It is as if a strange, toxic ailment has taken over European leaders today with regard to the Ukraine-Russia conflict. It is as if the EU has succumbed to an inexplicable anti-Russian fever, driving its leadership to accept an irrationality, a total illogic of reason, in joining the Ukrainian government in its death-defying spiral of succeeding in its futile quest to defeat Russia.
The Ukraine – Russia conflict is in its fifth year and promises to expand as the Europeans are threatening to increase their support on behalf of Ukraine – except the truth is that the Europeans have little to offer Ukraine.
The origins of the conflict date back to the 1990 meeting at the reunification of Germany, when the US promised Gorbachev that NATO would not move ‘one inch eastward’ toward the border of Russia.
In the ensuing decades, that promise lost its meaning as Ukraine, encouraged by the US, was planning to join the EU and allow NATO on its border with Russia.
In response, the Russians were adamant and began a Special Military Operation in 2022 to protect the oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk which were under direct, military attack by the Kyiv government.
The peace meeting scheduled in Istanbul drew former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who tried to convince President Zelensky not to sign the agreement, saying Europe and the US would have their back.
Zelensky, who had been elected President on a peace platform, was aware of the 1990s agreement and left Istanbul with no agreement.
Fast forward to 2024 with the election of US President Donald Trump, who had campaigned and been elected as a self-proclaimed ‘Peace President’ and with a promise to end the Ukraine conflict on ‘day one’. Trump later met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at an Anchorage summit to reach a settlement.
Trump lived up to neither promise as the US continued to provide behind-the-scenes support for Ukraine with weapons, intelligence, targeting, and funding to maintain support for the conflict. If Trump had fulfilled that promise, this war would have been over years ago, saving thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives.
But because Trump himself did not make a move to end the conflict, members of the EU have been able to voice support for war with Russia, and they have taken a more active posture.
Fast forward to 2026, now Trump, under mid-term election pressure from a mess he has created in Iran, has offered a diesel fuel deal with Putin to sell diesel to the US in exchange for sanctions relief. Just weeks earlier, the US approved a new sanctions bill that was said to further pressure Russia to capitulate.
It is fair to say that Trump’s motivation has been less a desire for peace and more a self-centered interest in protecting his own electoral position, as the American public is overwhelmingly against the Iran war and the economic inflation that the Trump administration has created.
Enter the EU leadership, who have supported Zelensky with weapons sold to European countries that incidentally found their way into Ukraine, as well as home-grown drones that provided Ukraine with the means to initiate attacks on Russian energy facilities and civilian targets.
With an early winter expected and combat intensified, thousands and thousands of Ukrainian citizens are forming a 40-hour wait, clogging the highway into Poland. Zelensky takes frequent trips to visit his European allies in Brussels or London, where Europeans don’t care about battlefield conditions or the fact that he hasn’t been a legal president since 2024, when he banned elections.
His administration is still ‘kidnapping’ Ukrainian men off city streets to enforce conscription into the military, while on the battlefield, Ukraine surrenders to Russia.
Both former CIA agent Larry Johnson and Michael von der Schulenberg, a 35-year career diplomat and member of the English Parliament, have found the EU level of intense hatred of Russia unconscionable and unacceptable.
Schulenberg says of the EU, “they just don’t have it, they don’t have the bombs, they don’t have the public will. They should be first to oppose war on the European continent.” He says that, as EU members, listening to European Parliament sessions and beating the drums of war, there is no discussion about diplomacy.
“Of course the US are our allies; but if we want to end the war, the only way we can do this is by putting more pressure on Russia. And we would call on the US to put the sanctions in place so that we would finish this war and these attacks on refineries would not be necessary to make war over,” said Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief.
Kallas makes no mention that sanctions have not worked for the last five years. There is no mention of diplomacy and no admission that the war is lost.
The Europeans have invented the fabrication that Russia is losing the war and that the Ukrainians are dominating the battlefield.
Europe, and some in the US Senate, do not understand that Zelensky is losing the war, as he meets regularly with a delegation from the US Senate. Frequently led by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Sen. Kevin Cramer (N.D.), who encourage Zelensky to continue the conflict.
Schulenberg says Zelensky has to understand he is losing the war and that he has to talk to the Russians. The Europeans do not have a realization of the situation with NATO on the Russian border; it is the Europeans who are blocking peace as they continue their war agenda.
The only option for the Europeans is to talk to the Russians, and they still talk about winning the war.
Former CIA Larry Johnson reported that several European countries displayed an intensity in their anti-Russian condemnation that he believes will lead Europe to start a war with Russia.
Their irrationality is ‘off the charts’ and that ‘at elite level they don’t want to talk about diplomacy’. There is no European recognition that they ignore NATO was pushing countries right up to Russia’s border.’
*
Trump said Zelensky has not done enough to achieve peace in the more than four years since Russia invaded its territory.
“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because he could have made many deals and for some reason he never does,” Trump said.