1.Poking the Bear
As Head of the Council for Foreign and Defence Policy, Sergei Alexandrovitch Karaganov is one of the most influential men in Russia. During his long and distinguished career, he has served as an advisor to both President Gorbachev and President Yeltsin and was one of the leaders of a group of hawks within the Kremlin who convinced President Putin to invade Ukraine in 2022, arguing that Russia had a moral duty to defend the human rights of Russians living outside the Russian Federation. As such, he is someone to whom the West should listen whenever he speaks, especially now. For he is currently saying that Russia should mount retaliatory strikes against factories in European countries that are supplying Ukraine with missiles and drones to strike deep inside Russia.
His argument is that President Putin’s patience and restraint with respect to NATO’s support for Ukraine is a mistake, in that the West has seen it as weakness, with the result that it has continually increased its support, believing that Russia will never retaliate because it fears an all out war with NATO. In fact, Karaganov goes even further in his criticism, arguing that, by allowing NATO to escalate its support for Ukraine, President Putin has actually made a pan-European war more likely. For when he is finally forced to say ‘enough’, which, at some point, Karaganov argues, he surely will be, Europe will be too far up the escalation ladder to turn back. He therefore advocates launching retaliatory strikes against factories in Britain and Germany now, when European leaders would have to be insane to risk precipitating a war which, in their current state of readiness, they could not possibly win.
In this regard, consider the British army, for instance, which, as of April 2026, comprised just 74,370 men, only about half of whom were actually combat troops, the rest being cooks, drivers, mechanics, medics and so on. Admittedly, the Russian army has about the same proportion of combat troops to others, but it currently stands at around 1,350,000 men. True, only about 750,000 of them are deployed in the Ukrainian theatre of operations at any one time, but this is largely because the Russians have a policy of regularly rotating units in and out of the front line so as to avoid burn out, something which would be far more difficult for any expeditionary force assembled by the European coalition of the willing, which would also have to contend with much longer supply lines, Kiev being 1,362 miles from London.
More to the point, the Russians know how to fight the kind of war currently being fought in Ukraine, where drones and satellite based ISR systems (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) have made tanks and other armoured vehicles more or less obsolete and where the largest assault unit one can safely assemble consists of just three men. For contrary to what is often reported in the western media, the Russians don’t fight in mass wave formations, which would be suicidal. They fight slowly and methodically in three man teams, backed up by six man support units, which mostly consists of drone operators: one surveilling the target of the assault, another looking out for enemy drones, and another searching for enemy drone operators. It is why it has taken them so long to capture each of the fortified cities to which they have laid siege. For by the time the assault teams move in, after months of shelling, most of these cities have been reduced to piles of rubble, with no trees left standing to provide the assault units with cover from enemy drones.
Of course it will be argued that most NATO countries have observers embedded inside Ukrainian units precisely to learn these latest battlefield tactics. But this is not the same as having full tactical teams working together to learn from actual experience.
Another argument one might hear is that the Europeans would not necessarily have to use ground troops to respond to Russian retaliatory assaults on European factories but could, instead, rely on an ariel response. Given the fact that no European country has any hypersonic missiles, however, or many ballistic missiles of any type capable of inflicting significant damage on Russia, and that France and Britain have already given most of their SCALP and Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine, it is hard to see Europe winning any kind of missile exchange.
Karaganov is therefore perfectly correct when he says that European leaders would have to be insane to respond militarily to Russian retaliatory strikes against them. What’s more, most European leaders clearly know this. It’s why most of them have pledged to increase their defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, although most of them will not achieve this target for the simple reason that many of them, including Britain and France, are already bankrupt. The question this raises, therefore, is why President Putin is so reluctant to pursue the course of action Karaganov advocates.
One possible answer, of course, is that he fears that this would trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty, thereby dragging the USA into the conflict. While almost certainly influencing his calculations to some extent, however, there are at least two good reasons why this consideration might not be the decisive factor. For not only are Europe’s NATO members supplying Ukraine with drones to strike deep inside Russia, but some of them are even flying planes over the Baltic and Baltic States to detect holes in Russia’s mobile radar defence network and guide the Ukrainian drones through them, making them co-belligerents under the UN Charter, against whom Russia is perfectly entitled to defend itself. With Europe thus technically being the aggressors in any conflict between itself and Russia, this therefore raises the question as to whether retaliatory strikes against European targets by Russia would actually trigger Article 5 of the NATO Treaty and whether, even if it did, the USA would feel obliged to come to Europe’s aid and risk precipitating World War III.
