THE indirect power confrontation between Russia and the collective West has been ongoing for nearly three years. It cannot be ruled out that, in one form or another, it will continue indefinitely, which is unsurprising – the current anti-Russian aggression is yet another stage in a comprehensive pressure campaign against Moscow by Euro-Atlantic political elites. This campaign, in all its diverse forms and narratives, has already become an independent historical process, developing according to its own logic. One of its characteristics is the long-term and comprehensive preparation by Western political elites for another Drang nach Osten, as has happened this time as well.
In 2012, just 20 years after the disappearance of the US’s systemic adversary, the Soviet Union, Washington accused Moscow of corruption and human rights violations. These claims, which led to the imposition of sanctions, were formalized in the so-called Magnitsky Act. Symbolically, the introduction of new anti-Russian measures in this document coincided with the repeal of the anti-Soviet Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which had been in effect since 1974 and had restricted financial and trade operations with the USSR under the pretext of human rights violations. The continuity and systemic nature of the anti-Russian course, regardless of the administration in Washington, is evident.
This overtly unfriendly move led many experts – including those who had previously “overlooked” three waves of NATO expansion, numerous “color revolutions” that legitimized pro-Western leaders in former Soviet republics, and support for separatism within our country – to speak of another “cooling” in Russian-American relations. Moreover, anti-Russian rhetoric conclusively became a key theme in US foreign policy – first under the pretext of protecting human rights, then as a counter to our efforts to defend Syria’s sovereignty, and ultimately, after the return of the Crimea [to the Russian Federation]. The rise in Russophobia was accompanied by the systemic preparation of ideological, legal, and military-political frameworks for exerting comprehensive pressure on Moscow.
By orchestrating a coup in Kiev in 2014, the US and the European Union not only brought Nazis to power but also immediately initiated the transfer of military equipment to the new Kiev regime.1 Washington legally enshrined its commitment to training Ukrainian Nazi militants in the Ukraine Freedom Support Act, sending $350 million in relevant materials to radicals between 2015 and 2017 (and, according to Transparency International, $660 million from 2014 to 2017).
Starting in 2018, Kiev began receiving lethal weapons, and in late 2021, discussions emerged in American political circles about restoring Ukraine’s nuclear status. A representative of the regime installed in the former Soviet republic obediently echoed this narrative at the 2022 Munich Security Conference, confirming that, despite a series of bloody internal upheavals, Ukraine’s officialdom remains entirely unprepared for independent state-building, preferring instead to profit from exporting conflicts.
Russia’s swift defensive response to the national security threat removed any need for the West to justify its pressure campaign against our country. An unprecedented number of sanctions – more than 21,000 – have been imposed2 (for comparison: Iran faces just over 3,500; Syria 2,600; North Korea 2,000; Venezuela slightly more than 600; Myanmar about 500; and Cuba just over 200).3 Arsenals of outdated and new military equipment, along with mercenary detachments, have flooded into the conflict zone. By mid-2024, Kiev had received 800 tanks, 3,500 armored combat vehicles, 1,500 artillery systems, 300 multiple rocket launchers, 250 surface-to-air missile systems, 130 aircraft and helicopters, and over 30,000 UAVs.4 In just the first year of the conflict, foreign funding for combat operations exceeded $320 billion.5
The current stage of confrontation between Russia and the West will go down in history alongside other pan-European invasions of our lands: the two Patriotic Wars, the Crimean War, World War I, the Civil War-era intervention, and other ventures. This alone is enough to demonstrate that the Euro-Atlantic political establishment’s rejection of the concept of a sovereign Russia is an axiom.
It is essential to carefully examine the root causes of this confrontation in order to put an end to the existential aggression against us once and for all, sparing future generations unnecessary sacrifices. Above all, we must answer the question: Who exactly are we dealing with?
The formation of the collective West as a political phenomenon is a long historical process that requires separate study. Today, it is a heterogeneous group of countries with different political and economic systems, histories, cultures, and geographies, often with complex mutual relations. Nevertheless, they are united into several global (G7), regional (NATO, EU), and subregional (AUKUS, Quad) alliances. The key factor binding them together is a supranational ideology of global control, which unites political elites from various states under the condition that they renounce the protection of their own national sovereignty in exchange for “career” advancement within the Western-centric global governance system – or, at the very least, for business and personal benefits.
