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Pizza boxes. The first thing he noticed were those torn, greasy, half-open pizza boxes on the worn carpet of the fifth-floor corridor of the Chelsea Cloisters apartment building on Sloane Avenue, where the chauffeur of the Seico Car Service had brought him from Heathrow in just under an hour, where he checked in and threw his suitcase onto the bed only to climb straight back into the car, so that he could cut his first film from London that same afternoon at the studio on Great Chapel Street. Petra and the colleagues back at the home desk had put together a few amusing travel items in a package labelled “Great Britain Requests the Pleasure”, there was hearty laughter at the farewell, everyone delighted for the freshly minted correspondent, and at the bureau in Soho he was received with a friendly smile: “This one doesn’t simply telephone,” the bureau chief said breezily, “he writes me a letter. I liked that!” It was 1 July 2003, the city sweating in a ferocious heatwave, Prime Minister Tony Blair caught in the vortex of his gravest crisis, a crisis about doctored intelligence dossiers with which Downing Street had justified the invasion of Iraq alongside the USA in breach of international law, and in the treadmill of daily news coverage the question of who might have thoughtlessly tossed the picked-clean pizza boxes into the corridor simply sank without trace.

At first he thought no further either about the numerous long-legged young women in short skirts who gathered in the foyer of Chelsea Cloisters at nightfall, slipped past the porter one after another onto Sloane Avenue and climbed into the sports coupés, in order — as he assumed — to take a quick spin around the block. Their broken English and the scraps of Russian or Ukrainian marked them out as Ukrainian tourists, for whom the Cloisters had evidently proved an insider tip.

Days later he noticed the Lamborghini dealer by South Kensington tube station, who only ever carried the latest models, in yellow, red, black, as convertible or sports coupé, and it slowly dawned on him that there had to be buyers for these luxury cars around Hyde Park. There was an unbelievable amount of money in the city. The financial industry kept creating new, nested securities, collateralised debt obligations, often with junk real estate behind them, credit default swaps, which were supposed to insure against a credit default but were really wagers; bankers created money out of nothing and looked forward to fresh profits. Soon after the war against Iraq, provoked by Washington and London, the oil from the desert sand would flush money onto the mills of the loan sharks in the banking district, because new mineral resources are the basis for leveraged derivatives business and for new loans, which promised new premiums and new interest income.

Anyone carrying less than 50,000 pounds sterling a month in base salary, bonuses and premiums out of the glass towers of the banking district counted as a welfare case. The money vanished into tax havens, luxury property, luxury cars — and into the pockets of the girls who climbed into the passenger seat.^[1] They were the ones who, their work done, sometimes ordered something from the pizza service late at night and threw the cardboard exhaustedly outside the door of the room.

These were the scenes he could watch in the evenings when he sat outside the “Hour Glass” on Brompton Road and drank another pint or two to come down from the jittery frenzy of the daily film and news business. Prime Minister Tony Blair was the permanent theme, the “dodgy dossiers” with which he had tried, using rotten tricks and lies about alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to drag the country into a war that was — plainly recognisable — a war for Iraqi oil, which in turn was to become the basis of new speculative business and commodity futures contracts, new loans and new investments. Not only the government scientist David Kelly,^[2] whom the BBC exposed as the source of the information about the government’s deception operation, had to die for the profits of the financial industry, but also the people of Iraq.^[3] But the bankers fetched their convertibles from the underground car park, grabbed a companion or disappeared into the nightclub across the road.

The credit bubble grew ever larger, until Iraq sank into civil war and chaos and the bubble finally burst in 2008. The City of London was — and is — a state within a state. Ever since Maggie Thatcher abolished industry in order to break the working class, money in the Kingdom has been made above all in the financial industry.^[4] How the financial crisis built up and where its causes lay — on this the correspondents’ bureau reported virtually nothing; it concerned itself above all with the summer of the century,^[5] the “Lady Diana Fan Club” from Veitshöchheim in Lower Franconia^[6] and, of course, Tony Blair’s permanent crisis.^[7] If any time was left over, barbecues went up on the roof terrace in the mild evening air, as at the public viewing of the football World Cup in the summer of 2006, when the beer flowed in torrents. On the way home from Soho he could admire the Piccadilly branch of the diamond dealer De Beers, a reminder of the actual balance of power.

Stacked up in the bookshops lay Monica Ali’s novel “Brick Lane”: Nazneen is 19 years old when she leaves her small village in Bangladesh to be married in London to a man unknown to her and considerably older. Uneducated but clever, she grasps very quickly that this man’s great dreams of prosperity and social advancement will never be fulfilled. Her own small dreams, by contrast, do come true: she learns English from her daughters, she finds work in a clothing factory and a spirited friend in Razia. When her husband decides to return to Bangladesh, and her lover Karim wants to pin her more and more to the ideal image of a Muslim woman, she frees herself from them both and chooses a life in England.^[8]

In this novel London found its way to itself: the city as promise. Whoever came here out of the jungle of religious simplicity and cultural backwardness could carve a path to freedom under his or her own steam. London as a colourful, cosmopolitan and tolerant capital — that was how it liked to see itself. Scene of the action: Brick Lane, the street in which many poor immigrants from Bangladesh learned what it means to be British.

Ten years later he would meet a state secretary from Schleswig-Holstein who had worked at exactly that time in risk management at Deutsche Bank in London, came to Kiel via the Greens and from 2012 to 2017 served there as a political appointee, first in the finance ministry, then in the state chancellery: “I lived on Brick Lane, I know what that means.” He replied: “I know Brick Lane. When I was there in 2003, what I mainly saw were yuppies!” The mood froze instantly: “Kindly ask precise questions!” A bourgeois child who wanted to give himself the image of a man who had come up the hard way. In 2024 he moved to the Klimaneutralität foundation. There he continued to implement the “climate change” programme driven forward by the Rockefeller Foundation, with which it opens up new markets for finance capital.^[9]

By the time Monica Ali published “Brick Lane”, the street had long since begun to become a hotspot for tourists and higher earners. One Friday evening he drank two pints outside Nelly Dean’s pub on Dean Street and set off eastwards. On that summer evening he could see how Brick Lane had become the alibi for a financial district that essentially wrote its own laws. In this extralegal zone, bankers and law firms made sure that Ukrainian oligarchs could make their money disappear into special purpose vehicles and tax havens, while the banksters and their entourage spent their bonuses on Brick Lane in the evening. The street signs still hung in Bengali, but the smell of curry was fading. The street between Bethnal Green in the north and Whitechapel in the south was beginning to be colonised by the financial district.

One night in August he was racing, tipsy, through the left-hand traffic of the empty city in a friend’s car, on the way back from a party, and at the wheel M. recounted: “I was once with a Russian woman here in London who ran a call-girl ring with women from Russia and Ukraine. She made serious money with it. She was simply looking for a man — not one to keep her; she was looking for one who would take her out to expensive restaurants and accompany her to the opera. One who would dive with her into the flair of a cultivated, bourgeois life. She literally picked me up, and we were very happy together. We were planning a holiday in Spain. The evening before we left I got completely wrecked; the next morning the alarm tore me out of my sleep, I was in catastrophic shape, hastily gathered a few things together, threw them in the case, and at Heathrow she smelled at once that I had been drinking heavily and was nowhere near sober. In the queue at the counter I realised I had forgotten money, credit cards, everything. She paid for everything for fourteen days, didn’t say another word to me, and after the return flight we parted without a goodbye. That was my story with the Russian boss of a call-girl ring.” He answered drily, half in earnest, half in jest: “You idiot!”

The “Trafficking in Persons” report of the US State Department counted up to 800,000 victims of human trafficking worldwide in 2011 and notes tersely that the number of Ukrainian women forced into prostitution had “risen further” in 2010, the trade running in an organised and routine way through networks.^[10] In 2003 the Home Office estimated the number of sex workers who had entered the country at around 4,000; in 2010 their number was put at 2,600.^[11] Through Odessa alone, thousands of women are funnelled into the Europe-wide sex business; some are forced, some lured with promises of office or modelling jobs, some see no other way to survive and desperately seek to leave the city. About half of them come from Odessa Oblast, where traffickers roam the villages and wrap girls around their fingers with stories of career opportunities and riches. From Odessa the human trafficking is managed in a tight hierarchy of pimps, madams and a cross-border mafia, shielded by corrupt police officers. The report also mentions the involvement of members of government — a profitable business.^[12] After the beginning of the Russian invasion on 24 February 2022, many women were driven into flight — and into the sex business beyond Ukraine.^[13]

The mass appearance of Ukrainian part-time prostitutes on tourist visas mirrors the impoverishment of their homeland, a process connected with its increasing integration into Western economic circuits, in which Malta plays an important role. For it is there that Ukrainian oligarchs found special purpose vehicles and holdings in order to withdraw the fortunes plundered during the privatisation of the economy from the reach of their own government in Kyiv.

In London the vagabond capital of Ukrainian oligarchs found an attractive anchorage. This was ensured by the administrative position of the City of London, which for centuries has had its own administration, the City of London Corporation, and its own mayor, the Lord Mayor of London, as well as its own police force, and thus removed itself from the grasp of the government in Westminster.^[14] The Lord Mayor is therefore “head of the most powerful financial lobby in the world”, and his administration uses wealth and status to push forward the deregulation of the financial industry, not only in London but across the whole world. Here landed the profits from the colonies of the British Empire, here the wars of kings were financed, here the bypasses were invented for circumventing state currency controls. As early as the 1950s, British banking houses accepted deposits in US dollars — trading in foreign currencies was officially not permitted at the time — and offered higher interest rates than the US authorities allowed. This barely regulated so-called Eurodollar market grew rapidly; by 1980 deposits had reached a level of 500 billion USD, and by 1990 almost 90 per cent of all international loans were being granted through it. At the same time the London banks cultivated close connections to the remnants of the Empire: the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the Channel Islands — and Malta. Malta thus becomes the marshalling yard into the City of London: Ukrainian assets migrate into Western tax havens, which in turn encourage capital flight. Here lies the origin of the City’s offshore strategy: attract money and at the same time make it vanish from the taxman. The Square Mile of the City remains to this day a magnet for tax-flight money from all over the world.^[15] This is not about sustainable investment, but about quick profits.

This casino economy was given its breakthrough by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher after her election in 1979. Currency controls were lifted, the pound rose, exports became more expensive and a fifth of industrial jobs were lost, while the financial sector ballooned. In 2024, 400,000 bankers, brokers and insurance employees swarmed here on working days, producing eight per cent of British economic output.^[16] Financial geniuses invented credit derivatives, securitised assets and concluded all kinds of futures transactions in order to make still more money out of money.

The high wages and bonuses pulled other sectors into the boom — such as property, gastronomy and call-girl rings — but at the same time deepened the gulf between rich and poor in the city. The City has, moreover, a very particular form of democracy. For the resident banks are allowed to vote too, and indeed according to their number of employees; many staff bring many votes, so the corporations always have the majority, the elected representatives become lobbyists of the financial industry and big money gets a smoothly polished façade democracy.^[17]

Another decisive step followed in October 1986: the British parliament passed a law known as the “Big Bang”, a liberating blow for big money that cleared away further controls and lured US bankers into the City. In the 1990s the collapse of the Eastern bloc freed the capitalists in the West from a possible alternative; the oligarchs’ privatisation loot brought former public wealth into private hands and flushed fresh billions into the City. The Eastern European transformation winners hauled it in. The money came from their raids in their countries of origin, where the population was impoverished and had to foot the bill.

This corresponded with the EU’s business model: simply to bribe corrupt oligarchs and national elites, above all in Ukraine and Moldova, with economic power, in order then to “turn” the countries and draw them into the financial circuits of the Western capital market,^[18] whereby British banks also played a role in the theft of billions in state funds.^[19] Lax British legislation makes it easy to launder billions of stolen money and channel it into the EU. Since then it has been guaranteed that fresh capital for investment keeps flowing in, and that through the resources of the target countries — oil, gas, rare earths, black-earth soils, steelworks, pipelines, ports — new collateral for new loans is available. But this comes at the expense of the population in the EU’s neighbouring states. For their public wealth was privatised at knock-down prices; instead of being invested, the capital was withdrawn from the reach of their own state, the enterprises rotted or were closed down altogether, wages were often not paid, many workers lost their jobs. They experienced the process of absolute immiseration described by Karl Marx — and afterwards the dismal result had only to be blamed on communist mismanagement.

Families in eastern Ukraine were going hungry, and while the champagne corks were popping in the London financial district in the millennium years, whole regions were deindustrialised and the workers impoverished. “All wars are bankers’ wars,” said the financial analyst Alex Krainer.^[20] The daughters of those workers in Ukraine were the ones who lived with me in Chelsea Cloisters on Sloane Avenue, who populated the clubs and the chi-chi bars, and who at nightfall climbed into the gleaming Lamborghini convertibles the bankers kept in the underground garage and brought out only in the evening, to do a few laps around the block and to pick up some blonde or other who barely understood English but did her job rather well.

And so evening after evening they stood in their short skirts in the lobby of Chelsea Cloisters. Women who, on a tourist visa for one month, earned together what they needed in Ukraine to keep their lover in Kyiv afloat, to support their parents in Dnipro and to pay for their grandparents’ visits to the doctor. All of them people who had once pinned their hopes on the EU, and whom, after the coup on the Maidan in 2014, Galician Banderites could easily persuade that the Russians were to blame for everything — the ones in Moscow, or the “vatniki”, the subhumans in eastern Ukraine, who were best shot or driven out.

Naturally the tourist visas did not fall from the sky for his fellow residents on Sloane Avenue. At the British consulate in Kyiv the applications were submitted perfectly and professionally. The processing was tightly organised. People were needed who spoke good English, who knew the application procedure precisely, who were perhaps already familiar with the consular officials, people who could advance the fee. The girls had to cover all of this, or they could work it off afterwards — at a surcharge, of course.^[21]

The idea of equality and fairness landed for the time being on the rubbish heap of history; the bankers counted as magicians and the government read the City’s every wish from its eyes.^[22] This was true also and above all of Tony Blair and New Labour; all the major parties in Westminster received donations from financial firms and individuals from the City, and of the 20 most generous Tory donors in the period from 2010 to 2015, eight earned their money in the banking district.^[23] At least as important was the revolving-door effect between the ministries and the financial firms; leading politicians signed up after leaving politics for highly paid jobs in financial companies. After Tony Blair stepped down as Prime Minister he took a part-time post as an adviser to the investment bank J.P. Morgan, whose annual remuneration was estimated at between 500,000 and 2.5 million pounds.^[24] In the City the mood was that of a party: take while there is something to take.

