Many of the most widely publicised cases of alleged Russian sabotage — the “jamming” of the GPS signal of von der Leyen’s plane, the Baltic cable incidents in late 2024, a crashed DHL cargo plane, a fire at Heathrow Airport in 2025 — ended up collapsing upon basic scrutiny. In each case, Russian involvement was ultimately ruled out. […]

The same goes for the drone panic that swept Europe in the fall of 2025, when near-daily sightings caused the closure of several airports across the continent. Leaders openly blamed Moscow, yet virtually all the “Russian drone” sightings turned out to be unfounded. […]

So is this just a case of collective panic fuelled by click-addicted media? Or, given that the claims of a Russian “hybrid war” against Europe appear to rest on little more than propaganda, is there a concerted effort by the European Union-NATO establishment to condition citizens to believe that Europe is under attack from Russia?

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Thomas Fazi

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Latest book: The Brussels Empire: The EU’s Silent Coup Against Democracy (German version only for now: Die Brüsseler Tyrannei: oder Der diskrete Staatsstreich)

The images of flames engulfing the town hall in Limoges, France, and of its bell tower collapsing, are going round the world. Episodes like this can only be condemned, just as one can only condemn the looting that has accompanied the protests in many parts of France.

And yet, if we stopped at this level of reflection, we would simply be engaging in a classic exercise in petty-bourgeois conservatism — which has its reasons, but which is also dramatically short-sighted. To start preaching about burnt-out cars and smashed shop windows, and go no further, merely shows that one has not yet grasped the seriousness of the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

What we are witnessing in France — and, in different forms, in many other European countries by now (Spain, Portugal, Albania, Belgium and, since yesterday, Italy too) — is anything but an irrational event. There are historical events that appear irrational only from close up, but which possess an evident rationality when viewed from a sufficient height.

Rational does not mean painless, nor does it mean free of injustice.

We must train ourselves to hold two levels of analysis together: one at which specific acts and specific individuals can be judged barbaric, uncivilised, vandalistic; and one at which we can (and must) understand that history is always a river carrying debris and corpses — but one that cannot be stopped by sermons.

What is happening has an iron collective rationality, even if those taking part in it often have only a limited understanding of it, or none at all.

For many years now, Europe’s peoples have experienced their ruling classes as an anonymous technocratic organism — a self-propelled rubber wall moving on “autopilot”, utterly indifferent to the needs of the population. The wager of these finance-linked technocratic elites has been that they could lull consciences to sleep with today’s opium of the people, the media (entertainment and infotainment), and tame the recalcitrant with restrictive measures (a truncheon blow here, a closed bank account there, a tweak to an electoral law one moment, an annulled election the next, and so on).

The general assumption of Europe’s leaderships — tacit and unquestioned — is that one does not reason with the plebs: one simply alternates the carrot and the stick.

Everything that is said publicly is always an instrumental lie, without exception — save for the occasional case in which a truth can itself be put to instrumental use. Public discourse has become an endless performance that cares less and less about preserving even a semblance of credibility.

Thus no one in their right mind really believes that Russia is about to invade us, but this does not stop legions of institutional nonentities from repeating this bollocks with a straight face every day. And of course everyone knows that, in this game of fairy tales pumped out by a press for hire, the only thing that matters — the one fixed point as circumstances change — is the intention to dispose arbitrarily of public resources and channel them towards private interests.

In short, the ruling classes have long since grown used to treating the population as a dumb beast, to which no rational justification is owed and which is to be handled, on the one hand, with selective flattery and targeted privileges and, on the other, by being rendered powerless.

And this mechanism can work, and does work, for a long time. Until it doesn’t.

And it stops working the day too many people are losing too much to be able to afford to remain in a state of torpor. “Losing too much” here should not be taken to mean something like “death by starvation”. In a modern society, people enter a condition of unbearable deprivation long before they “starve to death”.

Today, for instance, being unable to afford to use a car or to access the internet means, for the majority of the population, being cut off from the world, from work, from social life, from life itself. And the fact that cars and mobile phones were once luxury goods means nothing: this is now the new threshold of “participation in common life”, what separates life from non-life.

Plebs raised like beasts of burden, to be fed the occasional panem et circenses, shit jobs and televised snake oil, are not — and will not be — receptive, on the day this game breaks down, to arguments about public decorum, respect for property, reverence for monuments and so on.

Those burning cars, historic buildings and shops are culturally and morally deprived. But the real culprits, the ones who should be made to pay, are the elites at the top who cultivated and wanted that deprivation, thinking it served their purposes.

Today the pressure cooker is about to blow. Even if this wave subsides, this is only the beginning, because Europe’s ruling classes are in no position — neither materially nor culturally — to change course. So fasten your seatbelts: we are heading for a crash.

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Latest book: The Brussels Empire: The EU’s Silent Coup Against Democracy (German version only for now: Die Brüsseler Tyrannei: oder Der diskrete Staatsstreich)

I should like to begin my remarks with a remark made by Professor Panda this morning when he spoke of the return of the national interest. This gave me quite a bit to think; because although it is valid for many countries in the world, I think there is a huge exception to this rule. That big exception is Europe.

If we look at the steps taken by European countries in recent years in economic policy, in the fields of security, in geopolitics and especially when it comes to the war in Ukraine, it is impossible to claim that these countries have been pursuing their national interests, no matter how much you stretch the concept. European countries have systematically undermined their core economic interests, security and geopolitical interests. The obvious question then is: why? In my opinion, there are two possible explanations for this.

One possible explanation is the following: European leaders have been misguided, they have acted imprudently; despite all the hard evidence to the contrary, they have pursued and are still pursuing what they believe to be the national interest of their country. Now, if it had impossible to predict the consequences of these policies, perhaps this possibility would be conceivable. However, this was not the case at all. For example, it was obvious that severing ties with cheap Russian gas would be disastrous for Europe.

Many of us, including me, wrote this as early as February or March 2022. We were able to predict this not because we are clairvoyants, but because it was evident. Just as it was evident that Ukraine had no chance of defeating Russia militarily, even with NATO support; therefore, it was just as obvious that pushing for a maximalist military-only solution to the conflict would spell disaster for Europe, not only economically but also in terms of security. This was even truer for Ukraine itself, of course.

Many of us have been saying this from day one. Therefore, unless we assume that European leaders were too dumb — and as dumb as some of them undoubtedly are — to see this reality that was obvious to many observers, that is, that this policy clearly ran counter to Europe’s interests, and then to see that doubling down on that policy would only make things worse, we have to consider the other alternative on the table: that European elites, for a long time, have not been pursuing the national interests of their respective countries, nor the collective interests of Europe as a whole.

In other words, the classical realist framework, which suggests that all states tend to defend and maximise their interests in economic, military and similar terms, doesn’t seem to apply to Europe. Because, when viewed from this theoretical perspective, the line followed by Europe remains completely irrational. We therefore need a different conceptual framework in order to make sense of European politics; and I believe that the most useful framework in this case is that of “vassalisation”. In the simplest terms, Europe — by which I mean virtually all EU countries and the entire Brussels establishment — has been hijacked by a transnationalised transatlantic elite that doesn’t care in the slightest about the concrete interests of their own countries and is in fact beholden to completely different interests: private interest, i.e., the interests of a narrow oligarchy — today, mainly the interests of transnational financial circles and military-industrial structures — and foreign interests, namely those of Washington’s imperial core (and, as a by-product, of Israel).

So how did we get to this point? Undoubtedly, this is the product of a very long process that emerged right after the end of the Second World War. The United States identified Europe as one of the key pillars of its global dominance strategy at the time. Projecting American power around the globe required keeping Europe under economic, military and also cultural control. Europe has effectively been under US military occupation since World War II. Even though eighty years have passed since the end of the war, there are still nearly 100,000 American soldiers stationed on the continent. Some 30 strategic American bases throughout Europe remain in existence. According to official discourse, they are here to protect us. Protect against whom? Against Russia, which poses no real threat to Europe?

In fact, I would argue that Russia didn’t pose a real threat even during the Cold War years. This threat was, in fact, largely manufactured and inflated by NATO itself. Naturally, NATO never aimed to defend Europe. Its main aim was to always keep Europe under control, to ensure that the continent was subordinated to American strategic interests, and to project American power throughout the world. This was true yesterday and it is even truer today. NATO today not only ensures that Europe remains aligned with US interests — and the Russia-Ukraine war is the most obvious example of this — but also serves to project American power around the globe. Just the other day, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, known for saying the quiet part out loud, stated that 5,000 sorties were made from American bases in Europe in support of the US-Israeli aggression against Iran.

Europe is therefore fully complicit in this attack on Iran, despite messages of condemnation from some leaders. In reality, Europe forms an essential part of the logistical infrastructure of American military power, allowing it to project eastward, towards Russia, as well as southward, towards the Middle East. All the NATO 3.0 chatter or narratives about the so-called rupture between Europe and the US are therefore just a huge theatre. On the contrary, NATO 3.0 will further reinforce Europe’s subordination to the “alliance”.

NATO was, of course, only one of the instruments. America’s national security apparatus also established extremely close links with the security apparatuses of European countries. And, of course, the US has long exercised tremendous economic, technological and financial control over the continent. It has also established massive cultural and ideological domination on the continent — not just through popular culture, but also through the English-language media, transatlantic think tanks and faux “non-governmental organisations”. Then there is one final tool, which is often overlooked but which, in my opinion, is crucial: the European Union itself.

The European Union has long been presented as a potential counterweight to American power, but it has never functioned as such. In fact, it has always been a critical lever that has chained Europe to the US-led transatlantic NATO system; it has effectively functioned as NATO’s political arm. This situation is particularly evident today under Ursula von der Leyen, who has made extraordinary efforts to align European countries with US interests, even against the will of individual European governments.

Today we are at an extremely dangerous threshold. Because, through the EU, which is a structurally undemocratic institution, the transatlantic NATO establishment has established full economic and political dominance over European countries. These are not sovereign countries by any definition; and therefore, they are not democratic, to the extent that sovereignty is the precondition for popular self-rule. This situation makes the possibility of achieving a systemic transformation through the ballot box even more difficult.

To sum up, I can easily say that Europe is an occupied continent in many respects. Thus, how the peoples of Europe can break away from the transatlantic system and achieve decolonisation is perhaps the most vital question facing the continent today.

Of course, Europe’s predicaments predate before America’s emergence on the scene as a global empire. The essence of the problem lies in the deep-rooted hostility that European economic and political elites have felt towards democracy and the working classes for centuries. When using the concept of “liberal democracy” today, we assume that democracy emerged spontaneously from liberalism. This is a complete lie. All of the great liberal thinkers of the past were opposed to democracy, that is, mass democracy, intended as a political order in which everyone has equal voting rights.

The democracy they imagined was a democracy of the propertied classes, of the capital-owning classes. Indeed, mass democracy was achieved in large part thanks to the often bloody struggles of the working classes and the socialist movement. Therein lies the main issue. The peoples of Europe have had to wage a fierce struggle against their own elites from time immemorial.

We have some of the worst elites in the world. Not only do they not care about the well-being of the people of the Global South; they do not care one bit about the well-being of their own people, the people of Europe. This is why Europe has been mired in violence, political conflicts and class struggles from the past to present. Even in the “golden age” of Western capitalism, after the Second World War, mass democracy was highly conflictual. I am Italian: my country was the scene of massive waves of political violence in the Seventies and Eighties. Similar dynamics occurred in Germany, France and all the major European countries. And this is considered the heyday of mass democracy; and in many respects it was — it was precisely in these decades that the greatest social and economic gains for the broad masses of people in Europe were achieved — but these gains were not only the result of elections, but also of mass mobilisation and high-intensity, and often violent, political conflicts. In my opinion, this picture reveals a much deeper knot. The rights obtained in the post-war period were not granted to the people; it was the consequence of the fact that, for a brief historical period, the organised power of the working classes, the broad masses, were able to wrestle some power away from the organised power of capital — though these were always relative gains.

The problem is that the basis — the concrete material conditions — that made mass democracy possible have disappeared in many respects today. Mass production sites and large factories where workers came together and organised no longer exist. Therefore, the structural and material conditions that created mass democracy have largely disappeared. Beyond the question of freeing ourselves from US imperial tutelage, which also means dismantling the EU, the other crucial question then is: how can we restore democracy and once again wrestle some power and control away from the political and economic elites when the material basis on which we achieved these gains in the past no longer exists? Our elites are acting in a completely unbridled manner today precisely because there is no real counterweight left to stand against them. Herein lies the crux of the matter.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary. Alternatively, you could buy me a coffee!

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Thomas Fazi

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Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Brussels Empire: The EU’s Silent Coup Against Democracy (German version only for now: Die Brüsseler Tyrannei: oder Der diskrete Staatsstreich)

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Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary. Alternatively, you could buy me a coffee!

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Brussels Empire: The EU’s Silent Coup Against Democracy (German version only for now: Die Brüsseler Tyrannei: oder Der diskrete Staatsstreich)

A few days ago I shared a detailed summary of the book. I’m now happy to share the book’s introduction, which was also published in German in the magazine NachDenkSeiten:

As someone whose political baptism of fire came in the anti-globalisation movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s, as a card-carrying member of the Italian radical left, I long held a neutral, even positive view of the European Union. Like most people in that milieu, I grew up believing that nation-states and national sovereignty were a reactionary, even fascist relic of the past — or at the very least that hyper-globalisation had rendered them obsolete — and that the EU was the answer: an attempt to make Europe stronger and more autonomous by getting countries to “pool” their sovereignty and thus better withstand the forces of the market, and, more broadly, to overcome the old national divisions and finally unite the peoples of Europe. That this was itself a variation on the globalist creed I claimed to oppose was lost on me at the time, as it was on almost everyone else in the movement. I had drunk the progressive-flavoured pro-European Kool-Aid.

I began seriously to question those views only after the 2008 global financial crisis, and above all during the so-called “European sovereign debt crisis” that followed. As I picked apart the official narrative about the political-economic response to that crisis — an enquiry that became my first book, The Battle for Europe, published in 2014 — I also found myself questioning the nature of the institution driving those policies: the European Union itself. What I saw was not an institution shielding Europeans from the violence of financial markets but one that was doubling down on it: imposing structural economic violence on entire countries in the form of austerity and “structural adjustment programmes”, and eviscerating democracy in the process. I saw unaccountable bodies such as the European Commission and the European Central Bank using the powers that states had bequeathed them to override the democratic will of the people and enforce social and economic misery on millions of people, most brutally in Greece — all while the mainstream kept repeating that “more Europe” was the only way forward.

There was no going back for me after that. I have spent the years since exposing the true nature of the European Union, in several books and hundreds of articles, even when this put me at odds with most people on the left. By the time the pandemic struck, I had spent a decade challenging the EU’s anti-democratic, neoliberal-enforcing policies, and I thought there was little the Brussels machine could still do to surprise me. I was wrong, though not in the way I first assumed. Over the past few years the supranational institutions of the EU have extended their reach far beyond the economic (mis)management and hyper-regulation of member states, into areas that had long been considered the preserve of national governments — from information to public health to foreign policy to, now, war itself.

The Union today not only sets the terms on which 450 million people work, trade, consume and invest; not only does it continue to dismantle Europe’s welfare states in the name of austerity (and now, rearmament) and to financially coerce entire states into compliance; not only does it keep overturning national laws and constitutions at will, and hollowing out democratic processes — all things that it has been doing for a long time. Today, it also runs multi-billion-euro propaganda operations and presides over a sprawling apparatus of online censorship; it interferes directly in national elections; it sanctions its own citizens without trial, stripping them of basic civil rights; and, perhaps most worryingly, it has mutated into a full-blown war machine, standing at the forefront of a rearmament drive and proxy war against Russia that has already inflicted serious damage on European economies and risks dragging the continent into open conflict with the world’s largest nuclear power. And yet most citizens remain largely unaware of the EU’s role in the steady dismantling of their democratic, economic, political and social rights.

What surprised me was not the direction of travel; it was the speed and the scope — and, above all, how little resistance any of it met. That was the second lesson of these years, and the one that prompted this book: my earlier critique had been too narrow. I had treated as an economic pathology — a neoliberal deformation — what was in fact something else entirely: a political design whose full dimensions only became legible once the economic mask slipped. The censorship, the electoral management, the war drive: these are not new departures. They are the same logic, applied to new domains. It is this hidden reality that this book sets out to expose: how Brussels’s opaque machinery actually works, who it serves and at what cost. But the book also addresses those critics, on left and right alike, who oppose the EU’s current policies yet continue to believe that the Union can be democratically reformed. Even among its critics, the EU is generally regarded as a well-meaning project that somehow, at some point, lost its way — though there is disagreement about when, why and who is to blame. This book proposes a different thesis: that the EU’s current incarnation is not a deviation from a previously positive path, nor from its founders’ intentions, but the culmination of a project that was elitist, anti-democratic and authoritarian from its inception. What we are witnessing is not a degeneration but a revelation: a project finally showing itself for what it always was. If that is right, the question of reform largely answers itself, though the reader will have to wait for the final chapter to see the case made in full.

The book argues that European integration, including in its pre-EU incarnations, should be understood primarily not as an economic project but as a political one: a project aimed at disempowering mass democracy. That impulse is as old as the project itself. The founding generation, formed by the interwar collapse, set out to build a “constrained democracy”, in which the most consequential decisions were placed beyond the reach of electorates. By the mid-1970s, as the post-war settlement unravelled and popular demands multiplied, mass democracy had come to be seen by elites on both sides of the Atlantic as a lethal threat to the capitalist status quo, and the impulse to contain it hardened into a programme. The vehicle was an assault on the nation-state — democracy’s primary institutional expression — to the benefit of transnational capital and domestic oligarchies. That programme was constitutionalised at Maastricht, which embedded neoliberalism into the very fabric of the Union — a shift that the euro then locked in once and for all, by depriving (most) member states of the most fundamental pillar of economic sovereignty, the power to issue their own currency, and transforming them into something resembling colonies of Brussels and Frankfurt. The book argues that this amounted to nothing less than a constitutional and juridical coup d’état, albeit an unusually discreet one. This was by design. From the outset, integration was designed to advance by stealth and through crisis: each emergency, real or manufactured, used to transfer upward powers that no electorate would have granted in “normal” conditions.

