In the first part of this study, I argued that the European Union was seeking to create a situation resembling a « phoney war » between itself and Russia. The objective was to reap all the political benefits that can be derived from the existence of a common enemy, while avoiding direct involvement in a real war that it lacks the means to fight. A state of war could justify the suspension of legal and democratic processes. It could also strengthen the powers of the European Commission vis-à-vis the member states, thereby advancing the long-term project of a federal Europe. To avoid any ambiguity, when I refer to the EU, I am referring to the administrative entity itself. I distinguish it from Europe as a geographical, historical, and cultural reality. It is worth remembering that the EU is not a state, let alone a nation.

Yet since the publication of that first article, history appears to be accelerating.

On the one hand, the EU has shown itself willing to break with the very legal framework that constitutes its essence, and to interfere with electoral processes whenever they threaten to bring a Eurosceptic leader to power. On the other hand, as I anticipated, provocations have intensified. Every red line has been crossed. There was the strike on Valdai while Putin was expected to be there. There have been deep strikes inside Russian territory, whose targeting and guidance are clearly provided by Western actors. There have been announcements of Ukrainian-German cooperation in drone production. More serious still is the openly declared conversion of German industry toward arms production, never happy news for Europe in general. And finally, as the icing on the cake, there was Macron’s highly publicized announcement of Franco-Polish military exercises built around the scenario of a “nuclear strike on Saint Petersburg. » Let’s pause and imagine the reaction in France if Belgium were to announce joint military exercises with Russia or China under the scenario of “nuclear strikes on Paris.”

We will examine the Russian response in greater detail later. For now, however, it is worth noting that Sergey Lavrov recently declared that Russia now considers itself at war with NATO. It should be remembered that, unlike Western diplomatic communication, Russian state communication is deliberate and carefully calibrated. Every word is weighed. When a figure as important as Sergey Lavrov chooses such language, it signals a profound shift in Russia’s posture toward the conflict. Moreover, Lavrov also transmitted a list of targets located within the EU that Russia now considers legitimate. Had the mainstream press been doing its job properly, it would have noted that these statements were made immediately after Lavrov’s official visit to China, where such strategic issues were obviously discussed. Whatever consequences may eventually arise from these declarations, one may safely assume that they were examined and coordinated with China’s leadership.

It therefore seems necessary to deepen the analysis in order to better understand the strategic vision guiding the Euro-Atlantic elite. Above all, it is urgent to abandon the comforting but dangerous fantasy that this elite is irrational, or even driven by a suicidal impulse. On the contrary, we must confront the possibility that it is acting rationally. It is fighting for its own survival, even if that comes at the cost of immense suffering for the populations it governs. More importantly, this rationality is shaped by the economic and political structures of both the European countries and the United States. What we are witnessing, therefore, is a deterministic historical sequence that bears more than a passing resemblance to the one that preceded the First World War.

The Empire Is (Re)Born in Decline

Thus, it is clear that we have indeed entered a state of war. The European Union is already striking at the heart of Russia, while Russia’s official position now recognizes a state of war with the countries of the EU. Along the path that has led to what seemed impossible in the early 2000s—a state of war between Russia and Europe—there were many opportunities to halt this escalation toward conflict. Europe could have resisted the American plan, proposed in 2005, to invite Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. It could have distanced itself from the 2014 coup. It could have sincerely supported Minsk I and Minsk II instead of using them to facilitate Ukraine’s transformation into a launching pad against Russia. When the 2019 RAND Corporation reports were published, openly describing a strategy aimed at provoking a war in Europe, in pursuit of dubious geopolitical fantasies, Europe could have denounced Washington’s sorcerer’s apprentices and demanded that preparations cease. Finally, it could have allowed the Istanbul negotiations of April 2022 to reach their conclusion. Instead, Macron called Putin and persuaded him to pull his troops back from the outskirts of Kyiv, only for Boris Johnson to travel to Kyiv and demand that Zelensky tear up the agreement in exchange for the ultimately untenable promise of unwavering military support. We have forgotten that the sabotage of the Istanbul agreements was, in fact, a Franco-British initiative. The Russians have not forgotten. Putin himself recently referred once again to Macron’s role in an interview. Every opportunity was missed or deliberately sabotaged in a voluntary rush toward a war that Europe lacks the means to fight and even less the means to win. The reason is simple: Russia remains the world’s leading nuclear power, and any strategic defeat would ultimately be prevented by the use of these weapons of last resort. Why, then, pursue such a course? In the first part of this study, I argued that the economic and political tensions generated by Europe’s current crisis were reactivating the “imperial software” embedded in what might be called the political genetic heritage of the founding nations of the European project, all of them former colonial powers.