In the decade before the crisis the financial sector grew twice as fast as the rest of the British economy, by an average of six per cent a year. With its accumulation of commercial banks, investment funds, securities dealers, insurers and reinsurers in the City, London had won back from Wall Street its reputation as the world’s leading financial centre.^[25] No one — not even the government in Westminster — was willing to face the negative consequences of an oversized financial sector: the overvaluation of the pound benefits the City of London, because it is aimed at attracting rich investors from offshore territories, and they will not come if the pound loses value. But the strong exchange rate destroys the competitiveness of industry on international markets, leads to insolvencies and job losses as well as to a trade deficit, and so Britain has to attract money in order to balance the current account.^[26] Everyone believed that the fragmentation and worldwide dispersal of credit risks made the system safer — because they wanted to believe it.

While he was visiting the grave of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery — the actual grave lies far from the memorial, in the rear Jewish section of the cemetery — the red-green coalition in Berlin also wanted to break up Deutschland AG, and so fired up finance capitalism. The tax exemption of capital gains in 2002 enabled the banks to sell their industrial holdings tax-free and invest the proceeds in stock-market bets. This had two fatal consequences: first, German banks were very quickly caught in the vortex of the 2008 financial crisis, which without this reallocation they might have been partly spared. Second, the international financial industry was able to buy its way into German companies and thereby influence management decisions.

In London in the spring of 2009 the wind of the financial crash blew human fates like empty beer cans through the rain-soaked streets. The bankers no longer had money quite so loose in their pockets. The share-release parties were cancelled. At business dinners they saved themselves the companions, all of whom had one button too many open on the blouse. Privately they did without the numbers; instead of excesses, family was back in fashion, and the call girls were sent away and could see where that left them. The oligarchs got capitalism, the football clubs like Roman Abramovich,^[27] the golf courses, the clubs and salons; the girls from Ukraine got the exploitation, the collective blame and the street corner, where more and more young women from south London joined them.^[28]

He was there himself when Polish construction workers on Jamaica Road broke into an empty block of flats with no heating and no running water. In London rain and icy March cold they needed a roof over their heads and somewhere to sleep, for they had been fired from one day to the next; the banking crash was driving the construction firms into bankruptcy, on the construction sites the cranes suddenly stood still, outstanding wages were no longer paid, and those who had hoped to earn more in overalls in the East End than at home as a teacher or professor simply lacked the money for the flight back to Warsaw.^[29] In a pub in Brixton he had to break up a fight, because Poles and Britons, drunk, were about to go for each other and were already reaching for the chairs: “Stop guys and cool down, you won’t get a better life with fighting each other, all this shit is about class, not about race. You can find decent men in any country!”

The banking crisis was passed down the line; both Polish and British workers had the water up to their necks, and the rage long encapsulated in the daily struggle for survival — the rage left behind by neoliberalism, the wage cuts, the work intensification, the redundancies, the fear of one’s own failure, the exhaustion, the resignation — broke out, most violently where the quake had caused the greatest damage. Among the Britons at the table, the suppressed fury left behind by neoliberalism had long since been successfully displaced into a racist reflex.^[30] The last thing these people, battered by capitalism, needed were lectures on diversity or lessons on the climate; but they were receptive to reason and respect, and above all nobody wanted to make a fool of himself in front of foreigners, least of all in front of a German: “Did you hear this gentleman? Friends, I think he’s right. Let’s stay friends and have another pint!”

With the taxpayer’s money the governments rescued the banks — more than a trillion pounds, that is a thousand billion, was spent by the British state on bank rescues from 2007 onwards; but the subsequent recession turned out even more costly, the economy shrank by ten to 15 per cent, jobs were lost, debts rose dramatically, and austerity measures in the social and education sectors followed. Once again the financial industry had won.^[31]

The financial crisis dragged two decisive structural changes in the financial system in its wake: first, it brought a shift from bad loans to government bonds, and second, a displacement of these bonds away from the banks into the shadow banking system. The rescue of the banks with taxpayers’ money has led, according to the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, to a reduction in risk in the banking sector while at the same time the debt burden of states has risen as never before in peacetime. At the same time, fund assets have migrated out of bank balance sheets, while they have risen dramatically at hedge funds, investment funds, pension funds, insurers and financial investors. This increases the risks, because in the shadow banking system investments are often leveraged with derivative mechanisms in order to exploit price fluctuations optimally while easing the burden on equity capital. This raises the danger of procyclical fire sales and can shake states’ refinancing conditions.^[32] Thus Germany’s budget too has fallen into the Babylonian captivity of international financial investors in the largely unregulated shadow banking system, who earn billions from the Ukraine war and can put pressure on any state that wants to step out of the front of warmongers by selling off its bonds.

The holes in the budget that had opened up after the meltdown in the financial system served as a welcome pretext for dismantling the welfare state further. Faced with the choice of rescuing the financial sector or the welfare state, the government left no doubt that the City enjoys priority, and so signalled to the whole world that foreign money is in good hands here. The financial industry had to be kept alive, even if the rest of the world sank into chaos, misery and war.^[33]

For more than three centuries the City of London has financed wars and sold insurance against the resulting destruction, and in doing so the financial centre uses the emerging chaos as a weapon. Lloyd’s of London is the insurance pillar of the City’s network of financial control, not actually an insurance company but a corporate body functioning as a marketplace on which several financiers, joined together in syndicates, come together to bundle and spread risks. Lloyd’s has a reputation for always delivering, but this comes at a price. In 1898 the company formalised a long-standing practice by introducing the “Free of Capture and Seizure” clause, with which war risks were struck out of insurance policies and the possibility was created of demanding excessive premiums on the outbreak of a conflict. This clause was applied in the First and Second World Wars, with the beginning of the civil war in the Donbass and the accession of Crimea to Russia in 2014, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 — and after the attack on Iran by the USA and Israel.^[34]

In 1999 almost the entire world was opened up to unregulated derivatives trading, so that government bonds, oil flows, shipping routes and war-risk insurance could be broken down into credit default swaps, hedges and other derivative products and thereby made the plaything of speculation. The decisive lever was the WTO agreement on financial services of 1997 (the Fifth Protocol to the General Agreement on Trade in Services), which came into force in 1999. Under it, all 156 nations in the WTO had to abolish the separation between commercial savings banks and investment banks that speculate with derivatives. The WTO agreement became the battering ram for opening global markets to this derivatives business. Derivatives trading thereupon exploded and developed into one of the most concentrated and most profitable businesses in the world, and it is controlled by a few large banks.^[35]

In the City of London the machinery of war insurance and the machinery of derivatives work hand in hand, for the former ensures the raising of chaos premiums, and the latter harvests them through rehypothecation and legal seizure. The hedging of war risks is a form of insurance, but the derivatives market is a far larger insurance trap, for derivatives are sold as protection against market risks while in fact being a speculative gamble that skims profits off all important economic flows.^[36]

In June 2025 the notional value of outstanding over-the-counter derivatives was put at 846 trillion dollars, 16% more than the previous year^[37] — that is almost a quadrillion, a one with 15 zeros. As early as 2016 the volume of transactions on the financial markets exceeded turnover in goods and services by more than a hundredfold.^[38] When this bubble bursts, it will trigger a wave of insolvencies that will force the fire sale of liquid assets. The stock-market insider David Rogers Webb documented the legal mechanisms by which the derivatives dealers claim everything for themselves.^[39] For quiet changes to the Uniform Commercial Code and to corresponding EU regulations have turned ordinary investors into mere “entitlement holders”, who merely hold a legal claim against their securities dealers, while in any insolvency shares, bonds and deposits legally serve as collateral for the derivatives complex — collateral that has been rehypothecated many times over. If the derivative collateral fails, then the rehypothecated house of cards erected upon it collapses, margin calls will follow, the chain of priority in access is triggered and the great raid begins.^[40] It would be the meltdown of the financial system.

To prevent that from happening, ever new collateral must be pumped into the system — oil and gas deposits, rare earths, coal and iron ore, minerals of every kind — which can serve as objects of speculation on future profits and thereby as the new basis for derivatives trading. At the beginning of 2013 the then Dutch Prime Minister and later NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte concluded a contract with Shell and the Ukrainian government allowing the energy giant to extract shale gas over an area of almost 8,000 square kilometres in the region between Kharkiv and Donetsk.^[41] The energy multinationals Chevron and Exxon had also signed such extraction contracts. In total the three companies had pledged investments of 32 billion USD, which already permits conclusions about the profits expected. A consortium of Exxon, OMV Petrom and the state enterprise Nadra Ukrainy alone wanted to invest up to 12 billion USD in developing the largest deposit by area, the Skifska oil and gas field in the Black Sea.^[42] Friedrich Merz, as CEO of BlackRock in Germany, evidently made similar arrangements for the financial investor.^[43]

The Donbass is rich in mineral resources such as hard coal, iron ore, important minerals such as lithium, manganese, titanium, cobalt, rare earths, graphite and other metals that are decisive for the energy transition. 95% of Ukraine’s energy resources lie in the Donbass.^[44] These resources are an important incentive for the war.^[45] Shell, Exxon, Halliburton and Chevron wanted to extract these resources with the help of fracking technology and export them to the EU.^[46]

US Senator John McCain turned up in 2014 at the coup on the Maidan. In 2008 the major energy companies had supported his election campaign with a total of two million dollars, and in return McCain voted in the Senate against support for renewable energies and against higher taxation of the oil companies, which spared the Big Energy complex fiscal costs of some 13 billion USD. In May 2014 Ukraine’s largest private energy company, Burisma Holdings, appointed the son of US Vice President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors. A few weeks earlier, the former Polish Prime Minister Aleksander Kwaśniewski and the campaign manager of the later US Secretary of State John Kerry, Devon Archer, had already joined the body. As early as the end of April 2014, four weeks before his son joined Burisma, Joe Biden had visited Kyiv and spoken with the coup government about Ukraine’s energy supply, promising to support the country in implementing the contracts concluded in 2013.^[47]

But the companies had reckoned without their host. Of all regions, the gas-rich Crimea and eastern Ukraine resisted the 2014 coup on the Maidan. In the Donbass the ousted President Yanukovych had received more than 90% of the vote in the 2010 elections; the population was not prepared to accept the violent regime change, and in Crimea 96.77% voted in a referendum for the return to Russia.^[48] At all access points to the Yuzivska gas field — in Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Volnovakha, Lysychansk and Rubizhne — citizens occupied the town halls and blocked the transport routes. Within a few weeks the extraction region turned into a civil war zone. The rebellion in the Donbass deprived Western corporations and banks of the possibility of converting the natural resources into their own collateral.

On 30 April 2014 the International Monetary Fund approved an aid package of 17 billion USD.^[49] Kyiv’s Western sponsors put pressure on the new government to act against the uprising and to regain control in the east and south.^[50] From a report by the US broadcaster CNBC we know that Kyiv’s approach was “politically driven by key IMF shareholders” in order to support the Yatsenyuk “kamikaze” government in its reform efforts. The International Monetary Fund threatened: should the central government lose control over the east, the aid programme would have to be recut.^[51]

On 13 March 2014, alongside the army, the 60,000-strong National Guard was mobilised under the new security chief, the militant right-wing extremist Andriy Parubiy.^[52] CIA Director John Brennan personally organised from Kyiv the deployment of dozens of CIA and FBI special units to build up a security structure against the insurgents.^[53] By military means the coup government also wanted to push through the extraction of fracking gas.^[54]

US foreign policy had prepared the energy corporations’ offensive in Eastern Europe since 2010 with the “Global Shale Gas Initiative”: “This is a diplomatic royal flush,” said the head and coordinator for international energy affairs David Goldwyn, who recommended that Washington should promote access to new exploration areas in order to secure investment.^[55] The point was to integrate energy resources into the Western hemisphere, to reduce dependence on Russian gas in Ukraine and in Europe, and thereby to achieve a geopolitical shift of power.

The central obstacle identified in this was the energy partnership between Germany and Russia. A confidential paper by the RAND Corporation from January 2022 — whose authenticity was of course immediately denied — states plainly that the US economy, and the banking system in particular, cannot function without an inflow of financial and material resources from external sources. In order to secure a transfer of resources from Europe to the USA, an economic crisis would have to be brought about in Germany. To that end it would be necessary to interrupt the cheap supply of Russian energy, and the only feasible way was to draw Germany into a war in Ukraine.^[56]

From the very beginning, the war in Ukraine was about pushing the Russian competitor out of the energy market and generating new profits.^[57] This was urgently needed, because the companies had financed their investments in new extraction technologies through high-interest loans. The investment bank JP Morgan estimated the financial bubble around the fracking industry at around 550 billion USD. Should these high-risk bonds default, a scenario similar to the default of property loans at the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis threatens.^[58] That means profits from fracking exports urgently had to be generated and new loan collateral obtained.^[59] That is exactly what the Ukraine war is about too; that is what the 2003 war against Iraq in breach of international law was about, and that is what the attack on Iran will be about in 2026: taking possession of resources, forcing markets open, controlling logistics routes, winning new collateral for new loans and leveraging the profits in derivatives trading.

One of the key shareholders mentioned by CNBC was presumably Ariane de Rothschild, CEO of the Edmond de Rothschild Group. On 18 March 2014 she wrote to Jeffrey Epstein that she had sat a long day on the bank board, that the numbers were acceptable but not satisfactory to her, that she was putting them under pressure to be more innovative about asset management funds while restructuring, that she was at a dinner with a client and fed up, that she missed their talks and hoped he was well, that she would be at home the following evening — and that they should discuss Ukraine. Epstein replied that the upheaval in Ukraine should provide many opportunities, many.^[60] And indeed: given Ukraine’s liquid collateral, estimated at 10 to 12 trillion USD, one can certainly speak of great opportunities — and of the collapse of the financial system if this collateral fails to materialise.

It began with the greed for new profits and the pincer grip on new collateral for the speculators. The 2014 coup in Kyiv and the junta’s attack on the population in the east and south of Ukraine were supposed to deliver this collateral. This created the conflict that led to a full-scale war with Russia, and that could widen into another devastating world war in Europe. All wars are bankers’ wars. They did not get the minerals in eastern Ukraine. That is why they cannot go back. They want the war.

There is no history without the crime scene on which it is committed.^[61] London 2003 was the analytical test case in which time and space stretched. He had to admit: it only really struck him when the financial crisis of 2008 caused the house of cards of flimsy speculation to collapse, and when in February 2014 the first blood flowed in Ukraine.

