By Tilak Doshi
In September last year, images from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi smiling, arms linked — told Brussels and London more than any communiqué about where two decades of energy self-harm had led. On the sidelines, Gazprom and CNPC signed a “memorandum” on the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline through Mongolia. This was a political signal, not a priced gas contract. I set out at the time, in How the West Snookered Itself in Energy Geopolitics, how the obsession with Net Zero had handed Moscow and Beijing a strategic gift while leaving Germany, once Europe’s industrial powerhouse, prostrate.
A year on, the diagnosis has not changed. What has changed is the prescription. Having wrecked their own economies through the fantasy of decarbonisation, the EU and UK’s governing liberal-left establishment — stagnant, unpopular, and facing the electoral rise of AfD in Germany and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France — has settled on a time-honoured remedy for domestic failure: warnings of the threat of war.
The Wages of Self-Sabotage
I have written at length about the irrationality of EU and UK energy policy (here and here among others). America pursued a radically different trajectory during President Trump’s second term. Washington’s November 2025 National Security Strategy openly abandoned the pretence that Europe remains a serious partner. It described a continent that has traded its classical liberal inheritance — free speech, open inquiry, democratic accountability — for the utopian triad of Net Zero, mass immigration (consisting largely of young unskilled men from the Middle East, North Africa and West and South Asia) and an ever-expanding regulatory, growth-killing state.
Mario Draghi’s competitiveness report found that the EU’s total real output, measured at 2015 prices, had slipped from a little more than 15% below the United States in 2002 to 30% below by 2023. At market exchange rates the EU’s share of world GDP has fallen from roughly 29% in 1980 to about 17% in 2024. China’s surged over the same span while the US maintained it leading position.
Chemical and industrial firms have voted with their capital: for example, BASF’s Ludwigshafen closures of its ammonia and fertiliser lines, and the relocation of production to the United States and Asia. This reflects the industrial logic of policy-inflated energy costs working itself out. Heavy and energy-intensive industries, from automotive to steelmaking and oil refineries, have moved to where energy is cheap and abundant — to the US and above all to China, now the world’s dominant industrial power by far. The US under President Trump is increasingly incentivising a “reshoring” of industrial capacity. To give momentum to the reshoring of industry, America has ditched the Paris Agreement and, as of January this year, formally withdrew America from the IPCC and UNFCCC along with dozens of other multilateral bodies judged contrary to American interests.
None of this need have happened. Europe possessed impressive endowments — a skilled workforce, deep capital markets, an educated population, robust economic growth arising out of the ashes of World War II. It could and did ably compete with the United States and China. What it lacked was the political will to resist a green industrial policy conceived by activists and bureaucrats rather than engineers and economists.
In Britain that policy has a name and a face: former Energy Secretary (and now Foreign Minister) Ed Miliband, whose economic and energy illiteracy has been widely remarked upon. The result, as the shuttered ammonia lines at Ludwigshafen attest, is not the low-carbon prosperity promised by the architects of the European Green Deal but a slow, voluntary surrender of manufacturing capacity. This has migrated to jurisdictions unburdened by carbon pricing, renewables mandates and the regulatory thicket of the EU’s “sustainability disclosure” regime.
From Climate Alarmism to War Fever
The climate consensus that sustained two decades of European energy policies is collapsing under its own contradictions. US support for the globalist green agenda is gone, the IPCC’s alarmist scenario modelling has been retracted and ESG finance is in retreat. The EU and UK political establishments that built their legitimacy on the alarmist climate consensus need a new organising threat. The rhetoric of imminent war with Russia, barely audible eighteen months ago, has become the dominant note of European public life, displacing the language of climate emergency that had until recently served much the same unifying, mobilising function.
The pattern will be familiar to students of political history: a governing class unable or unwilling to reverse policies that have visibly impoverished its own population reaches for an external threat large enough to make domestic failure feel secondary. What is unusual about the present European episode is the speed of the transition and the transparency of the motive. One season the enemy is carbon dioxide; the next, it is Vladimir Putin. The rhetorical machinery — moral urgency, the demand for public sacrifice, the casting of suspicion on dissenters — barely needs repackaging.
Manufacturing an Enemy
The EU’s Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030 projects high-intensity war as a near-term likelihood. It sets 2030 as the date by which Europe must be able to deter Russian aggression. Military planning deadlines of this kind are how governments convince their citizens to prepare for war. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has said Russia could be “ready” to use military force by 2030. Even while insisting President Putin “is in a bad place” and is “not winning the war” in Ukraine, he simultaneously urges NATO members toward heightened readiness against a Russian attack. This characterization of Russia as both weak and a dangerous threat is an odd combination of confidence and alarm that only makes sense as political theatre.
Britain’s Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, has told households to keep cash, bottled water and tinned food at home, warning that the country faces a “greater risk of war” with Russia than at any point in his lifetime. Poland’s Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski told reporters that he keeps rice, a hand pump and home-made preserves against the day Russia attacks. Germany’s Bundeswehr has gamed out scenarios in which up to 1,000 wounded soldiers a day would arrive from a NATO-Russia front. It is reopening a Cold War-era underground medical bunker in Ulm. The Somerset squire Jacob Rees-Mogg has taken to informing viewers that in the next few years the country may face a war, and that people may have to die to save it, as they did in the world wars. Unsurprisingly, this invitation to send other people’s sons to someone else’s war declared by the British government was met with disgust. More remarkable still was the television exchange in which former Labour adviser Paul Richards proposed that Britain would need to “lock a few people up”, namely, “pro-Russian voices” who doubt the threat is real. This is the language not of deterrence but of pre-emptive mobilisation of opinion, a rehearsal for wartime censorship before a single shot on NATO soil has been fired.
Sergei Lavrov’s rejoinder at the UN General Assembly last month was bald and direct. Russia’s calls for calm, he told reporters in New York, were being met by a European arms build-up that risked becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy — investment in weapons production that, sooner or later, risk nuclear war. He dismissed talk of a planned Russian assault on Europe as nonsense, and posed the obvious question that Western commentary studiously avoids: why would a Russia, a “full-spectrum commodity superpower” spanning eleven time zones, covet territory in a culturally exhausted, economically stagnant Western Europe bereft of natural resources?
The Ministry of Truth Comes to Britain and Brussels
The war rhetoric has been accompanied, entirely predictably, by a parallel tightening of the permissible bounds of debate. Prime Minister Andy Burnham used his address to the UN General Assembly this September to announce a new “National Centre for Information Defence”. He will task this quango with detecting and disrupting “hostile information attacks” working alongside intelligence agencies and social media platforms to police what counts as a “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain”.
