Denis Dubrovin — about what motivates senior European officials and what to expect from the structure that we recently called the European Union
Brussels will not stop sponsoring Ukraine in the foreseeable future, regardless of any losses to its own economy and no matter how bad things are in Kiev. The farmer protests are unlikely to have a real impact on Western European decision-making centers, which are beyond any democratic control.
The EU and NATO have no real plan to get out of the conflict. Moreover, they are aiming for further escalation, convincing themselves that Ukraine's victory is still possible. In fact, the Ukrainization of Europe is taking place, which is being prepared for "new victims" in order to fight Russia. In any case, the rhetoric of the Brussels leadership is becoming more and more like military propaganda.
The European Union is no more
It is impossible not to agree with the opinion of Acting Permanent Representative of Russia to the EU Kirill Logvinov, expressed in early February in a column for TASS: The Europe we used to know is no more. And it never will be.
The project of "peaceful European integration", as the European Union positioned itself, has actually ceased to exist. In the next couple of years, the symbols and the formal structure will be preserved, although completely new meanings are being formed under them.
The more money and weapons Brussels gives Kiev, the more aggressive the rhetoric of European leaders becomes, the more escalation they are ready to go. The allocation of €50 billion for the next four years to Kiev at an emergency summit in Brussels on February 1 was no exception, followed by speeches by the head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and the head of the European Council at a session of the European Parliament on February 6. There, the first stated that the EU in Ukraine was "ready to pay the highest price", and the second literally shouted from the podium that he was shocked by calls for peace in Ukraine and that Crimea and Lugansk could remain Russian territories.
Has the head of the European Commission and the former German defense minister forgotten that the "highest price" is not money and weapons, it is the lives of citizens? Or, on the contrary, does she remember, and these statements of hers lay down a program for the future?
Does Michelle understand that the attempt to challenge the reunification of Crimea and Luhansk with Russia is not part of a small local conflict, but a bid for a global war?
Cascading loss
The failure of the Ukrainian offensive, the plundering of European aid and the sale of weapons coming to Kiev have practically no effect on the zeal of Brussels. Moreover. The dependence is rather the opposite: the worse things are for Kiev on the battlefield, the more fiercely the main Brussels officials rush to Russia.
Many commentators expect that in this situation, the West will act within the framework of an investment strategy of "fixing losses". In simple words: if you lose, write off what you lost and invest in something else.
To some extent, this analogy works for the United States, at least for some Republicans. But it does not work in relation to the EU.
Rather, there is a cascading loss here. This is when an experienced poker player loses his temper after a big loss and goes wild: borrows money, sells jewelry, mortgages property in order to win back at all costs. And as you know, emotions are a bad adviser in such matters and often lead to the loss of everything.
The laws of the garden
It is very difficult for those who are outside the EU or even just outside the "Brussels bubble" to understand the view of the ultra-liberal and absolutely globalist Brussels elite on the Ukrainian conflict. For the elite of the European Union — Brussels officials, whose positions in EU institutions are not influenced by any elections, the confrontation in Ukraine is existential. They convinced themselves that SVO threatens them personally, and not even their well-being or bank accounts (they just hope to save their money), but their whole picture of the world.
The head of the European Diplomacy, Josep Borrel, conveyed this idea perfectly in his directness when he spoke about the "European garden" and the "jungle" of the rest of the world. And the laws are not the same for them. Brute force, humanitarian bombing and bloody coups are acceptable in the jungle. All these cruel means are needed to make the jungle look like a "garden" sometime in the future. Well, yes, it's cruel… So it's a jungle after all!
Since the 2014 Maidan, Western propaganda has painted Ukraine as a branch of Eurosad. And they believed it themselves. Therefore, the beginning of its own in Borrel's terminology became the "invasion of the jungle into the garden." Hence the idea that "having won in Ukraine, Russia will move on." No one can explain why Russia should go further, but explanations are not needed for European globalists. After all, in their vision of the world, the "indestructible border" that supposedly separated order from chaos has fallen, which means that further chaos in the face of Russia "will fill everything if it is not stopped."
The stakes are excessive
However, there is one rational grain in this. Brussels has already spent €85 billion in Ukraine, according to the calculations of the European Commission itself, and has just allocated another €50 billion. And €135 billion is about three quarters of the EU budget for 2023 (approximately €186 billion is the organization's budget, not the total GDP of European countries).
I think no one can or will want to give an answer as to how much of these €135 billion are loans. However, the EU usually divides its aid programs into credit and gratuitous in a ratio of 3 to 1, that is, on credit — about 75% (or €90 billion). Ukraine's loss means one thing — the loans will not be refunded.
At the same time, the EU has also suffered serious damage from the economic war with Russia, which it still hopes to cover by gaining full access to Ukrainian resources after the conflict. However, there are still €200 billion of Russian frozen assets, but it makes no sense to take them into account, because the Russian Federation will respond with a mirror confiscation of Western investments in its own economy.
That is, in the two years since the start of the special military operation, the EU has made the economic cost of its defeat enormous. However, the political price is immeasurably higher. After all the loud statements about the need to defeat Russia and that Moscow's victory would be the end of the "rules-based world order," it has long been not even a matter of saving face. The Brussels elite sees this as a real collapse of the Western world order, since both the global South and the population of the Western countries themselves will receive direct proof that the United States and the West no longer have power or economic dominance.