The summer was already turning towards autumn. At the end of August he took his leave of the studio on Great Chapel Street and of the building behind the railings, which has long since ceased to exist because it had to make way for underground construction and land speculation. The news machine had spat him out again and ran on with other, ever more supple young talents who produced films and live links as if on a conveyor belt and hoped for the great career. He took one last walk through Covent Garden as far as Brick Lane, then ordered lunch in Chinatown, took a drink at dusk in the Hour Glass and read on the bar mat the advertisement for Spitfire beer: “Ref, watch the Germans. They always want to nick some extra yards!”^[62] The jocular warning to the referee about the German menace in football played on the long-term memory of the Battle of Britain and the London nights of bombing. Memories that are being reawakened today by a chancellor who wants to make the Bundeswehr “the conventionally strongest army in Europe”.^[63]

London remained in the fever of stock-market bets, in which the fortunes of Ukrainian oligarchs were also invested, and the robbed followed their stolen money, climbing at nightfall into the sports coupés in front of Chelsea Cloisters and throwing the pizza boxes exhaustedly into the corridor at night. The great rip-off was running, casino capitalism was sucking up ever more resources ever faster, a pyramid scheme meant to rescue old bad loans and flimsy stock-market bets with new collateral. War — a gigantic laundry that flushes the stolen money of citizens over mountains of corpses into the accounts of corporations and financial investors. Iraq 2003, Libya and Syria 2008, Ukraine 2014, Iran 2025 and 2026 — the merchants of death must want war so that the house of cards of derivatives does not collapse: one long bloody delay of bankruptcy, the road into the final catastrophe of the capital system.^[64] London was the gate to hell and he had not even noticed it.

He took a taxi from Sloane Avenue to Heathrow and did not look back. It was a wonderful summer.

^[1]“He wanted to do well and to be see as doing well; and he did very much want his million-pound bonus. He wanted a million pounds because he had never earned it before and he felt it was his due and it was a proof of his masculine worth. But he also wanted it bcause he needed the money. The figure of £ 1,000,000 had started as a vague, semi-comic aspiration and had become an actual necessity, something he needed to pay the bills and set his finances on the square. His basic pay of £ 150,000 was nice as what Arabella called ‘frock money’, but it did not pay even for his two mortgages. The house in Pepys Road was double-fronted and had cost £ 2,500,000, which at the time had felt like the top of the market, even though prices had risen a great deal since then...” Lanchester, John: Capital. London 2012, p. 19

^[2]Baab, Patrik: British weapons expert David Kelly missing. Nachtmagazin, 18.07.2003

Baab, Patrik: After the death of David Kelly. Tagesthemen, 19.07.2003

Baab, Patrik: Kelly affair: Blair returns from Asia tour. Tagesthemen, 23.07.2003

Baab, Patrik: Kelly affair: The BBC under pressure. Zapp, 27.07.2003

Baab, Patrik: Kelly affair: Before Tony Blair’s press conference. ARD-Morgenmagazin, 28.07.2003

Baab, Patrik: Kelly affair: Tony Blair press conference. Tagesschau 14:00, 30.07.2003

Baab, Patrik: Kelly affair: Tony Blair press conference. ARD-Mittagsmagazin, 30.07.2003

Baab, Patrik: Kelly affair: Blair appears self-assured. Tagesschau 17:00, 30.07.2003

^[3]David Kelly allegedly died by suicide, but according to Norman Baker this is implausible. The traditional judicial inquest was replaced by the Hutton Commission, whose report is unsatisfactory. What is clear, by contrast, is that Kelly was placed under massive pressure by Tony Blair’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell: “I am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that this could not be suicide. The medical evidence does not support it and David Kelly’s state of mind and personality suggests otherwise. It was not an accident so I am left with the conclusion that this is murder.” Baker, Norman: Interview: David Kelly’s death is “unfinished business”. The New Statesman, 04.12.2013, https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/12/norman-baker-interview-david-kellys-death-unfinished-business

Baker, Norman: The Strange Death of David Kelly. London 2007

^[4]Stäuber, Peter: London. Unterwegs in einer umkämpften Metropole. Vienna 2026, pp. 17–47

^[5]Baab, Patrik: London suffers under the heatwave. ARD-Brennpunkt, 06.08.2003

^[6]Baab, Patrik: The German Diana fan club visits Margaret Tylor’s Royal House. Brisant, 04.08.2003 and ARD-Nachtmagazin of 04.08.2003

^[7]Baab, Patrik: Lord Hutton begins the questioning. ARD-Morgenmagazin, 11.08.2003

Baab, Patrik: BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan testifies before investigating judge Brian Hutton. Live, ARD-Morgenmagazin, 12.08.2003

Baab, Patrik: Lord Hutton questions Andrew Gilligan, BBC. Tagesschau 15:00, 12.08.2003

^[8]“Over the last decade and a half she had gleaned vocabulary here and there. The television, the brief exchanges at the few non-Bengali shops she entered, the dentist, the doctor, teachers at the girl’s schools. But it was the girls who taught her. Without lessons, textbooks or Razia’s ‘key phrases’. Their method was simple: they demanden to be understood.” Ali, Monica: Brick Lane. Cambridge 2003, p. 194

^[9]“The deindustrialisation of the West, which began in the 1980s, had long been in ideological preparation — in Great Britain since the 1860s to 1880s. In the 1950s and 1960s the environmental movement was added. The environmental movement of the 1960s was organised by the Rockefeller Foundation and paved the way for the later deindustrialisation.” Fursov, Andrei: The present world crisis: its social nature. The International Schiller Institute, 30.05.2013, https://schillerinstitute.com/de/media/andrej-fursow-die-gegenwartige-weltkrise-ihre-soziale-natur/

The Rockefeller Foundation: Making opportunity universal and sustainable through Climate and Resilience. Mobilizing capital and driving investment at scale into solutions that can reduce emissions dramatically and protect the most vulnerable from climate impacts. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/what-we-do/climate-resilience/

The Rockefeller Foundation: Addressing Climate Change. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/fellowships-convenings/bellagio-center/convenings/addressing-climate-change/

^[10]Townsend, Mark: Sex trafficking trade forces women from Odessa to massage parlours in Britain. The Guardian, 02.07.2011, https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/jul/02/odessa-ukraine-sex-trafficking-investigation

^[11]2,600 prostitutes were ‘trafficked into UK’. BBC News of 18.08.2010, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11012084

^[12]Townsend, Mark: Sex trafficking trade forces women from Odessa to massage parlours in Britain. The Guardian, 02.07.2011, https://www.theguardian.com/law/2011/jul/02/odessa-ukraine-sex-trafficking-investigation

^[13]Richey, Valiant: As Ukrainian refugees fall prey to sex-traffickers, Scotland has a duty to tackle demand for prostitutes. The Scotsman, 04.06.2022, https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/as-ukrainian-refugees-fall-prey-to-sex-traffickers-scotland-has-a-duty-to-tackle-demand-for-prostitutes-valiant-richey-osce-3718538

Henn, Jessica: Ukraine’s Ticking Time Bomb: Women, War and HIV. MS. Magazine of 16.03.2022, https://msmagazine.com/2022/03/16/ukraine-women-war-hiv-sex-work-prostitution/

^[14]Shaxson, Nicholas: Treasure Islands. Tax Havens and the Man Who Stole the World. London 2011, pp. 244–279

Stäuber, Peter: Die Macht der Quadratmeile. Die Wochenzeitung, 15.03.2012, https://www.woz.ch/1211/finanzplatz-city-of-london/die-macht-der-quadratmeile

^[15]Stäuber, Peter: Die Macht der Quadratmeile. Die Wochenzeitung, 15.03.2012, https://www.woz.ch/1211/finanzplatz-city-of-london/die-macht-der-quadratmeile

^[16]https://finanzplatz-frankfurt-main.de/finanzplatz-london-finanzplatz-deutschland-grossbritannien-nach-dem-brexit-wohin-steuern-wirtschaft-und-finanzplatz-london-interview-plessentin

^[17]Stäuber, Peter: Die Macht der Quadratmeile. Die Wochenzeitung, 15.03.2012, https://www.woz.ch/1211/finanzplatz-city-of-london/die-macht-der-quadratmeile

^[18]“The ‘Eastern Partnership’ programme was conceived as part of the EU’s neighbourhood policy. It was intended to enable both sides to build advantageous relations between the European Union and the former Soviet republics (https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/neigbourhood/eastern_partnership_en). Billions of euros were made available for the EU’s eastern policy — and still are (https://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/lexika/das-europalexikon/177178/oestliche-partnerschaft). An unbiased assessment of a decade of EU eastern policy is, however, sobering. The reasons for this failure were not entirely within Brussels’ control. A substantial share of the responsibility lies with staff of the European External Action Service (EEAS) and with the heads of the EU missions in the six Eastern Partnership countries. Misjudgements, unclear competences and dubious connections to corrupt oligarchs led to the failure of the expensive programme and of the entire EU eastern policy, both in Eastern Europe and in the Caucasus. One of the central figures in this development, driven forward under the leadership of Baroness Ashton, Štefan Füle, Federica Mogherini and now Josep Borrell, was the diplomat Dirk Schübel. In 2006 Schübel was appointed deputy head of the EU’s diplomatic mission in Ukraine. He worked only two years in Kyiv, but during that time he managed to forge close connections to the Ukrainian oligarchs. Schübel evidently also played a decisive part in enabling many well-heeled Ukrainians to enter Europe with their criminally acquired money. (Belnovosti/Белновости: “Восточное партнерство для восточного немца: лица европейской дипломатии”, in: Белновости, 09.06.2021, online at https://www.belnovosti.by/politika/vostochnoe-partnersto-dlya-vostochnogo-nemca-lica-evropeyskoy-diplomatii.) In Moldova, Schübel steered the mafia regime consistently towards Brussels despite the protests of the local population. (Keno Verseck: Machtwechsel in der Republik Moldau, Das große Aufräumen nach dem Milliardenraub, in: Der Spiegel, 31.08.2019, https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/republik-moldau-das-grosse-aufraeumen-nach-dem-milliardenraub-a-1284189-amp.html. Matthias Williams: Powerful tycoon sees Moldova sticking to EU path regardless of election outcome, in: Reuters, 11.11.2016, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-moldova-election-tycoon-idUKKBN13617A?edition-redirect=uk. Belnovosti/Белновости: “Восточное партнерство для восточного немца: лица европейской дипломатии”, in: Белновости, 09.06.2021, https://www.belnovosti.by/politika/vostochnoe-partnersto-dlya-vostochnogo-nemca-lica-evropeyskoy-diplomatii)

The provisional high point of the Moldovan scandals was the theft of one billion USD from the country’s state budget by local officials and oligarchs, who for years had been presented in the EU delegation’s reporting as reformers, adherents of the market economy, of democracy and of European values. British banks evidently also took part in this theft (Whewell, Tim: The great Moldovan bank robbery, BBC News, 18.05.2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33166383).

The EU’s eastern policy, formulated by notorious revanchists in the spirit of the Cold War, achieved almost exactly the results that were to be expected from the outset: it divided the continent into two camps and left little freedom of action to all those who sought a middle way. Dirk Schübel and his colleagues from the EEAS are not to blame for that. But the attempt simply to buy up corrupt national elites and entire countries with economic power failed and left behind about the worst conceivable image of Western Europe in these countries, which could only see their national dignity injured by these machinations. The damage to the EU is immense. (Belnovosti/Белновости: “Восточное партнерство для восточного немца: лица европейской дипломатии”, in: Белновости, 09.06.2021, https://www.belnovosti.by/politika/vostochnoe-partnersto-dlya-vostochnogo-nemca-lica-evropeyskoy-diplomatii)

^[19]“It’s a mystery that’s thrown Europe’s poorest nation into deep crisis - $1bn has vanished from three of Moldova’s leading banks, much of it passing through UK companies... loans worth $1bn were transferred in just two days to a series of UK- and Hongkong-registered companies - companies whose ultimate owners are unknown... The five Moldovan firms, including Caritas Group SRL, that allegedly received the loans are said to have transferred the money immediately to five UK- and Hongkong-registered firms. But they all bank in Latvia, and most seem to be owned in turn by companies in offshore tax havens. And in a final layer of obfuscation, they now owe all the money not to Banca Sociala, but to another UK-registered entity, Fortuna United LP, that’s said to have bought the entire combined loan. Look up Fortuna United LP, and you’ll find it’s registered - along with 421 other active firms, at a flat in a run-down part of Edinburgh. It’s a limited partnership formed of two companies in the Seychelles about which no further information is available. UK limited partnerships, unlike limited companies, are not required to file publicly-available annual returns or accounts. The only public information they must supply is their registered address and the names of partners - but these need not to be individuals, and need not to be based in the UK. The number of limited partnerships registered in the UK has risen sharply, from 17,239 in 2009-2010, to 27,853 in the last financial year, 2013-14. Vasile Sarco of Moldova’s Office for Prevention of Money-laundering says the purpose of using UK-registered companies is to hide the beneficiaries of the funds. He’s investigating not only the disappearance of the $1bn from the three banks, but also earlier $20bn operation which laundered dirty money from Russia through Moldova into the EU.” Whewell, Tim: The great Moldovan bank robbery, BBC News, 18.05.2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33166383

Stern, David: Moldova crisis, An elite power grab? BBC News, 27.01.2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35410818

^[20]Krainer, Alex: After Iran War: A New Global Economy. Glenn Diesen, 10.04.2026

^[21]Ralph Bosshard notes, in connection with criminal networks: “The trail also leads to a curious company in Great Britain that simultaneously sells ladies’ underwear and offers financial services.” Bosshard, Ralph: Krieg, Korruption und Flüchtlinge: Die ukrainischen Geheimdienste und die Mafia. Globalbridge, 26.03.2026, https://globalbridge.ch/krieg-korruption-und-fluechtlinge-die-ukrainischen-geheimdienste-und-die-mafia/

Bosshard, Ralph: Interview on Gegen den Strom (Patrik Baab)

^[22]Lanchester, John: Warum jeder jedem etwas schuldet aber keiner jemals etwas zurückzahlt: Die bizarre Geschichte der Finanzen. Stuttgart 2013, pp. 32f.

^[23]Stäuber, Peter: London. Unterwegs in einer umkämpften Metropole. Vienna 2026, pp. 38f.

^[24]https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/article-1693540/How-rich-is-Tony-Blair.html

^[25]Finance capital, according to Andrei Fursov, achieved worldwide dominance by transforming the monetary system from an instrument for supporting the real economy into its ruler, with the British system becoming the model for worldwide financial control. This process is characterised by the decoupling of the financial sector from production, the control of money creation by the financial industry and thus its decoupling from real values, the transformation of the old industrial elites into speculation-oriented financial elites, and the leading role of the British financial world and hence of the City of London. Андрей Фурсов (https://sponsr.ru/aenigmate/): Как финансиалисты прокладывали себе путь к мировому господству и смогут ли удержаться на вершине (Fursov, Andrei: How the financial elites paved their way to world domination and whether they can stay on top), Sponsr, 24.04.2024, https://sponsr.ru/aenigmate/64435/Kak_finansialisty_prokladyvali_sebe_put_k_mirovomu_gospodstvu_i_smogut_li_uderjatsya_na_vershine_Andrei_Fursov/

^[26]Stäuber, Peter: London. Unterwegs in einer umkämpften Metropole. Vienna 2026, pp. 37f.