In other words, the collective West is an international corporation of political and business figures, hierarchically subordinated (according to Max Weber’s model of mandatory division of labor) to the ruling elites of the US and Great Britain (who play the role of “founding fathers”) and constantly seeking expansion. The primary tool for ensuring this expansion is an economic system based on exploitation (unbalanced consumption, including direct appropriation) of resources from other countries and peoples, which has for decades been presented as a market economy, though this characterization does not reflect reality.
The Western economic model is a complex combination of protectionist measures and a multi-vector system of control (in military-political, trade, diplomatic, cultural, and other areas) designed to minimize the costs of accessing resources and new markets. It is commonly believed that it self-regulates through supply and demand, and that the material prosperity of Western states is evidence of its success.
In reality, however, the Western version of the market economy (and the interaction it fosters in governance, society, and other areas) is an opaque space of speculative transactions, where success is primarily secured through unfair competition and coercion. Maintaining balance requires continuous expansion to acquire new resources, markets, and capital. Exhaustion of potential in each stage or area triggers a crisis, the momentum of which is then used to reset the “rules of the game” and launch a new cycle. The so-called market system is doomed to oscillate between breakthrough and collapse, peak and crisis, incapable of self-balancing and continually dragging new areas and nations into its turmoil to ensure its main goal – the influx of resources on terms favorable to Western elites.
This is the essence of the so-called “rules-based order,” in which the US and its satellites set the terms of each new stage of economic expansion to maintain their leadership and control over subordinate states. Before its emergence in the early 1990s, the so-called liberal world order was actively promoted as a counterweight to the socialist ideas that had gained traction following the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II and convincingly demonstrated the advantages of the Soviet system. Prior to the liberal world order, there was no talk of [human rights and] freedoms – European and American political and business elites thrived by reselling cheap resources from subjugated territories.
In essence, we are witnessing a modernized version of colonial practices, where resource redistribution in favor of the West is now predominantly enforced through nonmilitary coercion, as the costs of military interventions have risen exponentially with the advent of the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Nevertheless, traditional Western methods – economic, political, and cultural manipulations aimed at dividing and isolating target states – continue to be employed to subordinate and integrate them into the Western system of sustenance. Similar measures are undertaken against every “undesirable” country, where elites and society are artificially divided, often under the pretext of insignificant or fabricated issues. This fragmentation prevents [countries] from promptly consolidating forces to fight for national sovereignty.
Not only are such approaches not new – they are, in fact, archaic and have been widely used in political struggles throughout the history of international relations. However, only the West has made the imposition of a “war of all against all” a central element of its diplomacy, institutionalizing it as a systemic practice and achieving consistent success. This is hardly surprising – after all, it is easier to destroy than to build.
The flip side of this apparent prosperity is that the entire development of Western civilization has become dependent on external expansion. As evidenced by the current bleak socio-economic situation in the West, despite its short-term advantages, the US and the politicians who have sworn allegiance to it are unable to cope with the challenges of growth amid a shortage of cheap resources and Lebensraum. From a historical perspective, without another crisis that resets the “rules of the game” on the international stage, the West is unlikely to resolve its accumulated problems and negative trends on its own.
The entire history of the confrontation between continental Europe, including Russia, and the Anglo-Saxon elites and their subordinate ruling circles in foreign states confirms this. The greatest blow to the global hegemons came from the rise of the global national liberation movement, in which the support of the Russian Empire and Soviet Russia played a key role. Even the failures of numerous anti-Russian military ventures instigated by the West ultimately allowed it to use its own defeats to annul previous agreements with us, legitimize domestic and foreign policy changes, and regroup for a future revanche.
However, Russia’s historical successes in liberating the world’s peoples – starting with its support for India’s struggle for independence in the latter half of the 19th century and culminating in the mass emancipation of African nations from colonial dependence – inflicted irreparable damage on the West. In 1960 alone, thanks to a Soviet initiative at the UN on granting independence to colonial countries and peoples, 17 sovereign states appeared on the map of Africa.