A more convincing argument as to why Putin has so far resisted Karaganov’s advice, therefore, is that he simply believes that keeping the war contained within Ukraine’s borders is in Russia’s best interest, especially as it is currently entering its final phase. I say this because there are now only two fortress cities in the Donbas left to be captured, Slovyansk and Kramatorsk. Once these fall, which, like Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka, they surely will, there will then be nothing but open grassland between the Russians and the Dnieper River, at which point the Ukrainian government will have no choice but to sue for peace on Russia’s terms or risk losing everything. The last thing Putin wants to do at this stage, therefore, is draw the Europeans into the conflict, which, in all probability, would not only delay a final negotiated settlement, but would very probably entitle them to a seat at the negotiating table where they would almost certainly muddy the waters with their own agenda.
The problem he has, however, is that, while the war on the ground is thus progressing as planned, Ukraine’s drone and missile strikes inside Russia are clearly causing him a political headache, not with the Russian people as a whole, with whom he still has an approval rating of over 70% – even after four and a half years of war – but with people like Karaganov and possibly others inside the Kremlin, which ought to make European leaders review their strategy at the very least least.
I say this because one of the main reasons Putin has managed to stay in power for over twenty-six years is his very collegial style of leadership. Although the final decision is always his, he often has over twenty meetings a day, not just to make sure that he is properly briefed, but to gather other people’s opinions and build a consensus. It’s why his closest colleagues, such as Sergei Lavrov and Dmitri Medvedev, have stayed with him so long: because they feel part of a team. If Putin feels that the mood in the Kremlin is swinging in Karaganov’s direction, therefore, especially if long time supporters like Lavrov and Medvedev start leaning in that direction – as some people say they already are – it will be very difficult for him not to go along with them.
The question this raises, therefore, is whether European leaders are fully aware of this. For while they may believe that Russia will not retaliate against their aggression for fear of triggering a broader conflict, by continuing to provoke the Russians the way they have been doing, they may well be driving Putin into Karaganov’s camp, which, given that they have no adequate military response to Russian retaliatory strikes is an enormous risk.
This then raises the further question as to why they are actually indulging in this nonsense at all. And the most obvious answer, of course, is that they simply believe their own propaganda. They really do believe that Russia is weak: that the Russian economy is about to collapse, that the Russian army has lost more than a million men and that if Ukraine can just apply a little more pressure, the Russian people will rise up and either remove Putin from office or force him to settle on Europe’s terms. The problem with this answer, however, is that, while Russia’s claimed economic weakness and military losses may be the official line coming out of most European governments, unless their intelligence services are merely telling them what they want hear, there must be at least some people in these governments who are aware of the truth and of the risk they are therefore running.
If they are aware of the risk, however, this would then imply that they think it worth taking, which would further imply that they still actually believe that Ukrainian drone strikes will have the desired effect, which not only betrays a certain cognitive dissonance but demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of Russia, the Russian people and, indeed, of Vladimir Putin himself.
2.The West’s Most Common Misconceptions about Russia
This lack of understanding of all things Russian is partly, one suspects, the result of sheer ignorance, which partly stems from the fact that very few of our politicians have ever actually been to Russia and have apparently never read the reports of those who have. What makes this even worse, however, is the fact that, when it comes to Russia, the West seems totally unable to rid itself of a number of common prejudices or misconceptions, the first of which is the belief that today’s Russian Federation is really no different from the Soviet Union and that Vladimir Putin is as much a tyrannical dictator as Stalin, ruling Russia through fear and the FSB.
In fact, the story we constantly tell ourselves about Russia is more or less the same as the narrative which the Americans have been spinning about Iran for the last forty-seven years, in which the Iranian leadership is portrayed as a despotic theocracy which rules Iran through the ruthless oppression of the IRGC, and in which the Iranian people, if given the chance, would rise up, remove this despicable regime and embrace western style democracy. The only difference between the two narratives is that, in the case of Iran, the popular uprising was supposed to take place as soon as the regime’s leadership had been assassinated, whereas, in the case of Russia, it is believed that the revolution can be precipitated by making the Russian people more angry with Putin for the daily drone strikes against apartment buildings, buses and schools than they are with the West.
