... the US has played a leading role. However, the question of the EU's strategic autonomy has gradually departed from purely theoretical considerations. While maintaining its role as an economic giant, Brussels has long remained a political dwarf. The Ukraine conflict has become a powerful political stimulus for expanding political opportunities, although the preconditions for
such a dynamic existed earlier.
Similar incentives are emerging in other areas as well. The European Union has been forced ...
... 2010s under the threat of secondary sanctions and financial penalties. The European Union criticised the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Germany and France were particularly vocal. Even Moscow adopted a more cautious and balanced policy. Finally, after the Ukraine crisis started in 2014, the EU was hardly in a hurry to escalate sanctions against Russia. Brussels, and especially Berlin, were irritated by the first Trump administration’s attempts to impede the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline ...
... conflict have been ongoing for almost a year. They were initiated by the American side. President Donald Trump has radically revised America’s approach to the conflict. While Joe Biden was committed to war until Russia’s capitulation and to supporting Ukraine for as long as necessary, Trump has declared his intention to resolve the problem through negotiations and compromise. The very recognition that Russia has its own interests and goals, as well as the positioning of the United States as a mediator ...
... explains why Washington’s recent diplomatic push has been greeted with such attention. American officials insist their emerging 28-point peace plan is based on battlefield realities rather than wishful thinking. And the reality, as they see it, is blunt: Ukraine cannot win this war, but it could lose catastrophically. The goal of the plan is to prevent further losses and restore a more stable, if uncomfortable, equilibrium.
This is a standard approach to a conflict that is important for the participants ...
... October 30 “to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis.” Yet despite the scale of both the exercises and the announcements, these developments amount to little more than routine measures aimed at maintaining nuclear deterrence.
Since Ukraine launched its first major counteroffensives in the autumn of 2022, Russia has seen lively debates over the nature and logic of deterrence. These discussions have produced a wide range of expert opinions—both on the very concept of deterrence ...
... – shifting the country’s center of gravity to the Urals and Siberia – is not just extremely beneficial, but also unavoidable, as the western, European vector has been blocked for the foreseeable future by Western policy that provoked the war in Ukraine.
Now that Europe is sinking into moral and political degradation, we must commence Siberization as soon as possible.
PROBLEMS IN THE EUROPEAN DIRECTION
In order to fully set the new course of the country’s development, “Siberize” it, turn ...
The possibility of a return to extreme-era dynamics cannot be dismissed
The Ukraine conflict may well pave the way for a larger scale Russia-NATO confrontation. While hard to fathom and with everything suggesting that the scenario remains quite unlikely, it relies on nuclear deterrence as its main pillar. But just how effective ...
... 2017. For Iran, 2023. Since then, war – in its modern, diffuse form – has intensified. This is not a new Cold War. Since 2022, the West’s campaign against Russia has grown more decisive. The risk of direct nuclear confrontation with NATO over the Ukraine conflict is rising. Donald Trump’s return to the White House created a temporary window in which such a clash could be avoided, but by mid-2025, hawks in the US and Western Europe had pushed us dangerously close again.
This war involves the ...
Three scenarios for the situation in Ukraine
Since Volodymyr Zelenskyy came to power in the spring of 2019, Ukraine’s political system
has seen fundamental changes
. The ongoing transformation goes beyond formal institutional logic and is taking on more and more distinctly authoritarian ...
... ago.
In the space of just a few weeks, the leaders of the EU’s most prominent countries issued ultimatums to Russia – with no thought as to what they might do if Moscow ignored them. Unsurprisingly, the efforts of the four most vocal backers of Ukraine – Britain, Germany, France, and Poland – collapsed into rhetorical theater with no follow-through.
Estonia, never one to miss a moment for posturing, saw a group of its sailors attempt to seize a foreign ship en route to St. Petersburg. The ...
