A victim of Russia’s brutal aggression that’s generating a proper humanitarian catastrophe this winter, Ukraine is also stuck between two kinds of Western populism. One is that of Donald Trump and his European far-right equivalents, who don’t care much about either Ukraine or the rules-based order, only their private interests. The other one is that of the anti-Russian (and anti-Trump) hawks who tend to wrap the cynical interests of the military-industrial complex in phoney liberal rhetoric as they pretend to defend the values they don’t truly adhere to — not in Ukraine anyway.
With the Munich Security Conference, Europe’s most important event for foreign policy and military experts, approaching, its longtime chairman, Wolfgang Ischinger, set the agenda regarding the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, which is shifting into its fifth year this month. As long as Ukraine defends Europe, he told the Tagesspiegel, the Russian threat to Europe isn’t huge, but once the war is over, it will increase enormously.
Even as he rushed to deny that he doesn’t want peace to be achieved any time soon, the message was clear: Ukraine is helping European countries to prepare for war with Russia (no matter how implausible this eventuality is looking now, given it presumes Kremlin rulers are essentially suicidal).
At least this is how the Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin, Andrii Melnyk, read Ischinger’s stance. The argument that “Ukraine should bleed out just to buy Europe more time for its own defence” was cynical, he told Ischinger on X. Ukrainians urgently need a ceasefire, insisted the ambassador.
Meanwhile, the idea that peace in Ukraine would be premature remains predominant in a few major European capitals, especially London, as well as inside hawkish American think tanks which have invested their reputation in defeating Russia — a goal that appears to be further away than ever before. Two prominent foreign policy scholars, Michael Kimmage and Hanna Notte, put it far more candidly than Ischinger in a Foreign Affairs piece. “Most important, the US and Europe shouldn’t rush any talks to end the conflict,” they wrote.
This sentiment prevailed at the meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council at the end of January, Hungarian foreign minister Peter Szijjarto suggested in an interview. Several European foreign ministers, he claimed, openly stated at the meeting that “the European Union is not prepared for peace”. This echoes Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s claim, made a year ago (according to Ukrainian media), that peace in Ukraine was riskier than war.
The rationale behind these arguments is really hard to comprehend. Western powers have been steering Ukraine towards refusing any realistically attainable compromise for many years. The only result this policy has achieved is that realistic conditions for peace have considerably deteriorated compared to what Ukraine would have been getting by default during the talks in Istanbul in 2022 or Minsk in 2015.
The threat of Russia attacking NATO countries is even harder to substantiate in a rational, unemotional conversation. Direct conflict between Russia and the West, which both sides made a point to avoid in the last four years, means nuclear war, which would end human civilisation as we know it. Economically and demographically, Russia is a dwarf compared with the EU alone, not to mention the combined force of the EU, the US and Britain. It can’t win a war against the West without resorting to nuclear weapons.
An all-out conflict with the West is not a part of the mainstream political discourse in Russia or an ideological goal — unlike the USSR, modern Russia has no real ideology. There is no way Russia would attack NATO countries unless it senses a genuinely existential threat — through the blockade of its Baltic ports or Western-assisted missile strikes on Moscow from Ukraine’s territory. It’s indicative enough that for the last four years, Moscow hasn’t been directly responding to what people like former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson openly call the West’s proxy war against Russia.
Wild claims grossly misinterpreting Russia’s motives and intentions are an integral part of jingoistic populism, which has been fuelling this conflict for years. So, it has turned out, was the false promise of defeating the world’s leading nuclear power by a combination of economic and military means.
Speaking at the Munich conference in 2022, days before the start of Russia’s all-out invasion, the same Boris Johnson — then still in office — said that “Russia must fail and be seen to fail”. Just over a month later, Johnson would help derail the peace talks in Istanbul, which could have ended the armed conflict at the outset, according to top Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia and a plethora of other sources.
Addressing a huge crowd in Warsaw in March 2022, then-US President Joe Biden effectively pledged to topple Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”. He also claimed that Western sanctions had “reduced the rouble to rubble” and that the dollar was trading at 200 roubles at the time of speaking. It was a direct lie. The real rate on that day was 95 roubles per dollar. It is less than 80 roubles per dollar today. Last year, the rouble emerged as one of the world’s best-performing currencies, surging by 44 percent against the dollar year on year.
EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas kept saying that she believed in Ukraine’s ability to defeat Russia as late as October 2025 — an assessment that completely contradicted the reality on the ground since 2023 when, after the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russia began its slow offensive, which continues today, while Ukraine’s crucial infrastructure is being turned into rubble and the country is rapidly depopulating.
Coming from people who claim to be “liberals”, this unhinged populism creates a paradoxical situation in which certified far-right populists, such as Trump or Hungary’s Orban, as well as the leaders of Germany’s AfD, begin to come across as reasonable and conflict-averse people when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine. They’ve long figured out that they can exploit their opponents’ Russophobia by exposing their incessant lies, exaggerations and unfounded boasts.