That is one face of the Brussels Empire. The other is, if anything, more remarkable: the same Union that wields near-absolute power over its members displays near-absolute submission to its patron across the Atlantic. The EU has not merely served as a vehicle for shifting the balance of power in favour of capital; it has been a core instrument of Europe’s subordination to Washington and the transatlantic war lobby — most obviously in relations with Russia, where it has embarked on a disastrous proxy war against its nuclear-armed neighbour. Integration was embedded from birth in an American-led strategic order — sponsored, financed and steered from Washington — and has now matured into what this book calls hyper-vassalisation: a condition in which Europe is more politically, economically and militarily subordinate to the United States than at any point since the Second World War. These two tendencies are not in tension; they feed each other. Supranational power grabs have repeatedly received Washington’s validation in exchange for alignment; and each deepening of alignment has required the suppression of domestic dissent, which the new supranational powers conveniently supply. An empire that is itself a vassal: that is the paradox the title names and the condition this book seeks to explain.

A final word on how the book is organised. It falls into two parts. Part One is a historical reconstruction: it traces the project’s genealogy from its interwar intellectual origins through the founding decades and the road to Maastricht and the single currency, the euro crisis and the authoritarian turn it consolidated, the first populist revolt and the Union’s counteroffensive, and on to the two great accelerants of centralisation and subordination: the pandemic and the Ukraine war. Part Two turns from narrative to anatomy: how the EU actually works today, the economics of supranational integration, the propaganda and censorship complex, the sanctioning of individuals, the management of inconvenient elections, the politics of hyper-vassalisation — and, finally, the question of whether such a construction can be reformed at all. Readers impatient to understand the present may go straight to Part Two, which is written to stand on its own. But I consider the historical part to be just as important, as it supplies the evidence on which everything else rests. Without it, the recent past reads as a chronicle of scandals and blunders; with it, the chronicle resolves into what it actually is: not a machine malfunctioning, but a machine doing exactly what it was built to do.

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Latest book: The Brussels Empire: The EU’s Silent Coup Against Democracy (German version only for now: Die Brüsseler Tyrannei: oder Der diskrete Staatsstreich)

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This is an article I’ve been meaning to write for a long time, since the “Russian drone” hysteria of late 2025, but life got in the way. The latest wave of “Russian hybrid war” claims finally prompted me to get round to it. As far as I’m aware, it’s the most detailed critical analysis of the “Russian hybrid war” narrative published so far — which is also why it’s rather long. As always, comments, corrections and additions are welcome.

Lately, not a day goes by in Europe without some drone scare, fire or blackout being blamed on Russia. We are told that these incidents are all part of a relentless “hybrid war” that Russia is waging against Europe — one that involves drone incursions, airspace violations, sabotage, arson, cyberattacks and more. We are told this “includes plots to place incendiary devices aboard DHL cargo planes, blow up railroad tracks in Poland, and burn down warehouses and shopping centers all over Europe”, as well as “acts of sabotage against defense companies and the defense industry in Europe”, and “attacks on European critical infrastructure” — but also, apparently, sending secret agents to defecate in the lavatories of Finnish MPs. We are also told that “[s]uch attacks began occurring shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022”, and have escalated in recent months and weeks. According to Kaja Kallas, “Europe faces a fast-proliferation of sabotage attacks and airspace violations”.

Tensions escalated dramatically last month after Germany formally attributed an attempted explosive-drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport to Russia, with subsequent investigations reportedly tracing the operation back to Russian military intelligence. This raised the stakes considerably: it was one of the most serious incidents on German soil ever officially pinned on Moscow by Berlin — albeit a “failed” one. German foreign minister Johann Wadephul said the attack “fits into a broader pattern of Russian hybrid operations in Europe”.

Within hours, EU-NATO leaders across multiple capitals had not only accepted the attribution but agreed on what the incident meant: a piece of a coordinated campaign, with a known motive, requiring a predetermined response, i.e., sanctions and more Ukraine support. “The evidence is clear”, said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, on the same day as the German government’s announcement — though at that point the Germans hadn’t yet shared any evidence, either with the public or, it would appear, with other EU-NATO governments. French President Emmanuel Macron also said that the attack was clear evidence that “the Russian hybrid threat against Europeans... has intensified”. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski warned that Russia’s confrontation with Europe was becoming increasingly “kinetic”, adding that “Russia is at war with Europe”. “This is the new normal”, said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Seemingly confirming this, just a few weeks later, on September 29, the Estonian government officially accused Russian special services of commissioning an arson attack on the building of the Estonian defence company Milrem — another serious step up from the previous pattern of alleged but unofficial attributions to Russia.

Warnings of worse to come

Meanwhile, we are also constantly told that Russia intends to escalate even further — i.e., that we should brace for much more serious attacks against Europe, possibly just around the corner. Within the space of a few days, it was reported that “European intelligence officials have raised the possibility of an imminent Russian test of NATO, with one saying a potential attack could come in a matter of ‘months, not years’”; that, according to the FBI, “Russia is plotting targeted assassinations across the US and in European countries”; and that there exists a CIA report warning Italy, France and Spain about a potential Russian operation involving drone attacks launched from merchant ships in the Mediterranean Sea, or so the journalist who published the “scoop” in El Mundo claimed to have been told by an anonymous source close to the Lithuanian Ministry of Defense.

The article received massive global coverage — yet, in less than 24 hours, both Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto and Macron firmly denied receiving any such warning and dismissed the claims as groundless, suggesting that the story was concocted either by the “anonymous source” or by the journalist himself. The episode also shows that such claims, especially when presented with no supporting evidence whatsoever, need to be treated with extreme caution — particularly when they rest on shaky logic to begin with. In this case, for example, one may reasonably wonder what interest Russia would have in attacking Spain and Italy, two of the least enthusiastic supporters of the forever war Ukraine.

But there have been even more bizarre claims. In recent weeks, there has been coordinated messaging across NATO that Russia could be preparing a “false flag attack... in the next few months” — i.e., a drone or missile strike that Russia would then claim was an “accident” or even try to blame on Ukraine. But how would Russia benefit from either of these scenarios? They have both occurred already — there have been several instances of stray Russian and Ukrainian drones entering NATO airspace near the border with Ukraine (see below) — and the only effect has been to harden NATO’s stance. Moreover, if Russia were aiming for plausible deniability, why did it allegedly leave its fingerprints all over the attempted drone attack in Leipzig/Halle? And how do these claims square with the opposite claim that Russia may launch an open attack against a NATO country “within months”, as Danish intelligence recently said? Which one is it? But we are not expected to ask questions or point out inconsistencies in the story; we are simply expected to believe what our media and governments tell us.

Is Russia about to attack? Even NATO isn’t sure

Of course, none of us has any way of knowing what Russia is planning to do, especially given that this is a dynamic situation in which Russia’s actions are influenced by NATO’s actions and vice versa. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for his part, denies all allegations, and has repeatedly stated — most recently on September 19 — that Russia has “no aggressive intentions towards Europe or European countries” and is ready to restore relations and cooperate with its European neighbours — while at the same time accusing European leaders of using the alleged Russian threat to justify their own policies and seek an escalation with Moscow. Of course, one may argue that if Russia were poised to attack, it wouldn’t tell Europeans in advance, and so its words shouldn’t be taken at face value.

This is true, of course. At the same time, insofar as most states are rational actors that tend to think and act strategically — and Russia certainly fits the description — one may ask what rational or strategic interest Russia would have in launching an attack on Europe that could easily lead to an all-out NATO-Russia war, especially since Russia’s refusal so far to retaliate in kind to NATO-enabled Ukrainian attacks on its territory, including against civilians, has likely been motivated precisely by a desire to avoid such an outcome. Interestingly enough, such scepticism is shared even by some voices within the NATO establishment.

Estonia’s foreign intelligence service, for example, wrote in its 2026 Annual Report, published in February: “There is... no cause for panic. In the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service’s assessment, Russia has no intention of militarily attacking Estonia or any other NATO member state in the coming year. We are likely to reach a similar assessment next year”. Even Finnish President Alexander Stubb, otherwise very hawkish on Russia, has pushed back against warnings from fellow European leaders that Russia could attack NATO in the near future, saying Helsinki’s intelligence sees no evidence of an imminent military threat. “We don’t see the evidence of that”, Stubb said. “In our intelligence we see that there is activity but no imminent military threat right now”. Indeed, as reported by Politico, even NATO’s official assessment remains that there is no imminent threat: “At this time, we see no imminent threat of attack”, said a NATO official speaking on behalf of the organisation. On September 29, at a joint NATO press conference, Lithuanian PM Mindaugas Sinkevičius stated that he asked Mark Rutte for real intelligence evidence of Russia preparing an imminent attack, receiving confirmation that none exists. “I asked [Rutte] is there proof, real proof, that Russia is planning something? But there is actually nothing”, he said.

This shows that even NATO’s own assessments are highly contradictory. In terms of public sentiment, however, it makes little difference, since the imminent-attack claims far outweigh the more cautious assessments, which generally receive hardly any coverage. In any case, in the absence of evidence pointing in one direction or the other, speculations about future scenarios ultimately remain just that: speculations ­— especially considering that we have to assume that Russia’s posture isn’t fixed but is inevitably influenced by NATO’s actions. What we can assess with some certainty is what Russia has been engaged in so far — which in turn provides us with the best possible insight as to what it might do next. The question that needs to be asked is thus: does the evidence support Western claims that Russia is engaged in a “hybrid war” against Europe?

The “hybrid war” reports — and its inconsistencies

There are several databases and reports that purport to quantify Russian hybrid warfare, which are often cited as proof of a coordinated, escalating Russian campaign. These include datasets and reports by the European Repository of Cyber Incidents, which is strictly focused on cyber attacks, Leiden University, the Soufan Center, Associated Press, the US-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the UK-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and the Bratislava-based think tank GLOBSEC. Taken individually and at face value, each of these reports paints an apparently damning picture comprising dozens — and in some cases hundreds — of alleged sabotages, attacks and influence operations spanning several European countries over many years. Worrying indeed. Read side by side and in detail, however, they tell a very different story: the numbers diverge wildly; the central concept is undefined; attribution often rests on nothing more than press reports of official suspicion; and the reports’ own caveats — buried in footnotes, appendices and methodology sections — often undercut the claims made in their executive summaries.

For starters, the numbers don’t add up. Depending on which report you read, Russia carried out somewhere between 52 and 255 hybrid attacks in Europe after February 2022 — a fivefold spread for what is supposedly the same campaign. The Soufan Center, covering just six countries — two of them, Moldova and Georgia, outside the EU — records more incidents for 2025 alone than CSIS does for three years across the whole continent. The numbers diverge because there is no agreed answer to the most basic question: what is a hybrid attack? The IISS paper itself concedes that hybrid warfare is “an amorphous term” with wide variation in definitions. Some reports limit themselves to physical attacks and plots, and even then these range from arson to placing pro-Kremlin stickers, vandalism and spraying graffiti; others include “influence operations” such as monthly peace demonstrations in Amsterdam; and others even include Russian naval passages through the English Channel. Ultimately the term can be used to include almost anything. The biggest difference in numbers is determined by the treatment of (alleged) drone sightings attributed to Russia — numbering in the hundreds but in most cases eventually debunked (see below) — and hence excluded by most reports, despite receiving huge media coverage and being one of the largest contributors to the “hybrid war” hysteria.

Moreover, in most cases, the evidence linking Russia is very weak — or non-existent. Across these reports, the evidence that Russia was behind a given incident usually consists of a news article reporting that officials suspect it. There is no independent verification: if a government says “Russia did it”, it goes on the list — even in the absence of any evidence. Moreover, the Leiden dataset includes incidents that were linked to Russia by officials or politicians, or uncovered by journalistic investigations — but also those that merely “appeared to fit in a pattern” of similar events. The reports also lean on each other. IISS’s dataset is built on the Leiden dataset; GLOBSEC cites the Leiden figures, IISS and an AP count; CSIS cites the Leiden research; the Soufan Center interviewed the author of the Leiden dataset. Ultimately, most roads lead back to the same pool of media reports of official claims — in most cases of “possible” or “likely” Russian involvement. And those official claims are not neutral. The IISS paper, remarkably, says so itself: decisions about attribution are “rarely made in a political vacuum”, and public statements “reflect broader strategic calculations as much as their confidence in the evidence”.

Nor can many of the organisations behind these reports be considered neutral. The IISS, CSIS and GLOBSEC all have funding ties to American and European arms manufacturers (GLOBSEC counts among its donors the defence company Helsing, which the Ukraine war has turned into Europe’s most valuable startup), as well as to the transatlantic establishment, and are known for their hawkish approach to the Ukraine war and to Russia. The language of the reports themselves betrays their ideological commitment. The CSIS brief argues that NATO should abandon its “mindset of self-deterrence” and launch a “calibrated offensive campaign” against Russia. The IISS urges a “more assertive and proactive stance”, with its chair, Lord Mark Sedwill, saying that Britain was at war with Russia. The GLOBSEC report speaks of “state terrorism”.

But, in fact, as noted above, the reports themselves contain very little evidence, if any, to support the “Russia is at war with Europe” narrative.

Aside from the handful of sabotages that have resulted in convictions — discussed below — and even then with only tenuous links being drawn to the Russian state, virtually all the incidents logged in these reports are based purely on unsubstantiated claims made by Western officials, security services or media outlets, often without presenting evidence (as we shall see, this also applies to formally attributed actions like the Leipzig/Halle drone incident). As the Associated Press admits, “[i]t is often difficult to prove Russia’s involvement, and the Kremlin denied carrying out a sabotage campaign against the West. But more and more governments are publicly attributing attacks to Russia”. This constant talk of “possible” or “potential” Russian attacks ultimately generates a public perception of a relentless campaign being waged against Europe, even in the absence of evidence. As Ivo Capaul of ETH Zürich noted, the effect of the media coverage and political climate (a wholly intended one, I would add) is to create “cognitive biases in the form of a clustering illusion” — seeing patterns between data points that are not necessarily connected, or that in some cases don’t exist at all.

The claims don’t stand up to scrutiny

Indeed, what is astonishing is how many widely reported claims of Russian sabotage ended up collapsing upon basic scrutiny. One of the most infamous cases occurred in September of last year, when it was widely reported (initially by the Financial Times) that Russia had “recklessly” jammed the GPS of von der Leyen’s airplane over Bulgaria, forcing pilots to land using “paper maps” after “circling the airport for an hour”. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte was quick to suggest that the incident was part of a wider pattern of “hybrid warfare” that included “cyber attacks and severing subsea cables”. Public outcry ensued. However, the story collapsed within hours: a flight tracking service demonstrated that the signal was never lost and the plane was actually only 9 minutes late. Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov stated there was nothing to investigate. This was a significant case of claims promoted by sources close to the top of the European Commission being prominently exposed as false, yet the claims made were never retracted or clarified. Nor did they give rise to wider scrutiny of the “Russian hybrid warfare” narrative.

But this was not an isolated case: there have been countless claims of Russian sabotage or hybrid activity that were massively amplified by the media, only to be subsequently debunked or proven false — the latter going largely unreported. In November 2024, a series of incidents causing damage to cables in the Baltic Sea was widely reported in the media. Coverage was fuelled by European decision-makers openly attributing the incidents to Russia even before the investigations had been concluded. The lack of clear information sparked public speculation about who was responsible for the incidents and how exactly they had come about. Finnish authorities detained a ship, suspected of being part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” used to avoid sanctions, after that cable and others were damaged. It eventually turned out that the damaged undersea cables in the Baltic Sea had been caused by Hong Kong- and China-flagged ships — not by Russian vessels. The Finnish intelligence service SUPO observed that “statistically, the number of cases of cable damage in recent years is quite typical for the Baltic Sea”. Yet again, no apology was issued by European authorities for the false claim.

That same month, a DHL plane crashed in Lithuania. Several European officials implied that the crash might have been the result of Russian sabotage, with these claims being widely amplified in the Western media. On the very day of the crash, before any investigation had been carried out, Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s then foreign minister, raised the possibility that it could be a “hybrid incident”, referencing the recent severing of the Baltic Sea cables. General Carsten Breuer, the Bundeswehr’s chief of defence, went even further, suggesting it may have been a “test” by Russia to probe weaknesses, saying “We encountered a similar situation earlier this year, and now something has occurred that fits this pattern” and that the Kremlin might be “checking vulnerabilities”. A few days after the crash, Sir Richard Moore, the then head of MI6, alleged that Russia had launched a “staggeringly reckless campaign of sabotage” in Europe. In March 2025, exhaustive investigations by the Lithuanians revealed that the crash was caused by pilot error, a finding that was not reported with anything like the prominence of the original allegations that the plane was brought down by Russian action. Once again, notable accusations were demonstrated to be provably false in a way that should raise questions around the wider narrative being pushed — but that didn’t occur.

A similar situation played out when Heathrow airport near London shut down on March 21, 2025, after an electricity substation caught fire. Claims that the fire was part of a hybrid warfare campaign were widely publicised. Philip Ingram, a former colonel in British military intelligence, was quoted as saying that the attacks looked like something “straight out of the Russian military intelligence playbook”. A few months later, the real cause of the accident was revealed, and it proved to be far more mundane: a privatised electricity company had failed to properly maintain and upgrade the installation. The same pattern of accusations running ahead of the facts could be seen in other cases, from explosives found near a NATO pipeline to a hole in the fence of a German water treatment facility.

The drone panic — much ado about nothing?

A similar pattern can also be observed in the “Russian drone” hysteria that has come to dominate the “hybrid war” narrative over the past year. In particular, the autumn of 2025 saw a veritable media frenzy around the issue. Numerous reports were published of drone sightings all over Europe — in Germany, Poland, France, Norway, Lithuania, Denmark and other countries — often resulting in airport closures. European leaders, such as Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, openly blamed Russia for the drones. “Our suspicion is that Russia is behind most of these drone flights”, Merz said after incidents at Munich airport, without providing any evidence. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and von der Leyen called it a “hybrid war”. The Danish Justice Minister went as far as comparing the situation to 9/11. The crisis came at a time when European leaders were locked in intense debate over Europe’s common defence policy, after US President Donald Trump had put a (temporary) stop to military shipments to Ukraine. Indeed, several of these sightings occurred just ahead of an October 2025 summit of European leaders in Copenhagen, where funding for a “drone wall” and other defence measures was high on the agenda.