^[27]Baab, Patrik: Roman Abramovich buys success for FC Chelsea. ARD-Morgenmagazin, 15.08.2003 and BR Euroblick, 17.08.2003 (The 6-minute report was cut to remove the passages critical of Abramovich. At the time the football fans among the editors were delighted by the oligarch — or rather by his money. The original manuscript still exists.) Further information: Midgley, Dominic and Chris Hutchins: Abramovich. The Billionaire From Nowhere. London 2005

^[28]Tempest, Kate: The Bricks that Built the Houses. London 2016

^[29]Baab, Patrik: Poles in London: The dream is over. Europamagazin, 28.03.2009

^[30]“In all societies churned up by neoliberalism, mass rage prevails. Long encapsulated in the daily struggle for existence, it finally breaks out, most violently where the quake caused the greatest damage.” Engler, Wolfgang: Die offene Gesellschaft und ihre Grenzen, Berlin 2021, pp. 104f.

^[31]Hüetlin, Thomas and Mathieu von Rohr: Land voller Angst. Kaum ein Land erlebt durch die Wirtschaftskrise einen so brutalen Absturz wie das Vereinigte Königreich. Der Spiegel, No. 9, 2009, pp. 108–111

^[32]“For instance, with broker-dealer balance sheets having smaller heft in the financial system post-GFC, liquidity in sovereign bond markets increasingly relies on open-ended mutual funds, hedge funds and other asset managers. These entities often face significant liquidity mismatches, rely on short-term funding backed by government securities as collateral or are either frequently highly leveraged or exhibit leverage-like behaviour. As a result, their liquidity provision is less stable and more likely to evaporate during periods of market stress. Hedge funds, in particular, have increasingly become a significant source of procyclical liquidity, especially in government bond markets. These investors actively pursue relative value trading strategies that seek to exploit small price differences between related financial instruments. To boost the returns on these small price differences they heavily leverage their positions. One method often used is to pledge government securities as collateral in the repo market to borrow more cash with which to purchase additional government securities. This practice has further evolved in recent years, with investors borrowing amounts equal to or higher than the market value of the collateral provided... Hedge funds’ relative value strategies are highly vulnerable to adverse shocks in funding, cash or derivate markets, as evidenced by some recent episodes. During the market turmoil of March 2020, for instance, margin calls in Treasury futures markets triggered fire sales, resulting in destabilising deleveraging spirals.” Tooze, Adam: Chartbook 401: The dollar system in an age of market-based finance — financial globalization beyond banks, Substack, 25.07.2025, https://substack.com/home/post/p-169614598

^[33]Stäuber, Peter: London. Unterwegs in einer umkämpften Metropole. Vienna 2026, pp. 44–47

^[34]Brown, Ellen: All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame. Global Research, 13.04.2026, https://www.globalresearch.ca/all-wars-bankers-wars-iran/5922072

^[35]Brown, Ellen: All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame. Global Research, 13.04.2026, https://www.globalresearch.ca/all-wars-bankers-wars-iran/5922072

^[36]Brown, Ellen: All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame. Global Research, 13.04.2026, https://www.globalresearch.ca/all-wars-bankers-wars-iran/5922072

^[37]“The notional value of outstanding over-the-counter (OTC) derivates rose to $846 trillion at June 2025, up 16% from June 2024. This marks an acceleration from the moderate 5% annual upward trend since end-2016.” Bank for International Settlements: OTC derivates statistics at end-june 2025. 08.12.2025, https://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy2512.htm

^[38]Nachtwey, Oliver: Die Abstiegsgesellschaft. Über das Aufbegehren in der regressiven Moderne. Frankfurt a. M. 2016 (3rd ed.), p. 52. Cf. Schulmeister, Stephan: “Over the past 15 years transactions on the financial markets increased considerably; in 2007 their volume was around 74 times world production. More than 90% of all transactions are accounted for by financial derivatives, the greater part of which is not attributable to hedging but to speculation.” Id.: Handelsdynamik und Preisschwankungen auf Finanzmärkten und das Stabilisierungspotential einer Finanztransaktionssteuer. WIFO, 08.2008, https://www.wifo.ac.at/wp-content/uploads/upload-8546/MB_2008_08_05_FINANZKRISE_TRANSAKTIONSSTEUER_.pdf

^[39]Webb, David Rogers: Die grosse Enteignung. Straßengel 2024 (English original: The Great Taking)

^[40]Brown, Ellen: All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame. Global Research, 13.04.2026, https://www.globalresearch.ca/all-wars-bankers-wars-iran/5922072

^[41]

/photo/1

^[42]Daniljuk, Malte: Neue Energie für Europa. Telepolis, 17.01.2015, https://www.telepolis.de/article/Neue-Energie-fuer-Europa-3369425.html

^[43]

^[44]Ford, Matt: Russia Is Crashing Ukraine’s Hopes For Energy Independence. The Atlantic, 08.04.2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/russia-is-crushing-ukraines-hopes-for-energy-independence/360281/

^[45]

^[46]Krainer, Alex: All wars are bankers’ wars. So was Kiev’s 2014 anti-terror operation. Substack, 15.04.2026, https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/all-wars-are-bankers-wars-so-was

^[47]Daniljuk, Malte: Neue Energie für Europa. Telepolis, 17.01.2015, https://www.telepolis.de/article/Neue-Energie-fuer-Europa-3369425.html

^[48]Krainer, Alex: All wars are bankers’ wars. So was Kiev’s 2014 anti-terror operation. Substack, 15.04.2026, https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/all-wars-are-bankers-wars-so-was

^[49]IMF approves $17 billion bailout for Ukraine. Reuters, 30.04.2014, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-ukraine-crisis-imf/imf-approves-17-billion-bailout-for-ukraine-idUKKBN0DG1XW20140430/

^[50]Ukraine’s most senior intelligence officer, Andrii Telizhenko, said that CIA Director John “Brennan gave the green light to use force against the Donbass”, namely on 12 April 2014, and discussed “how the US could support it... A plan to keep the Donbass in Ukraine’s hands... Ukraine must take decisive, aggressive measures...” The following day, 13 April, the junta announced the so-called anti-terror operation against the rebels. Krainer, Alex: All wars are bankers’ wars. So was Kiev’s 2014 anti-terror operation. Substack, 15.04.2026, https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/all-wars-are-bankers-wars-so-was

^[51]Boyle, Catherine: IMF warns Ukraine on bailout if it loses east. CNBC, 01.05.2014, https://archive.is/llqw0

^[52]Hyland, Julie: What the Western-backed regime is planning for Ukrainian workers. World Socialist Web Site, 14.03.2014, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/15/pers-m15.html

^[53]Pilger, John: In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia. Washington’s role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime’s neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world. The Guardian, 13.05.2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/ukraine-us-war-russia-john-pilger

^[54]Ukrainian army helps installing shale gas production equipment near Slavyansk. TASS, 25.07.2014, https://tass.com/world/742366

^[55]Quoted from Goldwyn, David L.: Making an Energy Boom Work for the U.S. New York Times, 12.11.2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/business/energy-environment/making-an-energy-boom-work-for-us.html

^[56]“The present state of the U.S. economy does not suggest that it can function without financial and material support from external sources... There is an urgent need for resources to flow into the national economy, especially the banking system. Only European countries bound by EU and NATO commitments will be able to provide them without significant military and political costs for us. The major obstacle to it is growing independence of Germany. Although it still is a country with limited sovereignty, for decades it has been consistently moving toward lifting these limitations and becoming a fully independent state... An increase in the flow of resources from Europe to U.S. can be expected if Germany begins to experience a controlled economic crisis... The current German economic model is based on two pillars. These are unlimited access to cheap Russian energy resources and to cheap French electric power, thanks to the operation of nuclear power plants. Halting Russian supplies can well create a systemic crisis that would be devastating for the German economy and, indirectly, for the entire European Union... The only feasible way to guarantee Germany’s rejection of Russian energy supplies is to involve both sides in the military conflict in Ukraine. Our further actions in this country will inevitably lead to a military response from Russia. Russians will obviously not be able to leave unanswered the massive Ukrainian army pressure on the unrecognized Donbas republics. That would make possible to declare Russia an aggressor and apply to it the entire package of sanctions prepared beforehand... The prerequisite for Germany to fall into this trap is the leading role of green parties and ideology in Europe. The German Greens are a strongly dogmatic, if not zealous, movement, which makes it quite easy to make them ignore economic arguments... Personal features and the lack of professionalism of their leaders — primarily Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck — permit to presume that it is next to impossible for them to admit their own mistakes in a timely manner.” Research Report — Executive Summary. Distribution: WHCS, ANSA, Dept. of State, CIA, NSA, DNC. Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, 25.01.2022 — Confidential.

Further evidence: Berletic, Brian: U.S. Is Grooming Europe for War with Russia. Interview, The Greater Eurasia Podcast (Glenn Diesen), 30.04.2026,

^[57]Nye, Joseph S. Jr.: A Western Strategy for a Declining Russia. Project Syndicate, 03.09.2014, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/joseph-s--nye-wants-to-deter-russia-without-isolating-it

^[58]Ölpreis: Prognose von Morgan Stanley belastet. Boerse.de of 09.12.2014, https://www.boerse.de/nachrichten/Oelpreis-Prognose-von-Morgan-Stanley-belastet/7522862

Daniljuk, Malte: Neue Energie für Europa. Telepolis, 17.01.2015, https://www.telepolis.de/article/Neue-Energie-fuer-Europa-3369425.html

^[59]Ebinger, Charles K.: The Department of Energy’s Strategy for Exporting Liquefied Natural Gas. Brookings Institution, 19.03.2013, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-department-of-energys-strategy-for-exporting-liquefied-natural-gas/

^[60]Ariane de Rothschild to Jeffrey Epstein, Tuesday, 18 March 2014, 20:55: “Hi Jeff, very long day sitting on bank board... Numbers are ok but not satisfactory to me. And i m putting them under pressure to be more innovative about asset mgt funds while restructuring. I m in a dinner with a client Fed up! I miss our talks and hope you re well. Will be at home tomorrow night, will you be free? And lets discuss Ukraine”. On 18 March 2014 at 16:40 Jeffrey Epstein wrote: “ukraine upheaval should provide many opportunities, many”. Quoted from Krainer, Alex: All wars are bankers’ wars. So was Kiev’s 2014 anti-terror operation. Substack, 15.04.2026, https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/all-wars-are-bankers-wars-so-was

^[61]“From then on there was no history any more without the settings and crime scenes on which it took place. It was the analytical test case of opening up a history that has not only time but also space in mind.” Schlögel, Karl: Moskau Lesen. Munich 2011, p. 13

^[62]The Spitfire advertisement played on the nationalist prejudice that something cannot be right if football was invented in England but the Germans always win.

^[63]https://www.bundestag.de/dokumente/textarchiv/2025/kw20-de-regierungserklaerung-merz-1064956

^[64]“However, in 2008 the crisis phenomena once again asserted themselves insistently — they were temporarily flooded with money, but the crisis itself did not go away; it is continuing all the same. And now the world economy is, in essence, on the brink of catastrophe. Moreover, unlike the economic crisis of 1929–1939 or the recession of 1873–1896, which were varieties of structural crises, the capitalist system now faces a systemic, terminal crisis. Capitalism has served its time; something new is needed.”

Андрей Фурсов (https://dzen.ru/govoritfursov): Перерождение, которого опасался Сталин. Советское руководство отказалось от будущего в середине 1960-х годов. (Fursov, Andrei: The rebirth Stalin feared. In the mid-1960s the Soviet leadership gave up the future. Blog of 12.09.2024) https://dzen.ru/a/ZuLEESPl5UPFey63

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Originally published in Current Concerns*, Issue No. 12, 16 June 2026
https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2026/no-12-16-june-2026/what-on-earth-has-become-of-germany

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On 28 May 2026, the German journalist and author Patrik Baab published an interview with Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, on his YouTube channel “Gegen den Strom”.¹ Baab had conducted this approximately 90-minute conversation during his stay in Moscow – following the US President’s trip to China on 14 and 15 May, but before the Russian President’s visit there on 19 and 20 May, before the Ukrainian bombing of a vocational college in Luhansk on 22 May, and before the Russian retaliatory strike on the Ukrainian capital Kiev on 24 May. The interview touches on a wide range of current and fundamental issues, and we recommend that you do not dismiss Ms Zakharova’s comments as Russian “propaganda”. Instead, you should reflect on what she has said. What is particularly striking is that Zakharova’s statements are serious, incisive and resolute – and they are also quite different from the polemical, vitriolic and aggressive outbursts of our Western warmongers. We have selected excerpts that deal with Germany and our approach to human rights violations in Ukraine.² The risk of a direct war between Russia and the countries of the European Union (and NATO) has risen dramatically in recent weeks. German politics is playing a decisive role in this. There is still a chance to avert the catastrophe of a major war. This requires a different perspective on the past few years – indeed, a realisation of our own shared responsibility for the situation in which we find ourselves today.

Patrik Baab:

Following a meeting with Zelenskiy, Friedrich Merz was quoted by the press as saying: “The Russian Federation has no chance of winning this war [in Ukraine].” Does Moscow have the impression that this war is intended to be Europeanised […]?