Of course, neither of these uprisings has or will ever occur, not only because neither of the governments concerned are the evil regimes which the West depicts them as being, but because their respective leaders are actually much loved. In fact, most Russians regard Vladimir Putin as something of a saviour, having turned Russia around after the economic collapse of the 1990s, in which a small number of oligarchs may have made billions of dollars by buying up former states assets for just 1% of their true worth, but where most ordinary Russians actually struggled to find enough to eat, resulting in millions of premature deaths due to dietary related diseases and a fall of five years in average life expectancy.
If it hadn’t been for President Putin, in fact, the whole country might easily have disintegrated into a patchwork of fiefdoms ruled by the above mentioned oligarchs and a loose network of organised criminal gangs, generally known as the Russian mafia. Not only did he crack down with brutal efficiency on this so-called mafia, however, but by making an example of a man called Mikhail Khordorkovsky, who was thought to be worth $50 billion at the time, he also forced those oligarchs who had not already fled to London to pay back some of their ill-gotten gains or face prosecution and imprisonment. Even more importantly, he cleaned up the corruption that was then endemic within both government and a number of very large corporations such as Gazprom, which were still at least partially owned by the state, enabling him to rebuild Russia’s broken economy around its huge natural resources and take Russia from being an economic basket-case to being one of the richest countries in the world.
Because the rouble fluctuates enormously on international currency markets and is significantly undervalued at best, it is unfortunately very difficult to calculate Russia’s actual GDP with any degree of accuracy. The best way to do it, in fact, is by using Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), which compares how much a rouble will buy in Russia with how much a dollar buys in the USA. This, of course, is only indicative of how wealthy Russians are today but it is generally agreed that, in 2025, Russia had the fourth largest economy in the world with a per capita annual income of $52,479.
Nor has this been significantly affected by sanctions. In fact, Russia’s inability to buy US and European components for its various manufacturing industries has meant that many Russian companies have been able to expand significantly by producing substitute parts inside Russia. Along with increased military expenditure, in fact, this has produced a boom in Russia’s manufacturing sector, to which, at one point, the Russian central bank had to respond by increasing interest rates to over 20% in order to prevent overheating. Even with interests rates still at 14.25%, however, Russians are still immeasurably better off than they were 25 years ago, making it hardly surprising, therefore, that President Putin has won five presidential elections, the latest, in 2024, with 88% of the vote on an 87% turnout.
Of course, people in the West say that this is a sure sign that Russian democracy is a sham and that the elections are rigged. After all, no one wins an honest election with 88% of the vote. But of the five political parties represented in the State Duma – excluding Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party – not one of them has ever complained about election fraud, not even the Russian Communist Party, which is still the second largest party in the country.
Of course, it will be said that this is because they are being censored or silenced in some way. But there is absolutely no evidence of this. Indeed, the fact that Sergei Karaganov can write articles and give interviews on Russian television which are openly critical of President Putin strongly suggests that Russia enjoys a substantial degree of free speech. Recent visitors to Russia all say, in fact, that people openly discuss President Putin’s conduct of the war and that public opinion has been gradually drifting towards Karaganov’s harder line position. This doesn’t mean, however, that anyone is actually suggesting that Putin be removed from office.
More to the point, if he were to be ousted from power, given the current mood in the country, his successor would almost certainly be Dmitri Medvedev, who, while completely loyal to Putin, is very much a hard liner, which rather undermines the second most popular belief the West seems to entertain about the possible effects of drone strikes inside Russia: that even if they do not precipitate a popular uprising, they will heap enough political pressure on Putin that he will be forced to accept Europe’s terms for a peace settlement.
