UK drones being sent into Russia to kill Russians. London is proudly boasting of Storm Shadow missile production in Ukraine. The Germans are talking about how to kill more Russians. The EU keeps pumping money into drones that then kill Russian civilians and destroy Russian infrastructure.
With that the state of play, one would assume Russia too is inflicting damage upon these European belligerents. Perhaps, behind the scenes as allegations of hybrid warfare reach a fever pitch. But it’s difficult to know whether this has any truth to it or is more of European operatives inflating the Russian threat so as to sell the conflict and the ridiculous amounts of money spent on it.
Meanwhile, we have CIA director John Ratcliffe scurrying off to Moscow to reportedly warn Moscow about attacking NATO states. Even more ludicrous were reports that he went to point out to the Russians that they are losing the war:
This story is even more absurd than first look. Follow the NYT hyperlinks, and the CIA chief sources his “Russians dead in 35 minutes” intel from a widely mocked FP story by Peter Frankopan, who sourced it from Astra, a Russian opposition Telegram channel.https://t.co/LPDqHpYMEG pic.twitter.com/pSpxtf3BXQ
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) August 28, 2026
If it’s to be believed that Ratcliffe really was warning Moscow, regardless of how much weight that carries and what the US has left on the escalation ladder, it would appear Europe is stepping into the role that US proxies Ukraine and Israel play. They attack and Washington, despite being party to the conflict via funding, logistics, targeting, etc., pretends to act as a mediator. It’s unlikely Russia is buying it. And there are other theories about Ratcliffe’s mission.
My take on the CIA director’s Moscow trip is different from everyone else’s.
Media says Ratcliffe flew to Moscow to warn Russia. I think that’s backwards.
He was called in to be warned by Russia.
Think about it. If America wanted to warn Russia, they’d do it publicly. They’ve…
— SlavicPatriot (@infantserbian) August 28, 2026
There’s also the possibility that Ratcliffe was there to deliver a plea for peace coinciding with a push from the Vatican.
Whatever it was, the situation has only escalated since with Russia hammering Ukrainian infrastructure and the Europeans becoming more hysterical.
The allegations of Russian hybrid warfare are coming every day now. From Politico:
In Romania, a marine drone loaded with explosives was discovered a few hundred meters from the Neptun Deep gas project in the Black Sea and neutralized by Romanian armed forces. President Nicușor Dan explicitly blamed Russia for the incident. A few days later, Slovak police foiled a planned arson attack on a drone factory. In Estonia, authorities are investigating possible Russian involvement following an arson attack on a defense contractor. Explosions at ammunition plants in Italy and Bulgaria are also under investigation; though there is no clear evidence of Russian sabotage in those cases so far.
If accurate, that means we’re in a dangerous phase of each side daring the other.
The UK and European governments appear eager to step into the role. While London is constant and currently the lead instigator, bragging about providing UK-made drones for deep strikes into Russia. Following UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s announcement that it would help Ukraine manufacture Storm Shadows, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that Ukrainian Storm Shadow strikes on Russian territory would draw a response against British military bases not just in Ukraine. Storm Shadows were immediately used in an attack on a shopping center in Donetsk.
❗️Eight people were injured in Donetsk after Ukrainian Armed Forces struck the “Donetsk City” shopping center area with Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG missiles, — Denis Pushilin, head of the DPR
Among the injured are two girls born in 2010 and 2016, three women, and three men. Three more… pic.twitter.com/Oz6G9QQtFa
— Zlatti71 (@Zlatti_71) August 26, 2026
Shortly after, this happened in London (could be a coincidence):
A major fire has broken out at an industrial site near Wembley stadium in north London.
Twenty fire engines and 125 firefighters are battling the blaze on Hannah Close, Neasden, at what is believed to be an Amazon warehouse🔗https://t.co/IPmZC0wuKO pic.twitter.com/TIz2ZbvpwH
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) August 28, 2026
The UK is now advising citizens to stock up on tinned foods. Not to be outdone, others are ramping up their efforts across the continent as well.
The French are racing to get defenses up against drone swarms.
