear weapons by October 30, 2001; in turn, the United States, Russia, and Britain promised to safeguard Ukraine’s national security. China also issued a statement in the same year, promising that, if Ukraine is threatened or attacked by nuclear weapons, China will provide security guarantees.

In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine and occupied Crimea. In 2022…

Oh, I forgot! Newly published documents from invasion’s first weeks reveal Putin’s plans to render post-war Ukraine powerless. You can read it here: ДОГОВОР ОБ УРЕГУЛИРОВАНИИ СИТУАЦИИ НА УКРАИНЕ И НЕЙТРАЛИТЕТЕ УКРАИНЫ (AGREEMENT ON THE SETTLEMENT OF THE SITUATION IN UKRAINE AND THE NEUTRALITY OF UKRAINE), drafted on on March 7, 2022.

What kind of peace can we expect?

👉 When Russia invaded, Putin wanted:

  • To change the power in Kyiv and enthrone a pro-Russia regime.
  • To occupy the rebellious self-declared republics in the East.
  • Possibly, to occupy the entire Eastern half of Ukraine (everything east of Kyiv).

👉 Now, Putin wants:

  • To keep the occupied territory of Ukraine, not just the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, which are already incorporated into the Russian Federation. That amounts to 20% of Ukraine’s territory.
  • To get guarantees for at least 20 years that Ukraine won’t join NATO and that it will remain neutral, which forbids any other military or political alliance.
  • Possibly, that Ukraine doesn’t join the EU, either.

👉 What Zelensky used to want:

  • To get back Crimea.
  • To get back all the occupied territories in Donbass.
  • To make Russia pay for the war crimes and damages.
  • Possibly, even to get Putin arrested and sentenced.

👉 What Zelensky (or Ukraine, for that matter) can expect to obtain:

  • Nothing! I mean, some sort of peace, but nothing more than that.

👉 What will Putin get:

  • Russia will keep all occupied territories in Donbass.
  • Russia will keep Crimea.
  • Ukraine will get the fuck off of Kursk.
  • Ukraine will not be able to join NATO.
  • Ukraine will most likely not join the EU or the EEA either.
  • Russia won’t pay any war reparations.
  • Russia won’t be liable for any war crimes. Here, folks, the only war crimes were perpetrated by these two soldiers who have already been sentenced.
  • Most likely, all sanctions against Russia will be dropped.

Putin has already won. 

Already, Viktor Orbán called for the EU to rethink its sanctions against Russia. As we speak, and even as Gazprom stopped deliveries to Austria’s OMV, Russian gas is still sold in significant volumes to Slovakia and Hungary, as well as the Czech Republic, while smaller volumes go to Italy and Serbia.

What will prevent Russia from invading Ukraine a second time? I don’t fucking know! What I know is that the current war will stop in a couple of months time!

The second Trump administration will replace the Great Moscow State Circus; being a laughingstock, it will at least deliver some quality entertainment. The other day, Sylvester Stallone called Donald Trump the “second George Washington” and compared him to Rocky Balboa. I can’t even. Then, Trump’s team already looks like a bunch of lunatics. Matt Gaetz, Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard… can it go any worse? Not counting RFK and Elon Musk (with Vivek Ramaswamy). America is a laughingstock anyway (but only because cryingstock is not a word).

What we all lost is the perspective of true peace.

Decades will follow in which Russia will regard the West as its mortal enemy. Despite the trade that will continue between the parts, the West will need to prepare for war, regardless of the fact that a war might never come. Sweden and Finland have just urged their residents to prepare for a possible war.

What I believe will follow in the medium-long timeframe:

  • The UN will keep losing relevance. The Security Council is already useless, and so is the General Assembly. The UN will eventually collapse.
  • Something akin to an extended BRICS+ Initiative will replace the UN for everyone but the Global West.
  • The Global West will extend the NATO to become “their UN” (our UN) in all regards.

I never thought that I might get to live in such times.

Miscellaneous links

In the short-medium timeframe, let me show you, for educational and entertainment purposes, the Potemkin villages that can be seen in parts of the Pyongyang, and some other glimpses into DPRK’s absurd realities. Everything on YouTube.

En-fucking-joy!