What recent events reveal is that Europe is beginning to move beyond its role as a sub-imperial component of the American empire and is attempting to assert itself as an autonomous imperial power. The growing distance between the United States and Europe, now turning into open hostility, is merely the trigger for a development that had become inevitable. The role of a “sub-empire” was both possible and profitable during the bipolar world of the Cold War and later during the unipolar era that lasted from the 1990s until roughly 2010. Europe’s emancipation and transformation into an autonomous power—seemingly driven by the indifference, and now even the hostility, of its American sovereign—is in reality a consequence of the emergence of a multipolar world. That is what is forcing the United States to reconsider its priorities. The central objective of American geopolitics remains control over Eurasia. Yet in a world where Washington must now confront multiple powers working alongside its principal challenger, China, Europe simply no longer matters enough.

The fragility of this emerging empire is fourfold: a severe economic situation marked by heavy debt and dependence on external financing; insufficient industrial capacity; a military apparatus that is remarkably weak; and a critical dependence on an ally that is increasingly turning into an adversary—the United States. The conflict with Russia only aggravates Europe’s longstanding structural problem: its lack of natural resources. Whereas it once enjoyed the ability to balance competing suppliers against one another, it is now heavily dependent on the United States.

American adventurism in Iran only worsens this problem. Yet here again it is important to note that, although Israel’s pursuit of regional hegemony plays an important role in American decision-making, the true geopolitical objective remains control of Eurasia. Bringing Iran under control would weaken the Sino-Russian bloc that has emerged from the failure of the attempt to weaken Russia through the war in Ukraine. The conflict with Iran should therefore not be seen merely as the whim of an erratic president. It forms part of the new “Great Game” in which the United States is now engaged, with China replacing Russia as the principal target. It must also be understood as part of a broader strategy aimed at controlling energy supplies, a tool that American policymakers openly recognize as essential to maintaining U.S. hegemony.

Unable to anticipate the profound transformation of the international order driven by China’s rise, and unable to think about international relations outside the frameworks inherited from its imperial past, Europe now finds itself trapped. That trap is pushing it toward decisions that appear almost suicidal. They may seem irrational, but they are in fact dictated by the network of economic and geopolitical constraints within which Europe has trapped itself. The situation is not identical to that which preceded the First World War, but it bears a troubling resemblance.

The reasoning behind the unreasonable

For that is the fundamental question: how can the ruling class of an entire continent, one that also happens to be the birthplace of rational thought and the Enlightenment, engage in a form of collective economic, cultural, and geopolitical suicide, and do so with such remarkable unanimity? How can one explain the European Union’s refusal to seize the opportunity offered by the American disengagement from the very war it had helped to foment, and rebuild mutually beneficial relations with Russia? How can one explain such self-destructive determination in the face of a very real risk of nuclear escalation?