“It’s nothing catastrophic, we’re still at peace. But we need to make this move,” said the country’s chief of defense staff, Gen. Fabien Mandon. The implication being that France will soon be at war.
Germany is launching Zeitenwende 2.0.
This comes as Munich’s beer halls are packed with hi-tech entrepreneurs drunk on all the money pouring in to build Russian-killing weapons.
Munich-based defense tech company Helsing adorns city with posters. Source.
The Munich defense start-up scene booming while German industry collapses and the economy grows by 0.3 percent is representative of a wider disease across the continent.
As countries aim for the insane goal of 5% of GDP spent on defense by 2035 and private capital pours in to match, more and more money and labor are being rerouted away from social uses and toward the defense-tech complex. Germany, for example, increased defense spending 24% this year to $114 billion.
From the economic to the political and media, society is being re-engineered toward war.
German politicians are now practiced at throwing around the idea of “war readiness,” which harkens back to the Nazi era.
The German media, acting as an arm of the spook-Atlanticist-WEF club, asks few questions aside from “How ready for war should Germany be?” and “How can we help kill more Russians?”
Trump golf buddy and Finnish President Alexander Stubb has an interesting theory on that—or at least one he presents in public:
Alexander Stubb says that hitting logistics centers like Wildberries increases the price of the war for Russia and bumps up the number of Russians who want to end the war by another 10%.
He insists on the fact that this is a sensible military strategy from Ukraine and the only… pic.twitter.com/jcrvkSc0AO
— Margarita Simonyan (@M_Simonyan) August 25, 2026
If you can wade through all the BS in a recent Politico piece, it’s essentially a formal announcement of what’s long been becoming obvious: Ukraine might be going down, but it is going to target as many Russian civilians as it can on the way. To win hearts and minds, of course.
The EU soundtrack to that reality is Ursula’s broken record broadcast:
Today, Romania destroyed a naval drone carrying explosives near its Neptun Deep platform in the Black Sea.
An escalating campaign of threats is underway, unsettling our citizens and seeking to divide our Union.
This is hybrid warfare.
The founding mission of our Union is to…
— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) August 20, 2026
Yet it’s not European. At the NATO Summit in Ankara, the US retained control over NATO’s highest military officer, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR). Not only that, but in a move that shows how all the talk about the US stepping back from Europe is simply not true, SACEUR/the US obtained more control over European troops. That means Washington will decide where Italians, Germans and others are moved without needing to seek any okay from national parliaments.
As we’re only a step away from direct strikes between Europe and Russia, that’s a fairly large responsibility to be handed over to the Americans.
This is what NATO 3.0 burden sharing is all about. The Europeans need to provide more funding but also the human casualties in order to “extend” Russia, as the famous 2019 RAND paper puts it.
A much more recent U.S. Army War College report from June of this year reiterates those points. Washington needs European “allies” to take on a larger role against Russia so the US can turn its attention to the Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific. What exactly is that role though?
Well, the US is to maintain the nuclear umbrella and command-and-control. Europe is to provide blood, money, and soil solely for the primary interest of the US imperial core. It is preparation for proxy warfare and learning from the mistakes of Project Ukraine. It admits the following:
A deliberate and systematic “steel porcupine” strategy in Ukraine would have strengthened the denial pillar of NATO’s deterrence strategy.”
That role will now fall to Europe as the report calls for a pivot to a positional-defense framework.
What they’re talking about is Europe taking massive Russian strikes while simultaneously bleeding Russia through a long air war of attrition. Sounds insane, right? Yet there are no signs the European elite feel the same way.
If they did, they wouldn’t have steadily moved their countries to where they are today: defunding social states to buy American energy and weapons and submitting themselves to American military command.
With no energy, tech, military, or diplomatic independence, what is Europe other than a proxy? And we know how it goes for such states.
Revolution or War?
Despite the European elites best efforts, it’s still hard to see how the people go along. How are you going to get Europeans into the Eastern trenches? From my viewpoint in Italy, it ain’t happening. It would be more likely that we would see an armed uprising against the government here if they even tried.
European efforts to increase military recruitment are unsurprisingly going nowhere.
