GORDON HAHN
March 9, 2025
The NATO-Ukrainian Trans-Atlantic Coalition is crashing. NATO’s chief force and benefactor, the U.S., has abandoned the Coalition. The U.S. may do so regarding NATO itself. Thus, Europe moves to oppose the new U.S. administration of President Donald S. Trump’s push for rapprochement with Russia and an end to the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War over NATO expansion and other emncroachments on Russian national security interests in and around Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy is seeking to militarize a weak Europe in order to replace waning U.S. support. The trend is towards dissolution between and within all or at least most of the the forces involved in the NATO-Russia Ukrtainian War, bringing chaos, uncertainty, miscalculation, and a larger more destructive and degrading war closer, despite and, in. part, in spite of Trump’s peace intitiatives. The international level of the Ukrainian conflict is shifting from a bilateral confrontation between the West and Russia to a trilateral confrontation involving Russia, the U.S., and a new European-Ukrainian axis, with each riven by divisions generated by the intra-Atlantic cold civil war. This begs the question: Will Europe become a separate pole in the international system’s new multipolar stucture, adding to the U.S, and Sin-Russian pole?
Chaos at the Center of Gravity: Kiev
The unprecedented historical spat between the leaders of purported allies – U.S. President Donald Trump and his Vice Presdident J. D. Vance and Ukrainian President Zelenskiy – of February 28th appears to sound the death knell of the latter if not biologically then certainly politically. U.S. officials have called for him to resign, and Trump has refused further meetings with him until he is prepared to make peace in conditions of very weak hand on the battlefield compared to that of his opposite number on the other side of the negotiating table: Putin’s Russia and its advancing armed forces. After the February 28th public Oval Office dustup, Trump suggested Zelenskiy would not be “around very long”if he refused to negotiate with Moscow and end the war (www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-allies-secret-talks-volodymyr-zelenskyy-opposition-ukraine-elections-yulia-tymoshenko-petro-poroshenko/; video: https://x.com/i_katchanovski/status/1896663553643601989?s=51&t=n5DkcqsvQXNd3DfCRCwexQ).
But be careful of what you wish for. Despite Zelenskiy’s weakened position domestically and internationally, this at least partially illegitimate president may be the last or next to last surviving pillar of the Maidan regime and the Ukrainian state. For all his narcissism, egoism, corruption, and mounting authoritarianism, Zelenskiy currently holds the Ukrainian elite together and is the face of Ukraine abroad, still well-liked in Europe. He remains a figure that minimally satisfices all the various factions in Ukrainian politics and is able to hold off opposition elements, many of which he has emasculated by banning parties and media and by either forcing their leaders into exile or arresting them (e.g., former President Petro Poroshenko and Viktor Medvedchuk).
For these reasons and perhaps others, Russian Vladimir Putin himself has been very careful not to seek Zelenskiy’s removal or reject him firmly and finally as a potential negotiating partner. Despite Ukrainian propaganda to the effect that Putin has sought to assassinate Zelenskiy, the fact is that if Putin wanted to eliminate Zelenskiy from the scene physically or politically he would have done so already. One need only recall the 2023 episode in which Zelenskiy’s motorcade was followed by a Russian drone on a trip in Odessa and could have brought an attack upon it. There have been many opportunities to take Zelenskiy out, given his penchant for displays of bravery, visiting the front, and giving press open air media events on occasion in Kiev. Indeed, although Putin has called Zelenskiy an illegitimate president, given the end of the Ukrainian’s presidential term last year, the Russian president has never said he would not negotiate with Zelenskiy. He recently allowed for the possibility of Zelenskiy’s participation in peace negotiations, questioning only the legal status of a signature of a president whose terms has ended on any peace treaty. To reiterate, there is reason to believe that Putin has left Zelenskiy alive and held open the possibility of his participation in negotiations because he intutitively understands that Zelenskiy’s retention of power is the simplest and most reliable way to ensure Ukraine does not descend into chaos as Russia continues its offensives, leaving Russia with a much larger and dirtier mess to clean up perhaps across all of Ukraine after Moscow’s likely victory. In short, Russia needs Ukraine’s capitulation, not its collpase into chaos.