Brussels, meanwhile, presses ahead with an EU-wide digital age-verification and identity wallet regime that, whatever its stated purpose, builds the infrastructure through which online access is conditioned on identity disclosure. This creeping authoritarianism, with profound irony, has led the EU and UK to increasingly resemble the late Soviet Union in institutional architecture, ideological rigidity and lack of free-speech protections. Britain’s own Ministry of Truth apparatus of government, police and media monitoring reflects a government obsessed with suppressing anti-immigration sentiment on social media.
None of this is coincidental. Vice President JD Vance in his seismic speech last year told the assembled dignitaries of the Munich Security Conference that the threat he worried about most vis-à-vis Europe was neither Russia nor China but the retreat of European elites from their own foundational liberal values. These include the suppression of dissent and the restriction of speech deemed unhelpful to the official line, and the importation, without public consent, of mass immigration of mostly young men from the Middle East, Africa and West and South Asia that is steadily replacing the historic populations of the countries in question. President Trump has made much the same point: that the two most self-destructive policies pursued by the EU and UK establishment are green energy fanaticism and open-borders migration. He wants none of it for an America grounded in Christian values, the Bill of Rights and Enlightenment constitutionalism.
Whose War, Exactly?
The final irony deserves stating plainly. The European establishment’s newfound zeal for confronting Russia has been consistently deployed to frustrate any diplomatic off-ramp. When Ukrainian and Russian negotiators reached the outlines of a framework agreement in Istanbul in the spring of 2022, Boris Johnson’s unscheduled visit to Kyiv days later is remembered by Ukraine’s own chief negotiator, David Arakhamia, as the moment London counselled Kyiv to “sign nothing… and just fight.” Mr. Johnson, of course, denies exerting decisive pressure but the timeline is not in dispute. Nor is the fact that Ukraine, the supposed frontline democracy in whose name the West is being asked to countenance war with a nuclear power, has held no national election since 2019. A regime installed by a US-led coup in 2014 which displaced an elected government is now asked to stand as the vindication of Western democratic principle. Ukraine’s own reputation for endemic corruption was a persistent feature of independent rankings for years before the war. Western commentary treats any mention of the fact as tantamount to Kremlin sympathy. The moral capture of the debate has become totalizing with the charge of “Putin stooge” being the classic put-down line to all criticism of the NATO-led expansion since 1991, leading Ukraine down the primrose path to catastrophe.
An Old Story, Retold
As the saying goes, when all else fails, start a war. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that this old and cynical political logic — familiar episodes of governing-class failure across history — is precisely what is now in play across Western Europe and Britain. The region’s political elites presided over two decades of self-inflicted energy poverty, deindustrialisation and demographic upheaval. They now face electorates increasingly inclined to reward the populist parties that promise to reverse course. A governing establishment that built its legitimacy on Net Zero and open borders has discovered that a foreign enemy, real or embellished, is a more reliable route to continued power than an honest reckoning with its own record.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia makes an unusually convenient target: distant enough to be safely feared, weak enough (on Mr Rutte’s own telling) to be safely provoked, and useful enough, as an organising threat, to justify the curtailments of speech and dissent that a discredited establishment now finds it needs. Europeans and Britons alike would do well to ask, before this logic runs its course, who exactly is being asked to do the dying, and in whose interest.
Dr Tilak K. Doshi is an energy economist and the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor. He is a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former contributor to Forbes.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
And if you haven’t caught on that that those same Europeans have been telling Zelenskyy to attack Russia’s oil refining infrastructure in order to try and effect our midterm elections by keeping fuel prices high, you haven’t been paying attention.
Thankfully Trump’s threat to put a 90 day ban on all diesel sales from the US followed by a “request” to Europe to open up their strategic oil reserves has worked. The question is will it be enough?
Here, what I consider Canada’s best political blogger lays it out for you.
https://youtu.be/7jqaBkLCzc8
Thanks, good find.
This guy left Canada so speaks more freely than he could there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ-Z_l6Tlh8
Yea, I’ve watched some of his stuff plus several others, but I judge Sterling to be the best. I also like that he doesn’t hoc T-shirts during his presentations.
Good grief, who on Earth upvoted THAT?
rah thinks that Ukraine was manipulated into attacking Russian oil refineries by Machiavellian European politicians, who are willing and ready to endure fuel price hikes and shortages, and probably lose their own elections, just to help Democrats win more Congressional seats in the U.S. midterms.
Most politicians, especially including European politicians, are not even clever enough to see through the “net zero” scam. But rah thinks they’re nevertheless cunning enough to play Zelensky and the U.S. electorate like a fiddle, to worsen the upcoming midterm disaster in the U.S. 🙄
Yea, Whatever! He says as France burns. They have manipulated almost a whole continent into importing the third word so they can suck their wealth dry. Human caused catastrophic climate change is just one of several tools they have used to expand their subjugation of the masses.
you talking utter bollox..
In what world is FRANCE burning???
WTF a few school kids egged on by a looser like Melanchthon!
France needs more immigrants…agree
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MGJRtFGodvM?feature=share
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/52nnHsfXo8A?feature=share
etc, etc, etc
Whaaa?
Ukraine is attacking Russian energy facilities to reduce its ability to fight the war as fuel enables its military and to reduce its income from petroleum thus hamper its ability to fight the war. In fact Trump is pushing Ukraine to stop so that Russia can have diesel fuel to export thus lower world prices.
None dare calls it Evil, unadulterated & simple …
Because that would offend our modern sensibility that a person’s actions cannot be the result of a well cultivated desire to inflict harm-unto-destruction upon his fellowman but rather that his malevolence is merely a matter of perverse incentives i.e. the fault of society & ‘the system’. Thus we join as one of
The Facts plainly in evidence are that
— the War on Ukraine (since A.D. 2014) was provoked in order to see that part of the world die in futile agony as much as for any ill-gotten gains; and that
— the War on Hydrocarbon Minerals (since A.D. 2011) was provoked in order to reign cruelly over the deprived millions, in the same & greater lands, as much as for any profits extracted thereby.
In order to appreciate the necessary parallels, please consider (a) who promotes these operations (pausing to consider What has Their Track Record on serving Humanity?), and (b) what infrastructure (& jobs) are targeted … [ Please continue as you see fit to do so.]
Only T. Doshi has laid it out this clearly, but even he is ‘pulling his punches’. Let’s do better, rather than wait for the professional historians to finally get around to it.
With My Best Wishes to You All, we remain
Prof Th. Pradeep as channeled by RLW (you may call me ‘Rob’, we are never AI-Addled, never qAnon.
“Global Warming” started well before 2011.