Chancellor Merz is harming Germany

Maria Zakharova:

First and foremost, we feel that people like Merz genuinely hate their own people. Because everything Merz does, and everything people like him do, is aimed at ensuring that the citizens of Germany […] do not simply live worse lives overall, but live truly bad, very bad lives. And everything that Merz’s predecessors created – the true giants of the German economy, German science and German entrepreneurship – all of that has been destroyed. This feeling is very strong. And don’t think that this is just a figure of speech or a philosophical musing. It is a very practical observation of what the German leadership has actually been doing in recent years.
Up to a certain point, we could see that the people at the helm in Germany had, well, got some things right and some things wrong. Some things they did in partnership with Russia, for the benefit of both countries, and some things solely for their own gain, without regard for our country. But in any case, Germany’s interests were always the priority – as a nation, as a society, as a people.
But at some point in recent years, we have come to realise that everything the German leadership does not so much harm Russia – although it does that too – but above all harms its own industry, science, economy, entrepreneurship, education system and, ultimately, the German people themselves. […]
The Federal Republic of Germany’s export-oriented economic model is struggling with a decline in the competitiveness of German products on foreign markets, and this has been the case ever since the decision was taken to stop using energy sources from Russia. Who made that decision? It was precisely these German business leaders. Has Russia cut off supplies to Germany? No, right here, where you are sitting now, sat your colleagues from the German magazine Compact. That was about a year and a half ago. At the time, they asked me a direct question: Can Russia continue supplies by using the North Stream 1 and North Stream 2 pipelines, which have remained undamaged, to deliver gas to Germany? I have checked this with Gazprom and our experts, and they have confirmed that, yes, it is technically possible. Once the political and economic issues have been resolved, it would take around three weeks, perhaps a month, from a technical point of view. So, supplies could be resumed within a month. This means that it was not Russia that cut off gas supplies to Germany, but rather that Germany turned its back on Russian energy resources under pressure from its own politicians.
The German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy forecasts a further decline in Germany’s share of global markets. […] The foreign trade balance shows a negative trend: –1.4 per cent in 2025, –0.5 per cent in 2026 and, according to the current forecast, –0.2 per cent in 2027. All of this has, of course, also had an impact on the situation facing German manufacturers. To be honest, I was shocked by the following news. […] Apparently, Mercedes-Benz has announced that it intends to sell or make available part of its industrial – that is, its production – capacity for military purposes. This is, after all, a company that was one of the world’s most successful in the automotive and vehicle manufacturing sectors. It had fantastic prospects in the Eurasian region. I am talking about Russia now. After all, it wasn’t Russia that drove Mercedes out of our country, closed its dealerships or shut down its service centres. Mercedes left of its own accord. Why? Not because it was economically disadvantageous for Mercedes to remain in our market, but because German politicians forced Mercedes to withdraw. Now Mercedes is talking about possibly selling off part of its production capacity for military purposes. And why? Because they know full well that, in the foreseeable future, it will be impossible to recapture the market they themselves have abandoned. That market was immediately taken over by companies from other countries that didn’t leave. On the contrary, many of them came here when they saw that Mercedes had gone.
We have always regarded Germany as the country that is essentially seen as the driving force behind the European economy. According to the IMF, it is now the weakest link in the so-called G7. […] Just five years ago, I would have said that something like this could never happen. Germany, in particular, had the brightest prospects not only on the European continent, but worldwide. Why? The ability to work, the highest level of qualifications and professionalism – these were the basis for selection – and, of course, resources from Russia, combined with German technology. All of this together produced a fantastic result. […] All of that was destroyed in just a few years.
It is not we who are Germany’s enemies, but those who are currently leading Germany. Look, production volume has fallen by 5.3 per cent year-on-year. And according to German experts – these aren’t my figures; I’m referring to German experts – capacity utilisation is currently 5 per cent below the level that is normally considered a recession. If you think I’m pleased with these figures, you’re wrong. I regret this. Germany was one of our strongest partners. Economically speaking, yes, a true business partner indeed, but that is now a thing of the past. And I’ll say it again: has anyone attacked Germany? Has anyone occupied it? […] No, it is the citizens of Germany who have come to power, who promised prosperity and who have destroyed everything that Germany has built up over the last few decades. […]
May I ask a question? Not to you. I’d like to put a question to every German who will see this, who might spit at the screen or shout: “That’s Russian propaganda.” I’m just asking a question, and every German who sees, hears or reads it should answer it for themselves: Did Russia really do all this? […]

Patrik Baab:

What do you think? Is the Federal Republic of Germany already a direct party to the war?

Germany is belligerent

Maria Zakharova:

Do you really have no answer to that? Do you need any further confirmation of that? When it is Germany, in particular, that is arming the Kyiv regime in the first place, when the so-called Ramstein formula³ forms the basis of this arming, when representatives of the German state apparatus are personally coordinating the combat operations of Zelenskyy’s troops and the Kiev regime, supplying weapons and equipment, providing funds and exchanging information, then surely that is obvious.
I remember, about two years ago, perhaps a year and a half – yes, probably closer to a year and a half – on the fringes of the conference in Antalya, a piece of news literally sent shockwaves through the entire media landscape. It was about high-ranking German officers allegedly discussing a further attack on civilian infrastructure, on the Crimean Bridge and so on. Do you remember, these recordings were published about a year and a half or two years ago. That’s roughly how it was. What else can you call it?
[…] No one really doubts that Germany is fully involved in this. What is more, representatives of the Berlin establishment are saying this quite openly. They are not hiding it. They do not mince their words. They state quite clearly that the aim is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, and they are taking part in the hostilities on the side of the Kiev regime.
But that’s not quite right. They aren’t actually taking part in the fighting on the side of the Kiev regime. They are using the Kiev regime to achieve precisely what I mentioned at the start: their aim of inflicting what they call a strategic defeat on Russia. What other reasons could we possibly have for seeing things differently? I see no way of not calling a spade a spade. I simply can’t; I don’t have a single argument to refute your question. Not a single one. And even Berlin says exactly the same thing. And what they are doing is exactly what they are talking about. Both in the theory and in the practice of world history, this is described in exactly the same way. They are using the Kiev regime to, as they put it, inflict a defeat on Russia, to deal blows. Call it what you like.
[…]

Patrik Baab:

In the eyes of the public, at least in the West, the war in Ukraine takes a back seat to the problems in the Middle East. […]

No compassion for the victims

Maria Zakharova: That’s a brilliant line: in the eyes of the Western public, the conflict in Ukraine is taking a back seat because of events in the Middle East. Do you see? They’re worried about the Western public, but not about the people. They don’t care about those who have been killed, injured or maimed. They don’t care about the terrorist attacks targeting civilians, nor about the maimed children. They are only bothered that the conflict is being overshadowed.
But why, I ask, does this Western public not mind that their governments allocate hundreds of millions of euros and dollars to this conflict every week – yes, literally every week? By now, the figure has already reached billions, and that too amounts to tens of billions, which then turn into hundreds of billions of euros and dollars.
Why does this not concern the Western public? Why are they not interested in this fact? Why do they not care about the much-vaunted human rights, of which nothing remains in Ukraine? Absolutely nothing. These human rights have long since ceased to be observed there, and not only in relation to the Russian-speaking population, Russian citizens, people of Russian origin or Orthodox believers. Above all, these rights are being violated against Ukraine’s own citizens. Just look at what is happening there.
Forced conscription, mistreatment of people who have their own views on this situation, or who are exempt [from military service] or have health reasons that make service impossible for them. Physical abuse, even murder. Look at what is happening to freedom of expression. There is nothing left of it. There is only one perspective left: that of Bankova [the Ukrainian Presidential Office] and Zelenskyy. Everything else is to be shut down, put on hold and silenced.
Why is the Western community not bothered by the enormous scale of corruption? This is not simply corruption involving the theft of money in Ukraine. This corruption is linked to illegal trade, particularly in weapons, to the distribution of these weapons on the black market, and to a black-market transport network that has, in fact, even been enshrined in Ukrainian law. Why is the Western community not addressing the corruption that now affects not only those in power in Kyiv, but also Western leaders directly? Quite simply because it is obvious that neither Zelenskyy nor any member of his team could dispose of Western aid so freely if it were actually subject to Western controls or monitoring structures. If there were proper accounting practices in place there, with clear records of debits and credits, they wouldn’t be able to steal on this scale. Of course, this is corruption, and it is directly linked to Western advisers and sponsors. And it is precisely they who are at the centre of this corruption.
Why doesn’t the Western community care at all? Now they’re worried that the whole thing might somehow vanish into the shadows, but that’s a misrepresentation of the situation. Yet you were right to say it. That is precisely what concerns them. The shadows, not the substance of what is happening. But one must look at the substance. That is why we are discussing the actual causes of the crisis. That is why we are talking about what is really happening there.
[…] Everyone is only paying attention to the superficial trappings, do you see? The main thing is that the issue stays on the agenda, so that Zelenskyy can apparently travel endlessly to award ceremonies like the Oscars or to San Remo, to various song contests, to receive prizes for whatever, and to take part in various summits. What’s the point of all this? To provide a sort of ideological justification for what Western Europe has been doing for many years. In other words, he is being used as a sort of absolution for all the mistakes they have made.
And they are terrified that one day it will lose its shine and fade into the shadows. That is exactly what they fear. The worst thing is that they fail to realise that every day, every week, every month, they are funding terrorism – which has long since become international terrorism – with huge sums of money; that every day, children, women and the elderly are being killed with their money. People in hospitals, schoolchildren, people on the streets, every single day. And this is being funded by Western Europe. They ought to be horrified by this, but they aren’t, because the Western media don’t show them any of it. •

¹

² In the original interview, the question by Patrik Baab, which appears third here, was placed before the other two questions.

³ The “Ramstein format” (officially the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, or UDCG for short) refers to an international alliance of over 50 states led by the US. Since 2022, representatives of these states have been coordinating collective military and financial support for Ukraine, meeting for this purpose at the US base in the German town of Ramstein. The “Ramstein formula” determines the share of this support contributed by the various states.

Read the full interview excerpt (via Current Concerns, Issue No. 12, 16 June 2026):

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2026/no-12-16-june-2026/what-on-earth-has-become-of-germany

Watch the original interview on Patrik Baab’s channel, Gegen den Strom:

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Originally published on Forum Geopolitica. Read the original article here:

https://forumgeopolitica.com/article/from-sanctions-to-martial-law-and-a-state-of-emergency

Today, however, they do not serve to uphold democratic values or prevent human rights violations. Rather, they are a weapon for securing the neo-imperialist dominance of the West and its leading power, the United States. They serve not only to force the subjugation of states beyond the use of direct military force, but also to eliminate domestic political opposition through extrajudicial, arbitrary measures and to enforce preemptive obedience among the general population by instilling fear.

I would like to illustrate this with four examples: 1. The measures taken against the German journalist Hüssein Dogru as an example of the transition to anti-democratic rule. 2. The sanctions against retired Swiss Colonel Jacques Baud as an example of the supranational nature of sanctions. 3. The example of Ana Perez from Cuba: how sanctions, as an imperial, neocolonial instrument of oppression, affect an individual, and 4. The Magnitsky Act as a weapon to destabilize Russia in the struggle to secure U.S. hegemony.

I will show that sanctions are an instrument of domination employed by the United States and implemented independently by its European vassals. This serves as a particularly telling example of submission to the leading power at the cost of destroying one’s own economy, democracy, and the rule of law. The goal is to exploit the vassals more intensely and to perpetuate the war against Russia.

Example 1: Hüssein Dogru - Transition to Antidemocratic Rule

Journalist Hüssein Dogru is a German citizen and was born in Germany. He was sanctioned by the Council of the European Union on May 20, 2025. The justification given was that he was spreading Russian disinformation. Dogru denies this. There was no court ruling.

An instrument of foreign policy power is being used domestically against a citizen without a legal basis for punishment, without a ruling in accordance with the rule of law, and without a hearing for the person concerned. This represents a new form of arbitrary rule.

Dogrus’s bank accounts were frozen, his financial transactions restricted, and his access to money reduced to a monthly allowance of 506 euros. His bank often froze even this amount. The accounts of Dogrus’s wife and mother were also frozen at times. The couple has three children: two newborns and a 7-year-old son. The well-being of his children is at risk because he can no longer provide for them.

The European Union bases the imposition of sanctions on Article 215 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.[2] Under paragraph 2, the Council of the European Union may, on a joint proposal from the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and the Commission, adopt restrictive measures against natural or legal persons, as well as groups or non-state entities. At the secondary level, the sanctions are based on Regulation 2024/2642. The core element consists of financial sanctions under Article 2(1): “All funds and economic resources owned or held by, or in the possession of, the natural or legal persons, organizations, or entities listed in Annex I, or held or controlled by them, shall be frozen.”[3]

In January 2026, the German Bundestag transposed EU Directive 2024/1226 into national law and tightened its provisions. The governing parties—the CDU/CSU and the SPD—voted in favor. The Greens (B 90/Grüne) and The Left abstained. The AfD voted against it. One of the most significant changes is the reclassification of numerous violations from administrative offenses to criminal offenses. This applies to certain transaction bans, payment bans, and acts of circumvention, as well as violations of the so-called “everyone’s duty,” which requires everyone to report potential sanctions violations to the authorities.[4] This insidiously intertwines extralegal sanctions with criminal law.

In effect, Dogru is thus deprived of all his rights. This violates human dignity (Art. 1 of the German Basic Law) and nullifies the fundamental rights enshrined in the Basic Law. Anyone who helps him is liable to prosecution. His wife’s and mother’s bank accounts were frozen “due to your son’s existing control over the funds.”[5]

The Cologne Administrative Court has since lifted the freeze on his wife’s account, citing “serious doubts as to the legality” of the measures imposed by the Central Office for Sanctions Enforcement.[6]

The allegations against Hüsseoin Dogru are implausible for the simple reason that Dogru is critical of Russia and has condemned the Russian military entry into Ukraine as an invasion.[7] Freezing the bank accounts of relatives is tantamount to the reintroduction of the Nazi practice of “clan liability.” The punishment is not based on proof of individual guilt, but on the logic of guilt by association.

Ninon Colneric, a legal scholar and longtime judge at the European Court of Justice, and her colleague Alina Miron from the University of Angers in France conclude in a legal opinion: “Based on the provisions of the ‘UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights’ (ICCPR) regarding freedom of expression, the analysis provides evidence that Council Decision (CFSP) 2025/963 and Council Regulation 2025/964 are incompatible with the protection of human rights.” This refers to the statements and publications in the 17th EU sanctions package that turned Dogru and others into “unpersons.” They violate Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union of December 2000 (freedom of expression and freedom of information). They also violate Article 45 of the Charter, which guarantees EU citizens freedom of movement, as well as Articles 15 and 17, which establish the right to property and the freedom to choose one’s profession.[8]

All of these measures are illegal, inconsistent with the rule of law, and unconstitutional: “The response of European law to such situations,” according to Axel Fersen of the SPD’s Eppler Circle, “has been established for nearly two decades. It is known as the Kadi Doctrine. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in Case C-402/05 P (Kadi I) and in the subsequent decision C-584/10 P (Kadi II) that even sanctions motivated by security policy must respect the rights of the defense, the right to a fair hearing, effective judicial protection, and the right to property; that the Council must prove the validity of the grounds, rather than the affected party having to prove their innocence; that a general, vague justification is insufficient; and that even in the case of confidential information, judicial review must not be rendered meaningless. If the EU institution cannot provide such proof, the listing is invalid. The Union’s own case law regarding its own instrument is that simple and that unambiguous. A Union that does not apply this doctrine within its own ranks but instead circumvents it deprives itself of its credibility as a community based on the rule of law.”[9]

A grand coalition in the Bundestag supports these anti-democratic and illegal sanctions. Only the AfD members of parliament voted against transposing them into national law.[10] The active role played by the CDU/CSU and SPD, and the abstentions by B90/Greens and The Left, show that the anti-democratic forces are not to be found in the AfD, but rather within the ruling party cartel. This documents a new “extremism of the center”[11], an involution of parliamentary democracy[12] into a new form of authoritarian rule, while the AfD and BSW oppose the hollowing out of parliamentarism. This illustrates the transformation of democracy into a new, anti-democratic, and autocratic form of rule. The ruling party cartel is thus striving to introduce a dictatorship on velvet feet. It amounts to a “permanent coup d’état.”[13]

More than 340 state-funded nongovernmental organizations are aiding the ruling party cartel in its seizure of power and the transformation of parliamentary democracy into a state of intimidation by publicly defaming so-called “disinformation actors.”[14] They are the transmission belts of authoritarian rule, for they bring about a structural transformation of the public sphere into one of censorship and denunciation, thereby shattering the space for democratic debate. Together with extralegal sanctions, they serve to generate fear in order to enforce preemptive obedience among the population and to hollow out democratic processes.