The problem with this argument, however, is that it not only fails reflect the anger most Russians feel with respect to random drone strikes against civilian targets, but it also demonstrates a complete lack of any understanding of the issues for which Russia went to war in the first place and with which the vast majority of Russians totally agree. For, like Karaganov, they not only believe that Russia has a moral duty to defend the human rights of Russians living outside the Russian Federation, especially the 14 million Russians who found themselves trapped inside the borders of Ukraine when it was given its independence in 1991, but they also believe that a NATO aligned Ukraine would be an existential threat to Russia, which no Russian could accept.
This is because, were Ukraine to join NATO, the USA would then be able to install intermediate range cruise and ballistic missiles on its border, just five minutes flying time from Moscow – one minute less than it would have taken a Soviet intermediate range missile to reach Washington from Cuba in 1962 – giving NATO a pre-emptive first strike capability, something which Russia could never allow. Indeed, were this ever to happen, Russia would have no choice but to launch its own pre-emptive first strike against the US missiles bases on the Ukrainian border, thereby very probably precipitating World War III: something which the Russians have been trying to explain to NATO leaders since 2008 without seeming to make them understand.
As a result, the West has consistently refused to include clauses enshrining Ukraine’s neutrality in any proposed peace treaty. Nor does it accept that the desire of most Russians to protect the rights of Russians living within Ukraine’s 1991 borders was a sufficient reason for going to war. For that would be to accept that Russia had just cause for its invasion in 2022, which would undermine the West’s third and most stubborn false belief about Russia and Vladimir Putin, in particular: that the Russian President instigated an entirely unprovoked war against Ukraine in order to extend Russia’s territorial possessions and reconstitute the old Soviet Empire.
Not only is there no evidence for this, however, but it doesn’t make any sense. For geographically, Russia is by far the largest country in the world, covering 17.1 million square kilometres and spanning eleven time zones. Yet it only has a population of 146 million people, making it one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. Even more importantly, it has the world’s greatest store of natural resources, not only making it more or less self-sufficient in just about everything but the world’s largest exporter of commodities, from oil and gas to wheat and sunflower oil. What this means, therefore, is that it not only does not need more territory to house its population but it does not need anyone else’s natural resources to provide it with things it lacks.
In fact, with respect to Europe, it is the other way round, with Europe having long coveted Russia’s natural resources. It’s why, apart from the first world war, which was fought on the basis of alliances and miscalculations which everyone very quickly realised was a disastrous mistake, all the other wars fought between Europe and Russia in the modern era have either been fought to acquire Russia’s natural resources or to prevent the Russians trading them on world markets, making it hardly surprising, therefore, that tensions first began to arise between Europe and Russia when Catherine the Great captured Crimea from the Ottoman Empire in the late 18th century, thereby opening up the Black Sea, the Aegean and the Mediterranean to Russian trade. For until then, its only trading outlet to the west had been through St. Petersburg on the Baltic, which is ice bound for half the year and thus prevented Russia from seriously competing with the two great mercantilist powers of the period, Britain and France. Catherine the Great’s capture of Crimea and, indeed, all the Black Sea coast up to Romanian border was thus one of the greatest strategic achievements in Russian history and shook both Britain and France to the core.
The first of the two to respond to this was France under Napoleon Bonaparte, who, in 1812, in the middle of what was already a trade war with Britain, mounted the disastrous invasion of Russia which ultimately led to his downfall. This made it somewhat inevitable, therefore, that the next time either of them tried to contain or limit Russia’s trading reach, they actually did it together and stayed well away from Moscow, concentrating their attention instead on the root cause of the problem, Crimea, which they invaded in 1853 with the principal intention of returning it to the Ottomans. While the military campaign was largely successful, however, the strategic objective was entirely thwarted by the fact that, by then, the Ottoman Empire was in steep decline and could never hope to reoccupy let alone rule the territories captured by its allies, not least because, also by then, the population of the whole Black Sea coastline, from Crimea to Odessa, was almost entirely Russian, as it is today.
It was Europe’s third invasion of Russia, however, that was the most disastrous for all concerned. This, of course, was the German invasion of 1941, which was unashamedly undertaken both to provide more ‘living space’ for the German population, and to take control Russia’s oil fields and its vast swathes of agricultural land. In fact, so callously indifferent to the needs and interests of the native population was this invasion that, fearing some kind of moral reckoning, Europeans today have every right to regard a resurgent Russia as an existential threat. For although we may reason that it was only Nazi Germany, not Europe as a whole, which visited such terrors on the Russian people during the 1940s, killing 27 million of them, our fear and hatred of the subhuman eastern hordes which underpinned the Nazi philosophy is almost certainly part of a European collective unconscious which, in turn, is almost certainly one of the root causes of our current Russophobia.