It’s not really a War until the Wehrmacht weighs in, when the warming went local at Fukushima, destroying a nuclear-reactor (power plant), triggering a Tsu-Nami (Harbor Wave) that destroyed a coastal city, killing in the thousands & displacing in the tens-of-thousands, PROVING beyond any doubt that CLIMATE-CHANGE KILLS! When the reverberations reached the Bundes-Republik Deutschland, in March of 2,011 A.D., the people lost their collective wits, and have yet to recover. The War on Minerals Power (Uranium, Hydrocarbons) finally began in earnest. All prior to that was mere prelude, in this canonical recounting. From the undermining of mining to the undermining of Russia(ns), from Berlin to Kyiv was but a short step for the Feudal-Lords of Old Europe (Rome & Brussels, London & Paris & the aforementioned Berlin), may their names be accursed.
— RLW, free-blogging this morning from the Monterey Bay of Alta Caliphornia, formerly a part of the U.-S.-of-A.
Nutso!
Tidal waves come from earthquakes of subsistence type, like the one in Alaska in 1964 in contrast to the recent one near Alaska.
Problem with Fukushima power plant was that the tidal wave from a very strong earthquake damaged fuel tanks for generators that power cooling systems for reactor and spent-fuel ponds. Plant designers underestimated the height a tidal wave could reach.
(The Alaskan quake of 1964 was over M9 strength. Hit Anchorage city hard The tidal wave trashed downtown Port Alberni BC because it entered a narrowing shallowing inlet which increased its height.
There’s evidence on Vancouver Island of a tidal wave from Japan a few hundred years ago.)
Apparently you don’t understand how a tsunami is created. Not by some bs about climate change/global warming but by an earthquake. The lying scientists haven’t figured out how to link earthquakes to burning fossil fuels.
This writer seems to be understating the very real threat from a failing and desperate Putin.
Or European Leaders pushing failed net zero policies while importing people from 3rd world countries feel desperate to hold onto power?
Importing people is the only way to generate a rising population to spread the national debts around.
Never mind. Once Putin is a smoking corpse we can send them all to Russia. Not many young men left there, after all.
Unlike the USA, we recognise that our leaders are a corrupt bunch of cunts and need to be reigned in. No matter what color ties they are wearing
If you want 3rd world people that is on you. They don’t assimilate well. But hey, you need your population to grow 😉
Maybe Britain should try growing its population the old fashioned way. 🙂
What, net zero?
Same thing.
Have you not seen our cost of living? The immigrant scum are given everything for free and then if they want to they can join their crime families or organised crime to earn tax free.
Lot more fun.
Might become a reality when the lights go out, and so too everything else that relies on an effective national grid. It’s amazing how child birth explodes when there’s no telly, internet or anything electronic to keep us entertained 😅🤫
Threats that exist only in your tiny mind,
The writer is just peddling Russian/Trumpian bullshit.
Sure Net Zero is a crock of shit. But who was behind it all if not Russia?
Who stood to gain from renewables that need to be balanced by Russian gas, and demonising coal and nuclear power to increase the demand for – you guessed it – Russian gas?
Who stands to gain from massively shortages of hydrocarbons from the middle east due to Trumpian adventures?
Trump’s pals in the Russian gas industry.
Russia is nobody’s friend or ally. Not even King Donald’s. And bombing it back to the stone age is being effected by Ukraine a lot better than king Donny has managed in Iran.
“And bombing it back to the stone age is being effected by Ukraine a lot better than king Donny has managed in Iran.”
That’s true, but it doesn’t mean Trump isn’t capable of bombing the Mad Mullahs back to the Stone Age, Trump just chooses not to do so at this time.
I disagree with this policy. I think Trump should have wiped out 100 percent of Iran’s military capabilities with the first attacks, instead of stopping at 75 percent, in hopes of doing a deal with religious fanatics to end the war.
Leaving the religious fanatics with offensive capabilities is the source of all sorts of problems in the area, and making a good deal with religious fanatics is wishful thinking, as the Twelfth Imam has the veto on any deal. He says “Death to America!”. How do you deal with insanity like that? Answer: You don’t deal with them, you remove them from power.
It seems to me it is pretty obvious now the strategy is regime change brought on by strangling the Mullahs and IRGC so hard that they will be busy fighting over the scraps so that an uprising by the Persian people has some chance to end their rule.
It may just work. Already the IRGC has been calling on their proxy Islamists for help and China appears to have washed its hands of the whole situation.
Destroying the whole infrastructure would have left the oppressed Iranian people with nothing if they are successful in their revolution.
We shall see. But one thing almost certain. If the indigenous people of Iran are successful a whole lot of Islamists and those that have supported them will be good as dead. 47 years of brutal oppression fosters one heck of a lot of hate and scores to settle.
“The Arab Spring was a wave of pro-democracy protests, uprisings, and civil conflicts that swept across the Middle East and North Africa starting in late 2010 and peaking in 2011.”
So Net Zero is a Russian plot? Really?
That’s what I was thinking. Do you Leo, or anyone else with this theory, have a credible article to read on this? …. or a credible YouTube video?
Under Putin, for many years Russia surreptitiously bankrolled climate activists in the West, to undermine competition to their own oil and gas industry. The Grauniad (Jun 19, 2014), The Hill (Mar 1, 2022), and The Express (Mar 4, 2022) all had articles about it.
If Putin is failing – why isn’t he the one telling his people that Ukraines Army is totally incompetent and losing the war yet such a threat that they may take over Russia at any time ?
How can Putin be failing if Russias advantage in terms of Drones and Shelsl is at least 3:1 and
that of Glide Bombs is as of now roughly 50.000 : 0?
If Putin is failing – why is the exchange rate of fallen soldiers 30: 1 ?
In February Ukraine received 1000 corpses, Russians got 31 in return.
Pretty much the same as in October last year with a 1000: 40 exchange.
On top of that many Ukrainians get pulverized or buried during glide bomb attacks
+ according to Ukraine, Russians eat the corpses.
How do you explain this ratio from a Putin is failing point of view.
If Putin is failing – why isn’t he the one sinking to such extreme lows and trying to sell a 50 year old F 16 as gamechanger?
(imagine someone trying to sell a 50 year old sportscar as ultimate racing machine? Even a distorted Fox News brain would understand the problem – but with a fighter jet it works )
If Putin is failing – why are Europeans pushing for war against a dead horse?
And why is Zelensky the one who claimed 2 month ago that Ukraine lost 50000 soldiers,
while he said in February that they lost 55.000.
Must be some strong Voodoo Ukraine is using.
And why does a UkrainianArmy that started with 980K soldiers needs 30.000 new recruits every month
when it lost only 50K – roughly 1000 per month?
And right now they are about to start recruiting women for the frontlines – what does this tell you about failing?
Even if Putin were failing – Ukraines population dropped by almost 1/3 in 10 years according to statista.
Don’t you think this would turn the tide in his favor?