Example 2: Jacques Baud—NATO is pulling the strings behind the scenes

Jacques Baud is a Swiss military analyst, a former colonel in the Swiss Military Intelligence Service, a former employee of the United Nations and NATO, and the author of numerous books in which he draws exclusively on Western sources but clearly diverges from NATO and EU propaganda. He, too, is accused of spreading Russian disinformation (Here is our complete coverage of Jacques Baud).

Like Hüssein Dogru, Jacques Baud has also been stripped of all his rights. He no longer has access to his bank accounts in the EU. He is no longer allowed to travel and is therefore unable to return to his home country. No one is allowed to support him; doing so would violate the sanctions. Even his Swiss bank, UBS, temporarily froze his account entirely. Following massive public protests, at least his pension can now be paid out again and his health insurance premiums can be deducted.

Jacques Baud has received a great deal of support from the citizens of Brussels. Passersby on the street offer him words of encouragement. Neighbors and local residents cook for him, do his shopping, and slip him food and money. The Swiss “Freiheitstrychler” (“Freedom Bell Ringers”) brought him food from his homeland and demonstrated in front of the Swiss Embassy in Brussels.

After some time, Switzerland lodged a half-hearted protest with the EU but took no further action. Neither was the EU representative in Bern summoned, nor was Jacques Baud issued a diplomatic passport to grant him diplomatic immunity and thus ensure his legal protection. An embassy counselor explained to the “Freedom Bell Ringers”: “We can’t just issue a diplomatic passport to every broke tourist in Thailand!” By saying this, he implied that a former Swiss officer who served his country in war zones and crisis areas should be treated the same as a sex tourist. This reveals the attitude. Despite growing public protests, Switzerland is going along with the sanctions and thereby submitting to the directives from Brussels. Swiss neutrality today exists largely on paper and has become worthless in practice.[15]

Jacques Baud denies the allegations. He points out that his analyses are based solely on Western sources, not Russian ones. He suspects that the sanctions against him were imposed at the initiative of the French government. For one thing, he says, “it was Paris’s turn,” and for another, his publisher, Max Milo, is based in Paris. His lawyers’ strategy is not to challenge the sanctions in principle, but to have their client removed from the sanctions list.

The Berlin-based law firm Hummel Legal concludes that, in imposing sanctions against Jacques Baud and others, the Council of the European Union is exceeding its authority by interfering in internal societal spaces for the expression of opinion. The accusation of “supporting Russian narratives” is a vague and generic charge, violates the principle of specificity under the rule of law, and allows for arbitrary application. The decision violates the freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the freedom of the press under Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the freedom to choose an occupation under Article 15 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the fundamental right to freedom of movement under Article 45 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the Agreement on the Free Movement of Persons with Switzerland, the fundamental right to property under Article 17 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the right to a fair trial under Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The Council disregards the case law of the European Court of Justice and flouts the procedural principles of the rule of law. The conclusion: “The sanction decision of December 15, 2025, against Jacques Baud violates fundamental principles of the rule of law and infringes upon his fundamental rights. The sanction decision against Jacques Baud must be rescinded.”[16]

The wave of repression against opponents of the war and the government was initiated by NATO. At their 2023 summit in Vilnius, the governments of the member states announced that they would step up their cooperation with the EU in combating so-called “disinformation.”[17] This suggests that NATO is pulling the strings behind the scenes in the fight against dissenting opinions. With its “Strategic Agenda 2024–2029,” announced in June 2024, the EU shifted course toward a war-readiness stance. In it, the Council of the European Union promises to “strengthen the EU’s resilience as part of a comprehensive approach covering all threats and the whole of society.” In doing so, the EU classifies anything it considers “disinformation” as an attempt at destabilization and places it on the same level as terrorism and violent extremism.[18]

Norbert Häring rightly points out that the EU is thereby effectively declaring critics of the government and NATO to be enemies of the state. As a result, an undeclared state of martial law already prevails in the EU: “This means that NATO is effectively governing behind the scenes, and the usual constitutional guarantees for peacetime—such as freedom of expression and freedom of information—no longer apply when issues important to NATO are at stake.” [19] Last year, the German federal government declared that it is bound by secret NATO objectives.[20] Research shows that the governments of NATO member states use all social organizations and forces as conduits to subject individuals who are guided by the peace mandate of the German Basic Law to reprisals.[21]

The EU thus presents itself as a supranational, lawless, and anti-democratic entity. It imposes measures to circumvent the rule of law in coordination with NATO. These extralegal sanctions are therefore part of martial law. They precede the full imposition of martial law, are intended to destroy the existence of political dissidents, and to force preemptive obedience among the EU population by instilling fear. They are thus intended not only to prepare for war against Russia but also to pave the way for the declaration of a state of emergency.

Example 3: Anna Perez—Sanctions That Threaten Health and Lead to Death

You don’t know Ms. Ana Perez. She plays no role in the political debate; no one gives her a voice. She is one of the millions of victims of U.S. and EU sanctions policies. Her trail disappears somewhere between Havana and French Guiana.

In 2012, I received a call from a family I’m friends with in Santiago de Cuba: Their daughter Ana was in poor health; she had only three teeth left and could no longer chew. They didn’t have the money for dental treatment because they had to pay the clinic for the materials—if they were even available. I promised to help.

The poor dental health is a consequence of the sanctions the U.S. has imposed on Cuba since the revolution. This is because obtaining milk, milk powder, cheese, and sausage has been a problem on the island for years. As a result, parents—lacking sweets—let their children chew on sugarcane. It tastes sweet, but it’s poison for the teeth.

My own dentist advised against it. He said the cost of a complete dental restoration would be very high. It would require an artificial tooth root made of titanium or ceramic, which would be implanted into the jawbone. In addition, an artificial abutment would be needed as a base for the dental prosthesis. Third, a screw—also made of titanium—would be required as a prosthetic element for fixation. He said he would provide me with the necessary components, which would help keep the costs down.

Afterward, I wanted to discuss this with the dentist treating me in Havana. To my surprise, she said, “You don’t need to bring me any replacement parts.” She explained that while the materials I mentioned were subject to U.S. sanctions and could not be imported, “We have another way of making dental implants. We make them out of ivory!”

That left me speechless. After all, the ivory trade is heavily restricted internationally and largely banned. So how does the ivory get to Cuba? Then it suddenly dawned on me: The Cubans fought in Angola from 1975 to 1991. That deployment sealed the end of South African apartheid and Namibia’s independence. The export of ivory for medical purposes is strictly prohibited. But old trade contacts dating back to the era of the wars of independence apparently make a covert ivory trade possible.

In response to the Cuban Revolution and the expropriation of U.S. companies, the United States has imposed sanctions on Cuba since 1960. These include a comprehensive embargo: Nearly all economic transactions between U.S. citizens and companies are prohibited. The de facto oil blockade has led to massive energy shortages and power outages. Cuba is designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, which is why travelers from Cuba can no longer easily enter the U.S. via ESTA. The financial restrictions have led institutions such as Visa and Mastercard to temporarily suspend payments to Cuba.

The sanctions have brought Cuba’s healthcare system to the brink of collapse. The medical system, once considered exemplary, is now suffering from a humanitarian crisis. In practice, extraterritorial financial restrictions, logistical hurdles, and fuel shortages are hindering medical care. Even basic antibiotics, painkillers such as aspirin, and anesthetics are in short supply in hospitals. Newborn care is now severely limited; according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, infant mortality has doubled to 9.9 per 1,000 births, and the survival rate for children with cancer has dropped from 85% to 65%.

This means: Sanctions kill. According to a study by Francisco Rodríguez and colleagues, the results of which were published in the medical journal The Lancet, sanctions imposed by the United States and the European Union were responsible for 564,258 deaths annually from 1971 to 2021. This figure is significantly higher than the annual number of direct war casualties—106,000 deaths. [22] The total number of deaths during the period in question thus amounts to more than 28 million.

Sanctions are restrictive foreign policy instruments that are frequently applied to wide-ranging economic transactions with the aim of forcing a change in behavior through punitive measures. According to the Global Sanctions Database, the frequency and duration of sanctions have steadily increased since 1950, while their success rate in achieving their stated goal remains at around 30%. All economic sanctions have an adverse effect on human health. This is because they restrict access to medical products and health services, impair mental health, and undermine the human right to health.[23]

One-quarter of all countries were subject to sanctions between 2010 and 2022, most of them in Africa. [24] These sanctions typically involve the freezing of foreign assets, trade embargoes, or financial restrictions. They aim to destabilize countries that do not submit to the West’s rules. Unless they are imposed with the approval of the United Nations—as was the case, for example, with some sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa—they are all illegal.

Sanctions are therefore not a tool for enforcing human rights or democracy. They are aimed at blackmail, inciting popular revolt, and regime change.[25] They are a neocolonial instrument of power wielded by the West and its leading power, the United States, and are part of their strategy to subjugate third countries. All this talk of human rights is hollow, self-serving propaganda intended to obscure political and economic interests. Especially since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has sought to use sanctions to advance its interests.[26]

In addition, sanctions trigger strategies to circumvent them. Where they push target countries to the brink of economic collapse—as in the case of Cuba—they plunge those states into political instability and civil wars. The Cuban government is currently preparing for a protracted guerrilla war in the event of a U.S. invasion.[27]

Example 4: The Magnitsky Act—Propaganda Lies and the Sanctions War Against Russia

Filmmaker Andrej Nekrasov went through a nightmare with his 2016 hybrid of feature film and documentary, “The Magnitsky Act—Behind the Scenes”: massive criticism from the propaganda press and political backlash.[28]

Nekrasov’s interest was piqued by media reports about 36-year-old lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. According to the reports, Magnitsky had been arrested, tortured, and killed by Russian authorities because he had uncovered a $230 million tax fraud. This is a story told by American hedge fund manager William Browder (see our article from October 4, 2023, “Bill Browder: The So-Called ‘Human Rights Activist’—Who Himself Became Rich Through Shady Deals.”). Browder rose to become the largest foreign investor in Russia: By the time of his expulsion in 2005, his fund had swelled to $4 billion.[29] Nekrasov is enthusiastic about Browder’s story. His film is funded by public broadcasting as well as Norwegian and Finnish sources.[30]

However, the narrative of corruption and state terrorism begins to unravel as the investigation progresses. Inconsistencies emerge that give Nekrasov and his editor pause in the editing room. Magnitsky increasingly appears not as the young, talented whistleblower, but as a mere accountant in William Browder’s financial empire. Browder, who styles himself as Putin’s number one enemy and a champion of human rights, gets tangled up in half-truths and obfuscations.[31]

In the end, even Nekrasov—a critic of Putin—concludes that Browder lied and fabricated his story to cover up his own illegal financial dealings, that Magnitsky was an accomplice in the cover-up, that there were verifiable grounds for suspicion underlying his arrest, and that he died in prison due to health issues and medical negligence, not as a result of torture.

Magnitsky was not actually a lawyer, but an accountant—an auditor at a law firm that Browder had been using for many years. In Magnitsky’s original handwritten statement to the police, no one is accused by name of stealing the allegedly missing $230 million in tax payments. Nekrasov’s final verdict is that Browder is not a businessman of integrity, but rather the shrewd operator of a complex network of shell companies with ties to Russian gangsters—and he concludes that Magnitsky must have known about this. Nekrasov also suggests that Browder exploited Magnitsky’s death to divert attention from his own shady dealings.[32]

Browder used Russian front men to acquire, among other things, shares in Gazprom, which were not allowed to be sold to foreigners in order to protect valuable companies. When Browder realized that with Nekrasov he was not getting the desired result, he cut the interview short and warned the director that he “had better not go into that.”[33]

The film was largely banned from distribution—not through overt censorship, but through a propaganda campaign and legal threats from financial investor William Browder and his associates.[34] The goal was to control public opinion.[35] Browder managed to push the Magnitsky Act through Congress. [36] It is important to note that, due to his business deals and his use of tax loopholes, the financial investor renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1998[37] and became a British citizen, and that he was forced to leave Russia in 2003 following charges of tax evasion amounting to $40 million. In 2005, his visa was revoked.[38]

In July 2016, Russian authorities provided the U.S. Department of Justice with comprehensive information regarding the allegations against Browder and submitted a 1,100-page investigative file. Additional information was shared in August. The Russian Prosecutor General inquired nine times about the progress of the investigation in the United States. The U.S. Department of Justice showed no interest in investigating the violation of its own tax laws. Meanwhile, Browder used his demonstrably false statements and his illegally obtained profits—which had been funneled into the U.S. via offshore companies—to fund his lobbying efforts for the Magnitsky Act and to financially support the election campaigns of Democratic Party politicians.[39]

According to Russian prosecutors, William Browder was recruited by the British intelligence agency MI6 as an agent under the code name “Solomon” throughout his entire stay in Russia.[40] When asked, he denies being an intelligence agent. [41] However, the hasty support for Browder and his possible involvement with intelligence agencies show that Browder’s activities were “part of a planned political campaign driven by powerful financial interests and forces of the ‘Deep State’ that profited from the plundering of Russia in the 1990s.”[42]

The case became something of a symbol in the West of criminal activities by the Russian state and led to the enactment of the Magnitsky Act in the United States, which imposed sanctions on Russian officials. The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act was passed by the U.S. Congress in 2012 as a bipartisan bill and signed by then-President Obama. This was followed in 2017 by “The Global Magnitsky Act,” which empowers the U.S. to impose sanctions for human rights violations worldwide.[43] In 2019, the European Parliament passed a corresponding resolution calling on all member states to enact laws similar to those of the U.S.[44]

Ultimately, the goal here is to impose sanctions on Russia by presenting false information—or, in other words, to use lies as part of the economic war against Russia. This, in turn, demonstrates that such sanctions are purely arbitrary measures. The Magnitsky Act is just one example of the many sanctions imposed by the U.S. and the EU against Russia.