The irony is, of course, that Vladimir Putin, himself, was born and raised in St. Petersburg, in my opinion one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, and spent much of his early career in Germany, which he greatly admired. He then spent his first three presidential terms trying to forge closer ties with Europe and formed a close friendship with Angela Merkel, by whom he felt personally betrayed over the Minsk II agreement.
If Putin’s personal affinity with Europe, Russia’s massive size and its huge store of natural resources were not enough to persuade the Russian President not to expand its territory westward, however, there is one further consideration that is an absolute clincher. This is the fact that Russia already has the most ethnically and culturally diverse population in the world, speaking more than a hundred different languages, twenty-five of which are official languages. Of course, it could be argued that, having so much experience ruling over such a diverse empire is the perfect preparation for ruling over one that is even bigger and more diverse. But the biggest and most difficult job any Russian President has – one might almost say the biggest nightmare any Russian President has – is trying to keep all these ethnically and culturally diverse people happy and happily part of the Russian Federation.
This, of course, is partly achieved through the Russian Federation’s constitution, which gives each of the its 21 republics a substantial degree of autonomy while providing them with the very considerable benefits of being part of a free trade block which not only uses the same currency but is more or less self-sufficient, such that that most of the trade of most of the republics is carried out within the federation. As such, it is more or less what the European Union set out to be, only better. For while both the Russian Federation and the EU combine a free trade area with a common currency, the Russian Federation is far more democratic, with political institutions which significantly help unite its diverse populations. I say this because, while each republic has its own constitution and autonomous assembly, all Russians throughout the Federation vote for the President and the Federal Assembly in Moscow, the lower house of which is the State Duma. In contrast, no one votes for the European Commission or its President and most Europeans do not identify with them, unlike most Russians who most certainly identify with their President and have almost unanimously voted for him on five occasions.
For all its benefits and constitutional coherence, however, keeping the Russian Federation together is still a monumental task, not least because respecting and protecting the rights and interests of the individual republics while governing the Federation for the good of all is always a delicate balancing act. This was demonstrated most starkly in the case of Chechnya, to which President Putin made numerous personal visits in order to rebuild trust and bring about reconciliation after the two Chechen wars. The last thing he now wants to do, therefore, is force millions of Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians to be part of an empire to which they do not wish to belong and which they will resist with endless insurgencies and terrorist attacks, tying up millions of Russian troops for years, if not decades, at enormous cost but absolutely no benefit to Russia.
He doesn’t even want to take the whole of Ukraine, especially not the western part where the majority Ukrainian population absolutely hates Russians. In fact, during Ukraine’s first attempt to gain independence from the Soviet Union – during the second world war – the Ukrainians actually sided with the Germans, forming two whole Waffen SS divisions, which set about ethnically cleansing Ukraine’s non-Ukrainian populations, killing tens of thousands of Poles in and around Lvov in the west and hundreds of thousands of Russians in Luhansk and Donetsk, the very provinces in eastern Ukraine where the current war is being fought, and where the constant bombardment of Russian towns and cities by the Ukrainian army between 2014 and 2021 finally convinced President Putin to intervene in order to prevent history repeating itself.
What’s more, the Russians laid all this out in the peace proposals they put forward in June 2024 and which served as the basis for the peace talks between President Putin and President Trump in Alaska in August 2025. And yet European governments and their associated media still persist in misrepresenting both Russia’s actions and intentions, not just with respect to Ukraine but Europe as whole, which therefore raises the question as to why.
3.The Three Main Reasons Why Europe Misrepresents Russia
Apart from our deep-seated prejudices, I believe that there are also three main political reasons why Europe is currently so intent on grossly misrepresenting Russia, the first of which stems from the fact that, for most of its recent history – stretching back to at least the 15th century – Europe has regarded itself as the centre of the world. Europeans have always known that other countries existed, of course, but they were far away, uncivilised and either constituted a threat, against which they had to defend themselves, or an opportunity which they could exploit. Either way, they were essentially peripheral. It was Europe that really mattered. For it was Europe that was home to the rival powers which contended with each other, not just for European domination but, in an age of imperial expansion and colonisation, for domination of the world.