And if Putin is so much failing that even serial war criminal Keith Kellog is crying on TV about Russia losing 30k soldiers a month, while he never gave a shit about the millions the USA has killed during his decade long career as serial war criminal – then something may be wrong with the failing narrative.
Maybe Putin isn’t failing but your brain is.
Otherwise you’d understand why Putin isn’t the guy constantly begging for money and help ,
but his comedian counterpart from the eternal 5th column.
Why do you think Ukraines main way of recruitment has become impressment – a method the heavily involvedperfidious albion has been using for its Navy and Proxies for centuries to feed the East India/South Africa company.
thanks for the pro Putin propaganda farm.. and who killed off Prighozin ?? The Ukrainians??
Really the man is slowly defeating the combined efforts of 41 nations using Ukraine as their protective cover to avoid being directly attacked in return it is called a PROXY war using Ukrainian men and now women as cannon fodder for their own purpose of trying to weaken Russia.
“Top 10 Economies by Nominal GDP (2026 Projections)
…
9 Russia $2.65T
…
“
NOT RUSSIA
no bigger than Italy without the excellent food, wine and sunshine!
I wonder. It is the same people who told us of the marvels of decarbonization who are peddling the “Putin is Done” rhetoric.
Europe and Britain are done, to be sure. The US is done if the Left returns to power. Hanging our hopes on Trump, et. al., is indeed a gamble, but perhaps the one with the least probability of complete authoritarianism.
A failing and desperate West is far more credible a threat than Putin.
VP was born in 1952.
Approximately 117 billion humans have ever been born on Earth throughout history.
Approximately 8 billion humans are alive now.
If Putin in five years cannot defeat even Ukraine, how is Putin a serious threat to Western and Central Europe?
He is just a boogeyman, a spectre to frighten the masses, who are rushing toward the so-called “far right”, which just wants common sense and national interests to prevail over the failed policies of the old elites.
The European Union and NATO have, over the last 15-20 years, morphed into a new, updated Green version of the old Soviet Union! Elections within the EU can now be overturned if Brussels decides that the winners are “unacceptably” right wing, and the Thought Police of Orwell are flourishing across the continent and the UK!
Why would Western intelligence and elites want to provoke a war with a nuclear superpower? Money! The untapped wealth of Russia’s eastern provinces could prop up the Socialist programs of Europe for decades, if not generations; and they seem to feel that it is better to steal them than to make trade deals where the Russian people, and the blue collar workers of Europe, get to share in the pelf! And Ukraine may prove really handy for destroying oil infrastructure and raising world fuel prices, thus countering the anti-globalist efforts of OrangeManBad!
Somehow I find it rather ironic that, after importing millions of military age males, the EU may find them more interested in fighting the local police than the Russian Army; as we are witnessing now in France.
“The untapped wealth of Russia’s eastern provinces” is a myth..
It’s disappearing under china without a shot being fired.
Siberia and all it’s so called wealth is gone while Putin is wanking over Ukraine.
How? Intermariage with Chinese who are hard working unlike Russians and don’t drink to death.
Tilak Doshi is right about the EU’s and UK’s wrongheaded climate and energy policies, but completely delusional about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and threats against other European countries.
The EU and UK did not cause Russia’s war on Ukraine, or somehow trick Russia into threatening NATO countries. The EU and UK certainly do not “need” either of those things, and did not “manufacture” the threats from Russia. Putin did all that, of his own accord.
Putin started the war with Ukraine. Full stop. Nobody sane thinks that Europe wanted or needed him to do that. Hardly anyone in Europe expected that Ukraine could withstand Russia’s blitzkrieg for more than a few weeks, at best.
Likewise, Russian saber-rattling, nuclear threats, low-grade war of sabotage against NATO countries, frequent “accidental” incursions, and other provocations against Poland and the Baltics are entirely Putin’s doing.
Putin has an obvious motive: those threats induce European countries to retain their munitions for their own defense, instead of sending them to Ukraine. Pray that that is Putin’s only motive, because there’s also a real possibility that he really could start another war. He is, after all, a psychopath. (Unfortunately, he’s not the only one; Dmitry Medvedev is even more insane than Putin.)
With the laudable exception of Poland, Europe’s investment in defense is dangerously low. Russia spends an estimated 7-8% of its GDP on military. Poland spends only 4.5%, the USA spends only 3.2%, the UK spends just 2.35%, Germany 2.27%, and France just 2.03%.
The best way to prevent a Russian attack on NATO is to prepare for one. People like Tilak, who blame the EU for Russian imperialism, and who claim that Europe’s paltry “investment in weapons production… sooner or later, risk[s] nuclear war,” are Putin’s patsies.
Putin’s revanchist dream includes the restoration of russian dominance over the Baltics and eastern Europe. He’s already building up resources for a push west, while the russian military performs the same exercises near the Baltics that it was performing for several years prior to the invasion of Ukraine. He’s not remotely hiding his intentions. The fact this has become a partisan issue, and that it is being entangled with opposition to the false climate narrative, is ridiculous.
Putin has almost no cards left. He is losing, and losing badly, not because of the front line battles, but because his war machine is being systematically dismantled by Ukraine and his economy drained by wars and economic sanctions.
Russian GDP half the UK’s before the war. Lord knows what it is now. Interest rates are up around 15%. More than half its refineries are off line – probably for the winter. Most of its banks are technically insolvent. There is no gasoline or diesel to be had.
Not in te remote Siberian shitholes, but in the affluent suburbs of St, Petersburg and Moscow.
Ukraine however is being funded by Europe. Massively, Using interest on Russian money held in European banks because not even the oligarchs trusted Russian banks or Putin.
Ukraine now has its own ballistic missiles. Its own cruise missiles. European fighter jets. European ammunition. Deal upon deal done not with King Donny, but with European weapons manufacturers.
The Trump moaned that ‘Europe wasn’t pulling its weight;
Well it wasn’t, It was paying a fortune for US military equipment that Trump disallowed from being used.
Fine. Europe is now producing its own.
Corrupt as the EU is, in its pale imitation of the USSR, even its bureaucrats realise that Russia wont stop until it gets punched in the face, kicked on the ground and has its neck stamped on. And they will be dust in the sunset
So that’s what it is doing, although most of the impetus is not coming from the spineless EU, but from the actual countries themselves. Via NATO. And outside it.
As things stand, Russia cannot win, and Ukraine cannot lose. Western Europe;s GDP is five times bigger than Russia, which is a third rate oil republic run by gangsters.
The only card Putin has left is the nuclear card, but it is uncertain as to how many missiles he actually ever had, let alone how many missiles he actually has in working order. REMEMBER PAL, Putin Always Lies. And the moment he launches a nuclear missile, UK and French nuclear weapons will be deployed and European nations will have a reason – not just an excuse – to utterly destroy the Russian leadership.