The only other Ukrainian figure besides Zelenskiy whom it would be reasonable to rely on, or hope could be able, to hold the Ukrainian regime and state together through a largely capitulative negotiating process and winding down of the war is Ukraine’s ambasador to London and former commander of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy. Fired by Zelenskiy, Zaluzhniy was dispatched to London by Zelenskiy in fear that his commander might be organizing, or was becoming the focal point of, an opposition movement against Zelenskiy’s continuation in the Office of the President. The only other Ukrainian political figure more popular than Zelenskiy is Military Intelligence Administration (HRU) Director Kyryll Budanov, but he is far less popular than Zaluzhniy (https://gordonhahn.com/2025/03/01/ukraines-four-coming-collapses-parts-1-2/).
Zaluzhniy is popular not only among the general public but also with the rank-and-file Ukrainian soldiers and has ties to the powerful ultranationalist and neofascist wing of Ukrainian politics. Zaluzhniy’s connections are demonstrated by his hiring of Dmitry Yarosh as an advisor when Zaluzhnyi was head of the Ukrainian armed forces. Yarosh is the founding leader of the notorious neofascist ‘Pravyi Sektor’ or Right Sector (RS). Zaluzhniy has posed with Yarosh, various Right Sector figures, including the commander of RS’s military wing, the Volunteer Ukrainian Corps (DUK), now incorporated into the army, with photos including the red-black RS flag modeled on Ukraine’s World War II neofascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA), as I have shown repeatedly on this site. In terms of peace negotiations then, Zaluzhniy perhaps would be more constrained and less inclined to engage Putin in talks. Budanov, the CIA’s man in Ukraine, also has ties with Ukraine’s neofascists, having worked with them through the HRU and Russian neofascists opposed to Putin’s regime. So other candidates are being sought, as recent reports on Trump allies’ meeting with Tymoshenko demonstrate. However, her ability to hold things together is limited. She is no longer popular, is compromised by a previous gas deal with Putin’s Russia she concluded, is corrupt, and has many foes and enemies, including the neofascists.
Three facts testify to Zelenkiy’s possible removal from power, even by a coup orchestrated by Washington. Trumps’s statement that Zelenskiy must go if he rejects peace talks, his pushing Zelenskiy to hold presidential elections, and reports that Trump officials met with representatives of the Ukrainian opposition, including former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko and leaders of former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party (https://www.politico.eu/article/don...-elections-yulia-tymoshenko-petro-poroshenko/). Unfortunately, Trump may not be on time with any coup or ‘wink and a nod’—which his statement that Zelenskiy must go if he refuses to talk with the Russians — could be seized upon by those who run secret operations. Not only could any order he issues be implemented by the CIA so as to achieve the Deep State’s alternative goals, but the CIA could pre-empt the White House by organizing its own coup operation, perhaps one led by Budanov and including the forces he has at his disposal as HRU chief but also the many disenchanted military units suffering at the hands of Zelenskiy and his use of the war for personal political and political-propaganda goals. If the CIA ushers in a truly neofascist Ukrainian regime replacing the partially neofascist Maidan regime, then the war could be dragged out by these extremist elements for quite a while, particularly if anti-Trump Europe supplies them with weapons, not to mention troops. Such a development would also sow distrust between Trump and Putin, perhaps helping to scuttle the US-Russian rapprochement. This is precisely what the globalist-wokist faction in the West wants.
So Ukraine is separating from the US and is divided within itself. The resulting chaos has led to Ukraine’s effort to realign under a European umbrella, Zelenskiy is encouraging to form but which is as divided as Ukraine within itself and in its relations with Washington.
Atlantic Schism
With Trump’s return to the White House and his transformative policies undermining globalism and wokism, America’s cold civil war has exploded on to the European scene encompassing the Atlantic community in a cold civil war between global-wokists and national conservatives. Thus, the EU’s opposition to Trump’s rapprochement with Moscow and pursuit of Ukrainian peace is really part of this ‘domestic’ or internal Atlantic community power struggle between global wokism and ‘populism’, that is popular conservatism patriotic backlash against the attack on sovereignty and republicanism represented by global wokism. Like US foreign policy’s unfortunate susceptibilty to becoming an American domestic ‘political football’ or a kind of political instrument as a opposed to a separate field of national interest to be considered on its own, so too are Europeans and the global woke faction in Kiev, represented by Zelenskiy, using their opposition to talks with Putin to undermine Trump’s entire political reputation and anti-globalist and anti-wokist aspects of his agenda: anti-illegal immigration, tarriffs against free trade, anti-Green Deal, anti-COVID, and pro-free speech, among other things.