The West’s entire policy towards Russia and Ukraine for the last 30 years has been a catastrophic failure, which has created a great boon and an inexhaustible source of political fuel for anti-establishment actors. The never-ending postponement of peace in Ukraine derives from the fact that too many people have been too badly invested in unrealistic outcomes of the war, so they keep buying more and more time to mitigate the impact. But it comes at a huge cost that Ukrainians are paying with their lives and their country’s future.
Over the past several weeks, the Russian government has made a series of decisions so thoroughly perplexing that some Russians now believe they are witnessing a conscious and deliberate effort to detonate their country from within. (Probably your own government is behaving similarly. See? We aren’t so different after all. Why can’t we all just get along?)
Today I would like to share with you a sampling of Russian-language commentaries on this subject.
But first: Some brief background.
The first major event that is causing extreme trepidation within Russian society is the government’s campaign to block Telegram and limit and restrict internet access while forcing everyone to use Russia’s new FSB messenger, MAX. As part of this campaign, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) is also waging all-out war on VPNs, which have basically become mandatory if you want to use the internet in Russia.
Meanwhile, the entire country is experiencing periodic mobile internet outages. In some areas, mobile internet completely stopped working months ago. The government has created a “white list” of “approved” websites and apps that can be accessed during these outages. (They have reportedly even started testing this “white list” on home WiFi networks around Rostov-on-Don). The official explanation for these restrictions is that they are necessary to combat drone attacks. The last few weeks have seen some of the largest and most destructive drone attacks against Russia since the start of the SMO, so the official explanation might not be the most compelling one, as is so often the case.
Roskomnadzor is still a long way off from completely blocking Telegram (it typically works with a VPN), and the attack on “unapproved” web traffic has already resulted in some disastrous friendly fire incidents. For example, the government agency reportedly blocked IP addresses that are used to process bankcard payments, resulting in an hours-long shutdown of digital payment services in Moscow.
Then there is the Siberian Cow Slaughter.
To make a long (and ongoing) story short, authorities are killing the livestock of small farms in several regions of Siberia, purportedly to stop the spread of diseases (without bothering to test any of the animals before killing them). The farmers have been compensated with paltry sums that are only a fraction of the actual market value of their animals. Many are unable to purchase new animals and are now financially ruined.
When farmers began to share videos of their cows being slaughtered for no reason, authorities resorted to traditional terror and intimidation tactics.
Meanwhile, the livestock of large and politically well-connected corporate farming operations in the area have remained untouched.
All of the above begs the question: Why is the Russian government doing all of these very destructive and foolish things?
Russian-language news outlets and Telegram channels have been sharing various theories that might help answer this question.
Let’s begin with a commentary published at the end of March by Channel Stalingrad, an excellent independent outlet edited by “like-minded individuals who reject the liberal capitalism imposed on Russia after the collapse of the USSR”:
Telegram is de facto blocked, Putin’s authorities make no secret of their plans to restrict internet access through a system of “whitelisted sites,” and mobile internet has begun to be shut down under the pretext of combating drones. Along with this, a bill has been introduced in the State Duma that would effectively ban criticism and accusations of anyone in the media until a guilty verdict is finalized. It has outraged even those completely loyal to the Kremlin.
This is a blow to everyone, especially those who make money online and on social media by promoting their goods and services. It also simply creates everyday inconvenience for absolutely all Russian citizens. But the Kremlin seems to have lost its mind. The reason is most likely their conviction in the firmness of their power and the silence of the people.
But it is impossible to ignore the fact that the “tsar’s” lawlessness has reached cosmic proportions. What is Vladimir Vladimirovich planning? What is he preparing his “vertical” for? Mobilization? War with NATO? Logically speaking (if the concept of logic applies to the “vertical”), the Ozero cooperative [the group of oligarchs who support Putin] needs a completely controlled information space to nip any “surprises” in the bud. Combined with war fatigue, all this creates, at the very least, a basis for protest. And this isn’t just information noise. […]
But the main thing currently shaking the Tsar’s throne is the lawlessness in Novosibirsk, the [“anti-epidemic” measures] that have deprived a huge number of people of their sources of income without any justification, not even legal ones. The farmers surveyed don’t believe the diagnoses of pasteurellosis and rabies: those who have been raising livestock for a long time would easily recognize the symptoms. […]
In addition to the Novosibirsk region, livestock genocide has also been perpetrated in the Altai and Transbaikal territories, Buryatia, and the Altai Republic. […]
Novosibirsk Region Governor Andrei Travnikov called the mass slaughter of livestock “a strict but necessary veterinary measure.” This is par for the course for Russia’s “leaders.” Putin’s officials are not accustomed to admitting responsibility. We will never hear the truth from them. Because the fairy tales about slaughtering cattle due to pasteurellosis don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Schizophrenia is off the charts. They don’t even remember their own decisions. On October 31, 2022, the Ministry of Agriculture, by its Order No. 770, approved veterinary regulations for the implementation of preventive, diagnostic, therapeutic, restrictive, and other measures, the establishment and lifting of quarantines and other restrictions aimed at preventing the spread and eliminating outbreaks of various types of pasteurellosis. This regulation is completely inconsistent with the lawlessness currently unfolding in the Novosibirsk Region and other regions.