Virtually all “Russian drone” sightings, however, soon turned out to be unfounded. The drone incident that led to the shutdown of Frankfurt Airport was caused by a 41-year-old “amateur drone pilot”. The closure of Lithuania’s largest airport, it turned out, was not due to Russian drones, but to hot air balloons used by cigarette smugglers. In one striking case, it was reported that, according to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Polish state security had neutralised a drone over the presidential palace and that Poland’s president had asked for NATO support. But the prime minister’s account was incorrect and was later corrected; one of those arrested was a young Ukrainian man, the other person his 17-year-old Belarusian girlfriend. Jacek Dobrzynski, spokesman for the Minister for the Coordination of Special Services, denied shortly afterwards to Euronews any rumors that this was an espionage operation: “We reject rumors that this is a large-scale espionage operation. These are young people, maybe it was carelessness, maybe ignorance, maybe they wanted to make a film”.

In fact, an investigation by the Dutch newspaper Trouw found that in nearly 60 other incidents there was “much panic and hardly any evidence of Russian involvement”. Evidence in 41 of the drone sightings remained inconclusive. Furthermore, there were 14 cases of other flying objects (civilian aircraft, birds) being mistaken for drones and three turned out to be civilian “hobby” drones operated by private individuals. For example, people in Belgium mistook (small) planes and helicopters for drones, while the flying objects in South Limburg and Billund, Denmark, were stars. Investigations in Denmark, Belgium and Norway came to similar conclusions: in most cases, drone sightings were inaccurate and unverified and turned out to be aircraft, helicopters or satellites; no evidence was found that these were in any way connected to Russia.

There have been similar cases more recently. In mid-September, a NATO fighter jet was scrambled after a possible drone sighting in Lithuanian airspace — but it turned out to be a flock of birds. Just a few days earlier, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre had claimed that Zelensky’s plane was “almost hit by a drone” while taking off from Moldova en route to Oslo. However, official reports from Moldovan authorities and Ukrainian presidential sources later clarified what actually happened: the drone in question never came close to the airport; it crashed about 160 kilometres away, near the Moldovan-Ukrainian border. And so the story quietly vanished from the front pages, without corrections or apologies — but the mainstream press, now permanently on a Third World War footing, had already achieved its aim: to point the finger at Moscow and stoke a fresh wave of alarm.

Spillover from the war next door

Moldovan authorities and security experts later said that the drone was indeed of Russian origin. Even though, as always, no independent verification was possible, this is not improbable. It fits a pattern. There have been a handful of incidents — in Romania, Moldova and Poland — where it was confirmed that Russian drones had indeed entered these countries’ airspace. But in virtually all cases these airspace violations occurred near these countries’ border with Ukraine, during Russian attacks on nearby Ukrainian targets, and thus were most likely stray drones — i.e., drones that veered off course, possibly due to Ukrainian anti-drone jamming. In other words, they look much more like spillover from the war next door than a campaign of deliberate incursions.

This also applies to the Russian cruise missile that crashed in a field in Poland in July, likely because it either malfunctioned or was thrown off course by interference. Even Polish Prime Minister Tusk later stressed that “there are no reasons to think Poland was the intended target for this missile”. Meanwhile, news of Russian fighter jets occasionally entering Estonian airspace, sometimes just for a few seconds, also tends to attract a lot of media attention these days. In fact, these incidents tend to occur close to a narrow strip of international airspace over the Gulf of Finland where it is very easy to stray into Estonia’s airspace by accident, and have been occurring for years.

The most recent incident to date occurred in Lithuania, on September 15, when a drone entered the country’s airspace from Belarus and was shot down in central Lithuania. The Lithuanian president himself said the incident was most likely not a deliberate attack against Lithuania. “Most likely, it was a Russian drone intended for Ukraine that was diverted from its course by Ukrainian electronic warfare measures and entered our territory, where it was shot down”, he said. Indeed, strays aren’t only Russian. In March and May, several Ukrainian drones crashed in Finland, Latvia and the other Baltic states during Ukraine’s long-range attacks on Russian oil infrastructure, possibly because of Russian electronic warfare. Russia, for its part, denied the accusations — and accused the Baltics/NATO of actively allowing Ukrainian drones to use their airspace for strikes on Russia, framing it as NATO aggression. In one instance, the drones struck oil infrastructure in Latvia, triggering the resignations of both the Latvian prime minister and defence minister, though the story barely made the headlines.

There are, however, two incidents (allegedly) involving Russian drones far from the Ukrainian border: the September 2025 event in Poland and, of course, the “failed drone attack” at Leipzig/Halle airport in August, which is discussed further down. On the night of September 9-10, 2025, Poland claimed to have shot down several Russian drones that had crossed into its airspace, in some cases nearly 300 kilometres into the country, with NATO air defences involved in the response. This occurred amidst the ongoing Polish, Lithuanian, and NATO drills involving 30,000 Polish troops and just ahead of the upcoming Russian-Belarusian Zapad 2025 drills. Some therefore suspect that this was either a deliberate provocation by Russia or a botched recon mission, but it might also have been due to NATO jamming. Moreover, a Polish house was badly damaged. Images of the heavily damaged home were broadcast around the world as evidence of Russia’s brazen assault in the first-ever direct engagement between NATO and Moscow. However, it was later revealed that the house had been hit by a missile fired from a Polish F-16, not by a Russian drone, as the Warsaw government had initially claimed. In any case, even Western intelligence officials “privately” admitted to CNN that the Russian incursion was probably not intentional, and that the flight paths suggested the drones had lost their bearings because of electronic warfare countermeasures.

Leipzig/Halle: an assessment but little evidence

There is one major drone incident ­— arguably the most important so far in terms of its political repercussions — that remains to be discussed: the Leipzig/Halle incident. On August 5, Germany’s interior ministry announced that the evening prior staff at Leipzig/Halle Airport — a major cargo hub that since 2022 has also become a key logistics centre for NATO and for shipments to Ukraine, and Germany’s main hub for flights to the country — had noticed a small drone resting on the tarmac near a parked Ukrainian Antonov freighter, allegedly carrying an explosive charge and a detonator. The charge did not go off, and investigators said the explosive device was defused. Around the same time, a DHL cargo aircraft approaching the airport reportedly collided mid-air with a second drone, though no wreckage was found, possibly because it was destroyed in the engines. About three weeks after the attack, investigators found another drone in a field in Kabelsketal, an area adjacent to the airport in Saxony-Anhalt, possibly carrying military explosives.

On September 1, the German government officially blamed Russia for the incident, saying that intelligence points to “people being involved who acted on behalf of Russian state entities”. The following day German media reported that the Federal Prosecutor’s Office was investigating two suspects — a Belarusian and a Russian, at least one of whom was said to be tied to a(n unnamed) Russian intelligence service — though this wasn’t officially confirmed. So far, nobody has been arrested or even charged. The same day, Germany also announced the closure of the Russian consulate in Bonn, Moscow’s last remaining consulate in the country, and of the “Russian House” in Berlin — a further downgrading of already minimal diplomatic ties.

Russia denied involvement in the Leipzig incident; Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had previously called the claims of a Russian sabotage campaign in Europe “empty and ephemeral”. Yet, within hours of the German government’s announcement — before any suspect had been publicly identified or any evidence made public — NATO, EU and national leaders all rallied behind Germany, in a choreographed show of support that suggested careful advance coordination. They all issued near-identical statements, expressing “full solidarity” with Germany and accusing Russia of carrying out a “hybrid attack” and even of engaging in “state-sponsored terrorism”, as Kaja Kallas called it. “The evidence is clear”, said NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

In fact, at that point, German authorities hadn’t provided any actual evidence to the public — or, it would appear, to other EU governments. Rather, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt had simply stated “taken together, police investigations, patterns of the offences and intelligence findings establish Russian responsibility for the attempted attack at Leipzig Airport”, adding that “the means used to carry out the act” of sabotage in Leipzig — and he listed the drone’s configuration, various components used and explosives — “are known to us from other hybrid operations conducted by Russia and its war against Ukraine”. But this is not evidence; it’s a description of an assessment — one that the public was expected to take at face value.

Even establishment-aligned voices and outlets have expressed doubts. “The German government now maintains that the modus operandi, as well as police and intelligence findings, point to Russia as the perpetrator”, Johannes Varwick, professor for international relations and European politics at Halle-Wittenberg University, told Camille Schyns, author of one of the rare sceptical takes on the official narrative, published (to my surprise, I’ll admit) in EUobserver. “That may be plausible, but there is evidently no proof — at least none that has been made public, not even in qualified or indirect terms”, Varwick said. Subsequent media reports offered some details — the type of explosive, a supposed DNA trace — but these were not confirmed by authorities, leaving the public with a set of partially overlapping anonymous leaks, each attributed to security circles. Given the EU and NATO’s track record on “Russian hybrid warfare”, and its pattern of making evidenceless claims against Russia, several of which were later quietly disproved and many more never substantiated, a degree of scepticism seems warranted. Indeed, both the AfD and the left-populist BSW have questioned the lack of evidence presented when the Berlin government made its allegation.

Given the potential consequences of openly accusing Russia of attempting to carry out a terrorist attack in Germany, the least German authorities can do is provide some hard evidence to the public; otherwise people might be tempted to agree with Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who said that evidence of Russian responsibility “simply does not exist and cannot exist”. Until then, the Leipzig/Halle incident should be treated as yet another unsubstantiated claim made by Western governments and echoed by the media, which the public is simply asked to accept at face value.

The German government’s treatment of the incident closely resembled the Polish authorities’ response to the November 2025 rail sabotage, when two explosive devices damaged sections of the Warsaw-Lublin line. Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski immediately described the act as Russian “state terrorism”, while Prime Minister Tusk called the incident “probably the worst attack on state security since the outbreak of war in Ukraine”, emphasising that “a line has been crossed”. Within only 70 hours, Polish security forces had identified two suspects said to be responsible for both attacks who had already fled to Belarus — both Ukrainian “with long histories of collaborating with Russian intelligence”, according to Tusk. A third Ukrainian was then arrested, but the case has yet to come to court. The “worst attack” in years on Poland’s security appears to have been quickly forgotten.

The “Russian disinformation” narrative

Another point that deserves brief mention is the alleged informational dimension of Russia’s supposed hybrid war. We are told that Russia has been engaged for years in a massive influence and disinformation campaign aimed at manipulating helpless European voters; indeed, it has now become commonplace across Europe to blame virtually every unwelcome electoral outcome — including the recent Icelandic EU referendum — on Russian interference. Yet this is probably the dimension where the evidence is scantest — and where the consequences have been most dramatic. It has provided the basis for the introduction of censorship tools, such as the Digital Services Act (DSA), and for increasingly pervasive “electoral integrity” tools, such as the Democracy Shield, which in practice allow the EU to interfere ever more in national elections, under the guise of fighting Russian interference.

Romania represents the most glaring case. In November 2024, the independent eurosceptic and NATO-critical candidate Călin Georgescu emerged as the surprise winner of the first round of the presidential election. Before the runoff, which polls suggested he would win comfortably, could take place, the constitutional court annulled the result in an unprecedented move, citing alleged Russian interference — specifically a social media campaign on TikTok supporting Georgescu. No evidence was ever provided. Indeed, internal documents later obtained by the US House Judiciary Committee showed that TikTok had explicitly informed the Commission that it had found “no evidence” of a coordinated inauthentic network. Nonetheless, the electoral bureau subsequently barred Georgescu from participating in the re-run altogether.

What actually remains

As we have seen so far, the picture that emerges on closer inspection is very different from the one painted by Europe’s leaders and media. Many of the most widely publicised cases of supposed Russian “hybrid warfare” — von der Leyen’s jammed plane, the Baltic cable cuts, the DHL crash in Vilnius, the Heathrow fire, the wave of drone sightings that swept Europe in the autumn of 2025, the Romanian TikTok campaign — turned out to be media-amplified speculation that collapsed under basic scrutiny, with the retractions, if any, receiving a fraction of the coverage of the original allegations. Many others were simply never substantiated. Where Russian drones did demonstrably enter NATO airspace, they almost always did so near the Ukrainian border during strikes on nearby Ukrainian targets, and most likely by accident — a by-product of the war next door rather than a deliberate campaign against Europe. And even in the case of Leipzig/Halle, the most politically consequential incident to date, the German government has yet to make public any actual evidence of Russian responsibility.

Ultimately, once all the speculative, unproven or outright non-existent “incidents” are cast aside, what remains is a handful of cases of demonstrable sabotage. Of the hundreds of incidents attributed to Russia, only a small number have led to convictions — and even in these, the link to the Russian state has rarely been demonstrated. The courts have convicted low-level, usually paid recruits; evidence of who gave the orders was either never tested in open court, rested on guilty pleas or went no further than contact with anonymous handlers on Telegram. In no case has a Russian official been identified, let alone tried.

Poland has secured the most convictions, including 14 members of a network that planned to derail aid trains to Ukraine in 2023 and three Ukrainians convicted in 2025 of belonging to a sabotage group. Yet charges over the most notorious fire attributed to that group, at Warsaw’s Marywilska shopping centre, were only filed in April 2026, and prosecutors admit that the arsonist, as well as the alleged mastermind ordering the attack from within Russia, haven’t been identified.

The case most often cited as proof of a Russian parcel-bomb campaign is murkier still: in July 2026, a court sentenced Igor Rogov, a former Navalny campaign worker granted asylum in Poland, to seven years for spying on Russian exiles for the FSB, Russia’s main security agency, and for involvement in an explosives parcel intercepted in 2024. The trial was held behind closed doors — and according to some reports, Rogov might actually have been part of a Ukrainian intelligence operation smuggling explosive components into Russia.

Elsewhere, the pattern repeats. In Lithuania, a Ukrainian teenager pleaded guilty to the IKEA arson in Vilnius, while the investigation into who commissioned it continues. In Estonia, the conviction of an activist for organising an attack on the interior minister’s car on behalf of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, came without a public hearing. In London, the men who burned a warehouse storing Starlink equipment for Ukraine were convicted of acting for the Wagner Group, but the evidence pointed to a handler contacted on Telegram, not an identifiable state body. A Colombian who set fire to Prague buses for a promised $3,000 was sentenced on a plea deal that never established who was behind his Telegram contact.

Germany’s one completed trial is telling. In August, the Stuttgart court found that a Russian state body was behind GPS-tracker parcels sent toward Ukraine, allegedly to scout targets and transport routes for sabotage. The federal prosecutor had alleged that parcels carrying incendiary devices were to follow, but the supposed arson plot couldn’t be proven. Of the three Ukrainian defendants, one courier was convicted and given a sentence he had already served; the other two were acquitted. The same pattern applies to the case most frequently cited in Western capitals as proof of Russia’s “hybrid war”: the incendiary parcels that caught fire at courier hubs in Birmingham, Leipzig and near Warsaw in July 2024. Investigators believe the parcels — sent from Lithuania and containing sex toys, cosmetics and massage pillows fitted with homemade magnesium-based devices — were a GRU-directed “dry run” for attacks on cargo flights to North America. Arrests followed in Poland and Lithuania, and several suspects have been charged with acting on behalf of Russian intelligence. Formal terrorism trials began in early 2026 in both Warsaw and Vilnius, where prosecutors aim to prove that the operation was orchestrated by Russian military intelligence.

Taken together, these cases show that some genuine acts of sabotage have taken place, but while intelligence agencies across Western capitals tend to attribute these hybrid activities to Russia, the actual evidence tested in European courts often reveals a much lower-level operational reality: paid proxies, anonymous digital handlers and ambiguous operations that rarely result in establishing proven ties to the Russian state. But even if Russia were behind every one of these cases, we would still be talking about a few dozen incidents a year at most — none of them fatal, and with damage that, while sometimes serious, has been confined to individual sites. A genuine counter-intelligence problem, perhaps, if real; but hardly the existential threat or sustained all-out hybrid war that European leaders routinely invoke — and not even remotely comparable to the sustained campaign of drone strikes that NATO countries have been enabling deep inside Russia, including against civilian targets, by supplying Ukraine with intelligence and satellite support, and increasingly the drones themselves, as well as long-range missiles (more on this further below).

The attacks nobody talks about

But perhaps the most gaping hole in the story is the fact that there indeed has been one very serious attack on Europe’s infrastructure in recent years — however, this wasn’t carried out by Russia, but, according to German prosecutors themselves, by Ukraine. I am referring, of course, to the 2022 Nord Stream bombing. Whether one believes that the bombing was effectively carried out by a Ukrainian group acting alone, or that Ukraine is being used to deflect attention from the role of the US and NATO in the sabotage, is beside the point (personally, I’m partial to the latter explanation). Nor is an in-depth analysis of the sabotage itself within the scope of this article. What matters for the sake of the present discussion is that, even if we take the official story to be true — that this was an entirely Ukrainian operation — the reaction of the German and other EU governments remains nonetheless shocking: the country officially accused of carrying out the worst case of industrial terrorism in Europe’s history, in a plot that according to media reports was conceived at the highest levels within the Ukrainian state, wasn’t subjected to sanctions or political confrontation; on the contrary, it was promised open-ended financial and military support, and showered with hundreds of billions of euros. Meanwhile, the attack itself was quickly swept under the carpet — but not before the Western media tried, absurdly, to pin the attack on Russia.

Besides the Nord Stream sabotage, there is the case of the bomb that exploded at the entrance of an apartment building in Monaco in June, seriously injuring a Ukrainian tycoon with links to Russia and members of his family. The suspected bomber, a Ukrainian woman, fled back to Ukraine, where she was found shot dead a few days later. Though the Ukrainian state has not been formally implicated, a serving officer of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency initially confessed to her murder (though he later retracted his confession). Yet this attack, too, quickly faded from the headlines. It isn’t hard to imagine how Europe’s leaders and media would have reacted had the officer in question belonged to Russia’s GRU.

The real hybrid war

Ultimately, serious scrutiny of the “Russian hybrid warfare” narrative can only lead to one disquieting conclusion. A “hybrid war” is indeed being waged against Europe — but it is being waged by the EU-NATO establishment itself, against its own population. Europeans are being subjected to a sustained campaign of cognitive or psychological warfare aimed at conditioning them to believe that Europe is under attack from Russia, and that these hybrid attacks are a prelude to conventional hostilities — a claim for which, by and large, there is little or no proof. What the record points to, in fact, is a deliberate campaign of threat inflation in which governments, media outlets and defence-funded “think tanks” have colluded to instil a permanent sense of fear in the population, through relentless coverage of “incidents”, “attacks”, “sabotages” and “campaigns” that, in most cases, simply do not exist. As Mihail Evans, a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, New Europe College in Bucharest, wrote:

When an officially promoted narrative remains unquestioned by the bulk of the media and is, indeed, actively bolstered, we are in a fairly unusual situation. Something similar happened during the pandemic and one might suspect that the media management techniques finessed then have now been repurposed. In both cases there is an attempt to mold public perceptions and behavior primarily through fear. [...] After scrutinizing the weak basis for claims of “hybrid war”, we might begin to suspect that there is indeed a “playbook” at work, but one that is being run by NATO and the EU.