The concept is outlined in theoretical terms in the RAND Corporation’s paper “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia.” The report examines how a series of measures—fostering domestic protests, supplying weapons to Ukraine, and damaging Russia’s reputation—could weaken and destabilize Russia. RAND notes that measures designed to impose economic costs would have a particularly high probability of success, including trade and financial sanctions, which would need to be comprehensive and multilateral.[45] It further states that military aid to Ukraine would “provoke a war between Russia and Ukraine” and that this would be “a very long, costly war for Russia,” “which Ukraine would almost certainly lose.” [46] The destruction of Ukraine was thus factored in as a means to weaken Russia in every conceivable way.

Yet the sanctions are missing their mark and proving to be a boomerang.

Michele Geraci, Italy’s Deputy Minister of the Economy, has explained why the sanctions against Russia are missing their mark: 1. They are based on wishful thinking, and their effectiveness has not been evaluated. 2. The sanctions are being thwarted by the resilience of a country that is self-sufficient in energy and resources. 3. The share of gas exports to the EU has been massively overestimated. They account for only 2.2% of the Russian GDP, not 25–30% as assumed. 4. Russia’s resilience as a nation has been underestimated; the people are not rebelling against Putin but are rallying behind his policies. 5. The ability of the Russian government and the Central Bank of Russia to counteract the sanctions pressure that has existed since 2014 through fiscal and monetary policy measures was underestimated. 6. Illusions about the strategy of internationally isolating Russia. Only 40 out of 193 countries have joined the sanctions regime; all 153 others continue to trade with Russia.[47]

The European Union—and the German federal government in particular—has thus plunged the economy into a cycle of recession. Those in charge see investment in the military-industrial complex and the political persecution of government critics as the only ways out.

The Result

The sanctions imposed by the EU Council and individual member states violate the law and the German Basic Law. The EU is using the sanctions list as a weapon against critics and is maneuvering itself ever deeper into an abyss of lawlessness. [48]

The sanctions policy undermines the core elements of fundamental rights. It operates without an indictment, without a court order, without a hearing, and without a defense. The EU disregards the European Convention on Human Rights and European case law.[49]

These sanctions are either measures imposed by a supranational organization that lacks democratic legitimacy or unilateral measures taken by a hegemonic power that have not been approved by the United Nations. The Council of the European Union is composed of the executive bodies—that is, the government representatives of the member states—who were not elected by their parliaments to exercise legislative functions at the supranational level. This glaring democratic deficit is being exploited to undermine the rule of law in the member states.[50]

The sanctions are part of a new martial law that establishes a system of law without due process and grants authorities power without judicial proceedings. This new martial law can be seen as part of preparations for war. The apparent aim is to acclimate the public to new forms of arbitrary rule, which will then make it easier to declare a state of emergency. In a state of emergency, we will all become Hüssein Dogru and Jacques Baud: At that point, the right to freedom of movement under Article 11 of the German Basic Law, the privacy of correspondence, postal services, and telecommunications under Article 10 of the Basic Law, the right to the inviolability of the home under Article 13 of the Basic Law, the right to property under Article 14 of the Basic Law, the freedom to choose one’s profession under Article 12 of the Basic Law, and the right to free development of personality under Article 2 of the Basic Law will be restricted.[51]

The EU and NATO have long been engaged in a war against Russia, albeit a covert one. This economic war is being waged not only through numerous rounds of sanctions but also through blatant acts of piracy. Hundreds of billions are being pumped into the arms industry. Both of these factors are leading to the impoverishment and deindustrialization of Western European societies. Potential protests are met with the full force of the police.

The Digital Services Act of 2022 succeeded in implementing the model of Germany’s Network Enforcement Act (Netzwerkdurchsuchungsgesetz)—which was already in place—across the entire EU. The aim is to assert control over the discourse on geopolitical issues through the fight against so-called disinformation and overt censorship. [52] So-called disinformation is classified as a threat to internal security, regardless of whether it is controlled or promoted from abroad.[53] It is the governments themselves that determine what constitutes disinformation. This opens the door to anti-democratic arbitrariness.

The EU’s crackdown on critical journalists stems from a 2023 NATO summit decision.[54] The sanctions are orchestrated by NATO as part of its fight against disinformation and implemented by an EU that has mutated from a peace project into the Western alliance’s war machine.

They represent an attempt to maintain the hegemony of Western elites under U.S. leadership and to halt the decline of the West. These sanctions demonstrate the destruction of international law by the West and the United States and the return of the law of the jungle in international relations. Furthermore, the West’s sanctions are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. They are an instrument of murder and do not contribute to the promotion of democracy.

The sanctions against Russia are intended to bring Russia to its knees economically. Then-Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said, “This will ruin Russia.”[55] The sanctions would remain in place, “no matter what my voters think.”[56] The RAND Corporation has defined the goal as destabilizing Russia. The U.S. foreign policy strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski articulated the goal years ago of stripping Russia of its great-power status by breaking away Ukraine.[57]

Domestically, a permanent coup d’état is intended to secure the rule of transatlantic elites by hollowing out democratic procedures in such a way that the democratic facade is maintained. This amounts to the introduction of a dictatorship on velvet paws, whose claws remain invisible to the majority but are all the more effective for it. According to Giorgio Agamben, the state of emergency is transforming “into a constant practice of governance.”[58]

This therefore constitutes a direct attack on the democracy of the member states—in Germany, on the peace clause of the German Basic Law—and on the central, inalienable fundamental and human rights. These measures are unlawful, unconstitutional, and anti-democratic, and serve to prepare for war. Anyone who supports them is violating the United Nations Charter, Article 26 of the Basic Law, and Section 80 of the German Criminal Code, which prohibits the preparation of a war of aggression.

Therefore, those forces in the German Bundestag that support the sanctions policy must be removed from office. Through their sanctions policy, the federal government and the parties that support it are attempting to undermine the constitutional order. According to Article 20 of the German Basic Law, all Germans have the right to resist when no other remedy is possible.

[1] See the definition of censorship by Hofbauer, Hannes: Zensur. Vienna 2022, p. 7

[2] https://dejure.org/gesetze/AEUV/215.html

https://commission.europa.eu/topics/eu-solidarity-ukraine/eu-sanctions-against-russia-following-invasion-ukraine/sanctions-against-individuals-companies-and-organisations_de

[3] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/1102364/EU-6-030-25.pdf

[4] https://www.advant-beiten.com/aktuelles/sanctions-compliance-bundestag-beschliesst-verschaerfung-des-sanktionsstrafrechts

[5]

https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=151147

[6] https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/article/fall-hueseyin-doru-gericht-aeussert-ernsthafte-zweifel-an-kontosperre-seiner-ehefrau-10028800

https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=151147

[7] Zeise, Simon u. Raphael Schmeller: Vorwurf Russland-Propaganda: Wie ein deutscher Journalist durch EU-Sanktionen kaltgestellt wird. Berliner Zeitung, 15.11.2025, https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/article/eu-sanktionen-deutscher-journalist-russland-propaganda-10005566

[8] Hofbauer, Hannes: Aller Rechte Beraubt. Mit außergerichtlichen EU-Sanktionen zum autoritären Staat. Wien2026, S. 183-185

[9] Fersen, Axel: Eine Belastungsprobe für den Rechtsstaat. Eine neue EU-Sanktionspraxis und die Schutzgüter der freiheitlich-demokratischen Grundordnung. Erhard-Eppler-Kreis, Substack, 20.05.2026, https://erhardepplerkreis.substack.com/p/eine-belastungsprobe-fur-den-rechtsstaat

[10] https://norberthaering.de/propaganda-zensur/sanktionsgesetz/

[11] Lipset, Seymour Martin: “Fascism” - Left, Right, and Center. In: Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics. Baltimore 1981, S. 127-152. Deutsch: Lipset, Seymour Martin: Der “Faschismus”, die Linke, die Rechte und die Mitte. In: Nolte, Ernst (Hg.): Theorien über den Faschismus. Köln 1976(4), S. 449-491. Siehe auch: Geiger, Theodor: Panik im Mittelstand. Die Arbeit: Zeitschrift für Gewerkschaftspolitik und Wirtschaftskunde, H. 10, 1930, https://library.fes.de/cgi-bin/digiarb.pl?id=01021&dok=1930&f=637&l=654&c=637

[12] Agnoli Johannes: Die Transformation der Demokratie. Frankfurt a. M. 1978, S. 11

[13] See also Baab, Patrik: Staatsstreich in Permamenz. https://forumgeopolitica.com/de/artikel/staatsstreich-in-permanenz-die-zensur-industrie-und-das-verwertungsmodell-des-digitalen-kriegs-kapitalismus-teil-i

https://forumgeopolitica.com/de/artikel/staatsstreich-in-permanenz-die-zensur-industrie-und-das-verwertungsmodell-des-digitalen-kriegs-kapitalismus-teil-ii

[14] https://liber-net.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/de-report-de.pdf

https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=152185

[15] https://forumgeopolitica.com/de/artikel/jacques-baud-von-der-eu-im-namen-der-bekmpfung-von-falschinformationen-zensiert

[16] Hummel, Wolfgang J.: Rechtsgutachten der Sanktionen gegen Jacques Baud. Hummel Legal, Berlin 2026

[17] “As we step up our efforts to build resilience, we will continue to work with our partners who are undertaking similar efforts, particularly the European Union. (…) We will continue to combat disinformation and misinformation, including through positive and effective strategic communication. We will also continue to support our partners in strengthening their resilience to hybrid challenges.” Häring, Norbert: Der Bannstrahl der EU gegen kritische Publizisten geht auf einen NATO-Gipfelbeschluss von 2023 zurück. Geld und mehr v. 06.01.2026, https://norberthaering.de/propaganda-zensur/eu-sanktionen-nato-giplel/

[18] “We will strengthen our democratic resilience, among other things by (..) countering attempts to destabilize us, including through disinformation and hate speech. (…) We will counter attempts to sow division, radicalization, terrorism, and violent extremism.” Häring, Norbert: Der Bannstrahl der EU gegen kritische Publizisten geht auf einen NATO-Gipfelbeschluss von 2023 zurück. Geld und mehr v. 06.01.2026, https://norberthaering.de/propaganda-zensur/eu-sanktionen-nato-giplel/

[19] Häring, Norbert: Der Bannstrahl der EU gegen kritische Publizisten geht auf einen NATO-Gipfelbeschluss von 2023 zurück. Geld und mehr v. 06.01.2026, https://norberthaering.de/propaganda-zensur/eu-sanktionen-nato-giplel/

[20] Häring, Norbert: Bundesregierung bestätigt Bindung an geheime NATO-Ziele. Geld und mehr, 07.07.2025, https://norberthaering.de/macht-kontrolle/nato-ziele/

[21] Baab, Patrik: Staatsstreich in Permamenz. https://forumgeopolitica.com/de/artikel/staatsstreich-in-permanenz-die-zensur-industrie-und-das-verwertungsmodell-des-digitalen-kriegs-kapitalismus-teil-i

https://forumgeopolitica.com/de/artikel/staatsstreich-in-permanenz-die-zensur-industrie-und-das-verwertungsmodell-des-digitalen-kriegs-kapitalismus-teil-ii

[22] “In their panel analysis, Francisco Rodríguez and colleagues once again demonstrate that sanctions do kill: economic sanctions imposed by the USA or the EU were associated with 564 258 deaths (95% CI 367 838–760 677) annually from 1971 to 2021, higher than the annual number of battle-related casualties (106 000 deaths).” The health toll of economic sanctions. The Lancet Global Health, Vol. 13, Issue 8, 08/2025

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(25)00278-5/fulltext

[23] The health toll of economic sanctions. The Lancet Global Health, Vol. 13, Issue 8, 08/2025

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(25)00278-5/fulltext

[24] The prosecutors say that Mr. Browder was assigned the code name Agent Solomon by Western intelligence, while Mr. Navalny was called Agent Freedom.

[25] Kuzmarov, Jeremy: “A New Battlefield for the United States”: Russia Sanctions and the New Cold War. Socialism and Democracy, 2020, https://www.academia.edu/50949119/_A_New_Battlefield_for_the_United_States_Russia_Sanctions_and_the_New_Cold_War

[26] Kuzmarov, Jeremy: “A New Battlefield for the United States”: Russia Sanctions and the New Cold War. Socialism and Democracy, 2020, https://www.academia.edu/50949119/_A_New_Battlefield_for_the_United_States_Russia_Sanctions_and_the_New_Cold_War

[27] Cuba distribuye armas a civiles ante el temor latente de una invasión militar de EEUU. Diario Versión Final, 06.06.2026, https://diarioversionfinal.com/xvf-portada/vf-principal/cuba-distribuye-armas-a-civiles-ante-el-temor-latente-de-una-invasion-militar-de-eeuu/

[28]

[29] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/britisch-russischer-wirtschaftskrimi-es-ist-wie-beim-schiffeversenken-a-659672.html

[30] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380128363_The_Magnitsky_Act_Behind_the_Scenes_Andrei_Nekrasov_2016

[31] “Available documentary evidence and testimony, including those collected in a civil case before the Federal Court of the Southern District of New York, confirmed that the ‘facts’ reported by Browder to the US Congress, put down into the text of the act from his hearsay, were either deliberately distorted, or contrary to the truth. However, the same story has been put as the basis of the Global Magnistky Act currently consiederd in the Congress. Governmental and legal investigations revealed that William Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management (Guernsey) and a financial advisor to Hermitage hedge fund (which existed until 2013 under the control of HSBC Group), a Bristish citizen, who renounced his US citizenship in 1998 for tax reasons, had for 10 years lived in Russia on a tourist visa, in the period from 1999 to 2006 implemented in the territory of Russia an illegal scheme of bying up Gatzprom shares by foreign companies to nypass the ban on foreign direct investments into Gazprom shares wihtout permission of the Government of Russia.” Confidential - Bill Browder, WP-Content, 11.2021,

https://www.billbrowder.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Confidential-Grin-letter-given-to-Dana-Rohrabacher-April-2016.pdf

https://volksbuehne.adk.de/praxis/the_magnitsky_act__behind_the_scenes/index.html

[32] Komisar, Lucy: The Man Behind the Magnitsky Act. 100Reporters - New Journalism for a new Age, 20.10.2027, https://100r.org/2017/10/magnitsky/