This cold civil war is raging within Europe itself. In terms of the EU’s support for NATO-Russia Ukrainian War and extending the war in Ukraine for as long as it takes to deliver a strategic defeat of Moscow, countries such as Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, and, most recently, Croatia have adopted the position of dissidents. To some extent, Germany and Italy have expressed and demonstrated reservations. Other countries, such as Romania, are experiencing their own cold civil wars, as evidenced by the annullment of elections for fears a dissident would be elected Bucharest’s president, promting polarization and mass protests. Somewhat similarly, Slovakia’s conservative, anti-war Prime Minister Robert Fico has claimed there are Western efforts to organize a ‘color revolution’ against him (www.interpressnews.ge/en/article/137071-robert-fico-there-are-plans-aimed-at-overthrowing-the-government-there-is-a-group-of-experts-in-slovakia-who-were-involved-in-the-events-in-georgia-and-also-participated-in-ukraines-maidan/; https://t.me/stranaua/183655). In late January, NGOs behind anti-government protests were linked to USAID and George Soros but also to the Georgian Legion, a volunteer battalion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Fico even sent a letter to DOGE chair Elon Musk, asking for information on NGOs in the country linked to USAID (www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/politics/serbian-parliament-chaos-color-revolution-aleksandar-vucic-viktor-orban-usaid/). S
Disunion in NATO
Western leaders from Joe Biden to NATO secretary generals claimed that Russia’s ‘unprovoked’ invasion of Ukr had backfired; rather than stopping NATO expansion as Putin wanted, it extended it to Sweden and Russian neighbor Finland. Putin’s ’grave miscalculation strengthened NATO as never before’, they said, just as his Ukraine miscalculation was leading to ‘Ukraine’s victory’ and Russia’s ‘strategic defeat.’ We now know it is NATO that is being weakened. The divisions in Europe over the war mentioned above are just part of that picture.
Numerous Western publics, most importantly the American, have turned against their countries’ support for NATO’s and Ukraine’s rejection of the March 2022 Russo- Ukrainian peace agreement and for war with Russia in Ukraine. The an anti-war vote helped bring former President Trump back to the Oval Office with a Republican majority in both houses. The subsequent Trump administration’s Russia rapprochement and Ukrainian peace initiatives have broke open a schism within NATO that has been developing since the war began. Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, and Croatia are emboldened in the resistance to continuing the war, while the UK and France are countering Trump’s rapprochement and peace policies by moving to a military posture that seeks to divert massive funds to defense development and weapons production and to insert NATO country troops as ‘peacekeepers’ of a ‘coalition of the willing’ in order to draw NATO and, in particular into the war directly with boots on the ground. Trump did not fall for the latter conspiracy and refused to backup any European forces sent to Ukraine.
Western Europeans — French President Immanuel Macron, UK Premier Kier Starmer, and European Commission President von der Leyen — are vying to be the leader of Europe and rival to Trump as ‘leader of the free world’, the 21st century’s Churchill. Their coalition of the willing plans to insert peacekeepers into Ukraine immediately upon the signing of a peace agreement, but the Russians will not accept European peacekeepers, suspecting quite correctly that they will merely be a Trojan horse for the deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine to fight the Russians and will regard them as legally targetable combatants. Moreover, no US-sponsored agreement between Russia and Ukraine will contain such a point. So the intent is to provide cover for massive arms shipments, which Europe cannot muster anyway, in order to allow Kiev to re-start the war sometime in the future, perhaps in four years when a more amenable U.S. president occupies the Oval Office. With European troops targeted in the bargain, NATO and the U.S. can be forced into the frey.
The only realism involved here is the realization that the only way to defeat Russia in Ukraine is for NATO to enter the war directly and for all NATO countries to transition to a war footing. This would require a shift to a war economy and a military draft that European culture can no longer broach, particularly in the face of a clearly conjured Russian threat. Von der Leyen’s announced “ReArm” Europe program alone would divert hundreds of billions of Euros into defense spending
(video: https://x.com/Editorialz/status/1896942384610738408). The delusion is complete when one considers Europe’s lack of an industrial base (https://ctrana.one/news/475679-pistorius-sravnil-proizvodstvo-oruzhija-v-evrosojuze-i-rossii.html). Given European culture and the sad state of its economy, such a militarist policy would bring down all of the Western Europe’s governments and many of Eastern Europe’s one way or another and prompt any anti-NATO movement that doom the alliance.