How it will end no one knows exactly. Probably Russia will lose Kaliningrad, and Transnistria, and if the Finns decide to wade in, Karelia too, and all occupied parts of Ukraine including Donetsk Luhansk, Crimea, Kherson and and Zaporizhzhia.
It might even lose parts of Kursk, Russian rednecks don;t really care who rules them. Life will always be shit. But God gave them vodka,.
The negotiation will not be with Putin. Putin will be gone. Cancelled or vanished. Some new Mafia boss will cut the deal.
Russia will go back to being the third world shithole it always was. Ukraine will become the biggest arms exporter in the world and Russia will go back to exporting oil and gas, probably under the control of US and European oil companies
What will also happen, will be the collapse or simple economic death of a whole series of ‘woke’ and ‘green’ and ‘socialist’ movements in the west that were always 100% subsidised by Russia, Along with similar movements on the right on USA and Europe. In short people stirring up hatred will lose their meal tickets
Everybody will clainm that it was their input that made all this happen, In fact it is simply the tide of history.
Putin saw it turning against Russia. Tried to stop it, but ended up helping it destroy Russia.
Making Russia Great Again was always a tinpot dream. Take note
bingo!
Leo Smith, you’re right that Russia is losing, but it is not because their military is being “dismantled,” it is because Ukraine is strengthening their own military faster than Russia is strengthening theirs.
Russia’s military is far, far stronger now than it was 4.5 years ago, when Putin shredded the Budapest Memorandum (in which Russia had pledged to respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and existing borders, in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arsenal), and launched his blitzkrieg against Ukraine.
Your memory is correct that Trump complained bitterly that “Europe wasn’t pulling its weight.” But it is not true that Trump disallowed Ukraine from effectively using U.S. military equipment against Russia. It was Biden who did that, not Trump. Trump largely rescinded those constraints (though not as quickly as he should have).
You are right that Putin Always Lies. But that doesn’t mean all his threats are empty, it doesn’t mean he won’t attack NATO, and it doesn’t mean that NATO’s pathetically low defense spending is not an enticement for Putin to do so.
You’re exactly right, Archer.
Putin (like so many others) was taught at a young age that “great leaders” are warriors, who expand their nations by conquest. Putin wants to be a great Tzar, too. He wants to be remembered like “Peter the Great,” who nearly tripled Russian territory, and who famously melted down Russian church bells and cast them into cannons for the wars he started.
If Putin were sane, the lesson he would learn from his Ukraine debacle would be to not try to conquer his peaceful neighbors. Unfortunately, he is not sane, so there’s no telling what he will do. He might well convince himself that Europe is a paper tiger, and no match for his battle-hardened armies and arms factories.
There is some tiny grain of logic at the core of that insanity. Even as the Russian people and economy have suffered, the Russian military has rapidly strengthened. Their arsenal of antique Soviet armor is being depleted, but Russia and Ukraine have both become masters of drone warfare, and their production of drones, missiles and other guided weapons is prodigious and growing. Russia produces 3 to 6 times as many military drones as all of NATO combined. (But Putin-patsy Talik Doshi nevertheless thinks that it’s European weapons production which “sooner or later, risk[s] nuclear war.”)
That’s not a secret, and some western arms manufacturers have noticed, and are learning from it. But NATO as a whole is way, way behind both Russia and Ukraine in those areas.
“building up resources”
explain.
Russia has massively expanded its military infrastructure on its western border with the baltic states. New bases, enlarged existing bases, re-deployment of more than 100,000 troops to the region, stockpiles expanded in multiple locations. It’s all the same as the preparation that took place before the invasion of ukraine.
I usually take infrastructure to mean “word politicians use to make people think money was for roads and bridges instead of their beach holiday”. What is Russia’s newest jetfighter named? MIGs were in Top Gun with Tom Cruise in 1986 (40 years ago… pre cell phone… 486 desktop computers running Windows 3.1).
The war was started in Ukraine after the US instigated a coup d’etat in 2014 against a legitimately elected President who favoured good relations with Russia. They then ensured that the Minsk accords were not properly implemented and the outcome was thousands of Russian-speaking Ukrainians being treated like Palestinians in Gaza.
Let’s imagine a US version of Smotrich taking over and demanding that all Hispanics leave the USA or else. Gas chambers in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and SoCal!! Or 1000lb bombs dropped en masse on schools of Hispanic children??
Now I realise that the USA doesn’t have similar friends with military firepower to counter it, but just suppose that they did? Would standing up for the Hispanics be ‘terrorism’ or a humanitarian response to evil within your nation of thieves, fraudsters and warmongers???
+10
That president was in Putins pocket. The rest of your rant????
“the outcome was thousands of Russian-speaking Ukrainians being treated like Palestinians in Gaza.”
WTF is this rubbish???
I’m with you on Putin being the warmonger, not NATO or the EU. But Putin is just an ordinary authoritarian thug, not a psychopath. He got where he is by thuggery and spoils, not competent economic management. He thought Ukraine would be an easy distraction from his domestic central planning woes, Ukraine was just as corrupt as Russia, and NATO’s westward expansion and meddling in Ukraine elections was an easy domestic excuse for regime change.
Too bad for him that his corrupt regime extended to an incompetent military, and now he’s cornered himself. Backing out would admit he’s wasted 4½ years and millions of lives for nothing but a ruined economy. He’s got a tiger by the tail and his only hope is hanging on until the democracies lose interest. Zelensky’s only hope is a Russian coup or Putin’s death before the democracies lose interest. For all I know, both sides hope for a Ukrainian coup or Zelensky’s death as a wildcard.
Let’s talk about corruption…
I think you have it about right, although I don’t think the death of Zelenskyy would cause Ukraine to change course.
Putin is in trouble. He has to import North Korean troops into the battle to keep it going. The Ukrainians are fighting Putin to a standstill. Putin is proposing mobilizing 120,000 more Russian troops, but he says they won’t be sent to Ukraine, for some reason.
Yes, the pundits predicted Putin would crush Ukraine in three days. The pundits were wrong. The same pundits are still bloviating.
I don’t think Putin has any intention of attacking NATO. He may try a little harrassment, for various reasons, but that is all.
Nonetheless, Europe should take measures to defend themselves. This is the way to deter war.
The only attack Putin could launch on Europe would be a nuclear attack, and, of course, that would mean the end to Putin, and I don’t think Putin is suicidal.
Putin = Stasi, just less efficient, cos he was a lousy incompetent KGB hack from the very beginning, which is why he was stuffed into a little back office in Dresden talking by proxy to Mielke and Honey Honnecker.
You are obviously suffering from some sort of Putin breakdown.
Pretty much everything you wrote is absolute BS .
You get a bit of the 2nd paragraph right by coincidence – that’s about it.
