It has been almost a year since the Russian army entered Ukraine to implement Security Council Resolution 2202. NATO, rejecting this reason, considers that Russia invaded Ukraine to annex it. In four oblasts, the referendums on joining the Russian Federation seem to confirm Nato’s interpretation, except that the history of Novorossia confirms Russia’s explanation. The two narratives continue in parallel, without ever overlapping.
For my part, having edited a daily newsletter during the Kosovo war [1], I remember that the Nato narrative at the time was contested by all the Balkan news agencies, without my having the means to know who was right. Two days after the end of the conflict, journalists from the Atlantic Alliance countries were able to go to the scene and see that they had been fooled. The regional news agencies were right. Nato had been lying all along. Later, when I was a member of the Libyan government, NATO, which had a Security Council mandate to protect the population, misused it to overthrow the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, killing 120,000 of the people it was supposed to protect.
These experiences show us that the West lies shamelessly to cover its actions.
Today, NATO assures us that it is not at war since it has not deployed any troops in Ukraine. However, we are witnessing, on the one hand, gigantic arms transfers to Ukraine so that the Ukrainian integral nationalists [2], trained by NATO, resist Moscow and, on the other hand, an economic war, also without precedent, to destroy the Russian economy. Given the scale of this war by Ukrainians, a confrontation between NATO and Russia seems possible at any moment.
A new World War is however highly unlikely, at least in the short term: indeed, the actions already contradict the NATO narrative.
The war goes on and on. Not because the two sides are equal, but because NATO does not want to confront Russia. We saw this three months ago at the G20 summit in Bali. With Russia’s agreement, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky intervened in the debates on video from Kiev. He called for Russia’s exclusion from the G20, as it had been from the G8 after Crimea joined the Russian Federation. To his surprise and that of the Nato members present at the summit, the United States and the United Kingdom did not support him [3]. Washington and London agreed that there was a line that should not be crossed. And for good reason: modern Russian weapons are far superior to those of Nato, whose technology dates from the 1990s. In the event of a confrontation, there is no doubt that Russia would suffer, but that it would crush the West within days.
In the light of this event, we must re-read what is happening before our eyes.
The influx of weapons to Ukraine is a decoy: the majority of the materials sent do not reach the battlefield. We announced that they would be sent to start another war in the Sahel [4], which the President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, has publicly confirmed by attesting that many of the weapons destined for Ukraine were already in the hands of African jihadists [5]. In any case, building up an arsenal of odds and ends, adding weapons of different ages and calibers, is useless. No one has the logistics to supply fighters with multiple munitions. The conclusion is that these weapons are not being given to Ukraine to win.
The New York Times sounded the alarm by explaining that the Western defense industry is unable to produce sufficient weapons and ammunition. Stocks are already depleted and Western armies are being forced to give away the materials needed for their own defense. This was confirmed by the US Secretary of the Navy, Carlos Del Toro, who warned about the current stripping of the US military [6]. He said that if the US military-industrial complex does not manage to produce more weapons than Russia within six months, the US military will not be able to accomplish its mission.
First of all, if US politicians want to start Armageddon, they do not have the means to do it in the next six months and probably will not have them afterwards either.
Let us now study the economic war. Let’s leave aside its camouflage under a chastened vocabulary: “sanctions”. I have already dealt with this issue and pointed out that they are not court decisions and are illegal under international law. Let’s look at currencies. The dollar crushed the ruble for two months, then it went back down to the value it had from 2015 to 2020, without Russia having borrowed massively. In other words, the so-called “sanctions” had a negligible effect on Russia. They severely disrupted its trade for the first two months, but are no longer a problem today. Moreover, they did not cost the US anything and did not affect it at all.
We know that, while prohibiting their allies from importing Russian hydrocarbons, the United States is importing them via India and thus replenishing the stocks from which they drew during the first months of the conflict [7].
On the other hand, we are observing an upheaval in the European economy, which is forced to borrow massively to support the Kiev regime. We have no statistics on the extent of these loans, nor do we know who the creditors are. It is clear, however, that European governments are appealing to Washington under the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022. Everything the Europeans give to Ukraine has a cost, but it will not be accounted for until after the war. Only then will the bill be established. And it will be exorbitant. Until then, everything is fine.
The sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines on September 26, 2022, was not claimed afterwards, but beforehand by US President Joe Biden on February 7, 2022, at the White House, in the presence of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. It is true that he only committed himself to destroying Nord Stream 2 in the event of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, but this was only because the journalist who interviewed him had framed the subject without daring to imagine that he could also do so for Nord Stream 1. By this declaration and even more so by this sabotage, Washington has shown the contempt in which it holds its German ally. Nothing has changed since the first Secretary General of NATO, Lord Ismay, declared that the real aim of the Alliance was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” [8]. The Soviet Union disappeared and Germany took the lead in the European Union. If he were still alive, Lord Ismay would probably say that the objective of NATO is to keep Russia out, the Americans in, and the European Union under control.
Germany, for whom the sabotage of these pipelines is the most serious blow since the end of the Second World War, took it without flinching. At the same time, it swallowed the Biden plan to rescue the US economy at the expense of the German car industry. To all this, it reacted by moving closer to China and avoiding anger with Poland, the new US asset in Europe. It is now proposing to rebuild its industry by developing munitions factories for the Alliance.
As a result, Germany’s acceptance of US suzerainty has been shared by the European Union, which Berlin controls [9].
Second remark: the Germans and the members of the European Union as a whole have taken note of a decline in their standard of living. They are, together with the Ukrainians, the only victims of the current war, and they have come to terms with it.
In 1992, when the Russian Federation had just been born on the ruins of the Soviet Union, Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, commissioned the Straussian [10] Paul Wolfowitz to write a report which has only come to us largely redacted. Excerpts from the original report published by the New York Times and the Washington Post show that Washington no longer considered Russia a threat, but the European Union a potential rival [11]. It stated: “While the United States supports the project of European integration, we must be careful to prevent the emergence of a purely European security system that would undermine NATO, especially its integrated military command structure. In other words, Washington approves of a European defence subordinate to NATO, but is ready to destroy the European Union if it imagines itself becoming a political power capable of standing up to it.
The current U.S. strategy, which does not weaken Russia but the European Union under the pretext of fighting Russia, is the second concrete application of the Wolfowitz doctrine. Its first application, in 2003, consisted in punishing Jacques Chirac’s France and Gerhard Schröder’s Germany for having opposed NATO’s destruction of Iraq [12].
This is exactly what the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said at a press conference after the Allies’ meeting in Ramstein on January 20. While he had demanded that each participant donate weapons to Kiev, he acknowledged that “This year, it would be very, very difficult to militarily eject the Russian forces from every inch of Russian-occupied Ukraine. In other words, the Allies must bleed, but there is no hope of winning anything in 2023 over Russia.