Indeed, this psychological conditioning extends well beyond the news pages. Consider, for example, the almost simultaneous release of two feature-length films, in the UK and France, both revolving around a NATO-Russia conflict. In the Sky Original docudrama miniseries The Wargame, released last month, real-life political figures, such as Michael Gove and Nicola Sturgeon, must react in real-time to a simulated Russian attack on UK soil; meanwhile, in the French geopolitical thriller Jupiter, to be released in cinemas in November, a newly elected French president must decide whether to launch a unilateral nuclear attack on Russia in response to Russia issuing a nuclear ultimatum against Ukraine. Two films do not make a conspiracy, but they show how thoroughly the idea of war with Russia has migrated from the security establishment into mainstream entertainment.

Cui bono?

There are several reasons why the EU-NATO establishment might have an interest in wildly inflating the Russian threat. For starters, there is significant and growing opposition in many European countries to the forever war in Ukraine — to the vast sums still being poured into the country and to the economic costs of the war — and to the broader EU-NATO rearmament drive, which, by European leaders’ own admission, will require painful cuts to the welfare state. When Europeans watch Russian forces struggling, more than four years on, to advance beyond eastern Ukraine, they may well ask why such sums should be spent defending the continent against a country that has shown neither the capability nor any evident intention to attack it. “This is where the idea of a ‘hybrid war’ comes in”, Evans argues. “It allows defense spending boosters to claim that Russia is offensively striking European nations in nonconventional ways and to imply that such covert aggression might at any moment move to open hostilities”.

A number of respected international relations scholars have suggested that this is indeed what is happening. A February 2025 report for the Latvian Institute for International Affairs by Galvin Wade — a former Director for Russia, Baltic, and Caucasus Affairs at the US National Security Council — contends that the employment of the “nebulous tagline” of hybrid war is “driven as much by the need to goose flagging defense budgets and waning NATO cohesion as to analyze Moscow’s behavior”. Indeed, in late 2025 EU Commissioner for Defence Andrius Kubilius used the (subsequently debunked) “Russian drone” scare to argue for increased counter-drone abilities. “All of Europe is under threat”, he said, adding: “Russian drones can strike Belgium, Netherlands, France and more. From ships drones can target all coasts of Europe. All Member States need capabilities to detect drones”.

It worked. As noted by Schyns, sabotage allegations have driven increases in defence budget allocations, including a €250 million European Commission package for “drone and counter-drone capabilities”. In the summer of 2026, NATO countries pledged $40 billion (around €35 billion) for the same. This means that the military-industrial sector also has a vested interest in inflating the Russia threat. As already noted, many of the think tanks pushing the “hybrid war” narrative, such as the IISS, the CSIS and GLOBSEC, all have funding ties to American and European arms manufacturers that are directly profiting from the war in Ukraine — and from an inflated perception of the threat posed to Europe by Russia. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, American defence companies have enjoyed steady growth, while Europe’s rearmament drive has sharply boosted the revenues of European arms makers. The European counter-drone market alone is expected to quadruple by 2030. More recently, following the El Mundo report about Russia’s plan to launch drones from ships against Mediterranean countries (also swiftly debunked), Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s drone unit, told the Italian daily la Repubblica that “Italy, too, must set up its own brigade of unmanned systems; this will be crucial for defending against attacks from the sea”.

Europe’s security and intelligence establishment also stands to benefit from the “Russian hybrid war” narrative. It’s no coincidence that many of these claims originate with the security services themselves — agencies that stand to gain larger budgets or broader powers from the perception of a sabotage threat, raising obvious questions of conflict of interest. Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, for example, has invoked the danger of Russian sabotage to shed restrictions on its activities dating back to the post-war era, and may now be permitted to conduct sabotage operations of its own, along with offensive cyber attacks and more aggressive espionage. In the Netherlands, Prime Minister Rob Jetten pointed to the sabotage threat when unveiling a new national security law granting intelligence agencies expanded powers.

But it is not merely the military-industrial complex and defence-security establishment that stands to benefit from the ever-present spectre of a looming “Russian threat”. This also provides the EU establishment with a broader authoritarian dividend, insofar as it is routinely invoked as a justification for the ongoing assaults on democratic norms and increasingly authoritarian governance — from online censorship to the repression of dissent and interference in national elections. It supplies the external enemy without which this authoritarian consolidation would be far harder to justify — a permanent state of emergency, after all, requires a permanent threat. This is among the reasons why the EU establishment has proved so resistant to any de-escalation with Russia.

Escalation dressed up as defence

One final point deserves mention: the way in which the “hybrid war” narrative allows Western governments to present their own escalation against Russia as a mere “response” to Russian aggression. Indeed, Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, the outgoing chair of NATO’s Military Committee, openly stated that NATO was considering a far more “aggressive” posture towards Russia’s covert activities — up to and including pre-emptive strikes, which he suggested could be regarded as a form of “defensive action”. In late September, just days after the latest wave of “hybrid war” alarm, Ukraine launched more than 1,000 drones at Russia, including what was described as its largest-ever attack on Moscow. This was only the latest in a sustained campaign of strikes against Russia’s principal cities, its strategic infrastructure and, by extension, its leadership — supported by Western intelligence, executed with Western weapons and now backed by an explicit G7 commitment to “accelerate” the delivery of long-range capabilities. But the Western logic is self-reinforcing: if Russia were to retaliate, its response would be held up as proof that the warnings had been right all along. The logic is so brazen that one cannot help but wonder whether Western elites are actively trying to provoke a Russian response.

Whatever the case may be, the inflated “hybrid war” narrative clearly serves the interests of European governments and NATO far better than an actual hybrid war would serve Russia’s — let alone a conventional attack on NATO. According to European officials, Russian sabotage is meant to weaken European support for Ukraine. Yet it seems far more likely to have the opposite effect. Commenting on the Leipzig/Halle incident, for example, political scientist Johannes Varwick asked what interest Russia would have in an attack likely to produce “a deepening of the perception of threat in Germany, a stronger commitment to supporting Ukraine”. “Surely, even any Russian ‘planners’ would have recognised that a materially inconsequential provocation ultimately harms Russia and benefits Ukraine”, he added. “The question, therefore, is: cui bono?”.

From Gladio to today

Exactly: cui bono? Who benefits? This leads to a disquieting question: given how much European governments and NATO have invested in — and come to depend on — the “hybrid war” narrative, and the broader idea of Russia as an existential threat to Europe, will they continue to limit themselves to inflating a threat that has little basis in reality? Or might they at some point feel compelled to go further? There is, after all, a historical precedent involving NATO. In October 1990, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed to the Italian parliament the existence of “Gladio”: a secret paramilitary network, established in the early post-war years in various NATO countries under NATO auspices with CIA involvement, equipped with hidden arms caches and maintained for four decades outside any parliamentary oversight. The European Parliament’s resolution of November 1990 described an organisation that had “eluded all democratic control” and had been implicated in certain member states, “as evidenced by various judicial inquiries”, in serious cases of terrorism.

Parliamentary inquiries followed in Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany. In Italy, those inquiries reached the sharpest conclusions. A decade later, a report by members of the parliamentary commission on massacres concluded that a “strategy of tension” — bombings of civilians in public places, blamed on the left to frighten the electorate towards the anti-communist right — had been “organised or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence”. This is what is commonly known today as a false flag: a covert operation designed to conceal who is really responsible and pin the blame on someone else. It is curious, then, that European and NATO officials have themselves accused Russia of planning false flag attacks. Could this be preparing the public for a scenario in which an attack bears no trace of Russia — and is nonetheless blamed on Moscow precisely for that reason, as a “Russian false flag”?

A self-fulfilling prophecy

Whatever the answer, one danger is already clear: that of a self-fulfilling prophecy. A narrative that casts every fire, drone sighting or damaged cable as an act of war does not merely misdescribe reality; it begins to reshape it. Governments that have spent years telling their citizens they are already at war with Russia leave themselves little room for restraint when the next incident comes — and incidents will keep coming, whether caused by drones knocked off course by electronic warfare, by birds, by pilot error or by genuine sabotage. Poland is changing its rules of engagement so that pilots can open fire on the basis of radar data alone; NATO’s top military officials openly discuss pre-emptive strikes; Ukraine’s strikes deep inside Russia, enabled by Western intelligence and weapons, keep intensifying. Each step is presented as a response to Russian aggression. Seen from Moscow, each looks like confirmation that NATO is preparing for war — and Moscow’s countermeasures, in turn, will be read in European capitals as proof that the warnings were right all along.

This is the classic security dilemma, and in such a climate it would take very little — a misidentified drone, a misread radar track, an incident attributed to Russia before the facts are in — for a “hybrid war” that exists largely on paper to turn into a real one between nuclear-armed powers. That is the ultimate danger of today’s strategy of tension: not merely that it exaggerates a threat, but that, by exaggerating it for long enough, it may end up creating it. Avoiding that outcome requires precisely what European governments have so far refused to offer: evidence before accusations, corrections as prominent as the claims they retract and a willingness to talk to Moscow rather than merely about it.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Brussels Empire: The EU’s Silent Coup Against Democracy (German version only for now: Die Brüsseler Tyrannei: oder Der diskrete Staatsstreich)

But a Hungarian reader could be forgiven for mistaking it for a bill tabled by the recently elected government of Péter Magyar, which has been moving full steam ahead to put the country back in its place within the neoliberal, globalist order.

If you thought that the main issue in Hungary’s April elections was not the struggle between the right and the left, but whether Hungary would be able to preserve at least part of its sovereign foreign and economic policy, you would be right. Even its critics, however, have been surprised by the speed with which the new government — with the EU bureaucracy’s full backing — has moved to open up the Hungarian economy to foreign capital over the past few months, particularly in the energy sector, all while reducing the country’s foreign policy to a carbon copy of the Atlanticist playbook. To understand the current developments, one must remember that among the biggest sins of the previous — far from flawless — government were its opposition to the takeover of the Hungarian economy by Western capital and its stable relations with Russia. It is therefore not surprising that the new government has made two things its priority: opening the energy market to foreign capital and bringing Hungary’s Russia policy into line with Western orthodoxy.

It’s even less surprising when one considers that the three figures who now control Hungary’s economy, foreign affairs and public finances have all built their careers inside Western multinational corporations such as Shell, Erste and Cheniere; two of them have deep connections to American energy interests, while Anita Orbán, Hungary’s new foreign minister, is a committed Atlanticist with deep, institutionally embedded ties to the US national security establishment and neoconservative lobby. As I wrote back in June: “Given the profile of these three key figures, the trajectory of the Magyar government is not difficult to predict: energy diversification towards US LNG, financial opening towards Western institutions and corporate interests, and a foreign policy recalibrated towards Brussels and the Atlanticist establishment”. Alas, events so far have proven that prediction to be correct.

As for Hungary’s energy sector, one does not even need to read between the lines to understand what direction the country is headed in. Among the draft legislation proposed by the government for the fall, one is an “amendment... to establish an investment incentive program focused on the energy sector..., with the aim of increasing the share of foreign capital in the domestic energy sector”. This is in line with the recommendations and requests of Western international bodies — primarily the OECD and, of course, the European Commission. In its Economic Survey about Hungary, published in July, the OECD targeted the welfare measures taken by the previous government: tax breaks, early retirement for women, sectoral profit taxes, the protection of agricultural land, and — you guessed it — the energy price subsidies currently enjoyed by households. Unsurprisingly, all this corresponds to the EU Commission’s country-specific recommendations, which, among other things, lament the fact that “the high number of tax exemptions, tax incentives and sector-specific taxes make the tax system complex”, and even more astonishingly that the “use of sector-specific taxes disproportionately impacts larger, often foreign-owned firms” — which, one might argue, are precisely the companies that should be bearing the burden. The Commission also condemns Hungary’s “sizeable relevant fossil-fuel subsidies without a planned phase-out before 2030” and recommends “ensur[ing] that any measures taken to mitigate the impact of the hike in energy prices are temporary”. Furthermore, the Commission explicitly mentions the need to “accelerate the roll-out of renewable energy sources, in particular wind”.

These two documents form the ideological bedrock of the proposal the Commission issued in July, setting out the reforms and investments Hungary must implement to unlock the €10 billion in NextGenerationEU funds that Brussels has been withholding for years, officially on rule-of-law grounds. In practice, the proposal reads less like a reform programme than a shopping list, which goes so far as to specify the goods and services Budapest needs to spend money on. Nor is this confined to the NextGenerationEU funds: the prescriptions extend to national spending too. That a member state has no real say in how it spends funds notionally intended to boost its own growth and competitiveness tells you a lot about how the EU machinery works, all the more so given that a significant share of the money arrives as loans, not grants.

Furthermore, one cannot help but wonder how exactly many of the things that the Commission is demanding that Hungary buy, such as electric buses and digital notebooks, are supposed to boost the country’s economic growth. In any case, among the many useful items, the list contains multiple energy-related ones — in particular the purchase and installation of wind turbines and smart metres. Hungary is expected to install 6,200 MW of solar and wind capacity — but without resorting to any state or even EU funds for the plants themselves — and, based on these guidelines, the government has announced a plan to install 4,000 MW of wind capacity by 2030 — more than a tenfold increase on Hungary’s roughly 330 MW of installed wind capacity.

But why is the EU establishment so invested in the Hungarian energy mix? And why press for wind in a country with rather moderate winds? According to the Global Wind Atlas, the windiest tenth of Hungary averages 6.42 m/s at 100 metres, a modest resource by European standards — and below the 6.5-7 m/s that was long considered the threshold for commercially viable onshore wind, though that bar that has since been lowered by turbines built specifically for thin winds. Wind is also an inherently intermittent and unpredictable source: output depends on conditions no operator controls, and can fall to near zero across an entire country for days at a time.

Hungary has long drawn criticism from Brussels over its “dependence” on Russian energy, and relentlessly so since February 2022, on the grounds that the Orbán government did too little to diversify. That government’s own account was that Russian supply was cheap, reliable and a pillar of Hungarian growth. Whether it really was as advantageous as claimed by the previous government is hard to verify, since the long-term contract with Moscow is classified. That said, diversifying is an important goal, of course, but for a landlocked country like Hungary, this is not as straightforward as it seems. This was recently confirmed even by the new economy minister, István Kapitány; when asked in an interview how much the country’s reliance on Russian energy has decreased since the Magyar government took over, he replied: “Right now, Russia is obviously still the source from which the vast majority of gas and oil comes, and this is economically efficient”.

In any case, in 2025, diversification did increase in terms of import sources. Most natural gas continues to arrive from Russia via the TurkStream pipeline, through Serbia, but its share has decreased from 75.65% to 62.48%, whereas the volume of natural gas arriving from Austria has increased significantly, accounting for 22.21% of Hungarian imports in 2025. An important development is the recent increase in renewables, a field where the previous government performed surprisingly well: according to a Deutsche Welle report, 25% of Hungary’s electricity production now comes from solar energy — surpassing gas to become Hungary’s second-largest electricity source after nuclear power, and making the country the world leader in solar energy adoption when measured by the percentage of domestic electricity it gets from solar power, according to the energy think tank Ember. This will likely surprise many readers, given that Orbán was regularly accused of being a “climate sceptic”.

Nuclear energy, meanwhile, accounts for around 18% of total energy use, and over 40% of the grid mix, all of it from a single plant at Paks. The plant has been in the headlines recently: this summer’s historic draught disrupted the reactor’s cooling system and a complete shutdown was only narrowly avoided. Yet the government took action surprisingly late: Romania blew up a rock to divert water to its Cernavodă nuclear reactor in early August, while the Hungarian government took action only ten days later; moreover, the weir built to slow the current turned out to deepen the riverbed further, and the prime minister’s claim that Austria had lodged a complaint over its construction was later denied by Vienna. Some commentators consider all this a tactic to justify the delay in the construction of the second reactor (Paks II), to be built by the Russian company Rosatom. It is not entirely clear what the Magyar government wants to do with the second reactor, as they recently announced that they’ll review the project (even though the construction has started months ago). One thing is certain: the project has been constantly torpedoed by the EU; most recently, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) annulled the Commission’s approval of state aid for the project.

It is clear that there is still plenty of work to be done in the area of diversification, but the question arises whether installing wind turbines in a country which has only a few regions with considerable wind is the way to go about it — and, more importantly, whether it should be Brussels that decides. As for the new government, it seems more than willing to comply. So far, it has posted a first public tender for 702 megavolt-amperes of new wind power capacity, equivalent to around 700 MW. This is problematic for numerous reasons. For starters, there is no domestic wind turbine production in Hungary, so Hungarian companies can only bid for the construction (and expansion) of wind turbines — if at all. The turbines themselves will likely have to be purchased from Western European or Chinese companies, the latter looking increasingly unlikely in light of the recent investigation led by the Commission into the Chinese wind giant Goldwind’s state subsidies.

The tender has drawn criticism from developers and analysts on two fronts. Developers must pay host municipalities up to €50,000 per megawatt before generating a single kilowatt-hour, hand over further payments on every unit produced, and accept that state-designated “energy communities”, so far basically non-existent in Hungary, may buy up to a quarter of the project — all on top of Hungary’s existing windfall tax. One prospective bidder told the trade press that the numbers do not add up. But even though the terms of the tender may deter some investors, they do not deter all of them equally. An auction that rewards whoever pays the most upfront, years before a single turbine is connected, while no longer crediting the wind measurements and site studies on which smaller developers can compete, is one tilted towards large, well-capitalised players — and in Hungary’s wind sector, few of those are Hungarian.

Worse, the sites appear to have been chosen for spare grid capacity rather than wind: the largest single allocation, at Ócsa, sits in a densely populated area next to a nature reserve. This is particularly concerning because modern wind turbines are around 190 meters high, which including the blade height amounts to approximately 260-270 metres. Public opposition to wind turbines, which are seen as spoiling the landscape, is already growing stronger, so it would be reassuring to know that their installation will at least serve some minimal purpose.