It was indeed not the EU that tricked Russia – It was the USA(and partly UK) .
USA has invested 5 bio dollar into the fake ass revolution( deputy secr. of state is on tape saying that) after the 2005 “revolution” didn’t get the results it was supposed to.
(We brokered the Ukraine revolution – Obama).
The EU was only dragged into it – (remember Nulands”Fuck the EU” phone leak)
and is now left alone to pay the bill.
The plan to trick Russia into war was released in 2019 by the Rand corporation (Overstretching Russia) ,
just as the War against Iran was by the Brookings Inst.( Which Path to Persia) – sponsored by Nulands fellow 5th column Oligarchs Saban and Crown .
Miss Nuland is fellow of the Brookings Inst. as she was board member of the NED which sponsored and coordinated huge parts of the Ukrainian “revolution” under Nulands 5th column fellow Gershman.(in Belarus they failed btw).
These plans to attack Russia via Ukraine go back to Brzesinckies book Grand Chessboard(His daughter if famous for saying ” Its our job to tell Americans what to think” – she was very successful with you ).
And these plans are based on the Heartland theory.
Putin did not start the War.
The donbass has been attacked by Ukraine with up to 1500 shells per day(acc to OSCE)
before Putin stepped.
The USA wanted to attack Syria because of a single “Syrian” shell on Turkey.
(Later it turned out that the shell that killed a few dozen people was a NATO shell.)
The USA was crying for war with Iran – just because Iran took down an American drone
in 2019.
So 1500 shells per day started war after 8 years of permanent violations of Minsk agreements by Ukraine who were only a trick to buy time for Ukraine to militarize it(according to Merkel and Hollande)
Though being a lawyer and politician Putin is most likely not a psychopath –
otherwise he’d have given Ukraine the US treatment and bombed the hell out of it from day one.
He also wouldn’t have instantly started peace-talks with Ukraine in Turkey
and removed troops from Kyiv as sign of goodwill – but then psychopath Boris Johnson showed up and sabotaged the peace deal.
And who are you to know how much defense spending is dangerously low?
A blackrock salesman.
Russia spents only a fraction of the money the USA spents on war and it would
spent way less without the Wall Street/City of London war in Ukraine.
And quantity of spending won’t fix any problem as long as single Pak3 and Thad interceptors cost 4-10 mio.
The level of MiC rip-off is simply too high to have an effective military built up if you do not have the world reserve currency..
In 1991 the Russians were promised by the USA/Baker that NATO won’t expand an inch to the east if Germany is allowed to reunite.
After the German reunion this promise was violated a dozen times with the NATO at Russias borders.
Jeffrey Sachs said 4 years ago that he was told by a western state leader that the war is because of NATO – that leader was Mrs Macron.
“In 1991 the Russians were promised by the USA/Baker that NATO won’t expand an inch to the east if Germany is allowed to reunite”
No!:
“…To be sure, the former Soviet president criticized NATO enlargement and called it a violation of the spirit of the assurances given Moscow in 1990, but he made clear there was no promise regarding broader enlargement.
Several years after German reunification, in 1997, NATO said that in the “current and foreseeable security environment” there would be no permanent stationing of substantial combat forces on the territory of new NATO members. Up until the Russian military occupation of Crimea in March, there was virtually no stationing of any NATO combat forces on the territory of new members. Since March, NATO has increased the presence of its military forces in the Baltic region and Central Europe.
Putin is not stupid, and his aides surely have access to the former Soviet records from the time and understand the history of the commitments made by Western leaders and NATO. But the West’s alleged promise not to enlarge the Alliance will undoubtedly remain a standard element of his anti-NATO spin. That is because it fits so well with the picture that the Russian leader seeks to paint of an aggrieved Russia, taken advantage of by others and increasingly isolated—not due to its own actions, but because of the machinations of a deceitful West”
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/did-nato-promise-not-to-enlarge-gorbachev-says-no/
Most of the former Russian colonies in eastern Europe joined NATO as soon as they were free from the Russian yoke.
Since Russia invaded the Ukraine, several other nations that were never part of the Soviet Union, but bordered Russia, have also joined NATO.
I’ve been to Ukraine several times. They were very US and European friendly. Putin was happy when the Ukraine government was in his pocket. Crimea was also a friendly port to Russia. Then the corrupt Ukraine president was thrown out a supposedly legimate president was elected. Of course Ukraine was/is corrupt. Putin decided to take Crimea.
He also as noted would like to reform the Soviet Union.
The invasion by Russia was designed to take the bread basket of Ukraine. Putin misjudged Ukraine resistance.
And he has repeatedly threatened to use tactical nukes. I don’t know if he’s that deranged.
He has damaged the Russian economy as noted with very high inflation. My ex wife lives in Tula Russia and has complained repeatedly about prices.
Of course Ukraine has damaged Russian refineries and caused gasoline shortages as well as significant damages to Crimea infastructure. There has been very little loss of life in Russia by Ukraine drones in contrast to Russia constantly bombing civilian infastructure in Ukraine. Keiv was a beautiful city west of the Denepr river and I walked thru the city many times. It is now destroyed.
How some posters want to blame Ukraine and the US for the war is beyond my understanding.
Remember, too, Biden drippy pants told the Russians they could have the Crimea
“The population of Russia is approximately 143 million people as of 2026, according to Worldometer’s Russia Population”
About UK + France.
“The total population of the European Union (EU) is approximately 452.0 million inhabitants as of January 1, 2026.”
Edit: random-seeming statistics not presented to say Russia is not important. In European football jargon they seem to be “a mid-table team”.
Thank you for writing this! The Europeans see 10 millions of people in one of their neighbors country delocalized and about two million soldiers killed. That is a real concern and especially Poland and Germany invest into heavily their armies as a result. The authors has not provided any facts supporting his speculation that any European country is preparing an attack on Russia.
I know that this site leaves all rational argument behind when it comes to international politics, but it really is pathetic to claim that the wars started along the borders of Russia were not entirely US in origin. We all know what Obama’s mob did in Ukraine with Maidan. That was not EU supported, it was US-initiated and all of Europe was told to toe the line.
All the wars in the Middle East were US crimes imposed by their sovereign dictator, Bibi Netanyahu. Don’t tell us that Europe wanted any of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Lebanon or Gaza. And EVERY SINGLE ONE was imposed by US prostitutes who lie for a living, genocide for kickbacks and impose tariffs against anyone who wishes to obey the rule of law.
And now there is this ridiculous farce of the USA trying to make out that it is the peacemaker and Europe are the warmongers?
Go lock yourselves up in the loony bins you all deserve to reside in!!
It is just as pathetic to claim that Putin had no role in the circus going on there. You think he’s a saint or something? Poor, poor beleaguered Putin, surrounded by enemies.
