Hanging from Les Grandes Miseres de la guerre (Miseries and Misfortunes of War) by Jacques Callot, 1632. Atrocity of the Thirty Year War, 1618-1648, fought in Central Europe. This was a religious war sparked by the Reformation war of the sixteenth century fought in Germany. Wikipedia Public Domain.

Prologue

On December 20, 2025, the European Union (EU) almost crossed the Rubicon. It tried seizing Russian financial assets in Belgium for funding and continuing the hopeless and bloody eleven-year war in Ukraine, under the fake excuse of Russian “reparations” to Ukraine. An Indian newspaper described and warned of the consequences of the evolving tragedy this way:

“Seize Frozen Russian Assets for Ukraine War Funding? Brussels eyes €90B “reparations loan” from matured bonds in Euroclear. Belgium warns of lawsuits, retaliation – Russia could grab €127B European assets [in Russia]. Putin calls it “theft.” Risk global financial chaos or lifeline for Kyiv?”

The answer is both. The refusal of Hungary and the warnings of Belgium stopped the EU’s grabbing of Russian assets. Yet to understand this EU provocative and hostile act, we need to have some historical background.

History matters

Western Europeans in the twenty-first century, mainly France, Germany, Holland, Italy and Austria, including the non-European country of England, have been opposing Russia for centuries. The reasons for the hostility cross religion, culture and the unique geostrategic position of Russia. Christianity in Russia came from the Greeks in the ninth century. Russians became “Orthodox.” But since the fifth century the Western Europeans, who in the fifth century were mostly barbarian inhabitants of the collapsing Roman Empire, were overwhelmingly “Catholic” by imperial fiat and under the leadership of the Pope in Rome. In the sixteenth century War of the Reformation, German “Protestants” violently separated themselves from the Pope. England shared the Christianity of the post-sixteenth century Germany. Indeed, the British shaped Protestant Christianity to fit the whims of their monarchs.

These powers, before and after they took their modern state form, Germany, France, Holland, Italy, Austria and England did not like Russia for more than different version of Christianity. They were afraid of Russia, the largest country on the planet for centuries. England in particular, did not wish to see Russia move south, in the Aegean and the Mediterranean because it feared Russia might disrupt its Indian trade landlines through the territory of the Ottoman Mongols. England always supported the Muslim and jihadist alien country of the Mongol Ottoman Turks as a possible obstacle to Russia. It cared less that the Mongols had occupied the land of the Greeks. England preferred the genocidal country of the Ottoman Turks to independent Greece, whose territory the Mongol Ottoman Turkey captured in 1453. And when the Greeks managed to defeat the Mongol Turks in the 1820s and gained their freedom as an independent nation state, the British and the French and the Austrians were unhappy. Some of their scholars had studied Greek history and were aware of the ancient greatness of Hellenic science and civilization. They had racist notions about modern Greeks. They did not help the Greeks to recover their land occupied by the Moslem Turks. In fact, England and possibly France probably funded the assassination of the first Greek President, Ioannes Kapodistrias, on September 27, 1831.

Kapodistrias was a genius in diplomacy. He became the Secretary of State of Russia, 1816-1822. He saved France from being divided after the defeat of Napoleon and created the neutrality constitution of Switzerland. Russia, France and England appointed him the President of Greece in 1828. But England did not appreciate Kapodistrias’ nation state building efforts, so, with Kapodistrias’ Greek enemies, England destroyed Kapodistrias. The “great” powers, Russia, England, France, sent a German king to rule Greece. That way, they made certain they would do to Greece whatever they pleased.

The first confrontation between Russia and Western Europeans took place during the Crimean War, 1853-1856. France and England and parts of Italy, under the name of the kingdom of Sardinia, joined the Ottoman empire against the Russian empire in order to prevent the collapse of Turkey.

However, the Ottoman empire / Turkey dissolved after WWI, 1914-1918, and, once again, England, France, Italy and the US came to the support of Turkey in order to grab its petroleum in Iraq, and to block Russia from moving towards the Aegean. In that process, they wrecked the Greek army, which they had sent against Turkey in Asia Minor, 1919-1922. The Greek army captured most of the Turkish territory, reaching the outskirts of Ankara. But all their victories were for nothing, as the Europeans, US and Soviet Union funded, trained and armed the Turkish army.

