NATO and Russia on the Brink of War

by Karl Richter

Karl Richter cautions that Europe enters an autumn of decisions, as signals from Moscow and the West converge toward a perilous new stage.

I am not known as a scaremonger. Yet I also admit that I feel no fear in view of the developments that lie ahead. They are probably unavoidable. The Berlin regime, which — together with the entire mendacious “West of values” — has been working towards a confrontation with Russia, visible to all at least since 2014, should have been removed from circulation many years ago. The voter has clearly proven unable to accomplish this, and no asteroid is in sight either.

Therefore, the next stage of escalation is now approaching, and it is extremely dangerous. For the first time in recent days, Russia has officially made it clear that it already considers itself at “war” with NATO. Until now, Moscow had always avoided such declarations or rejected them with emphasis. None other than Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov laid down these new coordinates. At a G20 ministerial conference in New York, he said verbatim, according to the U.S. newspaper Politico: “NATO and the European Union want to declare, in fact, have already declared a real war on my country and are directly participating in it”

A few days later, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova added that there were indications of Ukrainian plans to carry out sabotage acts in Romania and Poland, in order to blame Russia. The Zelensky government in Kiev, she said, is preparing a casus belli — a legitimate pretext for the start of hostilities between Russia and NATO. “If all this is confirmed, we must admit: Europe has never in modern times stood so close to the outbreak of a Third World War.”

Lavrov is not Baerbock. When such statements come from the Russian Foreign Ministry, they carry special weight. They must be taken seriously. They reinforce the claims said to have been made by Russian diplomats last week at a secret meeting with European envoys in Moscow. According to the U.S. business news service Bloomberg, a senior Russian diplomat at that meeting justified the recent Russian drone flights over NATO territory as “a response to Ukrainian attacks on Crimea.” The Russian side is said to have emphasized that “those operations would not have been possible without NATO support.” Against this backdrop, Russian participants in the meeting are reported to have indicated that “Russia considers that it is already engaged in a confrontation including European nations.”

It is not my place to judge whether the “secret meeting” mentioned by Bloomberg actually took place and whether the quoted statements were in fact made there. I do not hide the fact that I have so far filed the alleged Russian drone flights under Western propaganda hysteria. Indeed, in a list published by Berlin’s Tagesspiegel on September 26, of seven drone incidents recorded since September 9, four were officially classified as “unresolved.” Of course, it cannot be ruled out that Russia is now shifting gears and seeking to spread nervousness within NATO headquarters. Nevertheless, it sounds like a tall tale — comparable, for example, to the horror story that the inevitable “expert” Carlo Masala serves up to the readers of his potboiler If Russia Wins: in it, Russia begins its aggression against the West, prophesied for 2028, with the conquest of a small Estonian town and a tiny offshore island in the Baltic Sea. One should not take the Russians for stupider than oneself.

For Western warmongers, however, the statements from Moscow, which seem to confirm the drone escalation, are of course a godsend. They now have yet another pretext for their war preparations. German Defense Minister Pistorius set the official line. On the sidelines of a conference of central German state premiers, he suggested a “new reality” “we must deal with,” since we are now “attacked in hybrid fashion with disinformation campaigns and through drone intrusions.” And: “We are not at war, but we are also no longer in complete peace.”

What is indisputable is the fact that NATO completely reverses the actual causal relationship in all this: after all, the chief party responsible for this extremely dangerous escalation is not Russia but NATO, which has been deliberately pouring oil on the fire through its continued support of Ukraine for now three and a half years, and which, at the latest with the Maidan coup in 2014, set the course towards confrontation. No one who pays attention to the facts denies this. Only the average German citizens, of course, know nothing about it and have nothing to object to in the blatant war preparations of his government. If it were otherwise, they would have to be out on the streets by the hundreds of thousands.

Unfortunately, the Russian side cannot be absolved of co-responsibility for things having reached this point. The course and outcomes of the “special military operation” in Ukraine are anything but glorious. Since February 2022, Putin has, on countless occasions, warned of “red lines” that the West must not cross — yet the West has crossed every one of them, and nothing, absolutely nothing, has happened. The Kremlin should hardly be surprised that barkers like Merz, Starmer, and Macron no longer take Russian threats seriously and now have no inhibitions at all in their support for the Ukrainians. Ukrainian drones are now systematically targeting Russia’s energy infrastructure — not only in Crimea — and doing so with real success. All this with active Western support, including German help in building long-range missiles without range restrictions. After three and a half years of war, the Russian side seems further than ever from finally extinguishing the Ukrainian blaze. How is this supposed to go on?

It is not as if there have not long since been critical voices in Russia itself. One of the most prominent, former intelligence officer Igor V. Girkin (better known by his pseudonym Igor I. Strelkov), has been behind bars for years. That does not prevent him from repeatedly making plainspoken situation analyses. Most recently, at the beginning of September, he warned that the Russian “special operation” in Ukraine had in fact failed: “We will neither tomorrow, nor the day after tomorrow, nor the day after that, win without very great efforts. And there will be no compromise, the war will continue. (…) We were unable in the summer to break through the front anywhere. We were unable in the summer to do anything except finally drive the enemy out of Chasiv Yar, which was attacked for 16 months — a city of 20,000 inhabitants! (…) The enemy has no need to conscript this age group [16-year-olds], to tighten exit regulations, or even to maintain existing exit regulations. Why should the enemy need more people, if he manages with the forces at his disposal? Yes, perhaps the enemy loses a certain number of potential soldiers. But at the moment he apparently does not need them at all. That is a disgrace.”

There is little to add to this. One thing, however, remains: the war that the West is waging in Ukraine against Russia will not end on its own. With Trump’s United States behind it, the West can continue it for a very long time. After the Ukrainians, the Poles can be sacrificed in Ukraine, and afterward, as needed, other Europeans, of course also the Germans, who are now having conscription reintroduced for precisely this purpose. And Russia and Russian society will not be able to endure the burdens associated with this forever. If Russia wants peace, confrontation with the West is in fact unavoidable. The West leaves Moscow no other choice. The stubbornness and determination with which Merz, Kallas, von der Leyen and company sabotage every peace solution and instead talk up and provoke war are gravely criminal.

Alexander Dugin, the great theorist of the multipolar world order, recently made a grave remark: Russia must end the war with a victory. Otherwise it will perish. Exactly this was already prophesied in 1997 by U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in his geopolitics classic The Grand Chessboard. He devoted no fewer than twenty pages to Ukraine. The question is: when will the penny drop in the Kremlin?

(Translated from the German)