The Transatlantic community’s new militarists (sans Trump’s U.S.) has now gone so far in opposing the community’s national republicans led by Trump that candidate for the Canadian premiership, Chrystia Freeland, whose grandfather was a member of the pro-Nazi, neofascist, anti-Semitic Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, has suggested that the British nuclear umbrella to Canada to defend against Trump’s America! (www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/03/03/british-nuclear-weapons-canada-trump-chrystia-freeland/) Meanwhile, parliamentarians in Europe are comparing Trump to Hitler and calling him a “tratitor” (video: http://www.facebook.com/750725919/videos/a.10161022662500920/653726307185455).Thus, internal Transatlantic politics, naked ambitions, delusions of granduer, and traditional European russophobia are negating any realist approach proposed by the smaller Eastern European states at least for the time being.
Zelenskiy, meanwhile, has seized on Europe’s new globalist-wokist militarism to counter Trump’s focus on talks with Russia conducted seemingly over the head of Ukraine, counterposing Europe’s emerging stronger pro-Kiev position to Trump’s ‘appeasement.’ Thus, he told the World Economic Forum in January that the U.S. “no longer is concerned whether the European Union will be its ally in the future” and has proposed that 200,000 European ‘peacekeeping’ troops be deployed to Ukraine (https://t.me/stranaua/183651 and https://t.me/stranaua/183682). Indeed, Trump has shown no interest in, even scoffed at the idea of including Europe in his talks with Putin, going over Brussels’ head as well. Thus, Zelenskiy told the Global Economic Forum, which has no love lost for Trump, that Europe must be included in any negotiations regarding a peace deal on Ukraine (video: http://www.facebook.com/ivan.katcha...P2bfPHAtQUzAKx9cKNuK2uQ99bdj3ozmcDCnvKX3FF1sl).
The new European strategic and military autonomy and any anti-Russian Europe-Ukraine coalition that emerges from it will ultimately lead to NATO’s full dysfunction and dissolution. Thus, it is the West’s grave miscalculation of betting on an easy victory over ‘weak Putin’s weak Russia’ that is destroying NATO. All this occurs as the same miscalculation unifies the ‘Rest’ under BRICS+ against what was once a unified West.
Putting aside a peace by Russian conquest, there are two basic paths to an end to the fighting: either through a ceasefire first, then peace talks, or, by contrast, only after negotiations come to an agreement on full peace. The latter process will mean a longer duration before the cessation of hostilities and more Ukrainian territory that will be occupied by Russian forces. There is no guarantee Putin will agree to return territory that his troops already occupy beyond Crimea and the four eastern regions. Moscow has already incorporated into Russia’s constitution as constituent parts of the federation. Russian forces already occupy some territory outside the five noted annexed regions and will soon have taken all the territory of those five regions. After that, Ukraine will need to make more concessions to Russian demands in spheres outside territorial issues, such as demilitarization and ‘denazification’ (regime change) Putin has insisted upon – in order to gain back any territory lost to Russian forces beyond the five annexed or incorporated territories.
But the West, outside the Trump administration and a few already mentioned states, has not woken up to reality. Russia has won the war and will do so as long as the West does not escalate the war into a full-blown European war. By continuing to pursue the strategic defeat of Russia on behalf of globalism, wokism, and their armed wing, NATO, they are digging ever deeper the large whole they have dug themselves into and, in the event of WW III, my very well dig all of our graves in the bargain. Because the longer the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War drags on, the more opportunity for miscalculations, black swans, and the like to explode the Ukrainian conflict into a Europe-wide one.
The longer Europe resists America’s rapprochement with Russia and peace efforts for Ukraine, the more it dooms Western republicanism, the Trans-Atlantic community, and the NATO alliance — not to mention Ukrainian statehood. There is now a real risk that the Trans-Atlantic community will be broken along with NATO but that the U.S and perhaps several European states, on the one hand, and the bulk of the EU, on the other, will become competing or antagonistic poles, adding a new European pillar to the U.S. and Sino-Russian-led pillars and thereby creating a multipolar rather than bipolar structure comprised by the ‘collective West’ and the Rest.