Alongside the questionable push to expand wind power capacity, the energy minister’s old contacts appear to be serving the country well — or at least serving someone well. István Kapitány spent his career at Shell, rising to global executive vice president; that same company has now signed a major deal with MOL, Hungary’s largest energy company, for the purchase of Shell’s BG Cyprus unit. The latter has a 35% non-operated interest in a Cyprus Offshore block, home ​to the Aphrodite gas field in the eastern Mediterranean. Shell — whose profits have doubled from last year to $9.84 billion ​in ⁠the second quarter of 2026 — justified the transaction by saying that it is “focus[ing] on opportunities that strengthen their integrated LNG value chain”. What they appear to be saying is that they sold the field to MOL because it was no longer considered a worthy investment. MOL has framed the purchase in glowing terms, despite the fact that the field will not produce any gas until 2031, and even then, the energy will not be imported to Hungary. It therefore will not, in any meaningful way contribute to the diversification of the country’s energy portfolio. Shell is essentially selling a stake in a long-dated, pre-development asset rather than a producing one — useful for Shell’s balance sheet now, but representing questionable value for Hungary.

Meanwhile, last month, Kapitány announced — on social media, now a routine channel for government communication — that while the previous government had secured the country’s gas supply, it had not locked in the price beyond January 2027. Naturally, he blamed the previous cabinet for all of this, even though he himself could have made hedging deals during the nearly five months that had passed since the April elections. Instead, he warned that businesses and households would have to bear the burden of rising energy prices; these are expected to skyrocket in the coming months. Many believe that the minister is laying the groundwork for the gradual phasing out of one of Orbán’s most significant measures: the cut to household utility bills. This seems like a realistic assumption, given that the Commission, echoed by the OECD, is calling not only for energy price reform but also for the simplification of the Hungarian tax system. In plain language, this means the elimination of the sectoral taxes imposed on companies, which Orbán used to finance the utility bill cut for households.

For the time being, therefore, the new Hungarian government has not refuted either the expectations coming from the EU or the fears of critical commentators: it wants to free the Hungarian legal system as soon as possible from any regulations that would even minimally restrict the activities of international companies in the Hungarian economy. Even those measures that appear to have no connection to foreign interests reinforce this goal. One example is the establishment of the newly created National Office for Asset Recovery and Protection, whose stated purpose is to uncover and investigate corruption committed in recent years. Most critics have rightly emphasised that this body seems to have been created with the specific aim of going after the former ruling party, but they are missing an equally important point. This authority will also likely contribute to eliminating, as effectively as possible, those Hungarian companies and businessmen that rose to prominence during the Orbán years — the so-called “oligarchs” — so that they will not be able to participate in any future public procurement tenders.

The first signs of this are already visible; for example, in a tender related to the installation of smart metres, OPUS TITÁSZ, belonging to Lőrinc Mészáros — whose companies won the most public procurement contracts under the previous government — was retroactively excluded for transparency reasons. It remains to be seen who will take on the work that was to be done by Mészáros’s company, but it is not hard to imagine that Western European companies will eventually get a bigger slice in the country’s public tenders. One may reasonably object that a country’s business sector should not be dominated by a handful of well-connected domestic firms. But will ordinary Hungarian taxpayers really be better off if the alternative is foreign companies gaining a bigger foothold in the economy — and taking their profits out of the country? After all, when the CIA singled out “full repatriation of profits” as one of the merits of Hungary’s new economic order in 1989, it was hardly the welfare of Hungarians it had in mind.

More broadly, however, any attempt to separate the government’s economic and political aims neatly is bound to fail. They are, after all, mutually reinforcing facets of a single project: bringing Hungary firmly back under Western control. Seen in this light, the government’s authoritarian turn — a constitutional overhaul effectively barring Orbán and much of Fidesz’s senior leadership from standing again, the shutdown of the public broadcaster’s news output, the closure of Fidesz-aligned institutions such as MCC and the Danube Institute — is not simply about crushing a rival party. It is about removing any organised resistance to the new government’s neoliberal shock therapy, and locking in the new EU- and NATO-dictated agenda for years to come.

Over the fall, it will become clear exactly what the government’s proposed bill — which aims to increase the share of foreign capital in the Hungarian energy market — entails. One thing is certain: in the few months since the election, the new government has wasted no time in implementing the Commission’s requirements. If they continue at this pace, the complete colonisation of the Hungarian economy will not take long.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

Subscribe now

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

I’m still looking for an English-language publisher so if you know any publishers who are interested in EU- and NATO-critical views, let me know 🙂

I just received this great quote from renowned German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck:

As an independent journalist, Thomas Fazi is one of the most knowledgeable and astute observers of the European Union. Fazi is able to identify and explain developments and interconnections that the conventional wisdom of academic EU research — largely funded by the very entity it studies — refuses to even consider. Unlike that approach, Fazi’s new book treats the EU and its functions within the European state system not in a technocratic manner, but rather from a political perspective. It shows just how far the EU has already succeeded in eroding the sovereignty of its member states — and, with it, their democratic potential.

Here is a detailed summary of the book:

The European Union (EU) was founded on promises of peace, freedom, prosperity and strategic autonomy. What does it stand for today? War, censorship, authoritarianism, economic stagnation, if not outright deindustrialisation, and geopolitical vassalisation to Washington’s diktats.

The EU has not merely failed economically, falling steadily behind the world’s other major advanced economies. Far more troubling, it has mutated into a quasi-dictatorial, pseudo-imperial power — one that sets the terms on which 450 million people work, trade, consume and invest; that continues to dismantle Europe’s welfare states in the name of austerity; that financially coerces entire states into compliance; that overturns national laws and constitutions at will; that runs multi-billion-euro propaganda operations and engages in widespread online censorship; that interferes directly in national elections (Romania, Hungary, etc.); and that extra-judicially sanctions its own citizens, stripping them of basic civil rights. All of this, while remaining almost entirely insulated from democratic pressure and largely beyond the control of the governments that nominally constitute it.

This is the product of a long process of creeping “Commissionisation” and supranationalisation of Europe’s decision-making process. Over the past decade, the EU’s institutional centre of gravity has shifted decisively towards the European Commission, which has steadily colonised policy areas once reserved for national governments — fiscal policy, public health, foreign affairs, defence. The mechanism has been remarkably consistent: each successive crisis — the sovereign debt crisis, Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine — has served as a pretext for the Commission to assume new powers, issue “emergency” decisions and quietly lock in permanent shifts in the architecture of EU authority. None of this has required formal treaty change. It has happened by stealth, outside the arena of public debate, through what scholars term “integration by stealth” — and the result has been a steady, cumulative erosion of national sovereignty and democratic accountability. Even former European Council President Charles Michel recently accused von der Leyen of creating “a super-authoritarian governance”.

To compound matters, the EU now stands at the forefront of an aggressive rearmament/war drive against Russia — one that has already inflicted serious damage on European economies, and risks dragging the continent into open conflict with the world’s largest nuclear power.

And yet most citizens remain largely unaware of the EU’s role in steadily dismantling the democratic, economic, political and social rights of Europeans. It is this hidden reality that this book sets out to expose: how Brussels’s opaque machinery actually works, who it serves and at what cost.

However, this book also addresses those critics — on both the left and the right — who challenge the EU’s current policies and yet continue to cling to the belief that the EU can be democratically reformed. Even among most contemporary critics, the EU is regarded as a well-meaning project that somehow, at some point, lost its way — though there is disagreement about when exactly that happened, why or who is to blame. This book proposes a different thesis: that the EU’s current incarnation is not a deviation from a previously positive path, nor from its founders’ original intentions, but rather the inevitable culmination of a project that was inherently elitist, anti-democratic and authoritarian from its inception. What we are witnessing today is not a degeneration but a revelation — a project finally showing itself for what it always was.

The book argues that the entire process of European integration, even in its pre-EU incarnations, should be understood primarily not as an economic project but as a political one: one aimed at disempowering mass democracy, which elites had sought to contain since the Second World War and which, by the mid-1970s, had come to be seen as a lethal threat to the capitalist status quo. The vehicle for this was an assault on the nation-state — democracy’s primary institutional expression — to the benefit of transnational capital and domestic oligarchies. This process reached a turning point with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which effectively embedded neoliberalism into the very fabric of the European Union — a shift that the creation of the euro then locked in once and for all, by depriving (most) member states of the most fundamental pillar of economic sovereignty: the power to issue their own currency. In so doing, it transformed member states into something resembling colonies of Brussels and Frankfurt. The book argues that this amounted to nothing less than a constitutional and juridical coup d’état — albeit an unusually discreet one.

The book also shows that the EU has not merely served as a vehicle for shifting the balance of power in favour of capital, but has been a core instrument of Europe’s subordination to Washington and the transatlantic war lobby. Indeed, the European Union has historically played a key role in entrenching the continent’s dependence on the United States. Contrary to the popular narrative that frames the creation of the EU — and, before it, the European Economic Community (EEC) — as a counterweight to American power, the reality is that Washington actively championed European integration as a Cold War bulwark against the Soviet Union, channelling its support through organisations such as the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), whose vice-chair at the time was none other than Allen Dulles, then head of the CIA. This support likely stemmed from the calculation that exercising control over a single supranational “government” would prove easier than managing dozens of individual national governments. Indeed, the EU, including in its earlier iterations, has always been wedded to Atlanticism, an allegiance that has only intensified since the end of the Cold War. This is why the EU’s technocratic establishment, and the European Commission in particular, has historically been more closely aligned with Washington than with Europe’s own national governments.

Recent events bear this out. Ursula von der Leyen — dubbed “Europe’s American president” — has used the Ukraine crisis to push through a further expansion of the Commission’s top-down executive powers, producing a de facto supranationalisation of EU foreign policy (despite the Commission having no formal competence in this area), while ensuring the bloc’s alignment with — or, more accurately, its subordination to — US-NATO strategy (not just on Russia but also on Israel/Gaza), and sidelining dissenting voices such as Hungary and Slovakia, all at the expense of Europe’s own core interests.

Finally, the book concludes that the EU is structurally irreformable, because supranationalism itself is an inherently flawed model. This failure becomes even more apparent when the EU’s approach is set against the rest of the world’s. The major transformations in the global economy over the past decades — the development of new technologies, the spread of global value chains, the growth of trade, the rise of China — required none of the conditions of the European Single Market, let alone those of the EU itself or its single currency. On the contrary, economies outside the EU — the United States, China and the rising economies of Asia and Latin America — have achieved growing prosperity and deepening international connectivity without comparable supranational structures or monetary arrangements. Instead, these countries have leveraged their national autonomy to adapt flexibly to global change, pursuing a more decentralised approach to economic and political cooperation. The experience of non-Western nations in particular demonstrates that national sovereignty need not hinder international partnership — and can in fact enhance it.

These countries increasingly favour looser arrangements, such as BRICS and ASEAN, over the EU’s model of supranational integration. Where the EU’s model demands a high degree of sovereignty-sharing, binding regulation and a strong central authority to enforce laws across member states, BRICS and ASEAN allow countries to cooperate while retaining substantial control over domestic policy. Such arrangements deliver economic cooperation without mandating policy harmonisation, allowing member states to pursue their own economic models while still fostering regional growth through a more flexible, consensus-based framework — one with the added benefit of enabling cooperation between countries with markedly different political, economic and value systems.

This framework reflects an emerging preference for multipolarity and is shaping a new model of international collaboration that diverges sharply from the EU’s supranational approach. Could this model serve as the foundation for a new, post-EU framework in Europe? One thing is clear: Europeans who care about peace, democracy and the continent’s future need to unite in opposition to the EU before it is too late.

INDEX

• Introduction

Part 1: The Making of the Brussels Empire

• Chapter 1. Liberalism Against Democracy

• Chapter 2. An Elite Project From the Very Start (1950s-1960s)

• Chapter 3. The External Constraint: From the EMS to Maastricht (1970s-early 1990s)

• Chapter 4. The Euro and the Pre-Crisis Decade (1990s-2000s)

• Chapter 5. Crisis and Revolt: The Euro Crisis and the First Populist Wave (2009-2019)

• Chapter 6. The Covid-19 Pandemic: The State of Exception as the New Normal

• Chapter 7. The Russia-Ukraine War: Von der Leyen’s “Geopolitical Coup”

Part 2: Anatomy of the Machine

• Chapter 8. How the EU Works — and How It Undermines Democracy

• Chapter 9. An Economic Critique of Supranational Integration

• Chapter 10. The EU’s Propaganda-Censorship Complex

• Chapter 11. The Lawless Empire: The EU’s Sanctioning of Individuals

• Chapter 12. The Managed Ballot: From Soft Power to Direct Electoral Interference

• Chapter 13. The Politics of Hyper-Vassalisation

• Chapter 14. What Future for Europe?

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Thomas Fazi

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In late September, MEP Raphaël Glucksmann announced his candidacy for the French presidency. Reactions were mixed. Whilst the mainstream media in France and Germany largely applauded the move, representatives of independent and alternative media outlets mostly voiced criticism and derision regarding the candidacy of “Gluglu”, as he is known to some.

“The man who wants to save France from the radicals”, was the headline used by the once-respected and formerly left-liberal German weekly DIE ZEIT for its article on Glucksmann’s candidacy. Further down, it states: “Glucksmann is a left-winger… and a moderate left-winger at that”.

Time for some context: we live in times when the distortion of language is reaching ever more extreme heights. Here we see some wonderful examples of this once again. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a classic left-wing politician, is described as “radical” (he is, alongside Marine Le Pen, one of the radicals from whom Glucksmann is supposed to save France), whilst Glucksmann’s position is described as “moderate”. These words are not neutral: “radical” has a clearly negative connotation, whilst “moderate” implies something positive.

Just as was once the case with the German Greens, where one wing of the party was labelled “Fundis” (i.e., “the fundamentalists”) and the other “Realos” (i.e., “the realists”). In this context, it was deemed “fundamentalist” to advocate pacifist positions, as well as those critical of capitalism and the system, and to fight for more grassroots democracy. It is only in the case of environmentalist positions — some of which worked towards deindustrialisation — that this approach might perhaps be described as “fundamentalist”. By contrast, those who were prepared to work within the existing system and neither tackle economic and political malfeasance within the system nor oppose US wars of aggression and interventions were portrayed as “realistic” and thus “mature”, “level-headed” and “reasonable”. We can observe the same manipulation in the reporting on Glucksmann’s candidacy.

But who is Raphaël Glucksmann, and why can he be described as another “bluff” by the Empire? Glucksmann is a French politician, journalist and documentary filmmaker, who self-identifies as a “social democrat”. From 2008 to 2012, he advised the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. In 2018, he founded the pro-European, environmentalist party Place publique, of which he is now co-president.

He is also the son of André Glucksmann, a French “star philosopher” and one of the most staunch advocates of American military interventions, who, following the attacks of September 11, 2001, was one of the co-founders of the pro-American think tank Cercle de l’Oratoire, whose stated aim was to defend US foreign policy in the French public sphere.

His son, too, has so far found no US regime-change operation or colour revolution that he has not enthusiastically supported. Whether as an adviser to Saakashvili in Georgia (the neoliberal and authoritarian President of Georgia, who received massive support from the US and NGOs such as the Open Society Foundation and USAID), as a supporter of the Euromaidan movement or as a speechwriter for the Ukrainian politician Vitali Klitschko: Glucksmann has repeatedly found himself on the side of Western-backed regime-change activities.

Even as a Member of the European Parliament, he eagerly supported every US regime-change propaganda campaign. For instance, in a speech in the European Parliament, he spread unsubstantiated rumours that the Communist Party of China was harvesting “halal organs” from executed Muslim Uyghurs in order to sell them to wealthy clients in the Gulf regions — a rumour that even the “Uyghur Tribunal” in London, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) via the World Uyghur Congress, had already classified as unsubstantiated a year earlier (2021).

But even more interesting is Glucksmann’s role as a Member of the European Parliament: from 2020 to 2022, he chaired the European Parliament’s Special Committee on “Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union, including Disinformation” (INGE), and subsequently chaired its successor committee, ING2, until 2023. Under his chairmanship, the committee became one of the parliamentary driving forces behind the call not only to combat so-called “foreign disinformation” publicly, but also to impose sanctions on its originators and disseminators. As early as January 2022, the European Parliament unambiguously titled its communication on the committee’s final recommendations: “EU should build a sanctions regime against disinformation”.

Two months later, the Parliament adopted the report. It called for sanctions against actors behind foreign influence operations and disinformation campaigns; in the case of organisations deemed to be disseminators of foreign state propaganda, the withdrawal of broadcasting licences should even be considered.

Glucksmann also led delegations to both the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga and the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats in Helsinki, a point of contact between the EU and NATO. In Riga, his committee collaborated, amongst others, with representatives of the EEAS East StratCom Task Force and the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.

Anyone wishing to gain an insight into his views and convictions in this regard can watch this informative interview with Glucksmann for the StratCom podcast from October 2022, in which he states that the Ukrainians are the true democrats and the true Europeans who are teaching Europeans the meaning of freedom, and that the heart and soul of Europe now lie in Kyiv.

So, if one sometimes wonders how the EU could have resorted to such extreme measures to restrict freedom of expression and freedom of the press — such as the draconian sanctions against the Berlin-based journalist Hüseyin Doğru or the Swiss political analyst Jacques Baud: Raphaël Glucksmann was one of the key figures who drove this development forward at EU level — a development that culminated in those regulations and decisions of the Council of the EU on the basis of which such sanctions can be imposed (see, for example, here).

Glucksmann is therefore neither a “left-winger” (in the traditional sense) nor a moderate. Nor is he the moderate way out of the dilemma facing the French, who are forced to choose between the two “radicals”, Le Pen and Mélenchon. He is — au contraire — a neoliberal, business-friendly, interventionist and authoritarian servant of the Western empire. Just like Emmanuel Macron before him, with whom he shares many similarities and a network. It is therefore no surprise that many of Macron’s allies and associates have already switched to Glucksmann’s camp, such as Sacha Houlié and Aurélien Rousseau (former Minister of Health under Macron, subsequently Glucksmann’s campaign director) or Marguerite Cazeneuve.

If my colleagues in the mainstream media were to dig a little deeper, they could easily have uncovered this. But that is probably not what they want at all. This is old neoliberal imperialist wine in new wineskins, labelled “left” or “right”, without these words actually meaning anything anymore. And anyone who openly criticises the excesses of the system they represent and fundamentally questions it is labelled “radical”.