The uproar on Telegam, which will soon be blocked, or has already been blocked, partially helped draw attention to the situation. Still, the only thing this publicity has achieved is control over the procedure itself and at least some regulations for compensation payments. But this is far from certain.
What is happening is complete lawlessness and legal chaos. A logical question: for what purpose? Perhaps some of the Kremlin’s elite are using these informational outlets to fight their competitors. Moreover, they do so without regard for the consequences. As happened, for example, in 2023, when the desire to remove Shoigu from the Russian Ministry of Defense through wholesale criticism of the army command and the promotion of Wagner sparked Prigozhin’s rebellion. Incidentally, criticism of the closure of Telegram is often interpreted as a struggle between the “Kremlin towers.” One of them is lobbying for “de-Telegramization,” while others are trying to stir up a rebellion against it. Consequently, farmers in the Novosibirsk region could very well have fallen victim to the games of Putin’s “vertical,” which is extremely distant from the region, from livestock farming, and from the aspirations of the ordinary people under its control.
If this is indeed the case, Putin has lost control of the state. And this could very well end in disaster. Quite soon.
Our next commentary comes from Yandex’s blogging platform, which is sort of like Russian Substack:
According to the agenda, our country is on the verge of a monumental leap. True, the nature of this leap raises questions among those accustomed to measuring progress in factories built, rockets launched, or technologies implemented. But this is apparently an outdated approach. Modern Russian management has discovered a simpler and more effective path—development by subtraction.
Imagine a gardener who wants to grow a giant pumpkin. A normal gardener fertilizes the soil, waters the beds, and protects the seedlings from frost. Our strategic gardener, however, believes otherwise: the pumpkin will grow to enormous proportions if weeds are prevented from growing, if clouds are prevented from flying past the pumpkin without drenching it with rain, if frosts are prevented from appearing prematurely…
In short, a new word in agricultural technology—you just need to think carefully about what to prohibit, compile an extensive and comprehensive list of prohibitions, and impose it on the pumpkin: grow, you bastard!
In the digital realm, we live in a harsh asceticism. The internet is sometimes shut down, sometimes left in place, but with conditions. VPNs are sometimes banned, sometimes allowed, but by subscription, like premium access to freedom, and for a fee. YouTube, social media, Roblox—everything reminiscent of a global world is being crushed by the digital sovereignty steamroller. The logic is simple: if you remove everything incomprehensible and alien, something native will inevitably flourish. True, so far only the market for workarounds is flourishing, but these are details. […]
It’s as if the government has decided that national development isn’t about creating something new, but about completely erasing the old. If you ban everything bad, it will automatically become good. If you take away people’s internet access, they’ll start watching Skabeeva and Solovyov on TV [government propaganda]. If you ban vaping, everyone will quit smoking. If you increase fines, everyone will become law-abiding.
But history teaches us otherwise: bans don’t create the future. They only preserve the present. You can ban English words, but without modern technology, the language will still deteriorate. You can ban travel, but without knowledge sharing, science will wither. You can force people to have children, but without security for the future, families will not be happy.
The result is a paradox. The list of what’s “not allowed” no longer fits on one page. And the list of what’s “allowed” remains frighteningly short.
The government offers us a fortress-state, safe, quiet, and forbidden. But a fortress is a place for defense, not for living. Life requires roads, not barriers. We need factories, not fines. We need ideas, not bans.
For now, the only sector that’s truly developing and showing steady growth in the country is the industry of restrictions. And if things continue this way, we risk becoming the most developed country in the world in terms of the number of restrictions. But living in this “developed” world will become absolutely impossible.
Finally, I would like to share two texts I came across while browsing Yaplakal, a popular Russian news and discussion forum.
Both texts are essentially conspiracy theories, but they illustrate the rampant disillusionment and distrust in the government that is entirely ignored by Very Important and Serious Russia Experts With Direct and Indirect Ties to the Russian Government.
I came to see my dad today and started whining over a glass of tea.
My dad is already at the age where he doesn’t need this internet. But after listening to me for a while, he abruptly said, “Stop. You’re telling me about prohibition and the collapse of the [Soviet] Union. Look at how it happened.”
He loves conspiracy theories.