gordonhahn.com
March 9, 2025
The NATO-Ukrainian Trans-Atlantic Coalition is crashing. NATO’s chief force and benefactor, the U.S., has abandoned the Coalition. The U.S. may do so regarding NATO itself. Thus, Europe moves to oppose the new U.S. administration of President Donald S. Trump’s push for rapprochement with Russia and an end to the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War over NATO expansion and other emncroachments on Russian national security interests in and around Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy is seeking to militarize a weak Europe in order to replace waning U.S. support. The trend is towards dissolution between and within all or at least most of the the forces involved in the NATO-Russia Ukrtainian War, bringing chaos, uncertainty, miscalculation, and a larger more destructive and degrading war closer, despite and, in. part, in spite of Trump’s peace intitiatives. The international level of the Ukrainian conflict is shifting from a bilateral confrontation between the West and Russia to a trilateral confrontation involving Russia, the U.S., and a new European-Ukrainian axis, with each riven by divisions generated by the intra-Atlantic cold civil war. This begs the question: Will Europe become a separate pole in the international system’s new multipolar stucture, adding to the U.S, and Sin-Russian pole?
Chaos at the Center of Gravity: Kiev
The unprecedented historical spat between the leaders of purported allies – U.S. President Donald Trump and his Vice Presdident J. D. Vance and Ukrainian President Zelenskiy – of February 28th appears to sound the death knell of the latter if not biologically then certainly politically. U.S. officials have called for him to resign, and Trump has refused further meetings with him until he is prepared to make peace in conditions of very weak hand on the battlefield compared to that of his opposite number on the other side of the negotiating table: Putin’s Russia and its advancing armed forces. After the February 28th public Oval Office dustup, Trump suggested Zelenskiy would not be “around very long”if he refused to negotiate with Moscow and end the war (www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-allies-secret-talks-volodymyr-zelenskyy-opposition-ukraine-elections-yulia-tymoshenko-petro-poroshenko/; video: https://x.com/i_katchanovski/status/1896663553643601989?s=51&t=n5DkcqsvQXNd3DfCRCwexQ).
But be careful of what you wish for. Despite Zelenskiy’s weakened position domestically and internationally, this at least partially illegitimate president may be the last or next to last surviving pillar of the Maidan regime and the Ukrainian state. For all his narcissism, egoism, corruption, and mounting authoritarianism, Zelenskiy currently holds the Ukrainian elite together and is the face of Ukraine abroad, still well-liked in Europe. He remains a figure that minimally satisfices all the various factions in Ukrainian politics and is able to hold off opposition elements, many of which he has emasculated by banning parties and media and by either forcing their leaders into exile or arresting them (e.g., former President Petro Poroshenko and Viktor Medvedchuk).
For these reasons and perhaps others, Russian Vladimir Putin himself has been very careful not to seek Zelenskiy’s removal or reject him firmly and finally as a potential negotiating partner. Despite Ukrainian propaganda to the effect that Putin has sought to assassinate Zelenskiy, the fact is that if Putin wanted to eliminate Zelenskiy from the scene physically or politically he would have done so already. One need only recall the 2023 episode in which Zelenskiy’s motorcade was followed by a Russian drone on a trip in Odessa and could have brought an attack upon it. There have been many opportunities to take Zelenskiy out, given his penchant for displays of bravery, visiting the front, and giving press open air media events on occasion in Kiev. Indeed, although Putin has called Zelenskiy an illegitimate president, given the end of the Ukrainian’s presidential term last year, the Russian president has never said he would not negotiate with Zelenskiy. He recently allowed for the possibility of Zelenskiy’s participation in peace negotiations, questioning only the legal status of a signature of a president whose terms has ended on any peace treaty. To reiterate, there is reason to believe that Putin has left Zelenskiy alive and held open the possibility of his participation in negotiations because he intutitively understands that Zelenskiy’s retention of power is the simplest and most reliable way to ensure Ukraine does not descend into chaos as Russia continues its offensives, leaving Russia with a much larger and dirtier mess to clean up perhaps across all of Ukraine after Moscow’s likely victory. In short, Russia needs Ukraine’s capitulation, not its collpase into chaos.
The only other Ukrainian figure besides Zelenskiy whom it would be reasonable to rely on, or hope could be able, to hold the Ukrainian regime and state together through a largely capitulative negotiating process and winding down of the war is Ukraine’s ambasador to London and former commander of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy. Fired by Zelenskiy, Zaluzhniy was dispatched to London by Zelenskiy in fear that his commander might be organizing, or was becoming the focal point of, an opposition movement against Zelenskiy’s continuation in the Office of the President. The only other Ukrainian political figure more popular than Zelenskiy is Military Intelligence Administration (HRU) Director Kyryll Budanov, but he is far less popular than Zaluzhniy (https://gordonhahn.com/2025/03/01/ukraines-four-coming-collapses-parts-1-2/).