In the previous section, I referred to the trap into which the European Union has locked itself. We must now trace the course of history backward in order to understand how the two jaws of that trap, one ideological, the other economic, were formed. My hypothesis is that the fear inspired by the birth of the Soviet Union, a state claiming Marxism and emerging from the ruins of the Tsarist Empire. It shaped the entire international policy of what would later become known as the “collective West” throughout the century spanning the period from 1917 to 2022. The conflict that began in Ukraine in February 2022 marks the culmination of a long process of hostility directed at containing and ultimately destroying Russia, whether it existed geopolitically under the name of the Soviet Union or that of the Russian Federation. After 1991, this evolved into a broader project aimed at eliminating the Russian language from the countries that emerged from the dissolution of the USSR. In Ukraine, the authorities attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade the population to abandon the Russian language. One may also recall the American senator who, around 2018, visited Georgia and, upon discovering that the country remained largely Russian-speaking, reportedly exclaimed: “But how can they ever be free if they speak Russian?” (sic)

It is also worth noting that in 1917 a war, officially described as a civil war, began on the territory of the former Russian Empire. Yet many of the same countries that intervened militarily then, can also be found in the coalition that, since 2022, has been waging war against Russia through Ukraine. This century is therefore framed by two major conflicts involving broadly the same protagonists. That alone helps explain why its duration has now exceeded that of the Great Patriotic War. What is at stake today is of fundamental importance.

The USSR: The Helpless Puppet Master of Western Policy

Let us read the closing words of *The Communist Manifesto*:

“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Workers of all countries, unite!”

For the great bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century, these words amounted to a declaration of war. Let us be clear about the terms involved. What “great bourgeoisie” meant at that time was a tiny network of interconnected interests controlling most of the wealth and, therefore, the politics of a colonial and imperial Europe. Today, we would use the term “oligarchy.” It is to this class that Marx addresses his threatening declaration. Yet this remained a class war, a kind of civil war, internal to the industrial imperial powers themselves. The situation changed when a new state emerged claiming Marxism as its guiding ideology. At that point, it became an issue of international politics. This young state, vast in territory and not yet formally the USSR, could, if successful, become not only a dangerous example for other populations but also a source of support for labour movements throughout the industrial world. It also inspired immense popular hope. The privileges of the bourgeoisie/oligarchy were directly challenged.

The first problem, therefore, was ideological. What if there really existed an alternative to the liberal bourgeois ideology that had emerged from Europe’s revolutionary and industrial transformations?

The second problem was economic. The new state interrupted the process of economic colonization that the industrial powers—France foremost among them—had pursued with the approval of the Tsarist government. The European oligarchy suddenly lost both its investments and its privileged access to the resources of the former Russian Empire.

For these two reasons, the emerging state immediately became the target of Western military intervention. Fourteen nations, including nearly all those that today oppose Russia through Ukraine, entered the war on the side of the Whites. Their objective was to facilitate the emergence of another state, one more favourable to the interests of Western ruling classes. The conflict therefore quickly ceased to be a purely civil war. Following the failure of this military intervention, the mere existence of the USSR became the central factor shaping the foreign policies of the industrial powers and, by extension, a major influence on their domestic political and economic choices. Without the fear of Bolshevism, neither Hitler nor Mussolini would likely have received the financial support and political backing that enabled them to come to power. Without that fear, France might not have remained paralysed while Germany and Italy supported Franco’s forces in Spain. The same obsession helps explain the compromises made by numerous European states, allowing Nazi Germany the time and resources needed to rebuild the military machine that would later set Europe ablaze.

The Second World War ultimately made an alliance with the USSR unavoidable. Yet in the minds of European leaders, that alliance remained purely circumstantial. They turned very early toward the United States to ensure that the post-war order would not be dominated by the Soviet Union. As soon as Soviet victory appeared inevitable, European elites began transforming themselves into transatlantic elites, particularly under the influence of two of the founding fathers of European integration, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman.

From 1946 onward—and thanks to the opening of archives, these facts are now much better documented—intellectuals, artists, journalists, academics, and political leaders across Europe were financed through funds linked to the CIA (or its predecessor, the OSS). At the same time, a growing number of programmes, associations, conferences, and prestigious study trips were organized for these European elites, helping to align them more closely with American interests.

The project of European integration naturally provided the institutional framework required to implement policies favoured in Washington.