Glucksmann is simply — like Macron and many others before him — yet another pretty face intended to sell an agenda of the powerful that is becoming increasingly unpopular amongst the population. His candidacy is clearly intended to split the votes of left-wing voters in France and take them away from the anti-imperialist and socialist candidate Mélenchon. Let’s see how many more rounds of this same game we have to endure before the majority of the population sees through it. In any case, Glucksmann must first win the joint social-democratic primary in October in order to enter the race as this camp’s joint candidate.

Incidentally, anyone looking for a bit of a laugh in these gloomy times might want to watch this amusing and insightful conversation (in French) between the independent French journalists Alexis Poulin, Yohan Pavec and Félix Marquardt about Glucksmann’s time in Georgia. Here, a former colleague and acquaintance of Glucksmann recounts his inglorious behaviour as an adviser to President Saakashvili and provides interesting insights into his character and career — like the time he busted the leg of the Georgian ambassador to France while jet-skiing drunk on the black sea or the time he allegedly pushed the female head of an NGO into Saakashvili’s hotel room and closed the door behind her, after having promised he wouldn’t leave her alone with him.

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As Politico recently reported, the first scenario involves excluding Saxony-Anhalt’s representatives from meetings on sensitive matters. In addition to the gathering of state premiers that the AfD candidate would be expected to chair for a year, Germany’s states regularly coordinate through a network of ministerial “conferences”. Among the most important is the conference of interior ministers, where some of the country’s most pressing security and intelligence matters are discussed. Thus, as several ministers confirmed to Politico, one possibility would be to keep holding the regular meetings of the interior ministers, but also organise separate gatherings for particularly sensitive issues from which the representative from Saxony-Anhalt would be excluded. According to an emeritus professor of constitutional law, the idea is “perfectly conceivable”, though he conceded that it might be challenged by the federal courts.

A second scenario would involve raising a “wall” within shared information systems. The argument is that the AfD, given its alleged “closeness” to Russia, cannot be trusted with sensitive dossiers. The notion that the AfD would act as a pipeline of classified information to Moscow is rather ludicrous — if only because that would amount to political suicide. “We talk to everyone, whether West or East,” said a spokesperson for the AfD’s Saxony-Anhalt branch. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to hand over files. Anyone who claims otherwise is talking nonsense. If and when we get access to such information, we understand our responsibility as a party of government.” Nonetheless, a Social Democrat politician told the magazine that the AfD should be kept away from all intelligence on right-wing extremism and espionage. In other words, an elected government would be deliberately kept in the dark about dossiers crucial to national security, rendering it effectively incapable of governing. Once again, it is claimed that this would be “legally possible”.

A third scenario, the most striking so far, would involve financially starving the AfD-led state. Saxony-Anhalt receives almost €3 billion a year from federal fiscal equalisation, equal to a fifth of its budget. The threat is to reduce or suspend those funds in order to “make life harder” for a potential AfD government, “or to coerce the party to behave in ways the political establishment finds acceptable”. The finance minister of Baden-Württemberg points out that the system is anchored in the constitution, as though a single constitutional provision could disguise the political motive behind financially strangling a rebellious region.

A final scenario being contemplated is the so-called “nuclear option”: the Bundeszwang, or federal coercion. Under Article 37 of Germany’s Basic Law, the federal government, with the consent of the Bundesrat, the chamber representing the states, may take “necessary measures” to compel a state to fulfil its legal obligations. In other words, Berlin could force a state government to obey federal law, a measure that has never been applied in the history of the Federal Republic, not once since 1949.

The picture that emerges is unmistakable: the same German establishment that is constantly lecturing other countries about democracy and the rule of law is demonstrating that democracy is tolerated only so long as it produces results deemed acceptable. When democratic processes produce an unwelcome government, or risk doing so, ways are sought to circumvent it, to hollow it out or to render it harmless — all in the name of “defending democracy”, of course.

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Icelanders were being asked to cede control over their fisheries, their agriculture, and their trade policy to Brussels, and—since no state acceding after Maastricht holds Denmark’s opt-out—agreeing in principle to adopt the euro. Sweden has demonstrated that this obligation can be deferred more or less indefinitely, but indefinite deferral at the sufferance of the institutions is not the same thing as a right of refusal.

In addition to a seat at the table—to be exact, six seats out of 720 in the European Parliament and one voice among twenty-eight in the Council—Iceland would have received (possibly) marginally cheaper imports and a little more tourism, all while becoming a net contributor to the EU budget.

But the deeper problem with the pro-EU argument is that it treats the bloc as though it were little more than a very large trade agreement—a body of technical standards governing the labelling of jam and size of fruits, to which membership would simply add a vote. But the European Union is much more than this: it is a political, institutional and ideological mega-machine, and its power over member states goes well beyond the percentage of directives transposed. As we saw in the wake of the financial crisis, countries that join effectively adopt an “economic constitution” that binds them to a ruthlessly enforced neoliberal framework that no democratic vote can override. This is particularly evident for eurozone countries.

[…]

Indeed, the island nation already made the argument against EU membership better than any article could. When the financial crisis struck in 2008, Iceland was hit harder than almost any country in Europe. Ninety percent of its banking system collapsed. Yet it recovered faster and better than virtually all of them. Why? Because it had something eurozone countries had surrendered: sovereignty. Iceland could let its currency adjust; it could let its banks fail rather than being forced by the European Central Bank to bail them out at the expense of its citizens; it could impose capital controls on its own authority and lift them on its own timetable—which it did, fully, only in 2017. It could also ask its own people what they wanted: in the Icesave referendums of 2010 and 2011, Icelanders refused to shoulder the private debts of failed bankers.

Compare that with the fates of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and my own country, Italy: countries that, trapped in the eurozone, were subjected to years of punishing austerity, mass unemployment, and social devastation, administered by unelected technocrats in Brussels and Frankfurt. Iceland weathered the storm because it was a much freer country. That was the lesson of 2008, and it remains truer than ever today.

[…]

Becoming an EU member would have been a bad idea twenty or thirty years ago, but it would be an even worse one now. Today, the bloc’s oligarchic machinery—the austerity, the technocracy, the contempt for democracy—has mutated into a full-blown war machine. The EU has launched a $927 million rearmament program, “ReArm Europe”, hastily rebranded “Readiness 2030”, on top of national commitments agreed at NATO’s Hague summit to raise military spending to 5 percent of GDP. Manfred Weber, leader of the largest group in the European Parliament, speaks openly of $7 trillion in European military spending over the coming decade, and insists that this build-up must be locked in so that, in his own words, no future government can undo it.

How will all this be paid for? The Financial Times said the quiet part out loud: Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state. One might object that Iceland already belongs to NATO and cannot avoid this fate in any case. But Iceland has been in the alliance since 1949, and still has no standing army: seventy-seven years of membership, not one Icelandic soldier. NATO has few means of actually forcing a country to follow its diktats. Joining the EU is another matter. It means handing full control of your economy to what has effectively become the political arm of NATO—one that will use every tool at its disposal to bring member states into line with the EU-NATO strategy.

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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

Read the article here. If you’re a paid subscriber and you can’t access the article write to me at thomasfazi82@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

At the recent NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, the American president Donald Trump had unusually warm words for his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.

The occupant of the White House expressed his support for Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian territory, stating that “it is an escalation, but it is also an escalation that could help bring about a conclusion” to the conflict.

The friendly meeting between the two presidents stood in stark contrast to the “Oval Office row” that had erupted between them at the beginning of 2025, when Trump had only recently begun his second term.

The openly pro-Ukrainian stance displayed by the American leader marks the failure of the diplomatic efforts launched with the meeting between Trump and the Russian president Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, in August 2025.

Those efforts, aimed at reaching a negotiated solution to the conflict, had met with firm opposition from Kyiv and the European countries, as well as from Republican and Democratic members of the US Congress.

Lavrov and the Minsk comparison

A few weeks ago, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov stated that he did not want “to even think that Alaska, just like the actions of the Europeans, was conceived to buy time in order to rearm the Kyiv regime. […] But in reality that is exactly how things went”.

In speaking of “the actions of the Europeans”, Lavrov was referring to the statements made by the former German chancellor Angela Merkel in a 2022 interview, according to which the Minsk agreements had been a stratagem to allow Ukraine to rearm.

Negotiated by France and Germany together with Ukraine and Russia in 2014 and then in 2015, the Minsk agreements were meant to ensure that the Donbas would remain under Ukrainian sovereignty while guaranteeing the region broad autonomy.

Merkel’s revelations suggested that the Minsk agreements were in fact a deliberate deception designed to induce Russia to accept a ceasefire with the promise of a peaceful resolution of the conflict, buying Ukraine time to strengthen its armed forces.

This thesis was confirmed by the former French president François Hollande, who had negotiated the agreements alongside Merkel.

Interviewed by the Kyiv Independent, Hollande maintained that “yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point”.

He added: “Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military posture. Indeed, the Ukrainian army is completely different from that of 2014. It is better trained and better equipped. It is to the credit of the Minsk agreements that they gave the Ukrainian army this opportunity”.

Petro Poroshenko himself, the Ukrainian president who had negotiated the agreements, told the Financial Times that Ukraine “had no armed forces at all” and that “the great diplomatic success” of the agreements was that “we kept Russia away from our borders — not from our borders, but away from a full-scale war”.

According to the biography of Putin written by the journalist Philip Short, Poroshenko said he had signed the Minsk agreements “because it was the only way to stop the fighting, but he knew they would never be implemented”.

Putin’s indecision?

Last June, then, Lavrov compared the consequences of the Alaska meeting between Trump and Putin to what had happened with the Minsk agreements. In other words, according to Lavrov, Russia had once again been deceived.

In reality, the understanding reached at Anchorage was even weaker than the Minsk agreements. According to Russian sources, it envisaged that Trump would press Zelensky to withdraw from the Donbas, and in exchange Putin would accept a ceasefire.

In practice, Trump never persuaded Zelensky to withdraw, while at the same time he sought to push Putin to declare a ceasefire even before the Ukrainian withdrawal — something the Russian president never accepted.

From Moscow’s point of view, a mere ceasefire would have produced a frozen conflict that would not have resolved the root causes of the war, once again allowing Ukraine to rearm and resume hostilities at a later stage.

Despite this — according to the critics of the Kremlin’s official line, whose voices are multiplying in Moscow — Putin continued his dialogue with the White House even when it was by then evident that the latter was exerting no pressure whatsoever on the government in Kyiv.

Moreover, these critics argue, Putin kept the war effort in Ukraine within the confines of the so-called “Special Military Operation” without proceeding to an escalation, even when it was by then clear that the whole of Europe was mobilising in support of Kyiv and that Washington was continuing to back the Ukrainian army at the logistical and intelligence level.

Uninterrupted support for Ukraine

That the White House supports Ukraine at the intelligence level is confirmed by recent revelations in the Financial Times, according to which the United States has helped Ukrainian long-range drones evade Moscow’s air defences and strike deep into Russian territory, in particular with an unprecedented wave of attacks on oil refineries.

In the first six months of 2026, Russian refineries were reportedly struck at least 194 times — a staggering increase on the same period the previous year.

But as early as December of last year, the New York Times revealed that, although the partnership between Washington and Kyiv was officially strained owing to America’s supposed willingness to negotiate with Moscow, the CIA had continued to maintain its presence in Ukraine and had helped orchestrate a campaign of drone attacks against Russian oil infrastructure.

Trump is even said to have praised these attacks, claiming that they gave him bargaining power in negotiations with Russia.

Even when the Pentagon decided briefly to suspend intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March 2025, the CIA continued to supply data to Kyiv, in particular on Russian operations on Ukrainian territory.

The CIA was also authorised to assist Ukrainian drone attacks against the so-called “shadow fleet” of Russian oil tankers in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

The fact that Washington was continuing to provide Ukraine with the intelligence needed to strike Russian energy infrastructure had already been confirmed by the Financial Times in October 2025 — that is, less than two months after the Anchorage meeting.

The data supplied by the US included route planning, altitude, timing and the details needed to evade Russian air defences, according to American sources cited by the newspaper.

Those sources maintain that Washington also helped determine the priority of the targets to be struck. The paper reports that Trump secretly backed Kyiv’s strategy of attacking Russia’s energy infrastructure “to make them [the Russians] feel the pain” and soften their negotiating position.

Coercive diplomacy

The United States, then, never became an impartial mediator in the conflict despite Trump’s declarations to that effect, having instead remained a co-belligerent party at Ukraine’s side.

From what has been set out above, it emerges that in the aftermath of the Anchorage meeting, the Trump administration decided to adopt a “coercive diplomacy” towards Moscow, not unlike that adopted with Iran, in order to push the Kremlin into accepting a ceasefire even in the absence of a Ukrainian withdrawal from the Donbas.

That strategy included support for the Ukrainian campaign of drone attacks on Russian territory, the imposition of sanctions (also decided in October 2025) on the two Russian oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil, pressure on India to stop buying Russian oil and even the possibility of supplying Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles.

The Russians, however, showed no sign of yielding to intimidation. Then, at the end of 2025, an event as mysterious as it was disturbing took place.

The attack on Putin’s residence

On December 29, the Russian foreign ministry denounced an overnight attack — which it described as “terrorist” — in which a swarm of long-range drones (91, to be precise, according to the statement) had targeted the Russian president’s residence on Lake Valdai, in the Novgorod region.

All the drones had been shot down by Russian air defence systems, the statement declared, adding however that such a reckless action would not go unanswered.

The morning after the attack, Putin personally called Trump to protest at what had happened.

Hours later, questioned by journalists about the episode, Trump replied: “I don’t like it, I don’t like it […]. President Putin told me. Early this morning he said he had been attacked. That’s not good. That’s not good... This is not the right time to be doing any of that… I was very angry about it”.

We have seen how Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian territory in fact take place with the direct support of American intelligence.

A New York Times article entitled “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine”, dating back to March 2025, revealed how the Pentagon and the CIA had been authorised as far back as president Joe Biden, Trump’s predecessor, to carry out strikes deep inside Russian territory.

A senior officer of a European intelligence service, interviewed by the paper, stated that the Americans “are now part of the ‘kill chain’” in Ukraine. The Russians are obviously aware of this.

At the time of the attack on the presidential residence on Lake Valdai, Moscow was convinced that US intelligence had taken part in the operation.

“I said straight away that it is impossible [to carry out this attack] without the support of [Western] intelligence services, first and foremost the CIA”, declared Aleksei Chepa, deputy chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the Duma, the Russian parliament.

A few days later, the CIA claimed that the attack had never taken place — or at least that the drones which had flown over Russia that night had not been headed for Lake Valdai.

Further irritated, the Russians cited the published photos and videos of the wreckage of the downed drones in support of their claim. On January 2, 2026, they summoned a US military attaché in Moscow for a formal meeting.

During the meeting, a senior Russian officer handed the American attaché what he identified as the navigation processor recovered from one of the downed drones, urging American specialists to decrypt its contents.

On January 5, after receiving briefings from the CIA, Trump said he did not believe that Ukraine or the CIA had attempted to kill Putin at his residence on Lake Valdai.

Yet it was precisely to this attack that Zelensky referred in a provocative open letter addressed to Putin at the beginning of June: “We often hear it said that you are comfortable in this war. Not, of course, when it comes to the security of your residence at Valdai or your parade in Moscow. Your own life is precious to you”.

An implacable adversary

Meanwhile, two days before Trump’s denial of January 5, American special forces had seized the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a raid on Caracas that had left around a hundred dead.

A few weeks later, on February 28, Israel would assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei — once again with the help of the CIA.

The Ukrainian attacks on the early-warning radars of Russia’s system for detecting potential nuclear threats, and on its fleet of strategic bombers (a key element of Moscow’s nuclear deterrence triad) — operations likewise conducted with the probable support of Western intelligence — constitute a further alarm bell for the Kremlin.

The recent failure of the Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Iran confirms, in the eyes of non-Western leaderships, that for Washington the only negotiation worth pursuing is one that leads to the adversary’s surrender.

The decapitation operations carried out against the governing leaderships of Iran and Venezuela constitute a warning to Moscow and Beijing, one which seems to indicate that the United States accepts neither compromise nor arrangements for coexistence with its adversaries.

In Moscow, many are by now convinced that the Anchorage overture was yet another deception. The path of negotiation appears closed off. What remains to be decided is how to confront the growing attacks conducted by the West against Russia by Ukrainian hand.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

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Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

I recently heard an activist say the following in an Instagram video: “We will never get our pre-Covid society back”. That sentence has stayed with me ever since, because it made me realise that I do in fact — somewhere in my heart — still harbour an unspoken hope that there is a “way back”; that we can undo, can erase from the world, the harm (inflicted on people) and the deterioration (to democratic culture) that have occurred in the Covid years and in the years since. But there is no way back. Or, as the beautiful title of a 1940 novel by Thomas Wolfe put it: You Can’t Go Home Again. But how to deal with this situation with resilience and steadfastness?

First, to clarify: this is a different question from that of a possible political and legal reckoning with the Covid era, or of apologies and social reconciliation. We are still waiting for both, even if we may no longer be hoping for them.

First and foremost, it’s about coming to terms with what has been lost. And there I find myself longing for the pre-Covid era and, above all, unwilling to accept that this world is a thing of the past; that we cannot return to it, but now find ourselves in a completely different reality. I believe that this, psychologically speaking, is known as an adjustment disorder.

And I’m experiencing this not only in relation to the negative developments during and since the Covid era — in terms of the social climate, division, the shrinking freedom of expression, the lack of respect for fundamental rights and other aspects — but also in relation to many other issues. I find myself unwilling to accept what the European Union has become, some of the decisions made by the Federal Constitutional Court and the Federal Court of Justice in Germany, what our leading politicians say and decide, what has become of once-beloved German media outlets such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung or DIE ZEIT, what has become of my image of Germany, of my idea (perhaps always mistaken) that we as a nation had learnt from our recent past.

It is hard to let go of these images, these memories. Perhaps it is down to age; perhaps to a sluggishness of the soul that is not made for the massively accelerated changes and developments of our modern world. Intellectually, all this is just about manageable (albeit with compromises). Emotionally, it sometimes seems almost impossible to cope with.

Of course, there is also something good in holding on to these memories of times, principles and rules, so that they can serve as a template and, by comparison, reveal just how much things have changed for the worse. Many younger people do not have such points of comparison at their disposal, and so they are all the more easily led astray. But this focus on the past and what has been lost — on how things “used to be” — does have something of a battle against windmills about it. It is nostalgia, a refusal to accept reality, and this often paralyses and wears one down.