“To destroy the Union, they started an unpopular war. It lasted a long time. During this time, the budget was depleted and people became disillusioned with the army.”
“Then they started passing weird laws. They tightened the screws for parasitism, any manifestation of dissent, etc. This was to create disillusionment with the government. And finally, they finished it all off with prohibition. They ruined an entire industry where people worked and, most importantly, killed people’s ability to relax normally. People didn’t drink less after that, but they started drinking whatever they could, and on the sly. They started giving prison sentences for selling alcohol. People started going blind from counterfeit alcohol. Well, it’s just like in your VPN, where people are willing to trust who knows who just to get around the restrictions.”
“And then, when distrust of the government reached its peak, when neither the people nor the army wanted such a government anymore, and anyone but them would rather have it, a coup happened. And mind you, it was almost bloodless. How much do they have to annoy everyone so that no one will stand up for the country?”
“And most importantly, all this was always done with the message that everything was being done for the people and the country. Mind you, it’s still the same. All to protect people from the corrupting influence of Western vodka. You’ll see, they already did it once, now they’re just repeating it.”
Of course, I laughed. Well, yes, there are a lot of coincidences. The long-standing scam, the empty budget, the idiotic laws and restrictions, the people’s disillusionment. There are a lot of coincidences, of course, but it’s just a coincidence.
Observing Roskomnadzor’s persistence in blocking Telegram and tightening control over messaging apps, I come to the conclusion that we’re misinterpreting what’s happening. The average person sees this as a fight against the opposition or spies. The opposition interprets it as a pre-election crackdown.
But what if this is part of a larger plan? A global rebranding of power, initiated by those who will soon leave the political arena.
Let’s consider the mechanism of a low barrier to entry for the future government. The scheme, although cynical, is quite effective.
Stage: Creating Problems. The current elite passes extremely unpopular laws.
We see this now—laws on blocking, mandatory biometrics, VPN bans, three-year data retention.
The old regime acts as an authoritarian controller, depriving citizens of their familiar tools.
The result is mass discontent. People previously apolitical begin to perceive the state as a source of problems. A grandmother, deprived of contact with her grandson, experiences negativity. Businesses losing customers due to restrictions are ready to support any changes.
The old regime, consciously or not, is generating hundreds of thousands of “silent protesters.”
Formation of a critical mass of irritation: When instant messaging apps are finally blocked, society will be divided into: 15% of tech-savvy users capable of bypassing the blockages (for them, the situation is not critical); 85% of the population, who will find themselves cut off from their usual communication channels.
For these 85%, any future government that declares, “We’re canceling this absurdity. Here’s the ‘Enable Telegram’ button,” will automatically become a savior. A low barrier to entry is achieved not by building something new, but by eliminating the negative consequences of previous policies.
An analogy with the 1990s: Gorbachev’s “dry law” generated hatred. Yeltsin, by figuratively legalizing alcohol, gained the people’s love. It doesn’t matter that this had its downsides. Allowing the banned became the key to high ratings.
The Savior stage: The arrival of a new government with a simple solution. Imagine: the year is 2026. Telegram is down, WhatsApp is unavailable. Communication has returned to 2005 levels. Discontent is skyrocketing. And then a “Technocrat” appears (his origin is irrelevant). His program consists of two points:
Repeal all laws blocking instant messaging apps within 24 hours.
Pay bonuses to telecom operators for restoring traffic.
What’s going on? The entire country, which until recently hated the “regime,” greets him with applause. The threshold for entering power is minimal. He doesn’t need to understand complex issues. He simply lifted the ban.
This is precisely the technology of power change with a low threshold for legitimization. The old regime has so exhausted the people with senseless restrictions that anyone who lifts them will be perceived as a benefactor.
What are the motives of the old regime? Why are they playing the role of the “bad guy”? The most pressing question. Don’t they understand that they are working for the successor? They do. But they have limited choices:
Either they tighten control, losing ratings but buying time.
Or they don’t tighten it, and they will be swept away in the near future, since instant messengers are used to coordinate protests.
They choose the lesser evil. And at the same time, they create the perfect “safety cushion” for their successor. The successor has probably already been chosen. He is waiting. He already has a decree ready on the “abolition of digital oppression.”
We’re outraged by the bans imposed by Roskomnadzor and the parliamentarians. But perhaps they’re simply fulfilling their role, laying the groundwork for the next political cycle.
The new government in Russia will get an easy start not because of its own merits, but because of the actions of the previous one. All it will take is a promise to “restore everything as it was,” and the people will give it their full support.
So, this opinion has taken hold, should I go to the nuthouse, or is there some truth to it?
Finland is moving to lift its long-standing legal ban on hosting nuclear weapons within Finnish territory. On NATO’s sensitive frontier with Russia, this is a step in the wrong direction.