One may argue that this was the moment when Europe’s present destiny began to take shape. It marked the emergence of what can only be described as a comprador elite. The process deepened over the decades and, following the collapse of the USSR, evolved into something approaching total subordination. This helps explain why, in 2008, European elites allowed themselves to be persuaded to support the American project of bringing Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. The risks were well understood. Angela Merkel attempted, unsuccessfully, to oppose the initiative. Her argument, subsequently confirmed by events, was that such a decision would eventually bring war back to Europe. Yet in a context where European elites had become deeply dependent on the United States, she proved unable to withstand the pressure brought to bear upon her.

Thus, through its mere existence, the USSR contributed to facilitating the American takeover of Europe. The Soviet Union, which had so desperately sought to expand its own influence across the continent, found itself in the paradoxical position of a helpless puppet master: its very existence became the vehicle through which its principal adversary extended its influence all the way to its borders.

Economics

Let us now take a brief look at Europe’s economic evolution in the period following the *Trente Glorieuses*. In 1973, Europe and the United States entered a new era of economic crisis. This provided an opportunity for the neoconservatives to promote their solutions and to persuade Reagan in the United States and Thatcher in the United Kingdom to implement them. Gradually, the rest of Europe followed suit, which is hardly surprising given the existing relationships of dependence.

Neoliberal policies encouraged deindustrialization, offshoring, and the erosion of the middle classes. They also promoted the financialization of the economy and the growth of inequality. At first, the model appeared to work. Relocating production increased corporate profit margins, while financialization boosted returns on capital. The incomes of the upper middle classes, who had accumulated savings, as well as those of retirees, rose sufficiently to offset the declining incomes of the lower and middle strata. In reality, however, Europe was consuming the legacy of the *Trente Glorieuses*. As an ever larger share of the population became poorer, the consequences inevitably began to affect the broader economy. Then came what one might call a “divine surprise”: the Soviet Union collapsed, opening up vast territories and providing access to a well-trained, highly educated, yet inexpensive workforce. European and American companies benefited from what can only be described as a form of recolonization of the lands east of the Iron Curtain. Enormous amounts of wealth were transferred from the territories of the former USSR to the West. Natural resources and human capital suddenly became available at bargain prices. This dramatic reconfiguration of the international environment had three major consequences. First, it inflicted immense suffering on the former Soviet republics, many of which descended into poverty and chaos. To appreciate the scale of the disaster, one need only note that the demographic impact of the Soviet collapse on Russia exceeded that of the Great Patriotic War. Second, the transfer of wealth temporarily concealed the destructive effects of neoliberal policies. Third—and this point is often overlooked—it revived European imperialisms, which would inevitably begin to clash with American imperialism. Many of the newly opened territories had historically been arenas of Franco-German rivalry. The most immediate and visible consequence of the collapse of the Cold War’s bipolar equilibrium was the Yugoslav conflict. It was only resolved when France eventually abandoned its traditional relationship with Serbia and aligned itself with Germany and the United States in support of Kosovo’s independence.

It was at this moment that the dormant imperial rivalries within Europe began to re-emerge, albeit discreetly at first. During the Cold War, they had been largely suppressed by the United States acting as both pacifier and protector against the USSR. Against this backdrop, Vladimir Putin’s reassertion of control over Russia’s natural resources after 2001 recreated a climate of hostility toward Russia. By ending the plundering of Russian resources—or, more accurately, the neo-colonial relationship that had characterized the Yeltsin era—he reduced the flow of wealth that had delayed the moment when Europe would be forced to confront the imbalances created by neoliberal policies.

This also helps explain the deepening economic relationship between Germany and Russia. Within this new geopolitical configuration, Germany sought reliable access to energy resources at affordable prices. In return, however, this placed Germany in an increasingly uncomfortable position vis-à-vis the United States. Germany’s vital interests were now beginning to diverge from the geopolitical vision of its principal ally and market: the United States.