Zaluzhniy is popular not only among the general public but also with the rank-and-file Ukrainian soldiers and has ties to the powerful ultranationalist and neofascist wing of Ukrainian politics. Zaluzhniy’s connections are demonstrated by his hiring of Dmitry Yarosh as an advisor when Zaluzhnyi was head of the Ukrainian armed forces. Yarosh is the founding leader of the notorious neofascist ‘Pravyi Sektor’ or Right Sector (RS). Zaluzhniy has posed with Yarosh, various Right Sector figures, including the commander of RS’s military wing, the Volunteer Ukrainian Corps (DUK), now incorporated into the army, with photos including the red-black RS flag modeled on Ukraine’s World War II neofascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA), as I have shown repeatedly on this site. In terms of peace negotiations then, Zaluzhniy perhaps would be more constrained and less inclined to engage Putin in talks. Budanov, the CIA’s man in Ukraine, also has ties with Ukraine’s neofascists, having worked with them through the HRU and Russian neofascists opposed to Putin’s regime. So other candidates are being sought, as recent reports on Trump allies’ meeting with Tymoshenko demonstrate. However, her ability to hold things together is limited. She is no longer popular, is compromised by a previous gas deal with Putin’s Russia she concluded, is corrupt, and has many foes and enemies, including the neofascists.
Three facts testify to Zelenkiy’s possible removal from power, even by a coup orchestrated by Washington. Trumps’s statement that Zelenskiy must go if he rejects peace talks, his pushing Zelenskiy to hold presidential elections, and reports that Trump officials met with representatives of the Ukrainian opposition, including former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko and leaders of former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko’s European Solidarity party (https://www.politico.eu/article/don...-elections-yulia-tymoshenko-petro-poroshenko/). Unfortunately, Trump may not be on time with any coup or ‘wink and a nod’—which his statement that Zelenskiy must go if he refuses to talk with the Russians — could be seized upon by those who run secret operations. Not only could any order he issues be implemented by the CIA so as to achieve the Deep State’s alternative goals, but the CIA could pre-empt the White House by organizing its own coup operation, perhaps one led by Budanov and including the forces he has at his disposal as HRU chief but also the many disenchanted military units suffering at the hands of Zelenskiy and his use of the war for personal political and political-propaganda goals. If the CIA ushers in a truly neofascist Ukrainian regime replacing the partially neofascist Maidan regime, then the war could be dragged out by these extremist elements for quite a while, particularly if anti-Trump Europe supplies them with weapons, not to mention troops. Such a development would also sow distrust between Trump and Putin, perhaps helping to scuttle the US-Russian rapprochement. This is precisely what the globalist-wokist faction in the West wants.
So Ukraine is separating from the US and is divided within itself. The resulting chaos has led to Ukraine’s effort to realign under a European umbrella, Zelenskiy is encouraging to form but which is as divided as Ukraine within itself and in its relations with Washington.
Atlantic Schism
With Trump’s return to the White House and his transformative policies undermining globalism and wokism, America’s cold civil war has exploded on to the European scene encompassing the Atlantic community in a cold civil war between global-wokists and national conservatives. Thus, the EU’s opposition to Trump’s rapprochement with Moscow and pursuit of Ukrainian peace is really part of this ‘domestic’ or internal Atlantic community power struggle between global wokism and ‘populism’, that is popular conservatism patriotic backlash against the attack on sovereignty and republicanism represented by global wokism. Like US foreign policy’s unfortunate susceptibilty to becoming an American domestic ‘political football’ or a kind of political instrument as a opposed to a separate field of national interest to be considered on its own, so too are Europeans and the global woke faction in Kiev, represented by Zelenskiy, using their opposition to talks with Putin to undermine Trump’s entire political reputation and anti-globalist and anti-wokist aspects of his agenda: anti-illegal immigration, tarriffs against free trade, anti-Green Deal, anti-COVID, and pro-free speech, among other things.