The West also invaded Russia during the Russian Revolution and civil war, 1917-1921. England, France and the US tried to destroy the Bolsheviks to no avail. The Western invaders caused destruction but indirectly consolidated the Russian Revolution. Russians did not exactly like foreigners trying to capture their country.

World War II, 1939-1945, tested the precarious balance of power in Europe with or without Russia that had become communist Soviet Union. Now the Germans, like in WWI, became the catalyst for mechanized war, slaughter and destruction on a massive scale, and the key role of the Soviet Union in crushing the barbarian Germans.

Continuing with its love affair with Turkey, England kept arming Turkey while preventing it from entering WWII. There’s little doubt England knew that Turkey was supporting Hitler’s Germany. On the other hand, Greece won the first victory of WWII with her defeat of larger Italian armies in Albania. England, however, did all it could to push Greece into the ruthless German war machine. But the paradoxical fact of WWII was that the Soviet Union fought on the side of England and the US. Communist Soviet troops fought the German invaders to death. The Germans killed about 25 million Russians but lost the war in their invasion of the Soviet Union / Russia. Exactly like the Russian winter, scorch earth strategy and Russian soldiers killed Napoleon’s troops in Moscow in 1812.

The Soviet leader Stalin and the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-1945, ended WWII and controlled Europe. They punished the criminal Nazi German leaders. Unfortunately, Roosvelt died and President Harry S. Truman, 1945-1953, imported Nazi scientists and engineers for their skills in weapons. Moreover, Truman’s advisors invented the national security threat of Soviet communism, thus precipitating the Cold War, 1945-1989, between Western Europe-US against the Soviet Union / Russia.

The “end” of the Cold War in 1989-1990 did not in fact diminish the Western NATO hostility towards the non-communist Russia. The NATO powers headed by the US were not impressed that the Soviet Union abandoned its empire and dissolved its imperial NATO-like military alliance. On the contrary, NATO took advantage of the disruption and original weakness of the disappearing Soviet Union. The Clinton administration started bombing Yugoslavia, an ally of Russia in Southeastern Europe. Simultaneously, NATO started absorbing former members of the Soviet Union, countries like Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary. NATO wanted to encircle Russia and bring its nuclear armaments to its borders, hence its subversion of Ukraine and the starting in 2014 of NATO’s war against Russia through Ukraine.

Germany-US

This very brief account brings us back to the present dangerous policy of the EU against Russia. Germany is behind this preposterous but illegal desire to rearm and lead the rest of the members of the EU to a war against Russia. I have no documentary proof, but it seems reasonable to assume that the US is behind Germany’s madness. The US maintains an army of occupation in Germany. The US drafted the constitution of Germany. But the US undid the Potsdam Treaty of 1945 that made illegal the armament of Germany.

Trump is saying he wants the end of the war in Ukraine, but the war continues. Trump also does nothing to stop Germany’s resurgent megalomania. He convinced EU to increase its military spending considerably. But why? Russia is threatening neither the US nor the EU. Does Trump or American policy makers consider the implications of another Nazi-like Germany?

As for France, the country remains silent. That means France is a supporter of Germany and the potential catastrophic war against Russia. Is Macron seeking to revenge the defeat of French troops in Moscow in 1812?

Epilogue

Hungary and Belgium and politicians and intellectuals from Europe, the US and other peace-loving countries should do their best to stop the train of war in the European continent led by Germany and, very possibly, the Trump administration. I cannot imagine the war party intends to push Russia to use its nukes. That would be a real holocaust for Europe and possibly the planet. The most likely alternative to the war of extermination would be a permanent war between Ukraine funded and armed by EU against Russia. In other words, these EU warmongers want to continue the eleven-year war indefinitely. They use Ukraine as a testing ground for new weapons. Conventional high tech warfare is “reinvented in Ukraine.” The increased EU military budgets will fund the purchase of more American weapons for the Ukraine war: keep the American military industrial complex rolling while killing Ukrainian and Russian soldiers.

The other, equally damaging, effect of the EU-Ukraine war would be the acceleration of the catastrophic climate chaos. Just like petroleum-powered industrialized farming and car and truck transportation, war is a major, if unspoken, factor behind rising temperatures, deadly heat waves, bomb rains, lasting droughts, stronger and more destructive hurricanes, shrinking groundwater, forest die-offs, and according to the UN Chief, Antonio Guterres, “more floods, more heat and more suffering – everywhere.”

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