The Tolling of the Bell: The Subprime Crisis

The subprime crisis finally arrived in 2008, as the inevitable consequence of mounting economic imbalances. At that moment, under German influence, Europe chose to rescue its banks without demanding any meaningful concessions in return. Money was printed and distributed to the financial sector, yet governments required no equity stakes in exchange. The bill would instead be paid by taxpayers through the implementation of strict austerity policies. It was a tragic decision, but one made almost inevitable by ruling classes shaped by three decades of neoliberal policies and by the ordoliberal doctrine that Germany had imposed upon Europe. The immediate economic consequences were disastrous. Faced with announced austerity measures, declining household incomes, and falling consumer demand, industry simply stopped investing. A few years later, the results became visible: Europe’s technological lag, its declining productivity, and its growing inability to compete, particularly with China. The United States followed a similar trajectory, but it retained one major advantage: abundant natural resources. Europe did not.

From Neoliberalism to Military Keynesianism

At the end of this thirty-to-forty-year cycle, Europe’s situation can be summarized as follows:

- A deindustrialized continent;

- Declining productivity;

- A widening technological gap;

- Growing internal rivalries rooted in competing imperial ambitions;

- Institutions born from fragile compromises, within a project originally designed to facilitate American domination of Europe;

- The gradual withdrawal of the American pacifier;

- Elites raised within the framework of American-led imperialism and increasingly incapable of thinking outside it, precisely at the moment when the United States is rewriting the terms of the deal in order to extract what wealth remains in Europe;

- The disproportionate influence of the Baltic states and Poland, whose accession to the EU was driven above all by hostility toward Russia.

Finally, there is a particularly serious structural constraint: Germany’s dependence on NATO in order to maintain its neo-colonial sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. In reality, Poland and the Baltic states entered NATO more than they entered the European Union. Their primary objective in the 1990s was not European integration but protection against Russia through NATO membership. If they were willing to surrender sovereignty that had only recently been regained, it was because they sought protection from the now-vanished “Soviet ogre.” (Much could be said about the formation of post-Soviet elites, especially when one observes how many of them emerged directly from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.)

Thus Germany, in order to preserve its dominant position in Eastern Europe—which in turn underpins its broader dominance within Europe—owes its loyalty both to NATO and to the American sovereign. Yet at the same time, NATO, with the support of Poland and the Baltic states, pushes Germany into a level of hostility toward Russia that directly undermines its own economic interests. This helps explain why Angela Merkel ultimately yielded to American pressure regarding NATO’s invitation to Ukraine.

For the other European countries, meanwhile, NATO and the Russian enemy have come to replace the role once played by the American pacifier. In a Europe where imperial rivalries are re-emerging, NATO serves as a mechanism for maintaining cohesion. Since NATO’s very reason for existence is opposition to Russia, the circle is complete.

Within this framework, military Keynesianism becomes the logical answer to Europe’s productivity crisis and technological decline. If the production lines of Mercedes and Volkswagen must be relocated to the United States in order to remain competitive, then German factories can be converted to produce tanks and other military equipment instead. Yet industrial investment requires long-term guarantees. Manufacturers will not invest unless they can expect years of production. A projected war with Russia around 2030 therefore becomes both an economic necessity and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Under these circumstances, war is no longer a choice for the European Union. It has become its destiny.

Violence as the Only Horizon

The fact that this war is already lost on the battlefield and cannot be won militarily should not be interpreted as evidence of irrationality on the part of the Euro-Atlantic elites. The objective remains the same: to gain access to Russia’s natural resources in order to exploit them, and to Russia’s highly educated population in order to exploit it “to the bone.” The OECD regularly notes that this is the most highly educated population in Europe. Contrary to what is often assumed, the issue is not merely cheap oil and gas. Russia is the only country that has successfully developed alternatives to Google (Yandex), Facebook (VK), WhatsApp (Telegram), and others. It is also the only country that combines vast territories with sufficiently low seismic activity, access to the natural gas needed to produce helium—essential for certain stages of semiconductor manufacturing—and a workforce qualified enough to sustain such industries. It is also a country that, within only a few years, managed to rebuild a commercial aircraft industry based entirely on domestically produced components. The examples could be multiplied.