This cold civil war is raging within Europe itself. In terms of the EU’s support for NATO-Russia Ukrainian War and extending the war in Ukraine for as long as it takes to deliver a strategic defeat of Moscow, countries such as Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, and, most recently, Croatia have adopted the position of dissidents. To some extent, Germany and Italy have expressed and demonstrated reservations. Other countries, such as Romania, are experiencing their own cold civil wars, as evidenced by the annullment of elections for fears a dissident would be elected Bucharest’s president, promting polarization and mass protests. Somewhat similarly, Slovakia’s conservative, anti-war Prime Minister Robert Fico has claimed there are Western efforts to organize a ‘color revolution’ against him (www.interpressnews.ge/en/article/137071-robert-fico-there-are-plans-aimed-at-overthrowing-the-government-there-is-a-group-of-experts-in-slovakia-who-were-involved-in-the-events-in-georgia-and-also-participated-in-ukraines-maidan/; https://t.me/stranaua/183655). In late January, NGOs behind anti-government protests were linked to USAID and George Soros but also to the Georgian Legion, a volunteer battalion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Fico even sent a letter to DOGE chair Elon Musk, asking for information on NGOs in the country linked to USAID (www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/politics/serbian-parliament-chaos-color-revolution-aleksandar-vucic-viktor-orban-usaid/). S
Disunion in NATO
Western leaders from Joe Biden to NATO secretary generals claimed that Russia’s ‘unprovoked’ invasion of Ukr had backfired; rather than stopping NATO expansion as Putin wanted, it extended it to Sweden and Russian neighbor Finland. Putin’s ’grave miscalculation strengthened NATO as never before’, they said, just as his Ukraine miscalculation was leading to ‘Ukraine’s victory’ and Russia’s ‘strategic defeat.’ We now know it is NATO that is being weakened. The divisions in Europe over the war mentioned above are just part of that picture.
Numerous Western publics, most importantly the American, have turned against their countries’ support for NATO’s and Ukraine’s rejection of the March 2022 Russo- Ukrainian peace agreement and for war with Russia in Ukraine. The an anti-war vote helped bring former President Trump back to the Oval Office with a Republican majority in both houses. The subsequent Trump administration’s Russia rapprochement and Ukrainian peace initiatives have broke open a schism within NATO that has been developing since the war began. Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, and Croatia are emboldened in the resistance to continuing the war, while the UK and France are countering Trump’s rapprochement and peace policies by moving to a military posture that seeks to divert massive funds to defense development and weapons production and to insert NATO country troops as ‘peacekeepers’ of a ‘coalition of the willing’ in order to draw NATO and, in particular into the war directly with boots on the ground. Trump did not fall for the latter conspiracy and refused to backup any European forces sent to Ukraine.
Western Europeans — French President Immanuel Macron, UK Premier Kier Starmer, and European Commission President von der Leyen — are vying to be the leader of Europe and rival to Trump as ‘leader of the free world’, the 21st century’s Churchill. Their coalition of the willing plans to insert peacekeepers into Ukraine immediately upon the signing of a peace agreement, but the Russians will not accept European peacekeepers, suspecting quite correctly that they will merely be a Trojan horse for the deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine to fight the Russians and will regard them as legally targetable combatants. Moreover, no US-sponsored agreement between Russia and Ukraine will contain such a point. So the intent is to provide cover for massive arms shipments, which Europe cannot muster anyway, in order to allow Kiev to re-start the war sometime in the future, perhaps in four years when a more amenable U.S. president occupies the Oval Office. With European troops targeted in the bargain, NATO and the U.S. can be forced into the frey.
The only realism involved here is the realization that the only way to defeat Russia in Ukraine is for NATO to enter the war directly and for all NATO countries to transition to a war footing. This would require a shift to a war economy and a military draft that European culture can no longer broach, particularly in the face of a clearly conjured Russian threat. Von der Leyen’s announced “ReArm” Europe program alone would divert hundreds of billions of Euros into defense spending
(video: https://x.com/Editorialz/status/1896942384610738408). The delusion is complete when one considers Europe’s lack of an industrial base (https://ctrana.one/news/475679-pistorius-sravnil-proizvodstvo-oruzhija-v-evrosojuze-i-rossii.html). Given European culture and the sad state of its economy, such a militarist policy would bring down all of the Western Europe’s governments and many of Eastern Europe’s one way or another and prompt any anti-NATO movement that doom the alliance.