The U.S. should be the first country to object to this reckless shift.
On March 5, Helsinki published draft amendments to the Nuclear Energy Act and the Criminal Code that would allow nuclear weapons to be brought into or based on Finnish soil, despite widespread public skepticism toward the change.
Officials say Finland is not seeking its own nuclear arsenal, and President Alexander Stubb has stressed that his country does not intend to host nuclear weapons in peacetime. However, this change would remove a constraint on future governments, meaning any subsequent administration could decide to permit the permanent presence of nuclear weapons.
Finland’s ban on nuclear weapons dates back to 1987, when Finland was neutral and trying to stay in the good graces of its powerful neighbor, the Soviet Union. In practice, the ban was originally meant to preempt the potential stationing of Soviet nuclear weapons on Finnish territory.
Even after the end of the Cold War, Finland stuck with the ban, reflecting a deep-seated national commitment to remaining nuclear-free. Now, the government wants to lift that constraint.
Defense Minister Antti Häkkänen claims this change is about aligning Finnish law with NATO requirements. Yet Finland joined NATO with the ban intact. The alliance didn’t insist Finland change course on this longstanding policy, and for good reason: NATO’s deterrent posture already works fine without placing nukes in Finland.
Why this matters to Washington
This development has direct implications for Washington. Finland has been a NATO ally since 2023, and the U.S.-Finland Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) ties American forces to Finland’s territory and infrastructure.
Signed in 2023 and in force since 2024, the DCA creates a framework for U.S. access, training, transit, and the prepositioning and storage of U.S. equipment and materiel in Finland.
The DCA was finalized when Finnish law still banned nuclear explosives. That legal stricture helped keep the U.S.-Finnish defense relationship explicitly non-nuclear.
If Finland now unilaterally lifts that ban, it rewrites the rules of the relationship. Nobody in Washington has publicly asked for this shift, and it isn’t obvious the U.S. even wants it.
Even if there are no plans to bring U.S. nukes to Finland, simply raising the possibility adds stress to the security situation in Europe. If a crisis heats up and the Kremlin thinks nuclear-capable NATO warplanes might be operating from Finland — which shares a more than 800-mile border with Russia — things could quickly spin out of control.
Researchers at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) warn that the presence of nuclear-capable F-35s near Russia’s strategic submarine bases, which lies roughly 100 miles from the Finnish border, could lower Russia’s threshold for preemptive action.
Russian officials, meanwhile, are already saying that, if Finland were to host nuclear weapons, it would become a direct threat to Russia and prompt Moscow to take “appropriate measures” in response.
A wider European trend
Finland’s proposal comes at a time when parts of Europe are flirting with a more nuclearized continent.
French President Emmanuel Macron, in a major doctrine update on March 2, said France would increase its nuclear warhead stockpile and hinted that nuclear-armed French jets could temporarily deploy to allied countries under a concept he called “forward deterrence.” Leaders from Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Poland have reportedlyheldtalks with France and the United Kingdom about possible nuclear weapons cooperation.
The latest developments come amid growing European anxiety about whether the U.S. will continue to serve as Europe’s security guarantor even as Washington prioritizes Asia and launches new wars in the Middle East.
Some European analysts have warned that this cascade is dangerous. As French political scientist Olivier Zajec argues, the notion of “friendly proliferation” in Europe is a dangerous illusion, driven by fear of U.S. abandonment. In reality, any European nuclear expansion would just provoke an American backlash and fray alliances, not make things safer. Europeans who imagine Washington sitting back while Europe nuclearizes are fundamentally misreading the U.S. strategic position.
Simply put, Washington isn’t interested in letting Europe’s nuclear map get more complicated. As Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, said earlier this month, the U.S. would “strenuously oppose” any effort by a European ally to develop its own nuclear capabilities.
The same logic should apply to hosting more nuclear weapons near Russia. “Friendly proliferation” is a fantasy. Adding nuclear weapons or nuclear actors to the mix just raises the risks of misunderstandings or accidental escalation.
Colby’s broader “NATO 3.0” vision rests on a clear division of labor: Europeans should focus on building strong conventional forces, while the nuclear deterrent stays American. That deterrent is already formidable: The U.S. stores approximately 100 nuclear weapons across Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Turkey.
At the Munich Security Conference last month, Colby emphasized that Europe should take responsibility for its own conventional defense, while mentioning extended nuclear deterrence only in passing. The idea is that Europe should be able to deter Russia without tangling the continent in a mess of nuclear tripwires.
Colby’s earlier writings did entertain the possibility of nuclear proliferation, but only in East Asia, and only if China’s rise made it impossible for the U.S. to keep the regional balance with conventional forces alone. That doesn’t apply to Europe.
Nordic restraint
In October 2025, Finland and the U.S. signed a deal to cooperate on icebreakers, and U.S. shipyards are now working with Finnish partners to build new Arctic Security Cutters. This collaboration with Finland represents a capability boost for America’s Arctic presence.