The West, as an imperial system, cannot simply abandon the project of colonizing these resources. The concept of “imperial software” does not refer merely to patterns of thought. It also encompasses the Euro-Atlantic political and financial system that emerged during the colonial era and survived the disappearance of the political and military structures of the colonial empires themselves. This system, together with the privileges it grants to Western elites, depends upon unequal exchanges between what is now called the “collective West” and the rest of the world. Through both its “hard” component—political and financial power—and its “soft” component—supremacist mental frameworks—it imposes an agenda aimed at the destruction of the Russian state. This is therefore a long-term project, repeatedly declared and publicly articulated. Yet the deteriorating condition of European economies has made it increasingly urgent. Europe’s fundamental problem is that it no longer possesses the means required to preserve the system that guarantees the privileges of its elites. To put it more bluntly, this is a system of asymmetric exchange that often borders on outright plunder and depends on the intensive exploitation of resources located outside Europe. The condition of European industry, its technological lag, and its demographic weaknesses no longer allow it to project sufficient power to maintain such unequal arrangements. The result is a decline in living standards and a corresponding loss of credibility for the ruling elites. The popularity ratings of Macron, Merz, and Starmer, together with the rise of populist parties, are indicators of this growing discredit. The conclusion is logically grim: an oligarchic system experiencing a systemic crisis can no longer tolerate democratic processes that might facilitate its removal from political power. We have already seen the European Union intervene directly in electoral outcomes in Romania and Moldova. The next step is to follow Zelensky’s example and suspend electoral processes altogether. This helps explain the European Union’s persistent efforts to provoke Russia, as I argued in my previous analysis. What is required is either a sufficiently serious incident—or the appearance of one—to justify a state of emergency and the suspension of normal institutional procedures. This is why the entire “Brussels elite” sometimes gives the impression of begging the Russians to send them a small Oreshnik strike. In a political cartoon, one could imagine them all dressed in white robes like the Burghers of Calais, kneeling before Vladimir Putin and pleading for just one small strike, however limited, merely to provide a pretext.

Once electoral processes have been suspended, the necessary sacrifices can be imposed upon the population in order to wear Russia down until the Russian state itself collapses. Syria serves as the model. The struggle would be conducted primarily in the economic and informational domains. Ukraine, meanwhile, must remain at war because it serves both as a source of pressure and as a justification for emergency measures.

Arms production would preserve a minimum number of direct and indirect jobs, thereby preventing uncontrolled popular unrest. But what would all these weapons ultimately be used for? History offers few examples of massive arms buildups that were never eventually employed. Since their use against Russia remains inconceivable as long as the Russian state remains intact and retains control of its enormous nuclear arsenal, only two troubling possibilities remain.

They could be used to address intra-European conflicts, not in the form of the great continental wars of the twentieth century, but in more limited regional confrontations within Europe or its immediate vicinity. As economic and social tensions intensify, such scenarios become conceivable. They could also be used for a more forceful form of domestic order maintenance, marking a return to the nineteenth century, when strikes were suppressed by soldiers firing live ammunition into crowds of workers. Impossible? Then why create a “Military Schengen Area”? If the objective were genuinely to fight Russia, NATO already provides mechanisms allowing rapid troop movements across the continent. That is one of its primary functions. It is therefore difficult not to suspect that Military Schengen is intended primarily to facilitate the movement of troops and equipment within the EU itself, without any clearly defined military objective. If the objective is not military, then it can only be domestic: maintaining order in the face of increasingly angry—or even desperate—populations. Violence therefore appears to be the ultimate horizon that the European Union offers its peoples.

Can the project be successful?

The fact that the project pursued by Europe’s elites is relatively transparent tells us nothing about its chances of success. Yet once again, they are acting within a framework of rational thought. One may therefore assume that they are collectively aware that a military victory over Russia is impossible. The key to success lies instead in the collapse of the Russian state through economic exhaustion, leading in turn to the moral exhaustion of both the population and the armed forces. This is what was attempted in Syria, and what is currently being pursued in Cuba. It was also the original plan in 2022, when the most extensive and comprehensive sanctions package ever devised against a country was put into place. Let us remember: the European Union, which can spend five years defining the permissible size of eggs sold within its territory, needed only forty-eight hours to design and approve the administrative measures necessary to implement those sanctions. That alone demonstrates that this economic blitzkrieg had been prepared long in advance. Russia weathered it remarkably well. Could the Cuban model of long-term economic attrition nevertheless succeed? One may state, without taking much risk, that the European Union is now confronting Russia and China simultaneously on the economic front. I leave it to the reader to assess the prospects of the EU against a Sino-Russian economic bloc.