NC commenter Kouros recently provided some important insight about barriers recruiters face in response to a piece in The Economist ‘Would Europeans fight, if it came to that?’. I’ve attached it at the end of this piece.
Would Russian strikes or false flags change that?
Would economic conditions, say a major recession accompanied by the destruction of the social safety net? We’re already seeing that occur to some extent as traditional industries fail and the safety net is defunded while military tech hubs like Munich boom.
So much destructive effort for what? Continue to “overextend” Russia and hope it will implode?
Or is this all simply preferable to admitting that Project Ukraine failed?
All these political hacks are just performing their function after being bought and paid for by the CIA. That’s according to Lawrence Wilkerson:
🚨 EX-INSIDER BOMBSHELL: WE CREATED THIS EUROPE ON PURPOSE – CIA BOUGHT STOLTENBERG, RUTTE AND ENTIRE GOVERNMENTS
I have never heard the truth stated so directly. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, retired U.S. Army officer and former Chief of Staff to the Secretary of State, just… pic.twitter.com/3yif2levDv
— Mark (@Mark4XX) August 23, 2026
That might be the charitable view. The other is that they’re more like bumbling gamblers who saw their only path to remaining on a winning streak was tying themselves to the US. And now they would welcome Russian strikes on NATO territory rather than be forced into retirement (or preferably a cell). That way they can say, “Look we were right! We had to wager everything on Ukraine as a first line of defense against the Russian menace!”
The comedian governments currently in place might not make it that far.
A political earthquake is looming in Germany, it has been coming, and like in France, the “centre”, if that’s even a real thing anymore, must learn that the “cordon sanitaire” is just a smoke screen for their own incompetence and inadequacies. https://t.co/mW1ElyjGQy
— Claus Vistesen (@ClausVistesen) August 19, 2026
There have been other earthquakes in recent years, from Italy to Sweden, and yet somehow the Atlanticist spook network always manages to keep the wobbling leaky cart full of loot on the road. No doubt that remains the goal going forward so the great bust out of Europe—or at least whatever is left of it— can continue.
***
From Kouros:
Dear Professor Tocci,
I read your article in The Economist with considerable interest and considerable anger, and I am writing because I think you are a serious enough analyst to engage with a criticism that the article’s format did not permit you to address, and because I have a son of military age, and I am not willing to accept arguments about European resolve and the stomach for war without first demanding that the people making those arguments state honestly what they are asking for and why.
I am a Canadian environmental epidemiologist. Canada lost 61,000 people in the First World War because Britain went to war and Canada was a dominion of the British Empire, in a conflict whose causal chain was presented to Canadians with approximately the same honesty that the current European security debate is being presented to their descendants. Canada lost 45,000 in the Second World War for considerably better reasons that were still not fully honestly stated. Canada went to Afghanistan for reasons that were presented as clear and turned out to be considerably less so. I am not willing to send my son into another abstraction without the abstraction’s premises being named.
Your argument is internally coherent given those premises: European deployment to Ukraine would function primarily as a psychological and political signal rather than a military intervention, hardening European publics to the reality of the war and demonstrating to both Russia and the United States that Europe has recovered a genuine willingness to bear costs for its own security. I understand the argument. I understand why serious European security professionals are making it. What I cannot accept is the specific intellectual technique that makes this genre of argument possible: the conversion of living people, sons, specifically, the sons of parents who are reading The Economist on a Tuesday morning, into the abstractions of boots on the ground and European resolve and the stomach for war, without the argument ever being required to look at what a boot contains or whose stomach is being discussed.
The problem is the premises, and you know the premises better than most. The Istanbul Charter for European Security of 1999, signed by all OSCE members including Russia and the United States and every European signatory, contains in explicit terms the principle of indivisible security: no state shall strengthen its security at the expense of the security of other states. The Astana Commemorative Declaration of 2010 reaffirmed the same principle after the Baltic states had joined NATO and the question of further eastern expansion was already live. You drafted the European Global Strategy as Special Adviser to Mogherini and Borrell. You know these documents. The article proceeds as if they do not exist.