President Stubb has also hinted at his desire for a more diplomatic European posture toward Russia, arguing that Europe needs channels of dialogue and that at least one European leader should be prepared to reopen contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin. These are the initiatives Washington should be encouraging.
Surveys suggest that such an approach would gel with the views of ordinary Finns. Recent polls found that 77 percent of Finnish people oppose basing nuclear weapons in Finland, and 84 percent support joining the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which would comprehensively ban nukes in the country.
A coalition of Finnish NGOs, including Finnish Pugwash, ICAN Finland, and Physicians for Social Responsibility, has argued there are “no operative grounds to import nuclear weapons to Finland” and recommended preserving legal bans on nuclear deployments in both peacetime and wartime.
Finnish opposition parties, including the Social Democrats and the Left Alliance, have criticized the idea and are calling for a proper debate in parliament. Antti Lindtman, leader of the Social Democrats, has argued that the legal change would damage Finland’s security and distance the country from the nuclear policies traditionally followed by its Nordic neighbors.
The U.S. should state clearly that nuclear hosting arrangements on NATO’s newest and longest Russia-facing border are not welcome. Washington should reinforce conventional deterrence and emphasize the need for dialogue and arms control. If the goal is a safer Europe, Finland’s nuclear shift is the wrong move.
Russia and Ukraine agree to Easter ceasefire: Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Friday that he has ordered Russian forces to cease fire “in all directions” from Saturday afternoon through Easter Sunday, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying Kyiv is “ready for symmetrical steps.” The truce comes after Zelenskyy had asked the United States to pass a holiday ceasefire proposal to Moscow earlier this week. Zelenskyy added that “Russia has a chance not to return to strikes after Easter as well,” signaling Kyiv’s desire for the pause to extend beyond the weekend.
Trump wants to punish NATO for Iran War by withdrawing troops from Europe, report says: President Donald Trump has discussed with advisers the possibility of withdrawing some of the more than 80,000 U.S. troops stationed in Europe, angered by NATO allies’ failure to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and by stalled efforts to acquire Greenland, according to a White House official cited by Reuters. The White House official said Trump is specifically considering bringing troops back to the United States rather than repositioning them within Europe. “He asked NATO specifically to come up with a plan [to secure the Strait] when we were in Davos” in January, the official said, “and they’re sort of not taking it seriously.”
In Moscow in July 1997, reporter Leonid Krutakov had a scoop. Anatoly Chubais, the Harvard-educated privatization boss and right hand of Boris Yeltsin, had been given a $3 million loan from Stolichny Bank just before that same bank — controlled by an intimidating “businessman” named Alexander Smolensky — won an auction for a state-owned agricultural property, Agroprombank.
It was a great story, but Krutakov had to make an epic journey to print it. First fired from Chubais-friendly Komsomolskaya Pravda, he was rejected by Moskovsky Komsomolets, then appealed to the legendary editor of Top Secret, Artem Borovik, before that magazine, too, turned him down. Finally Krutakov struck a deal to publish a piece called “Credit… Or Lose” — a play on the USAID-inspired “Vote or Lose” commercials crucial to Yeltsin’s recent re-election — in Izvestia. Immediately after, Izvestia editor Igor Golombiyevsky was fired, and in a town full of hotshot muckrakers, Krutakov was feted for turning four newsrooms upside down in pursuit of a single political bribery story.
I was eventually fortunate to get a chance to work under Leonid at his paper Stringer, and watched in admiration as he and a handful of colleagues took big risks at a time when Russian reporters were routinely shot, beaten, blown up, stuffed in drainpipes, or worse. Decades later, the writer I remembered for short-form breaking news has published a massive, meticulously researched history of the oil business called “Oil and Peace,” analogous in scope to books like Daniel Yergin’s The Prize. The book argues human history has become intertwined with oil to the point where there’s virtually no line between petroleum and politics itself, while underscoring the lunatic inefficiency of the oil-dominated world.
American analyses of these questions tend to focus obsessively on global warming, but Krutakov’s book spends more time focusing on the doomed math of tying so much of our lives — everything from light to food to antihistamines to dentures to transportation — to the production of one hydrocarbon. The high-energy lifestyles enjoyed by residents of the West are dependent on low extraction costs in developing nations, and the political unsustainability calculus is more troubling than the ecological one:
The energy density of oil is incredible… 159 liters of oil is equivalent to about 100 liters of gasoline. A month of driving equals a thousand kilometers, with an average consumption of 10 liters per kilometer. This means that the average driver burns as much energy in a month as it would take 12 people to build a three-story mansion in a year… It’s hard to even imagine how many people would have to work, and for how long, to provide the energy equivalent of one voyage of a supertanker from the Persian Gulf to Rotterdam.