All this ended, however, in the 20th century, when Europe squandered the accumulated wealth of centuries on two world wars, allowing two new superpowers to emerge: America and the Soviet Union. Not that this was initially a problem of course. For as long as the two were in opposition, the Americans needed allies in Europe to ensure that it was in Europe, rather the USA, that any war would be fought. In fact, it has been said that the Americans intentionally sold Europe on the concept of NATO as a defensive alliance so as to make it seem as if they were helping to defend Europe when what they were actually doing was occupying it and using it as a fortress.
The problems only began when the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the USA as the sole global hegemon, to which Europe was now more or less attached as a collection of vassal states, a position which European leaders cravenly accepted in the mistaken belief that this new world order would last forever and that it was better to sit at the king’s table, even in a position of subordination, than choose the wrong side of history and be left out in the cold. What they hadn’t counted on, of course, was that, under the stewardship of President Putin, the Russian Federation would not only experience a miraculous resurgence but would be joined by China in a completely new multipolar world. What they also hadn’t anticipated was that, having squandered its own birthright on a succession of endless wars aimed at enforcing its global hegemony, the USA would now also be in terminal decline.
Given that NATO cannot operate as an integrated organisation without US command and control centres, logistical support and its satellite based ISR systems, this therefore places Europe in a new and extremely perilous position, in which it could find itself without a unified defence, leaving each of its national armies to fend for themselves. Worse still, it presents once great powers, such as Britain and France, with the sobering prospect of being alone, small and irrelevant on the world stage, something which European leaders are so desperate to avoid that they are currently banding together in an unprecedented way to form the so-called coalition of the willing, which they hope will become a fourth global superpower.
The problem with this, however, is that the one European institution around which this power centre could coalesce, the EU, was not designed for this purpose. It was designed to make the individual nation states of Europe economically dependent on each other so that they would not start another European war, not to bind them together in a political union of the kind that would allow them to create a European army under a unified command. For that, the EU would have to actually become a federal state, much like the Russian Federation, with a democratically elected government and legislature.
Of course, this is precisely what a lot people in Brussels, as well as quite a few national leaders, would like to see happen. There are others, however, who do not want to see the interests of their own sovereign nation states subordinated to a Federal Europe, not least because they know that their populations identify far more closely with their own countries and fellow countrymen than they do with the far more abstract concept of Europe and expect their democratically elected leaders to prioritise their needs and interests ahead of the geopolitical obsessions of the Brussels elites. Indeed, it is why those elites are currently working tirelessly to remove nationalist politicians like Hungary’s Victor Orban from office or, like Romania’s Călin Georgescu, prevent them from being elected in the first place, demonising them as ‘far right’ and smearing them as ‘Putin’s poodles’ for wanting to continue buying cheap Russian gas. What is truly remarkable about this campaign, however, is the way in which it completely inverts reality by making it seem as if it is nationalist Russia that is the real threat to the nation states of Europe, not the European Federalist project itself.
The main reason why so many European heads of government go along with deceit, however, is not just the way in which it elevates them onto the world stage and makes them feel relevant, but the way in which it helps them avoid their own domestic problems, which, in the current political climate, can seem almost insoluble.
Take, for instance, the problem of falling birth rates, which may not seem that serious but is actually the problem from which many other problems stem. This is because most, if not all European state pensions and public sector pension schemes are not what most people think they are. For most people think they are like private pensions: funds into which they pay part of their earnings throughout their working lives and which slowly accumulate, earning interest, to provide them with a pot of money from which they can draw down a pension when they retire. But state pensions are not like this at all. They are actually Ponzi schemes, in which the pensions of current pensioners are paid directly out of the contributions of current workers, with no money being saved or accumulated. This means that they are dependent on there being more people paying contributions into the scheme than pensioners taking money out of it. When people are living longer, however, and fewer people are being born to join the work force, the whole pyramid gets turned on its head and is unsustainable.