I am not writing to defend the Russian invasion, which is a war crime by any measure of international humanitarian law and has caused catastrophic suffering to the Ukrainian population. Both things can be true simultaneously: the invasion is a crime, and the causal chain that produced it includes specific decisions by the Western side that violated specific legal commitments all parties had made. The push to include Ukraine in NATO, the specific trigger for the specific sequence of events that produced this war, would have violated the indivisible security principle that all parties signed. Acknowledging this does not excuse the invasion. What it does is make the question you are asking of European parents considerably more complicated than The Economist’s format permitted you to make it.
The European populations currently electing governments that question the war are not suffering from insufficient martial spirit. Some of them are parents who have the specific suspicion that they are being asked to send their children to die for an arrangement that was not honestly explained when it was being built, and that the people now calling for European resolve were among those who built it without the honesty it required. That suspicion is not unreasonable. A deployment strategy designed to produce the correct feelings by exposing Europeans to casualties will not address it. It will compound it.
You cannot honestly ask people to risk their children for a security order without telling them how that order was constructed, what commitments it rested on, and which of those commitments were honoured and which were not. I am asking you to tell them. Not in a format that The Economist will publish, but in the honest account that a serious analyst of your standing owes to the parents whose sons are being abstracted into strategic arguments.
With respect for your work and firm disagreement about this piece,
Nathalie Tocci
Dear xxxxxx,
Many thanks for your thoughtful message and reflections. I understand the concern. Less the anger. My argument is not about developing the stomach for war for the sake of it, less still because I think we should go war mongering around. I say this, as the article concludes, precisely because I think that signaling such resolve would constitute a key element of deterrence. We may disagree about what happened in the past in Europe, but the question still stands, what would happen if such deterrence were not to work and Russia were to attack a nato member precisely as he gets bogged down in Ukraine (which is precisely what’s happening) ? I am fairly confident that Trump’s US would turn the other side, but I know European countries would not and I suspect Canada would not either. That to me is the scenario that needs to be prevented and which I believe is more than plausible today. Deploying troops in Ukraine would in my view make that scenario far less, not more, likely.
Warmly
Nathalie
Inviato da iPhone
Il giorno 19 lug 2026, alle ore 19:59Sun, Jul 19, 9:50 PM (13 hours ago)
Dear Professor Tocci,Thank you for taking the time to reply, and from an iPhone no less, which I take as evidence that the question at least warranted a moment’s attention between more pressing engagements.
I appreciate the clarification that the argument is about deterrence rather than warmongering, and I understand the distinction. My difficulty is with the specific deterrence logic, which runs as follows: the willingness to fight deters the adversary, therefore we must demonstrate the willingness to fight, therefore we must put people in harm’s way to demonstrate it. This is internally coherent, but it requires a prior assumption that the adversary is deterrable only by military signalling and not by any other instrument, including the legal frameworks that all parties including Russia signed and that were specifically designed as non-military deterrence mechanisms. You have not addressed those frameworks in either your article or your reply, and I am genuinely uncertain whether this is because you consider them analytically irrelevant or because engaging with them would complicate the argument in ways the Economist’s format does not permit.
On the scenario you describe, Russia attacking a NATO member as it gets bogged down in Ukraine, I note that the logic requires Russia to be simultaneously so irrational as to escalate to NATO Article 5 while bogged down in Ukraine, and so rational as to be deterred by the presence of a few thousand European troops in a post-ceasefire scenario. These two assumptions are in some tension with each other, and the tension is not resolved in your reply.
You are right that I do not know what Canada would do. I know what I would do, as a Canadian parent of a son of military age reading your Economist article on a Tuesday morning. I am already setting money aside to help him relocate to Thailand if a draft comes about to fight for what you describe as European resolve. I mean this not as a provocation but as a data point from the constituency whose willingness to fight you are theorising about. The gap between the scenario as it appears from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the scenario as it appears from a kitchen table in Canada, is the gap that strategic communication has consistently failed to close, and that gap is precisely where the political conditions for the deterrence you are describing either exist or do not.
I wish you well and I mean that sincerely. The questions you are engaging with are genuinely important and you are engaging with them seriously. I simply believe that the legal architecture that was supposed to prevent this situation from arising deserves more of that seriousness than it has been receiving from the people best placed to provide it.
With respect,
By