The loss of access to cheap colonial resources triggered a sharp decline in socio-economic conditions, leading to a series of political and economic crises, particularly in Great Britain and the US. This became especially evident in the 1970s and 1980s. Under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, London launched large-scale privatization to replenish state revenues, abolished currency controls to attract foreign investment, cut spending on social services and regional development, and in foreign policy, pursued closer alignment with Washington, where conditions were also deteriorating. Behind the outward successes of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies, it is rarely mentioned that during his presidency, the US national debt began to grow rapidly, and immediately after his tenure, a wave of American “resource” expansions into the Middle East began.
Under these circumstances, and recalling the success of Russian arms in Europe, Euro-Atlantic politicians exerted considerable effort to re-enslave former colonies through nonviolent means – financial, legal, and propagandistic – allowing them to initiate the political division of Europe, which ultimately led to the dissolution of the so-called Eastern Bloc.
The integration of former socialist bloc states into the orbit of Western influence granted the West about 30 years of relative prosperity and gave them confidence that further eastward expansion, culminating in the defeat of Russia, would provide the Western economy with another 50 to 100 years of cheap resource inflows and global dominance.
History not only demonstrates the West’s inevitable competition with everyone – not just Russia – but also confirms that the once-popular idea of incorporating our country into the Western camp is ultimately unfeasible. This is not solely due to political, ideological, or other differences arising from divergent values. A major practical obstacle is that such integration would force Western elites to confront powerful competition from Russian and former Soviet political and business circles on an equal footing. Sooner or later, this would compel Euro-Atlanticists to forsake their own interests – i.e., to dismantle their system of survival by losing control over resources and mechanisms of global governance.
That is why, across the former Soviet Union, the focus is on weakening and discrediting Russia as much as possible, just as previously occurred within the borders of the Warsaw Pact. However, Moscow’s hypothetical defeat in the current confrontation is not merely a regional threat, as many believe, but a global one. It would provide Washington and Brussels with the resources to “develop” new regions and sources of power. And even if, in theory, the West manages to impose its “rules of the game” on the entire planet, that would still mean the same endless “war of all against all.” New conflicts, fault lines, and divisions would be artificially ignited to enable yet another phase of resource redistribution.
At the same time, the historically passive stance of the World Majority in its relations with the Western bloc inflicts colossal, existential harm upon itself. This poses a direct threat of extermination and the subsequent genocide of any indigenous people – not necessarily through violence, as was the case in the colonial era. Much more effective are the indirect mechanisms of societal homogenization employed by the West today to enhance the efficiency of its exploitation: the marginalization of culture, the romanticization of deviant behavior and destructive sect-like pseudo-religious sacrificial cults, the denial of human nature, corruption, drug addiction, as well as methods of artificially reducing populations.
Therefore, it is not enough to merely curb the current wave of anti-Russian aggression. If the response is limited to military security alone, history will simply be pushed back onto its previous track. As it continues to fend off Western attacks, Russia has entered the 21st century with a population scarcely larger than it was at the end of the 19th century. This is the price of Russia’s trust in its Western neighbors – whom, throughout history, we have seen not only as rivals but also as trade partners, allies in scientific and cultural development, and ultimately, fellow believers, even despite the long-standing schism within the Christian church.
However, hopes for the prudence of Euro-Atlantic politicians have yet to be justified, and the cost of trusting them continues to rise, sometimes approaching a critical threshold.
NOTES:
1 “Chto izvestno o voyennoy pomoshchi stran Yevrosoyuza Ukraine,” https://tass.ru/info/19873691
2 “Lavrov: za posledniye desya let protiv Rossii vveli svyshe 21 tysyachi sanktsy,” https://lenta.ru/news/2024/09/25/lavrov-podschital-chislo-vvedennyh-protiv-rossii-sanktsiy
3 “Bloomberg nazval Rossiyu mirovym liderom po kolichestvu sanktsy,” https://www.rbc.ru/economics/08/03/2022/6226867a9a7947db2e9e223b
4 “V Genshtabe VS RF rasskazali o kolichestve peredannogo s 2022 goda VSU vooruzheniya,” https://iz.ru/1697803/2024-05-17/v-genshtabe-vs-rf-rasskazali-o-kolichestve- peredannogo-s-2022-goda-vsu-vooruzhenii
5 “Bolshe 300 milliardov: kak mirovoye soobshchestvo za poltora goda pomoglo Ukraine,” https://rtvi.com/stories/bolshe-300-milliardov-kak-mirovoe-soobshhestvo-za-poltora-goda-pomoglo-ukraine