Importantly, the problem of declining birthrates is not intrinsically insoluble. Russia, in fact, has an even bigger problem in this regard than Europe. For when the Russian economy collapsed in the 1990s, as I mentioned earlier, people more or less stopped having children. This means that there are now fewer people in their 30s – the decade in most people’s lives when they would normally be having families – than would otherwise be the case, thus threatening to repeat the cycle. In fact, President Putin regards the problem as so grave that he has been personally involved in trying to solve it, not only by restructuring the tax system so as to give more tax allowances to families with more children but by providing grants to families so that women can take more time off work to have more children. He has also been working with the Russian Orthodox Church to promote a more family oriented culture, which, given that most Russians are Church members, has had a very positive effect.
In Europe, however, especially in countries like Britain, where the number of practising Christians is at an all time low and is largely confined to older people – a demographic that is not going to help very much – trying to change the culture in order to promote family life is a much more difficult prospect. Even more significantly, paying women to stay at home to have children would be seen as anti-feminist and any politician who suggested it would be labelled as a far right dinosaur if not an outright fascist, a bit like Vladimir Putin in fact.
So what do we do instead to solve our Ponzi pension scheme problem? We encourage more immigration, of course! The problem with this, however, is that most immigrants coming to Europe do so because they are fleeing war-torn Africa or the Middle East and do not have the education or training necessary to contribute very much to the economy. Most do not even speak the language of their destination countries. While they do not therefore contribute significantly to the funds available for paying pensions, they do, however, place a massive strain on the destination country’s resources and infrastructure.
Take, for instance, the water industry, which, in Britain, is constantly under attack in the media for its lack of investment, both in the supply fresh water and in sewage plants. The problem, however, is not underinvestment, but the rate of population growth and the physical limits to the speed at which investments can be made. In Britain, for instance, the population is currently growing by around a million people every year, for whom around 250,000 additional homes are needed, each of which consumes an extra 550 litres of water per day. This means that, every year, an extra 50 billion litres of fresh water is required, which is more or less the same as the amount of water contained in the average size reservoir. Because reservoirs are constantly refilled as water is pumped out them, this doesn’t mean, of course, that one has to build a new reservoir every year. One also has to take into account the rate of throughput. But if the population of a country is constantly growing, one does have to constantly build new reservoirs, which, in a country like Britain, is not that easy.
First, one has to find a suitable location, which should ideally be a valley with a river running through it. Then one has to overcome environmental objections to radically transforming a large area of countryside, acquire the land and build a dam. Because most of the most suitable locations for reservoirs are in upland regions, far away from built up areas, dozens if not hundreds of miles of mains pipes then have to be laid in order to transport the water to where it is needed. Building a new reservoir, therefore, is not just a multi-billion pound investment; it is a massive engineering project which, from planning to completion, can take more than ten years. Instead of blaming our water companies for any inadequacies in our water supply, therefore, we should be blaming the government for not limiting immigration to that which the country’s infrastructure can support.
Water supply, moreover, is only one part of that infrastructure. In Britain, for instance, our roads are not just noticeably more congested than they have ever been before but are visibly crumbling due to all the heavy goods vehicles using them, while both our schools and hospitals are overcrowded and understaffed. Nor is this again simply due to a lack of capital investment. For whether it be road repair or health care, it takes time to increase the capacity of almost any service. The number of staff required has to be projected on the basis of estimated future need and budgets for their remuneration agreed, often against stiff opposition. The staff then have to be recruited and trained which can take years, by which time, with uncontrolled immigration, it will be realised that the numbers needed were originally grossly underestimated, forcing politicians to throw even more money at the problem in an attempt to play catch-uptake. Faced with such seemingly intractable problems, it is hardly any wonder, therefore, that instead of even trying to deal with them, our leaders prefer to take on the role of international statesmen and immerse themselves in foreign policy issues, which, in contrast, seem that much simpler and easier to solve, especially if one can narrow the issues down to a single external threat.