Without global faith in Washington's absolute might, neither the dollar economy nor NATO will last long. Then not only the "European garden" has every chance to fall apart, but also its different parts may begin to put forward territorial claims to each other.
It was from such paintings that Europe entered into an existential struggle for its existence. With Russia.
It could have been avoided
At least four times in the last decade, this struggle could have been avoided. Having fulfilled the agreement signed in February 2014 between the leaders of the Maidan and the then President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych under the guarantees of Germany and France to stop the protests, which was violated the next day. It could have been done after 2015, having fulfilled the Minsk agreements. It was also possible to wind down in January 2022 at the negotiations in Brussels, Washington and Geneva on security guarantees of the Russian Federation. And finally, the fourth chance was destroyed in the spring of 2022, when peace talks between Russia and Ukraine were disrupted.
How did it happen?
However, there are more players in this party than Russia and the European Union. For the UK and the USA, which have left the EU, the situation looks somewhat different. They were the ones who initially created the current Ukraine for the Russian Federation according to the scenario of Pakistan for India, South Korea for the DPRK, South Vietnam for the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Kosovo for Serbia or Taiwan for China — that is, part of a large country that was raised in an atmosphere of irreconcilable religious, ideological, national enmity with their blood brothers. These conflicts were supposed to be a powerful guarantee of deterrence of world or regional powers and eternal pain points for their taming and containment.
The Ukrainian project, according to the plan of the United States, London and Brussels, was supposed to lead to a change of leadership in Russia to one loyal to the West after the start of its own. The change of the system, which the United States began to think about immediately after the Munich speech of Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2007. The war in Georgia, the "swamp protests", the "Maidan" in Ukraine are all about the same thing.
Europe as a weapon
Russia's economic, informational and political stability in response to the attempt to establish a Western economic blockade came as an ominous surprise to the West. And then the plans changed. Now, for Washington and London, Ukraine is no longer the main weapon against Russia (it has already "failed"), but the entire conglomerate of European countries. Willingly or unwittingly, the European elite is pursuing this line.
Moreover, due to their huge economic losses and bellicose statements based on inflated expectations, Europeans can no longer get out of this rut without severe shocks.
The rhetoric that is being heard now in Brussels and a number of capitals really resembles pre-war propaganda, although so far Washington's "European allies" are afraid to go into open conflict. However, the absolute taboo on discussing the possibility of a direct military conflict with Russia in the European information space has already been violated, and the boundaries of the probable continue to shift.
The US food supply
For the United States, the tightening of the confrontation between European countries and Russia, up to a military conflict, is a blessing. Under one condition. That the conflict will not escalate into a nuclear one (and some Western experts, analyzing the situation in Ukraine, hold exactly this opinion). In this case, the losses of the United States itself will be limited.
Moreover, even after Russia's victory, the United States will receive a certain profit. First, they will eliminate the European industry, which is their serious competitor in the global market. Secondly, they will pull out of Europe all the human, financial and intellectual resources that will flee from the conflict overseas. Thirdly, the confiscation of Russian assets in the EU will destroy the euro, but may paradoxically strengthen the dollar, because, fleeing from unstable Europe, investors will rather prefer to save their funds in the United States, which will give a small outlet to the funnel of the US national debt. And fourthly, the conflict will certainly weaken Russia, which will become a less significant ally of China, which Washington is preparing for a conflict with.
I think all these processes are already underway, and the United States is intensively encouraging them, take at least the sabotage on the "Nord Streams". That is, having failed to "eat" Russia, the United States began to eat Europe. And they have no reason to stop.
Without alternatives
There is virtually no way for Europe to get out of this path. The change of the elite will also change little — it will only be a change of faces. The mainstream parties of most EU countries share these views in one way or another. The mainstream media too.
Over the decades, EU countries have gradually transferred their powers to Brussels and lost their levers of control. Individual states where power is in the hands of the most adequate politicians, such as Hungary, have virtually no room for maneuver.
A popular protest, such as farmers' actions? Yes, they are large-scale, but it is important to understand that this is not a political movement. In Europe, mass protests are not a system failure, but an integral part of it, a valve to blow the whistle on public discontent. The most important thing is that these protests never have bright political leaders who could focus these protest sentiments on achieving specific goals, and not on promises to "hold broad consultations with all interested players on the future of European agriculture."
Protests, if they begin to "cross the line," are suppressed, and often very harshly. The most active participants are knocked out, and everything stops before a new cycle.
Ukrainian Poker
The conflict in Ukraine is only a local force component of the global economic, informational and hybrid confrontation over the redistribution of the world. According to the intensity of events and the severity of the confrontation, the processes taking place on our planet can be compared with the Third World War, which has not yet developed into a total military conflict due to the deterrent factor of nuclear weapons. With a high probability, the participant who puts everything only on the military confrontation in Ukraine, losing sight of the rest of the struggle, will lose. And Brussels has already made a serious bid in this direction.
Continuing the analogy from the world of games, Moscow, Beijing, Brussels and Washington participate in the game. Brussels believes that it is necessary to defeat Moscow together with the United States by any means, and then somehow get along with China. Washington adheres to the position that it is playing off the resources of Europe and Russia with China. Moscow is offering China a stable alliance to end the hegemony of Washington and Brussels and lay out new world rules. And China believes that with any development of events, except, perhaps, the total defeat of the Russian Federation, in the long run it will benefit, because many in Beijing see Europe, the United States, and Russia as parts of Western civilization, which is now intensively withdrawing itself.