But let us return to Sergey Lavrov’s statements. My own view is that the cries of alarm they provoked are largely performative. In reality, they must have sounded like sweet music to the ears of those making decisions in Brussels, Paris, London, and Berlin. After all, this is precisely what they need: a limited number of strikes against industrial targets that do not result in civilian casualties. Taken at face value, Lavrov’s words create the impression of a Russia jumping headfirst into the trap laid by Atlanticist hawks in both Europe and the United States. A more objective analysis suggests the opposite. Russia’s interests are best served by remaining focused on its strategic objectives while allowing Europe’s internal contradictions to continue weakening it. This is especially true given that a collapse resembling that of the Soviet Union remains conceivable and is undoubtedly studied very carefully in Moscow by people who experienced such a process firsthand. One should never forget that most of the current Russian political leadership lived through the disintegration of the USSR.

The difficulty is that, contrary to the image presented by television pundits, Russian political life is complex and shaped by competing currents of thought. One of these currents, which is gaining influence, is represented by Sergey Karaganov. Although he is not directly involved in decision-making, he remains an influential figure in Moscow. For this school of thought, Russia’s restraint has become counterproductive because the West interprets it as indecision and weakness. In their view, this perception has encouraged increasingly bold actions, including deep strikes into Russian territory carried out through Ukraine. Deterrence must therefore be restored. First by striking industrial targets within NATO countries using weapons such as the Oreshnik, and then, if necessary, by escalating toward the use of low-yield nuclear weapons. Such arguments are gaining traction among the Russian public, and recent events involving Iran have only reinforced them. As Russia approaches a new electoral cycle, pressure on the government is increasing. That pressure could eventually encourage the leadership to abandon its cautious approach and take far more drastic measures.

From a rational perspective, Russia’s most advantageous strategy is to exploit the growing tensions between the major powers with their long imperial histories. These tensions are barely concealed. Starmer is attempting to assemble a maritime alliance of ten Northern European countries. Merz proclaims his intention to build the largest army in Europe. Macron, meanwhile, is extending France’s nuclear umbrella to cover Poland and Norway, with others potentially to follow, despite the absence of any clearly articulated strategic doctrine defining what such commitments actually mean. It is a curious ménage à trois in which each participant seeks to pull the imperial blanket toward himself. Yet as provocations multiply—including actions as reprehensible as the bombing of a dormitory for trainee teachers—public opinion is becoming increasingly agitated, and crowds are rarely good strategists or tacticians. Strictly speaking, the most rational exit strategy for the Russian General Staff would be to maximize pressure in order to bring about Ukraine’s collapse. The price, however, would be increased suffering for the Ukrainian population.

We therefore find ourselves in a race against time between a Russian public increasingly angered by Western provocations and developments on the military front. The Western strategy is extraordinarily dangerous because it rests on the assumption that escalation can be controlled once it has begun, and that it can be halted before reaching the nuclear threshold. History suggests that such calculations have repeatedly produced catastrophic outcomes. Yet we are dealing with people who appear remarkably blind to historical experience.

And finally, one question remains: what happens if Russia collectively loses patience? The West is betting that sanctions and war fatigue will eventually persuade the Russian population to replace its leaders with figures more favourable to Western interests. The opposite is far more likely. If a profound change occurs within the Russian leadership, it will not bring pro-Western moderates to power. It will bring forward forces that are radically anti-Western and considerably more aggressive. To understand why, we must now turn to Russian history itself and examine the major ruptures that have shaped the century that began with the Revolution of 1917. That will be the subject of the next part of this analysis.