What’s more, blaming Russia for all our problems has the additional advantage of potentially solving many European countries’ most pressing domestic problem: that of being effectively bankrupt with a stagnant or actually shrinking economy. For by depicting Russia as a threat, both necessitating and justifying greater military expenditure, many European leaders, especially German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, seem to have convinced themselves that this will provide precisely the economic stimulus their economies require. After all, it worked for Nazi Germany, where remilitarisation effectively dragged the economy out of the post-war depression of the 1920s. What European leaders who argue in favour of increase defence spending conveniently forget, however, is that the Nazis funded their military expenditure by demonising a certain section of the German population, herding them into concentration camps and confiscating their wealth.
The irony, of course, is that one of the few European countries that wouldn’t have to do something like this today in order to fund additional military spending is Germany, which has a debt to GDP ratio of just 57.7% and which, unlike the UK, which has a debt to GDP ratio of 110.08%, therefore has plenty of headroom for more borrowing. Indeed, it is how Friedrich Merz is able to argue so strongly for rearmament, his principal motivation being Germany’s current state of rapid deindustrialisation, for which the repurposing of disused Volkswagen plants to produce tanks and armoured cars or even drones and missiles would seem like the perfect solution. The problem, however, is that in order to convince the German public of the necessity of this additional deficit spending he first has to convince them that Russia is a threat, with the danger, of course, that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and that the bandwagon taking us to war becomes unstoppable.
4.Reasons for Optimism
If the desire of European leaders to have relevance on the world stage, avoid insoluble problems at home or solve them through rearmament are thus seemingly driving us to war, there are, however, a number of factors which may act against this.
The first is the very low military base from which most European countries are starting the rearmament process. The well-known military and geopolitical commentator, Col. Douglas MacGregor, has pointed out on more than one occasion that, after Vietnam, it took the US military ten years to rebuild and restructure itself so as to be fit to fight the First Gulf War. More recently, former Ukrainian Chief of Staff, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, has said that, even with US involvement, it would take NATO twelve years to develop the competencies required to take on the current Russian army. The chances of a purely European army being fit to fight the Russians before 2038 are thus very remote and, by then, it is to be hoped that the war in Ukraine will be long over and a peaceful solution for future cohabitation found.
Of course, this doesn’t entirely rule out the possibility of European leaders being so incompetent and ill-informed that they order their military to undertake some gross act of folly. After all, in February this year, Donald Trump ordered the US military to overthrow of the Iranian government when anyone with any knowledge of Iran could have told him that, with the resources available, this was impossible.
Fortunately, there are at least two other reasons why a war with Russia is unlikely. The first is that, for various reasons, most of the people of Europe are unlikely to be willing to fight in it. Europe’s immigrant populations, for instance, who have no real allegiance to their adopted countries, would be particularly unlikely to fight for them, even if they were attacked. After all, they could simply move somewhere else. In contrast, Europe’s indigenous populations would probably fight for their countries in a defensive capacity, but are unlikely to join an offensive war initiated by ‘Europe’, especially if they felt that their governments were putting the interests of this abstract concept ahead of their own nation state. In some instances, one can even imagine them turning on their government in what could end up being a revolution or civil war.
The most important reason why war with Russia is unlikely, however, is that the political tide in Europe might actually be turning. Sir Kier Starmer, who was one of the leaders of the coalition of the willing and who spent more time working on behalf of Ukraine than he ever did on Britain’s domestic problems, was cast out by his own party at least partly for this very reason. What’s more, things are looking just as bad for Emmanuel Macron in France, who is likely to be replaced by Marine Le Pen in next year’s presidential election, and Friedrich Merz, who is unlikely to even make it to the next German election in 2029, the most likely winners of which are the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), whose leader’s first priority will be to go to Moscow, restore relations with Russia, volunteer to pay to repair the two Nord Stream pipelines and thus get cheap Russian gas flowing again so as to rebuild Germany’s shattered industry.
Indeed, it’s probably the main reason why President Putin has so far resisted taking Sergei Karaganov’s advice to strike European factories building missiles and drones for Ukraine. For he knows that, eventually, the electorates of Europe will get tired of the feckless grifters who are currently in power and replace them with serious, responsible leaders who will put the interests of their nation states and their own people first. And when they do so, what Putin most wants is to be able to do business with these new leaders without the background of war getting in the way. Indeed, this would be the best outcome for both Europe and Russia. We can only hope, therefore, that no one does anything stupid in the meantime.