Krutakov started working on this book, his first, two decades ago. Having never visited the U.S., he nonetheless spends a significant portion of the book tracing the rise of John D. Rockefeller, who’s described in enormous detail as a brilliant, morally dubious visionary. “Rockefeller built the world in which we live,” Krutakov says. “He laid the foundations of the oil industry as vertically integrated with an internal pricing system that allows controlling the cost of the final product.”
There are parts of the book that will cause an American reader to raise an eyebrow, like the assertion that the American Civil War “wasn’t fought over human rights or a struggle over slavery” but over two warring models of economics, between muscle and machine, “biological” and “mineral” energy. The bulk of America’s oil-producing regions were located in the South, which presented a considerable problem for the Union, which was heavily invested in the nascent new business empire led by Rockefeller.
It’s not news that a long list of subsequent wars were fought with control over the oil supply as either a central motivation or a significant subtext, with Hitler’s invasion of Russia in search of the Caspian petroleum fields a classic example. Krutakov he writes in detail about this key role oil played in triggering two world wars and misadventures in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. Still, the subject has never been more relevant than now. I asked him about oil’s role in the Iran war and what the future of a world rapidly burning through its energy reserves looks like:
MT: You say you’ve been working on this book for twenty years. What prompted you to start on this subject?
Leonid Krutakov: The topic seized me right after September 11, 2001. Then I realized that the world had entered a new phase of development, where energy resources became key to solving economic questions. The collapse of Enron, as the most “advanced” energy company in the world, showed that the ratio of real flows of physical oil to futures volumes of “paper oil” didn’t stand up to risk-hedging market tools. The market had been pushed too far into the future. The lever of financial engineering had exceeded the horizon of risk insurance. Regulatory political factors came to the forefront. It became clear that the energy component would lead the world to a global clash over energy sources, which we are witnessing today: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Russia, Iran…
MT: You write that the world cannot exist without oil. Will that always be the case? Is there an analog in history to our current oil dependence?
Leonid Krutakov: The world can exist without oil, but not in the same quantity and not in the same configuration as today. Oil is an accumulation of biological energy, concentrating enormous volumes of solar energy dispersed over time and space. One gallon of the gasoline we use today contains 90 metric tons of ancient plant substances. In one year, humanity burns a volume of fossil fuel equivalent to all the animal and plant life that inhabited the Earth over 400 years. We are eating through the lives and well-being of future generations.
Oil, of course, is not the only energy source. Today it is actively being replaced by LNG and coal, but these are also finite natural resources. Moreover, today’s agriculture is built on petrochemistry. Without nitrates and “targeted” pesticides, industrialized farms cannot exist, just as huge cattle farms cannot. As the Iran crisis shows, a shortage of oil and gas immediately drives up fertilizer prices, which means developing countries with growing populations will not be able to feed themselves.
So the world can exist without oil only in a limited format, which would lead to a decline in medical care and life expectancy (even ordinary aspirin is a petrochemical product). A drop in yields would lead to more hunger and epidemics in poorly developed countries. We would see a world of shrinking possibilities.
As for an analog to today’s dependence on oil, such dependence has always existed. Even in the era of Standard Oil, about 400 different products were produced from oil. Today this assortment has grown by orders of magnitude, including diapers and baby bottles. So the dependence has been growing all this time. And whenever energy-deficient countries faced questions of shortage, a global crisis followed. The analog of today is the 1973 crisis.
MT: Prior to the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Europe was largely dependent on Russian oil, as you wrote. Now the United States is in a war led by a president who wants to “take oil” from Iran. Are all wars now about energy (and oil in particular)?
Leonid Krutakov: It has always been so, for at least the last 150 years, since oil became the first (if you don’t count gold and silver) global commodity requiring unification of trading rules on a world scale. Oil became the first global commodity traded in only one currency. Oil lies at the core of the rules of the global market.
I show that the First and Second World Wars (Churchill regarded them as a single 30-year war) were also about energy resources, about the right to establish norms, standards, and regulations for the global market. The oil underpinning (more precisely, the kerosene underpinning) even ties to the Civil War of the North and South, the “oil triangle” war among three Eastern Seaboard states and agricultural states of America.
Iran, as I noted above, is only one link in the new Great War for the planet’s global market. The Libyan story began with a project to construct an oil pipeline to Italy along the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, which would make Europe, together with Russian pipelines, energy-independent from sea deliveries of oil and gas. Syria should have become part of the oil pipeline from Iran through Iraq, along the bottom of the Mediterranean to Europe. Literally on the eve of Syrian events, a tripartite memorandum Iran-Iraq-Syria was signed about the pipeline. Ukraine, before Maidan and the start of the Special Military Operation, was the main oil-and-gas hub between Europe and Russia.