The Transatlantic community’s new militarists (sans Trump’s U.S.) has now gone so far in opposing the community’s national republicans led by Trump that candidate for the Canadian premiership, Chrystia Freeland, whose grandfather was a member of the pro-Nazi, neofascist, anti-Semitic Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, has suggested that the British nuclear umbrella to Canada to defend against Trump’s America! (www.telegraph.co.uk/us/politics/2025/03/03/british-nuclear-weapons-canada-trump-chrystia-freeland/) Meanwhile, parliamentarians in Europe are comparing Trump to Hitler and calling him a “tratitor” (video: http://www.facebook.com/750725919/videos/a.10161022662500920/653726307185455).Thus, internal Transatlantic politics, naked ambitions, delusions of granduer, and traditional European russophobia are negating any realist approach proposed by the smaller Eastern European states at least for the time being.
Zelenskiy, meanwhile, has seized on Europe’s new globalist-wokist militarism to counter Trump’s focus on talks with Russia conducted seemingly over the head of Ukraine, counterposing Europe’s emerging stronger pro-Kiev position to Trump’s ‘appeasement.’ Thus, he told the World Economic Forum in January that the U.S. “no longer is concerned whether the European Union will be its ally in the future” and has proposed that 200,000 European ‘peacekeeping’ troops be deployed to Ukraine (https://t.me/stranaua/183651 and https://t.me/stranaua/183682). Indeed, Trump has shown no interest in, even scoffed at the idea of including Europe in his talks with Putin, going over Brussels’ head as well. Thus, Zelenskiy told the Global Economic Forum, which has no love lost for Trump, that Europe must be included in any negotiations regarding a peace deal on Ukraine (video: http://www.facebook.com/ivan.katcha...P2bfPHAtQUzAKx9cKNuK2uQ99bdj3ozmcDCnvKX3FF1sl).
The new European strategic and military autonomy and any anti-Russian Europe-Ukraine coalition that emerges from it will ultimately lead to NATO’s full dysfunction and dissolution. Thus, it is the West’s grave miscalculation of betting on an easy victory over ‘weak Putin’s weak Russia’ that is destroying NATO. All this occurs as the same miscalculation unifies the ‘Rest’ under BRICS+ against what was once a unified West.
Putting aside a peace by Russian conquest, there are two basic paths to an end to the fighting: either through a ceasefire first, then peace talks, or, by contrast, only after negotiations come to an agreement on full peace. The latter process will mean a longer duration before the cessation of hostilities and more Ukrainian territory that will be occupied by Russian forces. There is no guarantee Putin will agree to return territory that his troops already occupy beyond Crimea and the four eastern regions. Moscow has already incorporated into Russia’s constitution as constituent parts of the federation. Russian forces already occupy some territory outside the five noted annexed regions and will soon have taken all the territory of those five regions. After that, Ukraine will need to make more concessions to Russian demands in spheres outside territorial issues, such as demilitarization and ‘denazification’ (regime change) Putin has insisted upon – in order to gain back any territory lost to Russian forces beyond the five annexed or incorporated territories.
But the West, outside the Trump administration and a few already mentioned states, has not woken up to reality. Russia has won the war and will do so as long as the West does not escalate the war into a full-blown European war. By continuing to pursue the strategic defeat of Russia on behalf of globalism, wokism, and their armed wing, NATO, they are digging ever deeper the large whole they have dug themselves into and, in the event of WW III, my very well dig all of our graves in the bargain. Because the longer the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War drags on, the more opportunity for miscalculations, black swans, and the like to explode the Ukrainian conflict into a Europe-wide one.
The longer Europe resists America’s rapprochement with Russia and peace efforts for Ukraine, the more it dooms Western republicanism, the Trans-Atlantic community, and the NATO alliance — not to mention Ukrainian statehood. There is now a real risk that the Trans-Atlantic community will be broken along with NATO but that the U.S and perhaps several European states, on the one hand, and the bulk of the EU, on the other, will become competing or antagonistic poles, adding a new European pillar to the U.S. and Sino-Russian-led pillars and thereby creating a multipolar rather than bipolar structure comprised by the ‘collective West’ and the Rest.
The World Order’s Restructuring Intensifies as the Ukrainian War Implodes the West and Kiev
The NATO-Ukrainian Trans-Atlantic Coalition is crashing. NATO’s chief force and benefactor, the U.S., has abandoned the Coalition. The U.S. may…
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