Not a Saint, nor a demon in any comparative sense as world leaders go. It is not a binary condition. He was never the real threat in any military sense.
Of course, Putin has a role, mostly as a useful distraction. His real crime was to seek to distance himself from the financial despotism of the Western central banking cartel. Anyone who plays along, no matter how despicable, is welcome. Anyone who seeks to offer competition to the hopelessly degraded Western currencies becomes a pariah. All other considerations are secondary.
Ukraine is but a tool to be discarded when no longer useful.
Your fantasy, we’ll stay out of it……
The Maidan coup was EU supported.
Now German president was involved in peace talks and as soon as those were signed he went to the Maidan to instigate the protests.
Ukrainian troops were trained all across Europe before the coup – and the reason the coup started was an inacceptable EU deal that required Ukraine to cut economic ties with Russia (analogous to the Taiwan “revolution” when Taiwan cut ties with China).
The EU also fully backed the new and illegal ( the necessary 2/3 of parliamentary votes to remove the president was never reached) government
“that Obama’s mob did in Ukraine with Maidan. That was not EU supported, it was US-initiated and all of Europe was told to toe the line.”
WTF??
You have never been to Ukraine and clearly clueless!
Funny thing, the Berkut b//stards who brutalised Maidan + their paymasters that shot unarmed students in Kiev all turned up in Moscow within months to do the same sort of stuff there
What a clueless article.
Sigh. WUWT is going downhill
‘why would a Russia, a “full-spectrum commodity superpower” spanning eleven time zones, covet territory in a culturally exhausted, economically stagnant Western Europe bereft of natural resources?’
That is the question.
Not really-just think about the old empire, and so on.
Puke-face Putin started the war. I’m just surprised he hasn’t “fallen” out a window yet.
From the article (another good one, btw): “Britain’s own Ministry of Truth apparatus of government, police and media monitoring reflects a government obsessed with suppressing anti-immigration sentiment on social media.”
I noticed the other day when the Iranian terrorist were arrested in the UK, that the UK media referred to them as “residents of London”, and no names given, which told me right then that they were probably immigrants from the Middle East.
Learning how to interpret Leftwing propaganda is becoming a life skill. People who can’t tell the difference between the truth and Leftwing propaganda are likely to vote for the very people who have caused all their problems, namely, the Democrats, Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists.
The lying, distorting Left and their Leftwing Media propaganda are the biggest threat to Western nations and their way of life.
The Leftwing propaganda has made huge progress in commanding the narrative in the last few decades. How else to explain 75 million people voting for Kamala Harris, a totally unqualified candidate, in the last presidential election?
How else to explain the polls that think Democrats can handle the economy better than Republicans when it was the Democrats who created inflation and price distortions in the first place? Fox News Channel showed a chart this morning of inflation during the Biden and Trump eras which shows plainly who is at fault for the higher prices we have today.
Every Republican candidate should get this chart and show it at every public meeting. The chart speaks for itself. Also, get a chart of gasoline prices over the same period. It will show who is really responsible for higher prices. It speaks for itself, also.
As for “pain at the pump”, I pay about $20 more per tankful when I fill up my car. This does not break my bank. And it is a small price to pay to prevent the religious fanatics in Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. See the gasoline chart, and notice you paid more for gasoline under Biden.
And Carter-Dems both.
Well said. I must add that the Republicans have done little to thwart the trend and have, in many cases, cheered it on.
While Putin is a more credible threat than carbon dioxide, the real threat, as always, is from within.
You spoke of inflation, the tool of central banking and its servant governments. It says somewhere that money is the root of all evil. That is an oversimplification, I think. Inflation is a tool of creating money out of thin air and has been a boon to the planners and schemers in both branches of the ruling Party in the US, and in the world in general.
Mayer Amschel Rothschild is credited with saying, “Let me issue and control a nation’s money supply, and I care not who writes its laws.” Politicians, propagandists, activists, anarchists, and war are relatively inexpensive tools for those who wield that power. The illusion of 70,000,000 votes for an empty basket is not difficult, either.
E. Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, N. Macedonia, Finland, and Sweden. Those are the countries that have joined NATO since the fall of the USSR on Boxing Day, 1991; a treaty organization whose purpose was countering a Soviet invasion of Europe!
Russia has neither the manpower nor the desire to conquer Europe; an area mostly bereft of resources, with an aging population and infrastructure. Russian has, rather pathetically, been trying to curry favor with the US and the EUnuchs, to little avail; the depredations of the Clinton Admin being a major factor in the current make up there now.
Those, like Hillary Clinton, who claim to fear the Russian bear are dancing to shadows on the wall, thrown there by the MIC and Western intelligence agencies; the same guys who brought you Iraq, and weapons of mass destruction!
Ah! WMD. Now you see them, now you don’t…
According to the Czech military gas alarms and sickened US soldiers, the WMDs were there. I wasn’t, and neither were you, and if they were there, that fact was buried-why I don’t know.
As for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no intelligence agency from any nation, friend or foe disputed the claims that Saddam Insane had WMD.
Saddam himself, encouraged the idea, thinking this would keep him safe. Most of Saddam’s generals said they thought Saddam had an active WMD program going. Saddam wanted them to think that.
The West gave Saddam every chance to come clean about his WMD programs. They bent over backwards, but Saddam refused at every turn.
Saddam was very much like the fanatics that are currently running Iran. Not prone to cooperate. So you have to use force on such people.
Actually, Saddam was very much the antithesis of the fanatics running Iran, and was supported by the US as being a counter to them. He cared little what religion anyone espoused as long as they didn’t get in his way. The US government loves despots as long as they remain useful.
When he tired of being a puppet is when he became a liability.
Instead of criticizing Zelenskyy for droning Putin’s diesel fuel supplies, Trump should establish more refineries in the U.S.
We can thank Delusional Democrats for our lack of refining capacity.
In 1976 there were 17 oil refineries in the UK. By 2000 there were 12 refineries, but in the pursuit of ‘nut-zero’ we decided to close some, shut our oil & gas fields, & rely on imports !!
By 2024, the UK had just 6 refineries & a refined product deficit of about 275,000 barrels per day; then in 2025, we closed 2 more !! So now we are down to 4 (& one, Fawley, is due to shut for ~3 months for maintenance). Good strategic planning, eh
Got to praise the politicians; they really know how to fuck things up for us.
Now Trump tells us to empty our strategic stockpile to lower prices in the USA to improve his chances in the midterms. That’ll put the UK up shit creek in a leaky boat.
The Russian Spy/Intelligence operation is the largest in the world versus population size and has many hands on the keyboard hammering out propaganda….apparently some appears on this site. Putey has gotten himself into a big mess and Putey must go!