In the same line is the explosion of the gas “Nord Stream” pipelines, which established a direct link between Germany and Russia, bypassing Ukraine. One can recall Biden’s statement on the eve of the explosion that the U.S. would stop gas deliveries via Nord Stream. When asked how, he said he couldn’t say at that moment. As for Venezuela, perhaps no need to remind—everything happened right before our eyes. So Iran is not a precedent.
MT: Thirty years ago American and European oil titans dominated the market and Western advisers considered Russia a minor power, unable to realize the potential of its natural resources. Have the roles changed at all?
Leonid Krutakov: Russia remains fundamentally a rentier country. Over the past 30 years Russia has failed to convert its energy opportunities into cognitive capital. We did not convert oil revenues into education and science, we did not recreate an autonomous technological and industrial contour, as Rockefeller and America managed to do from scratch. Russia remains a critically important factor on the global energy map. Its military potential is significant, the foundations of which were laid under the USSR. In this sense, Russia remains a politically significant subject of world relations, but there hasn’t yet been a fundamental reorientation of the country’s development strategy at a deep level. I say this with pain for my homeland, because genuine supremacy is formed not in raw materials or the military sphere, but in education. Knowledge and science make a country truly great and significant for the whole of world civilization.
MT: You write about the “red line” around the Arabian Peninsula. There a hot war has erupted. What do you think are its causes?
Leonid Krutakov: Since the discovery of the first oil on the Arabian Peninsula, the U.S. has made the kingdom its oil dominion. After World War II, when Churchill tried to strike a deal with Roosevelt to divide the Middle East resource base between the two nations, the U.S. president answered him unequivocally that “the oil of Saudi Arabia belongs to America.” In the second book, which is being prepared for publication now, I explain this in more detail, with references to primary sources. The strikes on Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar by Iran mean that Tehran understands very well what bets are being placed in today’s game. It understands where the Western world’s most vulnerable spot lies. It understands why Trump came with the war against Iran.
MT: You write that you hope to avoid a conventional history, and instead create a book that captures the “underground currents” of this time period, as might be visible to future generations. What prompted that approach?
Leonid Krutakov: There has been a lot of research written about oil. I was seeking a new approach, aiming to rise above market conjuncture. To assess oil not just as an energy resource, but as a foundation for the entire social order and the system of international relations. I set the task of explaining historical patterns not through the will and personal characteristics of political leaders (such as Trump, for example, or Putin), but through the material resources that allow history itself to materialize. To turn the future from unpredictable into predictable. To find a basis for a global agreement among key world players.
I believed that if you expose the real global problem and publicize it, the question of future world parity could be solved not on the basis of power resources, but on a rational approach to our possibilities and the resources of planet Earth.
MT: Switching topics: what don’t Americans understand about the war in Ukraine? What was your reaction when the West cut off access to Russian television and tried to arrest people like Dmitry Simes? In the 2000s you had a reputation as a fearless reporter — what memories do you have of those times?
Leonid Krutakov: I think the American government understands the reasons for the war in Ukraine very well. The fact that these reasons are unclear to the American people only shows that these reasons have not been made public, as in the cases of Venezuela and Iran. For Russia, the situation of Ukraine potentially joining NATO was an existential threat. It’s somewhat like placing Chinese or Russian military contingents in Mexico or Venezuela.
Everyone remembers how the Cuban Missile Crisis began, almost leading the world to nuclear war: the deployment of American medium-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads in Turkey. The USSR, in response, began placing its missiles in Cuba. In this sense, the Ukrainian situation is a replica of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Thank God, so far there has been no direct confrontation between the United States and Russia.
As for cutting off access to Russian television, I can only say that this is how it always happens when you lose in direct information confrontation. When your arguments yield to your opponent’s arguments. This happened in the Soviet Union. And, unfortunately, today in Russia with cutting off access to Telegram. You cannot retreat into your own shell. In a war of meanings, victory can be achieved only through meaning, content, arguments, ideas. Retreat from discussion does not mean victory; it means admission of defeat.
The attempt to arrest Dmitry Simes, like the killings of journalists, is a symptom of a deeper disease affecting the whole world discourse. The revolver has always been and remains the last argument in a debate when you have nothing left to respond with. Look at the film industry. Where is “Rain Man”? Where is “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”? Only lines and comics. We in the cultural sphere have similar trends…
I haven’t felt like a journalist for a long time. It all ended with the death of the Stringer, in the issue you also participated in. The last issue was, ironically, the one devoted to the events of September 11, 2001. How do I see that time? A time of global catastrophes and enormous possibilities. A time of adventurers and unscrupulous brokers. A huge country dying in bloody convulsions, while someone was making enormous fortunes from it. In the second book (a continuation of the first), I want to devote attention to this period—the period of the Great Privatization or the selling-off of the country at retail.