On NachDenkSeiten, the independent German political news and commentary website that I work for, we write a great deal about topics, facts and arguments. But today I’d like to write about how we deal emotionally with the many changes and the massive deterioration in our political culture that we have witnessed in recent years.

My colleagues and I have lately received numerous letters from readers who write, in essence: “I really appreciate your journalism and your work, but sometimes I just can’t bring myself to read it all any more”. We, as editors and authors, sometimes feel the same way. It is depressing to document developments that seem to be heading in only one direction: everything is getting worse and worse. One is exhausted by the constant agitation, the constant annoyance, the constant outrage. And that is why nostalgia is so powerful, along with the desire for everything to simply go back to the way it used to be.

But acceptance comes before improvement. We won’t be able to go back; the only way is forward. But where do we find the strength to let go and carry on despite everything?

We must refuse to become as bitter as the times in which we live. For the political struggle takes place not only externally — through demonstrations, petitions, letters to the editor and articles — but also internally. If we become inwardly exhausted and give up, we have already lost.

A first and important step is to radically filter the news flow when we realise that the reports are driving us into a state of powerlessness and despondency. Then it is time for mental self-protection, for breaks, for nature, joy and beautiful things — for everything that restores our strength.

Another method of self-protection can be to depersonalise the “enemy”. In other words, not to hate the people who, from our point of view, are currently doing “evil” things, but rather to oppose what they are doing, the energy that takes hold of them at that moment, the propaganda to which they seem to succumb, the weakness to which they yield. If we start to hate the people on the “other side”, we have already lost the battle, because we are sinking to the same level as those we wish to fight. The way out of this is always empathy.

And we must focus our attention on the positive. After all, so much good is happening despite everything. The current times lay bare a great deal of human weakness and malice, but they also show us people who display incredible strength, resilience and integrity, who make great professional and personal sacrifices to stand up against injustice and war crimes, to rebel against their governments. Admiration for these people and support for them — even if it’s just a few words of encouragement and appreciation — can be valuable for them and for us.

One can also choose to focus on one’s private life from time to time — for a while — on one’s circle of friends, family and one’s own (hopefully pleasant) immediate surroundings. This is naturally difficult for someone who is politically engaged, but in these times it is nonetheless an effective survival strategy. Here in Germany, we find ourselves in the peculiar situation where, for politically critical and observant people, the suffering in the world and the very negative political developments in our own country coexist alongside a world that remains very secure and, in many ways, beautiful on a small scale — such as at the level of our own neighbourhoods, local authorities, villages and towns.

We live in an age in which the West’s global dominance is steadily waning, yet in its struggle against decline, all its most negative aspects are washed up to the surface and intensified once again (colonialism, exploitation, totalitarianism, wars, injustice, destruction, hypocrisy). And we are experiencing all of this from within the heart of the empire itself. And although many of us disagree with our governments and elites, we feel powerless and complicit, and are, of course, increasingly restricted and subjected to repression in our criticism and our expressions of dissent. This is a situation in which it is difficult to maintain one’s bearings. Looking out of the West’s echo chambers towards perspectives and analyses from the Global South and the BRICS states, and from resistance movements in the West can be a great help in resolving the recurring cognitive dissonance.

Another important decision is who we choose to direct our energy towards. For attention is energy. And whatever we focus our attention on gains energy and significance as a result. We live in a time when many familiar institutions are crumbling and delegitimising themselves, and elites are exposing their weakness and corruption. Amidst this destruction and self-destruction of familiar power structures, we can focus our energy more strongly on what is to come — on what we wish to strengthen and rebuild. This is uplifting, because we are engaging with things that are good in our eyes, and this strengthens the ideas, people and structures that we want to be part of a more positive future.

This is how we build resilience and steadfastness: by accepting the present without losing heart or giving up; by not allowing ourselves to become cynical — nor to lose ourselves in hatred. Instead, by showing compassion — towards ourselves and our opponents. And by preserving our softness in these hard times, allowing ourselves to mourn what has been lost, and then focussing our energy on continuing on our path amidst all the tottering and collapsing structures.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

On Thursday, the European Parliament “adopted” the extension of Chat Control 1.0. This is the temporary suspension of the EU’s ePrivacy rules that allows tech platforms to mass-scan citizens’ private communications, ostensibly to detect child sexual abuse material. “Adopted” is placed in quotation marks here because the word implies something that conspicuously failed to happen: a majority of MEPs voting in favour. In fact, 314 MEPs voted to reject the text, against 276 in favour. And yet it passed anyway.

This was made possible through a procedural sleight of hand worthy of Brussels at its most cynical. The file was rammed through under an “urgency procedure”: European Parliament President Roberta Metsola unilaterally reopened a dossier that MEPs had already rejected in March, and the Council conveniently bounced it back at the start of the summer recess, when securing attendance is hardest. Rejecting it a second time would have required not a simple majority but an absolute one: 360 votes. The law was therefore approved despite a majority of MEPs voting against it. The regulation will now remain in force until April 2028, buying time for negotiations on its even more ambitious successor, Chat Control 2.0.

As German MEP Fabio De Masi noted following the vote, Chat Control is a “legislative zombie” — a measure the European Parliament has rejected multiple times, revived again and again until the desired outcome emerges. This episode should give pause to those who insist that the EU’s democratic deficit could be cured by handing more power to the European Parliament. Here is that very institution’s president working with the Council to resurrect a file the Parliament itself had buried. If this is how the Parliament operates, empowering it further would only deepen this democratic deficit, lending a thicker veneer of legitimacy to what remains, at bottom, an executive-bureaucratic machine that treats votes as obstacles to be engineered around.

Defenders of the outcome point to a supposed silver lining: an amendment from the liberal Renew group excluding from the law’s scope communications to which end-to-end encryption “is, has been, or will be applied”, such as WhatsApp messages. Some MEPs have hailed this as a glimmer of hope, and it likely helped peel off enough votes to prevent outright rejection. But the amendment sits in flat contradiction with the entire logic of mass scanning, which is precisely why the Council, where the file is led by interior ministries with little appetite for privacy niceties, is widely expected to strike it out when the package lands on its desk in the coming three months. It’s a fig leaf, in other words, designed to be removed further down the line.

The re-elected Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDE) President Svenja Hahn called the vote “a disgrace”, warning that it “opens the door for mass surveillance of all private communication” and that “the surveillance of private chats pushed by EU states is a threat for our freedom and democracy”. Lyudmyla Kozlovska of the Open Dialogue Foundation placed it in a broader pattern of “a sweeping power justified by an urgent-sounding purpose, then quietly normalised” — first financial privacy, then travellers’ data, now messages. The real battle, she noted, comes in September over Chat Control 2.0.

And that is the point. Chat Control was never really about children. This scanning of private correspondence — something no one would tolerate if applied to paper letters — does little to catch actual predators, who operate on the dark net, while drowning police in false positives. By Swiss federal police estimates, some 80% of machine-flagged content is not even illegal. What it does build is permanent infrastructure for total surveillance, ripe for function creep and abuse, atop mandatory age verification that would end online anonymity for whistleblowers, journalists and dissidents alike. Former MEP Patrick Breyer put it best last year: “They are selling us security but delivering a total surveillance machine”. That machine has now cleared another hurdle.

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Thomas Fazi

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Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

Read the article here. If you’re a paid subscriber and you can’t access the article write to me at thomasfazi82@gmail.com.

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Thomas Fazi

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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

What, then, is the package that the Commission is so keen to sign into law? It is a framework totalling almost €2 trillion, equivalent to around 1.26% of EU gross national income (GNI) over the seven-year period. The European Parliament, never shy about spending other people’s money, wants to push that to 1.38% of GNI. But neither institution really admits the structural tensions buried in the figures. The EU must service roughly €750 billion in bloc pandemic debt, the repayment of which is now being permanently integrated into the regular EU budget. The Commission’s own proposal earmarks €149.3 billion for repaying the so-called “NextGenerationEU Recovery” and “Resilience Facility” funds — a sum that amounts to nearly 10% of total MFF commitments.

This matters because of what it reveals about the true nature of NextGenerationEU (NGEU). What was sold to European publics as an exceptional, one-off response to the Covid crisis is now the fiscal template for the Union’s future. The pandemic fund set the precedent: the EU can borrow on capital markets, distribute grants to member states, and then embed the repayment into the general budget for decades to come — all without anything resembling a proper democratic mandate. This is arguably what the “unprecedented” EU fiscal response to the pandemic was always about: normalising common debt as a mechanism for tilting the institutional balance of power decisively in favour of the Commission, downgrading member states and locking in a structural shift in European integration. Indeed, the EU has since repeated the trick with a €90 billion package for Ukraine, again funded through joint debt backed by the common budget. The “historical exception” has quietly become the norm.

To repay its vast debts, the Commission has proposed a package of new levies on companies. But if the new taxes fall short, as is likely, the fallback is a compulsory levy on member states. The existing “Own Resources Decision” — another wonderful piece of EU lexicon — already empowers the Commission to call on national governments for additional GNI-based contributions to cover NGEU repayments, on top of regular programme spending. In other words, if the new revenue streams underperform, the bill lands automatically on national treasuries, decided not by sovereign parliaments, but by the remorseless logic of the EU’s debt repayment. At any rate, EU debt now functions as a de facto tax on member states, bypassing the normal channels of democratic budgetary control.

Read the article here. If you’re a paid subscriber and you can’t access the article write to me at thomasfazi82@gmail.com.

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Thomas Fazi

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Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

In short, three key ministries in the new Peter Magyar government — energy, foreign affairs and finance — are now led by people who built their careers inside Western multinational corporations, all of them linked to two of the most powerful actors in the global economy, BlackRock and Vanguard, and in one case with strong ties to the US security state as well. This means that Western corporate interests in general, and American energy interests in particular, now have direct representation at the highest levels of the Hungarian state.

There is truth in the charge that Orbán’s government cultivated a domestic class of “oligarchs” and concentrated economic power in loyal hands. But Hungary’s domestic capitalist class pales next to what is poised to replace it. Whereas the corruption of local strongmen is visible, nameable, prosecutable in principle, the institutionalised influence of global capital is none of these things.

Companies like Shell (from which the new energy minister hails), along with the asset management funds that own them, have hijacked democratic decision-making across the Western world. They call it lobbying rather than corruption — but the distinction, in terms of outcomes for ordinary people, is largely cosmetic.

As former MP and Green Party co-founder (which he has since left) András Schiffer has asked, will the feudal power of domestically controlled capitalism simply be replaced by the more anonymous, more pervasive and far less accountable power of global big capital — with a liberal gloss applied over the transfer?

In light of the above, the trajectory of the Magyar government is not difficult to predict: energy diversification towards US LNG, financial opening towards Western institutions and corporate interests, and a foreign policy recalibrated towards Brussels and the Atlanticist establishment.

Read my deep dive into the new Hungarian power elite here.

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Thomas Fazi

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The risk of an all-out conflict between NATO and Russia is higher than it’s ever been — even at the height of the Cold War — given how deeply the two sides are now entangled in what is, in every operational sense, an increasingly direct military confrontation, even if the fiction of non-belligerence is still formally maintained. Unlike during the Cold War, when the superpowers maintained elaborate protocols designed to prevent direct confrontation, the lines today are blurred to the point of near-invisibility. A war that was supposed to be contained within Ukraine’s borders has steadily metastasised into something far more dangerous: a proxy conflict in which NATO’s role has become so operationally central that the distinction between proxy and principal has largely collapsed, and in which each week brings fresh evidence that the escalatory logic is running well ahead of any political capacity to control it.

The events of recent weeks have made this unmistakably clear.

Last week, a Ukrainian drone in the Donbas struck a college in Donbas, killing 21 people, most of them students.

This represents a very serious escalation in Ukraine’s intensifying drone offensive against Russia in recent months — including a growing number of deep-strike attacks carried out on Russian territory. Just a few weeks ago, at least three people were killed and several more injured in a large-scale Ukrainian drone attack on the Moscow region.

Meanwhile, according to Reuters, by March Ukrainian drone strikes on Russia’s three main export terminals on its western coasts — Novorossiysk on the Black Sea, and Primorsk and Ust-Luga on the Baltic — had knocked out around 40% of Russia’s oil export capacity. According to a New York Times estimate, by early April Ukrainian strikes had also damaged or destroyed around 20% of Russia’s oil refining capacity. Just this month, Ukrainian drones have struck two dozen Russian oil refineries, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence.

Some of the more recently targeted sites were located as far as 1,500-1,700 km from the Ukrainian border, signalling a significant improvement in Ukraine’s long-range drone capabilities.

As John Mearsheimer noted in a recent interview with Glenn Diesen, Ukrainian drone and missile strikes on Russian territory, including Moscow, represent a significant step up the escalation ladder. Though unimpressed by their immediate military effect, the trajectory concerns him deeply:

The amount of damage that those drones can do is not that great... it’s certainly not going to affect the outcome of the war in any meaningful way. That’s not going to happen. But I think the great danger moving forward here is that the Ukrainians working with the Europeans who remain determined to defeat Russia will increase the number of strikes and the kind of strikes on Russia.

Russia has already responded to the drone attack on the Donbas college with a massive assault on Kyiv, one of the largest since the start of the war, including the use of nuclear-capable Oreshnik missiles. And it has already threatened to launch a fresh wave of “systematic strikes” against the capital. The new strikes will target “decision-making centres and command posts”, alongside drone manufacturing facilities in the city, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Moscow has called for foreign nationals and diplomats to leave Kyiv “as soon as possible” and warned citizens to stay away from administrative and military buildings.

So far Moscow has refrained from targeting Ukrainian headquarters — a rather remarkable fact given that the Ukrainian armed forces have repeatedly targeted Russian headquarters, as Anatol Lieven noted. On Tuesday, the Ukrainian General Staff claimed that it had destroyed a major Russian command and control centre in Lugansk with British Storm Shadow cruise missiles. The effective use of these missiles — which Ukraine has been firing for the past two years — requires US targeting data.

Despite this, Moscow has not targeted Ukrainian headquarters in Kyiv precisely because of the likelihood that US and other NATO soldiers and intelligence officers would be killed, risking drastic escalation in response by the West. Since Donald Trump returned to the presidency and reopened diplomatic negotiations, the Russian government has also been restrained by a desire not to either anger or weaken him. However, last week US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that the peace talks are at a standstill, and that “there are no such talks occurring at this time”.

This points not merely to a dangerous escalation in the war — but also to its potential expansion beyond Ukraine’s borders.

After all, though these attacks are formally being carried out by Ukraine, the reality is that Ukraine could never carry out these drone attacks on Russian territory without intelligence and satellite support from NATO — and from the US specifically. Despite Trump’s peace overtures, his administration has continued providing Ukraine with intelligence to carry out long-range drone attacks against Russian energy infrastructure, according to multiple US and Ukrainian officials. The intelligence helps Ukraine “shape route planning, altitude, timing and mission decisions, enabling Ukraine’s long-range, one-way attack drones to evade Russian air defenses”. One source described Ukraine’s drone force as the “instrument” the US is using to achieve the goal of undermining the Russian economy and pushing Putin toward a settlement. The CIA has also been involved in building up Ukraine’s drone programme.

The degree of US involvement goes further than mere intelligence-sharing. While one US official said Ukraine selects the target and the US provides information on its vulnerabilities, other officials said the US has actually been setting target priorities for the Ukrainian military — meaning the US is in effect choosing what to strike.

The US also provides satellite support — both in the form of real-time GPS guidance (particularly over Ukrainian and Russian-annexed Ukrainian territory via Elon Musk’s Starlink) and through the provision of geospatial data that allows drones to operate without a real-time GPS signal, such as in areas where the signal is jammed: pre-loaded terrain maps, route data, target coordinates and air-defence evasion profiles, all of which depend on American satellite reconnaissance and intelligence.

This means that Ukraine’s deep-strike operations against Russia are functionally a US-NATO operation wearing Ukrainian colours. But NATO isn’t just providing the intelligence and satellite support for these attacks — and of course the money for the drones. Increasingly, it is providing the drones themselves as well.

Even though the overwhelming majority of drones used by Ukrainian forces are produced inside Ukraine itself, a newer and strategically significant development is the deliberate expansion of drone manufacturing into European countries, partly to reduce vulnerability to Russian strikes on Ukrainian facilities. Zelensky announced plans to open ten joint enterprises for drone production in Europe in 2026.

The country at the centre of this development is Germany. The Merz government is deepening its military cooperation with Kyiv, becoming increasingly a co-belligerent in the conflict with Russia. With American disengagement, Germany has long been Ukraine’s primary financial backer. But in mid-April, for the first time the German government entered into a strategic partnership with the defence sector of a country at war. The agreement paves the way for the co-production of weapons systems, drones with a range of up to 1,500 km and long-range missiles, together with Kyiv. One of the most visible examples is Quantum Frontline Industries in Germany — a joint venture between Quantum Systems and Ukraine’s Frontline Robotics — where the first drone rolled off the production line less than two months after the partnership was announced.

With a stroke of the pen, the German government has swept away the entire domestic debate of recent years over supplying German weapons to Ukraine for strikes on targets inside Russian territory. As former German MP Sevim Dagdelen has written, with the integration of Berlin’s and Kyiv’s defence industries we are witnessing the emergence of a German-Ukrainian military-industrial complex under Berlin’s hegemony. Indeed, it is likely that German-made long-range drones were used in the recent attacks on Moscow and the Moscow region.

Other European countries are involved as well. Since the end of 2024, Finnish group Summa Defence has set up several joint ventures with Ukrainian firms to produce drones in Finland. British firm Prevail Partners and Ukraine’s Skyeton joined forces in July 2025 to produce the Raybird surveillance drone in the UK. Skyeton has also opened a Raybird production line in Slovakia and is negotiating additional European partnerships, while Ukrainian drone consortiums are building assembly and component plants in Finland and Denmark.

This means that European nations — first and foremost Germany — are becoming ever more directly involved in the conflict. This seriously increases the risk of Russian retaliatory strikes on European territory. Indeed, in mid-April, the Russian Defence Ministry published the names and addresses of European companies — including several Italian firms — involved in the production of Ukrainian drones, stating that “the European public should both clearly understand the true reasons of threats to their security and know the addresses and locations of ‘Ukrainian’ and ‘joint’ enterprises producing UAVs and components for Ukraine on the territory of their countries”.