Russia could and should be as successful as Finland,,,Sweden,,,Norway. Russians have been under Czars for centuries and communist Czars for the last century…..so the people apparently do not know freedom. NATO is for defense and does not want war with Russia. China is the country likely to take over a large area of Russia. Look at who Putey tries to ally with – China Iran N Korea…..Putey is a very unfriendly person….Trump pretends they are pals but that is just Trump’s method – if Putey was replaced, Trump would claim to be pals with the new guy. If I had a magic wand …..I would wave it and Putey Xi Jinping Kimmi Jong and the IRGC would disappear……and the world would be a much much better place.
These “leaders” have not learned one of the great lessons from WWII — large wars are won with industrial output, not rhetoric. They are rapidly de-industrializing while making noises about starting a war with Russia.
Is there a climate model scenario including nuclear war in Europe? RCP-WW3?
‘Mr. Johnson – a known liar, of course, denies exerting decisive pressure but the timeline is not in dispute.’
The notion of Johnson “exerting decisive pressure” stretches credibility to breaking point.
Military preparedness is always a necessity; otherwise, countries become like Canada, defense featherweights that must depend too much on others for security. The trick is not to let it interfere with economic development because of over-regulation and adoption of fashionable energy policies that just look good in theory but can’t deliver in reality.
I start with drawing attention to leadership. We appear to be in an age when a very large number of previously well governed people are now under the power of weak and incompetent leaders.
Why? One good guess is that the people who voted for them have lived a generation or two as prosperous and safe individuals enjoying life and moving about the world as tourists and business people. This includes the Chinese Han majority mainlanders.
Contrast how it has been for Poles and Ukrainians and Israelis.
Then, I look at history.
Who can pretend that Nero, Hannibal, Alexander, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao and Hitler were created by the military/industrial complex or Jewish bankers or some crackpot political philosophy?
Anyone might think that there is an invisible and malevolent enemy who hates humankind, who is perverted and perverting; a liar and the father of lies.
Goes by the names of Lucifer or Satan or the devil in some circles.
I do.
Dr Doshi has put me in the stinking position of kind of standing up for the EU and Britain. It leaves a terrible taste in my mouth. Many leaders in the US have been upset with the EU and the UK for not holding up their share of NATO, think defense spending and armament. Trump has finally told them to get off their ass and do something about it. They are finally waking up to the fact that they must start holding up their end no matter what Russia is doing. Secondly I think everyone is astonished with Ukraine, they have held up way better than expected and I think far better than almost any EU nation. Third the UK and EU are sure to use Russia as the excuse for ditching much of the net zero nonsense and get back to energy and political policies that will move their countries forward for a change. I am kind of with Doshi but for way different reasons.
Can’t speak for the EU, but until Mad Ed Miliband and the rotten excuse of a government over which he has seemingly great influence are gone there is minimal chance of the UK ditching the net zero nonsense. But it will be interesting if the EU do blink first, given how keen Burnham is to butter up to them.
This is Poly Sci 101. When you are in trouble domestically, create a foreign problem. When you are in trouble in foreign matters, create a domestic problem.
Trump just sent a message to the UK and EU.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2026/10/04/u-s-removes-all-bombers-and-support-fleet-from-raf-fairford-in-u-k-following-suspected-terrorist-plot/
Though he pulled all the heavy strategic bombers home the USAF still has a considerable footprint in the UK.
A Fighter wing at Lakenheath
A wing of tankers and a wing of special operations at Mildenhall
Plus various logistics and intelligence units scattered around at various other RAF fields and facilities.
Personally I wouldn’t mind him pulling them all out.
Memories…….
Back in 1987 I think it was, my SF team was returning to Flint Kasserne at Bad Tolz Germany from the US via C-130. The aircraft landed at Mildenhall for some reason that I can’t remember and parked on the apron. We so far towards one end of the main runway we could see the British Civilians lined up outside the fence watching the aircraft come in to land over their heads. There were a bunch of F-15s flying around.
While standing there behind the aircraft after deplaning via the rear ramp and waiting for a van to come get us a SR-71 came into land. It popped that big Orange chute. Just awesome! It was way down the runway from where we stood when it took a left and disappeared in the distance.
While we were there we loaded into a USAF van and were taken to a local pub off base for lunch. I still remember the British Red headed waitress that waited on us and her accent. After lunch we boarded the same C-130 and flew on to Germany.
I flew back and forth across the Atlantic about a dozen times during my time in SF. Only twice were in airliners. Twice in C-141 B aircraft that made the trip non stop. All the rest in C-130 aircraft which stopped to refuel. If we took the northern route we would usually stop at Goose Bay, Labrador. If the Southern route going to Europe we would stop at Lajas field in the Azores and then at Torrejon just outside of Madrid.
Once in a C-141 and all the times flying across in the C-130s our team had the whole cargo bay to ourselves. We would play poker using sign language. Play hackysac and sleep. Once when I had a hangover I strung my hammock up at the rear of the cargo bay and wrapped up in my poncho liner and slept like a dead man.
One time when we were in the States for isolated mission planning there had been a wing box failure in a C-130 C and all of those particular model aircraft were grounded temporarily. So the Air Force came up with an old C-130 B model to get us home. We took the southern route and lost an engine enroute to the Azores. We were stuck there for three days waiting for them to fly a new engine in and install it so we had some time to explore off base. The Azores are part of Portugal. I made the mistake of getting a haircut from a civilian barber. Lots of elbows up clipping and such. A real show of doing it. The problem was that barber had terrible BO and my eyes were watering the whole time.
Another time for some reason on the way back to Germany we landed near Copenhagen, Denmark. We had a night out on the town and stayed in a Canadian Army barracks.
Another time we stopped at Bermuda and stayed overnight there.
Another time returning to the states via the northern route we lost an engine before we got to Goose Bay. Somewhere I have a picture take out a port side window that shows the feathered prop and down below an iceberg.
Memories………..
Huh?
Vladimir Putin is threatening European countries of EU/NATO because they are helping Ukraine fight him off.
Putin is scared of having a free democratic nation next to Russia.
Ukraine is moving toward more freedom and justice, working with EU to get close association and eventually membership, NATO membership would come much later.
It’s obvious that Putin cannot be trusted, being ready to fight him is a rational approach to living,
Putin’s pitch to seize land or more from Ukraine resembles Adolph Hitler’s expansionist aims – heavily based on claims of history.
But false – Ukraine existed before Russia, the area called Ukraine centuries ago included western Russia.
So a continent (and an island nation) that have done all they can to destroy their economies by going Net-Zero will be able to actually fight a war? Where will they get the fuels needed in a war or the ability to produce the munitions used in such a war after they have destroyed their major industries? So yeah, let’s court a war with Russia! Oh, I guess they are expecting their sugar daddy (aka the USA) to bail them out of their stupidity.