To make matters worse, there is growing evidence that Ukrainian drones are passing through the airspace of Baltic NATO countries to attack Russian targets — such as the drones that hit the Russian oil terminals in Primorsk and Ust-Luga on the Baltic Sea. Just this month, Ukrainian drones have triggered repeated airspace alerts over Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, prompting NATO fighter jet scrambles on multiple occasions, with at least one Ukrainian drone being shot down by a NATO jet over Estonia on May 19. Just days before, another Ukrainian drone struck an empty oil storage facility in Latvia. The political fallout has been significant, causing the collapse of the Latvian government over its handling of the crisis.

Russia has accused the Baltic states and NATO of actively allowing Ukrainian drones to use their airspace for strikes on Russia, framing it as NATO aggression. Presidential adviser Nikolai Patrushev stressed that this constitutes direct NATO country participation in attacks on Russian territory. For their part, Ukraine and the Baltic countries have rejected claims of deliberate collusion, accusing Russia of using electronic warfare and jamming to redirect Ukrainian drones into Baltic airspace — though this does not explain why Russia has proven unable to prevent drone attacks on sensitive and civilian targets, including in Moscow. European Commission President von der Leyen went as far as saying that “Russia and Belarus bear direct responsibility” for the Ukrainian drone incursions.

What is clear is that tensions in the Baltic are higher than they have ever been. The risk of a conflict between NATO and Moscow breaking out there is heightened further by the recent announcement of the creation of a joint naval force, dubbed the Northern Navies Initiative, comprising the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the Netherlands. This force appears to have the explicit aim of containing Russia between the Arctic and the Baltic, potentially by obstructing Moscow’s commercial traffic — and in particular its so-called “shadow fleet”. Provocations such as the boarding of Russian vessels, or even a naval blockade, would constitute an obvious casus belli. To this must be added the militarisation of Finland, which recently joined NATO, and the espionage and aerial surveillance operations being conducted from its territory against Moscow — factors that are transforming the Scandinavian country into a new strategic threat in Russia’s eyes.

It is not an exaggeration to say that we are one incident — real or engineered — away from the situation rapidly escalating into a direct NATO-Russia war. This is particularly concerning given the fact that Western provocations are emboldening the hardliners in Moscow.

Among the more radical approaches, that of Sergey Karaganov stands out — a long-standing political scientist, formerly an adviser to both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and currently among Putin’s advisers. Since the beginning of the conflict, Karaganov has advocated the possible use of nuclear weapons in Europe. His argument is that European elites are entirely discredited and lack the legitimacy to remain in power. But above all, they are incapable of reaching a compromise with Russia. They must be stopped by force of arms to prevent the conflict from spreading across Europe — first and foremost by striking strategic and highly symbolic military targets on European territory with conventional weapons.

According to Karaganov, if this were not sufficient to “persuade” European elites to come to terms with Russia, it would be necessary to resort to a “demonstrative” nuclear strike, or even one aimed at eliminating the European elites themselves. Such ideas, largely marginal at the outset of the conflict, are progressively gaining ground in both Russian military and political circles. In parallel, pressure on Putin for a change of strategy is mounting.

Mearsheimer takes seriously the argument advanced by Karaganov — that Russia should strike European targets with conventional weapons, escalating to nuclear if necessary — noting that what was once a minority view has gained wide acceptance inside Russia:

He argues now and I take him at his word because he is an honest person that the overwhelming majority of people that he talks to agree with him. The Russians in a sense are fed up.

On the nuclear dimension, Mearsheimer explains why the mere prospect of nuclear use gives Karaganov’s strategy its coercive logic:

Once you begin to go up the escalation ladder, everybody understands that at some point up there... somewhere up that ladder is nuclear use. On one of the rungs is the use of nuclear weapons... the mere threat of nuclear weapons will have huge deterrent value.

He also makes a striking historical comparison regarding Western red-line violations:

It’s truly amazing that the United States and Britain aided Ukraine when it invaded the Russian homeland in the summer of 2024. This is the Kursk offensive... the idea that we would help an ally invade the Soviet Union, that would never happen... or that we would help an ally attack one leg of the strategic nuclear triad. This is just unthinkable. It was just so dangerous.

His conclusion on the Russian strategic dilemma is the following:

If you’re playing Russia’s hand... you’re going to have to put your foot down, as my mother used to say. And you’re going to have to send a very clear signal that this is just unacceptable.

The risk of war is not some distant abstraction — it is dangerously, imminently real. The mechanisms of escalation that have brought us to this point are well understood: each step up the ladder, taken with the confident assumption that the other side will back down, makes the next step more likely and the space for de-escalation narrower. Western leaders have convinced themselves, through a combination of wishful thinking and institutional inertia, that Russia will continue to absorb provocations without responding in kind. But every week that passes without a diplomatic off-ramp brings us closer to the moment when that assumption is tested to destruction.

What makes the current situation uniquely perilous is not just the military escalation but the complete collapse of the political imagination that might arrest it. There are no Cold War realists, no back-channel, no serious European leader with the standing and the will to propose a negotiated settlement. There is only the momentum of the war machine, now distributed across a dozen countries and thousands of companies, producing weapons in Finnish factories, German joint ventures and British workshops — all of them feeding a conflict that, in the absence of urgent political intervention, has no logical terminus short of catastrophe.

The responsibility lies, ultimately, with European citizens. Our governments are not acting in our name or in our interests. It falls to us — before the next incident, the next miscalculation, the next drone that crosses into the wrong airspace — to demand that they step back from the brink.

Thanks for reading. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid, so if you appreciate my writing please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you haven’t already. Aside from a fuzzy feeling inside of you, you’ll get access to exclusive articles and commentary.

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Thomas Fazi

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Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)

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This is the English version of an interview that appeared in the May-June edition of the German magazine Hintergrund.

1. The Illusion of Multipolarity and “Engineered Chaos”

It is widely observed that a multipolar order is emerging, yet you have described US foreign policy — particularly under Trump — not as aimless, but as “engineered chaos”. How does Washington successfully use this strategy to obstruct a stable new international order, and who are the primary victims: the declared adversaries like China or the European “partners”?

Yes, I believe that Washington’s strategy is not aimless, but is rather the deliberate engineering of permanent chaos and disorder. Unable to defeat its rivals head-on, the US seeks to prevent any stable alternative order from consolidating. The logic is straightforward: a multipolar world requires, by definition, some degree of international order and predictability. By systematically dismantling that order — discarding treaties, weaponising sanctions, launching illegal wars, destabilising peripheral states — Washington ensures that no stable, coherent alternative international system can take root.

Both China and Europe are targets of this globalised proxy-war strategy, which targets the weaker links of the rival system, though they face it very differently. China is the US’s principal long-term adversary whose rise must be slowed at all costs, but China is also large, nuclear-armed and too economically integrated into the global system to attack directly. Europe is far more vulnerable, and in many ways a more immediately useful target. Keeping Europe destabilised, dependent and tied to Washington through NATO and energy prevents the emergence of the one geopolitical bloc that, if it ever achieved genuine autonomy, could decisively tip the global balance: a Eurasian economic space fully integrated within a new multipolar or polycentric global framework.

Europe is therefore a primary victim of this strategy, arguably more so than China. The war in Ukraine, the sabotage of Nord Stream, the forced switch to expensive American LNG in place of Russian pipeline gas, the war on Iran and its devastating energy consequences for the continent: none of these are accidents. They are the predictable outcomes of a strategy designed to keep Europe weak, divided and subordinate.

2. Energy as a Geopolitical Lever and the Ukrainian Factor

You argue that Washington has deliberately replaced European reliance on Russian gas with a dependence on USA liquefied natural gas (LNG). Given the massive tensions in March 2026 over blocked pipelines in Ukraine (e.g., Druzhba), has energy infrastructure become a tool for the US to exert pressure via Kyiv on “disobedient” EU states like Hungary or Slovakia?

That energy infrastructure has become a tool of geopolitical pressure is no longer a hypothesis, it is documented fact. The US National Security Strategy explicitly frames “American energy dominance” as a strategic priority, and the Trump administration has made no secret of using LNG exports as leverage to extract political and economic concessions from European governments.

The Druzhba situation, however, requires more careful reading. The attacks on Hungarian and Slovak energy infrastructure are most plausibly the work of the EU-NATO establishment, which includes liberal-Atlanticist factions within the US state apparatus but should not be simply equated with the White House. The timing is particularly telling: these moves were clearly aimed at destabilising the Orbán government ahead of the Hungarian elections. Given that Orbán is one of Trump’s closest European allies, it would be strange to lay this at the White House’s door. What we are seeing is the permanent transatlantic state — the Brussels-NATO apparatus — pursuing its own institutional interest in eliminating a disruptive element, even at the cost of working against a sitting US president’s ally.

The broader point stands regardless: energy has become the primary lever through which both Washington and the Brussels apparatus discipline member states that pursue independent policies. Hungary and Slovakia are being punished not for violating EU rules but for refusing to subordinate their national interests to the Atlanticist consensus.

3. The Brussels “Silent Coup” and Strategic Self-Destruction

In one of your reports for MCC Brussels, you speak of a “silent coup” by the EU Commission. Why does the Brussels bureaucracy engage in an economically self-destructive game that serves Washington’s interests, and to what extent is the current crisis being used to seize powers that rightfully belong to sovereign nation-states?

Washington has long supported European integration on the reasonable calculation that one supranational government is easier to manage than dozens of national ones. The EU has therefore always functioned partly as an instrument of US influence. But reducing it to that alone would miss something important. The EU’s deeper function is the transfer of power from democratic nation-states to elite oligarchic interests — financial, corporate and bureaucratic — whose power grows precisely when governance is moved to institutions insulated from popular accountability. The Brussels apparatus serves a transnational superclass, and the American connection is one dimension of that, not the whole story.

What has changed under von der Leyen is the pace and brazenness of centralisation. The Iran war has provided a fresh opportunity. The Commission has used the crisis to assert control over foreign policy domains that formally belong to the High Representative, which is supposed to reflect the position of member states, establishing parallel structures, including an intelligence cell under direct Commission supervision and a new Directorate-General for the Middle East. The pattern is consistent: each new crisis becomes a pretext for another transfer of sovereignty upward, away from member states and away from institutions with at least some democratic anchor towards the structurally undemocratic supranational institutions of the EU.

4. Hungary’s “Strategic Autonomy” and Technological Bridges

While the EU demands an almost complete decoupling from the East, Budapest [under the previous government] maintained projects like the Paks II nuclear plant. Can such technological and energy-related cooperations serve as essential anchor points for a multipolar integration of Europe, and why was Hungary seemingly the only EU country taking the concept of “strategic autonomy” seriously?

Hungary’s insistence on completing Paks II, maintaining energy ties with Russia and preserving trade relations with China reflected a coherent understanding of what strategic autonomy actually requires in practice, as opposed to the rhetorical version Brussels peddles. Projects like Paks II matter not only for their energy output but as long-term anchors: they create technical and economic ties that are far harder to sever than political alignments, and they signalled to partners that Budapest intended to remain a serious interlocutor whatever institutional pressure it faces.

As for why Hungary stood largely alone, part of the answer is Orbán himself, a genuinely exceptional statesman by the dismal standards of contemporary European politics, one who has proven willing to absorb sustained financial and institutional punishment in defence of what he sees as Hungary’s national interests. But there is also a structural explanation. Until the 1990s, Central and Eastern European countries were largely shielded from the cultural and ideological colonisation that decades of US soft power, media dominance and Atlanticist institution-building imposed on Western Europe. The result is a more robust and unselfconscious sense of national identity. These societies were never fully “reprogrammed”, and Hungary under Orbán has been the country most willing to act on that historical difference.

5. The Weaponisation of “European Solidarity”

When Hungary temporarily halted diesel deliveries to Ukraine in response to pipeline blockades, it was condemned in Brussels as “unsolidary”. Is the term “European solidarity” today merely an ideological weapon used to suppress national interests and stigmatise any diplomatic path — such as the one favoured by the Global South (BRICS)?

The selective application of “European solidarity” tells you everything you need to know about what the concept actually means in practice. EU member states Hungary and Slovakia, whose populations are suffering measurable economic harm from pipeline disruptions carried out by Ukraine, are lectured about their obligations to the bloc. Meanwhile, Ukraine, which is not even a member state, is treated as though it commands unconditional loyalty from every European government. When Hungary suspended diesel deliveries in direct response to attacks on its own infrastructure, it was condemned. When Ukraine attacks the infrastructure of EU members, Brussels finds nothing to say.

The concept has in effect become an ideological enforcement tool, a way of delegitimising any government that deviates from the Atlanticist consensus rather than a genuine principle of mutual support. Countries that pursue diplomatic engagement with Russia, China or the Global South are framed as threats to European unity. Solidarity, in this usage, means alignment with EU-NATO and liberal-Atlanticist strategic priorities, and those who question that alignment are cast as enemies of Europe rather than defenders of European interests.

6. Germany: The Loyal Vassal and its Deindustrialisation

Germany follows the line from Washington most faithfully, yet it suffers the most from deindustrialisation. Why does the German political elite — in stark contrast to the previous leadership in Budapest — offer no significant resistance to the systematic weakening of its own economic foundation?

Germany’s incapacity to resist its own economic degradation makes sense once you appreciate how thoroughly the country was reoriented after 1945. The post-war Atlanticist reprogramming went far deeper in Germany than anywhere else in Western Europe, reshaping not only political institutions but universities, media, think tanks and the formation of several successive generations of professionals whose entire worldview was built within transatlantic frameworks. The Atlanticist power bloc in Germany is hegemonic in a way that has no real parallel in other countries, and any politician who strays from the Washington consensus faces immediate pathologisation, usually framed as a dangerous echo of the country’s worst historical chapters.

Nonetheless, despite this, up to a certain point, Germany was able to conduct a semi-autonomous policy. Under Schröder (and partly under Merkel), Germany managed to carve out a degree of strategic semi-autonomy vis-à-vis Russia, of which Nord Stream was the most tangible expression. That experiment proved threatening enough to provoke a sustained effort to re-establish full control: the gradual marginalisation of politicians willing to defend German economic interests, and the careful cultivation of those who would not. Friedrich Merz is the outcome of that selection process, a leader who combines assertive language with total strategic subordination and who presides over the managed decline of German industry without seriously contesting it.

7. Vulnerabilities of the BRICS and the Risk of Collapse

You have warned against “excessive confidence” in the success of multipolarity. What is the greatest structural or political vulnerability within the BRICS alliance that the US might exploit to cause the emergence of this new world order to collapse?

Yes, I think there is a good deal of complacency in pro-multipolarity circles, a tendency to treat the transition to a new international order as essentially inevitable and the US as capable of slowing it only marginally. I take a less deterministic view. As said already, a new international order requires, by definition, some degree of order and stability. By engineering permanent destabilisation, the US can create serious structural problems for the BRICS project without needing to win any direct confrontation.

The vulnerability the US is best placed to exploit is the strategic incoherence of the Global Majority’s collective response. Russia is engaged in a de facto military confrontation with NATO. Meanwhile, China continues to avoid direct conflict at virtually any cost, and Iran has largely been left to rely on its own military means to respond to the US-Israeli aggression (albeit with indirect support from China and Russia). The BRICS has no unified security doctrine, no shared deterrent framework and its members continue appealing to UN mechanisms and a rules-based order whose fictional character the situation in Gaza has made impossible to deny. Continued reliance on frameworks that demonstrably do not function risks signalling to the Western bloc that escalation carries no serious cost.

For all its waning power, the Western imperial bloc remains remarkably united. Developing a comparable strategic coherence among the countries of the Global Majority is probably the single most important task facing those who want to see the multipolar transition succeed.

8. The Middle East Conflict and the Iran Crisis

How does the current war involving the US, Israel and the “decapitated” Iranian leadership fit into this broader struggle for global dominance? Is this an attempt to reassert unipolar control over a key region of the multipolar world?

The war on Iran follows the same logic I described earlier: rather than direct confrontation with great powers, the US targets the weaker nodes of the rival system. Iran fits this role precisely. It supplies roughly 13 to 15 percent of China’s oil imports, forms a key part of the emerging Russia-China-Iran strategic axis, and has long represented the main obstacle to uncontested Western military primacy in the most energy-rich region on earth. Removing it simultaneously advances US energy dominance objectives and serves Israeli regional interests, and those two agendas have now fully converged around a single operation.

What makes the current war qualitatively different from earlier episodes of US-Iranian confrontation is the recklessness with which it has been launched. Previous administrations understood, at least partially, why attacking Iran directly would be catastrophic, which is why they held back despite decades of Israeli pressure. That institutional caution is now gone. Europe is already absorbing the consequences: a severe energy shock, the risk of massive refugee flows and mounting demands for direct military involvement. Two devastating wars now run simultaneously on the continent’s doorsteps, one to the east that Washington stoked, and one to the south that Washington is actively waging. The first pushed Europe deeper into vassalage. The second carries the real risk of pushing it toward economic and social collapse.

9. The Future of European Sovereignty

As we look toward the remainder of 2026, do you see a path for a “sovereigntist” turn within Europe, or has the structural dependence on Washington and the Brussels bureaucracy already reached a point of no return for most EU member states?

Two structural problems make a genuine sovereigntist turn in Europe very difficult to foresee in the near term. The first is the absence of any major party willing to confront the EU as an institution rather than simply complain about it, which is actually a retreat from where the debate stood a decade ago. The second, and in some ways more fundamental, problem is that virtually no right-populist or sovereigntist party has grappled seriously with Europe’s structural subordination to the United States, of which the EU is partly an instrument. Attacking Brussels while embracing Washington is not a coherent sovereigntism. Indeed, it avoids the very question on which everything else turns: who ultimately controls Europe’s foreign policy, energy supply and military posture.

We are thus facing a paradox. The objective conditions for a break with the Atlanticist order are more favourable than they have been in decades. US power is visibly declining, the Trump administration is generating fractures with European publics that no previous administration has managed and the EU’s institutional legitimacy is in deep crisis. Yet the political forces best positioned to exploit this opening are instead either asleep, co-opted or lacking the geopolitical literacy to understand what is happening. The one piece of genuine good news is that awareness of the need for a radical break is spreading among ordinary Europeans. On this question, it is the so-called anti-establishment parties that have fallen furthest behind their own voters.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)