Details in: Krainer, Alex: The Killing Of William Browder. Monaco 2017, https://globalbridge.ch/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/TheKillingOfWilliamBrowder_PrintLayout_6x9-1.pdf

[33] Komisar, Lucy: The Man Behind the Magnitsky Act: Did Bill Browder’s Tax Troubles in Russia Color Push for Sanctions? 100Reporters, 20.10.20217, https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2017/11/the-man-behind-the-magnitsky-act-did-bill-browders-tax-troubles-in-russia-color-push-for-sanctions/

Hoke, William: Russia Says Browder Laundered Funds, Might Have Killed Magnistky. Taxnotes, 26.11.2018, https://www.taxnotes.com/featured-news/russia-says-browder-laundered-funds-might-have-killed-magnitsky/2018/11/21/28mf7

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380128363_The_Magnitsky_Act_Behind_the_Scenes_Andrei_Nekrasov_2016

[34] “Nekrasov’s reputation as a fearless investigative documentarist destroyed; he suddenly found himself labeled a stooge of the Putin regime at best, a participant in a conspiracy to malign Magnitsky, at worst. In the US, the film was effectively banned; no distributor would touch it. It had only one private screening, at the Newseum in Washington, DC, that was supposedly paid for by Natalia Veselnitskaya, a bit player in the Trump scandals, a screening that Browder’s lawyers vigorously attempted to prevent on the grounds that the film is defamatory... I see this affair as censorship masquerading as a libel case, and it played out that way in much of Europe. In the UK, where it’s easy to sue for libel, the film was likewise shunned; on the continent, Browder’s legal threats led the European Parliament to cancel an announced screening at the last minute; German public television withdrew its support, leading to its cancellation in France as well, essentially ending the possibility of any other public screenings.The picture has been publically screened in Norway and at a few unimportant film festivals, the notable exception being the Moscow International Film Festival.” Younblood, Denise J.: Tha Magnistky Act: Behind the Scenes, Andrej Nekrasov, 2016. Paper presented at the ASEEES National Convention, San Francisco, 2019, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380128363_The_Magnitsky_Act_Behind_the_Scenes_Andrei_Nekrasov_2016

https://www.politico.eu/article/meps-dragged-into-russia-film-row-lawyer-whistleblower-sergei-magnitsky-act-andrei-nekrasov-documentary/

[35] Diesen, Glenn: The Magnitsky Act & Narrative Control. Substack, 09.01.2025, https://glenndiesen.substack.com/p/the-magnitsky-act-and-narrative-control und

[36] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25190975

[37] Federal Register Volume 63, Nr. 204, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1998-10-22/html/98-28284.htm

[38] https://100r.org/2017/10/magnitsky/

https://www.telepolis.de/article/Aufklaerung-ueber-den-Magnitski-Fall-4080217.html

[39] “The Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation also possesses information that W. Browder and other persons have committed offences to the detriment of the Unites States, and this information has been repeatedly reported to the competent American authorities. For example, in May 2016, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was informed about the activities of a transnational criminal organization headed by W. Browder and involving the U.S. investment firm Ziff Brothers Investments owned by brothers Dirk, Robert and Daniel Ziff. In July 2016, over 1,100 pages of relevant materials on tax and other economic crimes committed by W. Browder with the participation of the owners of the Ziff Brothers Investments fund both in Russia and the United States were transferred to the U.S. Department of Justice. Additional information was provided in August 2016. Subsequently, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation nine times reminded its colleagues in Washington about those materials, including twice to the U.S. Attorney General (in 2017-2018) Jeff Sessions. However, so far American law enforcement agencies have not demonstrated their willingness to put an end to the breach of their own legislation. Meanwhile, lobbying by W. Browder for the Magnitsky Act based on his deliberately false statements was financed by the funds of criminal origin that had been moved illegally from Russia to the United States through a chain of offshore companies. Some of these funds were also used to sponsor the election campaigns of American politicians. In particular, W. Browder’s accomplices from Ziff Brothers Investments repeatedly made donations to the election fund of the Democratic Party of the United States – from 400 000 dollars in 2008 to 1,200 000 dollars in 2016. The total amount of money donated to the Democratic Party by Ziff Brothers Investments and Hermitage Capital is almost 2 million dollars.” https://tanzania.mid.ru/en/press-centre/news/regarding_william_browder_s_criminal_activities/

[40] “Prosecutors contend that Mr. Browder had colluded with an agent of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, MI6, ‘to cause the death of S. L. Magnitsky,’ by persuading Russian prison doctors to withhold care.The motive, according to what prosecutors said were intelligence intercepts, was to start a scandal, or ‘a significant news trigger to discredit the Russian Federation in the eyes of the international community.’ The prosecutors say that Mr. Browder was assigned the code name Agent Solomon by Western intelligence, while Mr. Navalny was called Agent Freedom.” Kramer, Andrew E.: Turning Tables in Magnitsky Case, Russia Accuses a Nemesis of Murder. New York Times, 22.10.2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/world/europe/russia-sergei-magnitsky-william-browder.html?eafs_enabled=false

[41] “At our first session, in London, Bill Browder did not act like someone who feared for his life. I had expected to find elaborate security at his building. Instead, I was given a perfunctory glance and waved up to the Hermitage offices, which overlook London’s picturesque Finsbury Square. I began to wonder if there was a hidden security system in place, speculating, as others have, that Browder either was protected by or had a special relationship with M.I.6, Britain’s foreign-intelligence service. Curious, I asked him, point-blank, “Are you M.I.6?” He hesitated and then said, cryptically, “I work with so many levels of British law enforcement, I never know who is working for whom.” When I broached the subject again, months later, he bristled: “I am definitely not under British protection. I have to protect myself. I am not M.I.6. I am not C.I.A. I am not anything. I bet there are nine intelligence agencies listening as we speak. But that is because I am not an agent of anyone’s—I am a completely independent operator. If I were really an agent of M.I.6, why would I be having so many problems opening a criminal case [in the U.K. against the oligarchs]? Maybe this is a double fake-out! The Russians are accusing me of being a C.I.A. agent!” Brenner, marie: “I see Him as a Modern-Day Pablo Escobar”: Inside Bill Browder’s War Against Putin. Vanity Fair, 11.11.2018,

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/11/bill-browder-war-against-putin?srsltid=AfmBOoozO1AkPza-X4EI3dT9TwdmqcOH0qYw639zBtmBftBmPTF0NDSw

[42] Kuzmarov, Jeremy: “A New Battlefield for the United States”: Russia Sanctions and the New Cold War. Socialism and Democracy, 2020, https://www.academia.edu/50949119/_A_New_Battlefield_for_the_United_States_Russia_Sanctions_and_the_New_Cold_War

[43] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46981

[44] https://publikumskonferenz.de/blog/andrei-nekrasov-im-interview-mit-weltnetz-tv-the-magnitsky-act/

[45] Dobbins, James u.a.: Overextending and Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica 2019, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html

[46] Dobbins, James u.a.: Overextending and Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica 2019, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html

[47]

[48] https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/article/eu-abgeordnete-sanktionsregime-wenn-von-der-leyen-geht-ein-segen-10014552

[49] https://forumgeopolitica.com/de/artikel/jacques-baud-von-der-eu-im-namen-der-bekmpfung-von-falschinformationen-zensiert

[50] Hofbauer, Hannes: Aller Rechte Beraubt. Mit außergerichtlichen EU-Sanktionen zum autoritären Staat. Wien2026, S. 209

[51] https://transition-news.org/wie-deutschland-per-spannungsfall-auf-den-krieg-gegen-russland-vorbereitet-wird

[52] ebda, S. 211

[53] https://norberthaering.de/propaganda-zensur/hybrider-krieg/

[54] https://norberthaering.de/propaganda-zensur/hybrider-krieg/

[55] https://www.rnd.de/politik/ukraine-krieg-baerbock-ueber-sanktionen-das-wird-russland-ruinieren-RZDYS2DEPRK5OST7ZGGRZ6UN4I.html

[56] https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/baerbock-zitat-101.html

[57] “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” Brzezinski: The Great Chessboard, New York 1997, S. 46

[58] Agamben, Giorgio: Ausnahmezustand. Frankfurt a. M. 2020(8), S. 14

The Russian side reacted cautiously. Today, I can give you one reason why. The reason lies in the mood of the Donbas people. This is completely unknown or underestimated in the West.

The war in Ukraine is seen in the West as an “unprovoked war of aggression”, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I admit, of course, that it was the Russian army that entered Ukraine. This is the only point Western journalists know. They are following the “3-I-Concept”: incompetence, ignorance and ideology. Like most of our politicians, they never were in Russia or Ukraine, they know nothing about the history of the Donbas and they never were in war zones. That means: They lost the ground of reality.

Unlike many journalists who sit comfortably at their desks and pass judgment on things they know nothing about, as a war reporter, I have spoken to many people in Ukraine and Donbas. It is very clear that I am completely cancelled in German propaganda media. And the journalistic organizations are fighting me, because they subordinated under the power elites and the ruling party cartel.

The historical reality is that NATO’s expansion towards Russia, through Ukraine, and the war waged by the Ukrainian government after the Western organized coup on the Maidan in February 2014, pushed by the West, against the Russians in Donbas, are the real causes of the conflict.

It is absolutely true that, for the Russians, this war is defensive. It is obvious that the Americans and Europeans are the aggressors, having arrived less than a thousand kilometers from Moscow. That is the objective situation. In this perspective, the war in Ukraine did not start on February 24, 2022, but eight years ago, in February 2014, with the coup on the Maidan Square in Kiew and the Maidan massacre, both orchestrated by US, EU and NATO representatives. According to the study of Ivan Kachanovski of the University of Ottawa, “The Maidan Massacre”, who collected more than hundred eye witnesses, evaluated video proofs and went through the investigation files, almost 100 people were killed by snipers placed in buildings occupied by the Right Sector. The snipers came to a large number from Georgia, Poland and Lithuania - professional and militarily trained special forces. The former military leader of the Maidan, Andrij Parubij, was killed in mid 2025 in Lwiw - possibly he knew too much. Ivan Kachanovski quoted eye witnesses, that Western politicians and diplomats were involved in the preparations of the assassinations as well.

After the coup, a wave of violence rolled through Ukraine, against Anti-Maidan protests and demonstrations, who started spontaneously all over the Eastern part of the country. There were many killings, like those in Odessa on Mai 2nd, 2014 and in Mariupol on Mai 9, 2014, when members of the Azow battalion drove with infantry fighting vehicles into demonstrators.

Let me quote some normal people of the war theatre. I interviewed them during the referenda in late September 2022 in Lugansk, Donetsk and Mariupol. The situation was as follows:

At the end of February, Ukraine made a push for negotiations. Moscow agreed. The European Union did not: it supplied weapons worth €450 million. In March, Zelensky offered talks again, and once more the Russians showed themselves willing to talk, but once more the EU prevented this with a second tranche of €500 million. Nevertheless, by the end of March, negotiators in Istanbul had almost reached an agreement. According to this agreement, Ukraine would have regained its territory before the invasion began. However, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called Zelensky on April 2 and visited Kiev on April 9 to urge him to withdraw his proposals, otherwise the West would stop its aid. Thus, it was the West that prevented peace. This reverses the question of who is to blame for the war—to the detriment of the West. In response, Moscow decided to freeze the status quo and incorporate the oblasts of Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporhyzhia, and Kherson in the Russian Federation to rule out a return.

The referenda, which in the West can only be described as sham referenda, took place in late September 2014. Here characteristic voices:

Irina Dikaja, the head of the election commission at a school in Lugansk, a woman in her 50s: “People are lining up to cast their votes. Yesterday it was pouring rain, and people stood under their umbrellas here in front of our school and in front of the election buses throughout the city. Older women cry when they receive the documents and put the ballot in the box. People with disabilities call us and ask us to send someone over, saying, ‘We want to cast our vote.’”

And: “We did not expect such a high turnout. The mood is very positive. Voters hope that this referendum will bring about change. They are voting in the hope that their lives will improve. That is the mood in a nutshell. They are optimistic about their shared future with Russia.”

A 60 year old man: “ This election is very important to me, to my family, and to my country, the Republic of Lugansk. We have been waiting eight years for this referendum. The people of Germany should know that Russian people live here. Everything connects us to Russia: politics, economics, religion; we celebrate the same holidays. We don’t want this kinship to be torn apart... That’s why I want the war to end quickly. And I have great hope for Russia, politically, economically, and in the field of education. I hope for myself, my children, and my grandchildren. Russia is our country, and we are returning to our home port. And I‘d like to tell you something else: we cast our votes without anyone standing behind us with a gun. No one forced us to go to the ballot box. We followed the voice of our hearts.” This voter recalled that the regions east of Dnjepr were originally Russian. These regions were transferred to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in the year 1922, because they wanted to create a unified administrative zone in order to straighten the Dnjepr River and build a hydroelectric power plant.

A taxi driver on September 24, 2022: “That’s your damn market economy. Where are the EU subsidies? We haven’t seen a penny of them here. We starved here in the 1990s. My father was a miner, my mother a housewife, and we were three siblings. We didn’t get paid for months. That was the capitalism that the West brought us. No one knew when there would be money again, when we would be able to buy something to eat. Things only got better after around the year 2000.” This is how the people of Donbas experienced the blessings of the free West.

A man in his 60s: “I am glad that it turned out this way. Russia was in ruins, and since Putin began to rebuild the country, people have been able to hope again. The year 2014 showed that a country that forbids you to speak your native language, robs you of your culture, and humiliates you, has plunged the Donbas into civil war.”

A female voter in her mid-50s wearing a purple down jacket at polling station No. 5 in Lugansk: “I cast my vote so that peace can finally reign again. So that our People’s Republic of Lugansk can become part of the Russian Federation. So that it can develop, become stronger, and we can finally have peace again. We are all eagerly waiting for things to improve here again. We all hope for that very much.”

A second voter in her mid-50s, passport in her hand: I hope the war finally ends. That the shelling finally stops and no more children die. I really hope so. Because the Ukrainians fired at us. We were one people in Ukraine. Why couldn’t we come to a peaceful agreement? Why did they always bomb us? It was terrible, people disappeared, children were killed. It was like fascism.” According to the OSCE, 14,400 people were killed between 2014 and 2021, and according to unofficial figures, more than 50,000.

Viktoria Litvinova, deputy election supervisor at Secondary School No. 60 in Mariupol, at polling station No. 36 013, clearly shows that she has had a difficult few months during the siege of the city, and the street fighting is still fresh in her memory, the city still was completely destroyed by heavy fighting: “There are also people who have a different opinion, and that is their right. Everyone has the right to his own opinion, and here voters can express it. But as I see it, that‘s the minority. People really like coming to the polls. Older women come and even bless the ballot boxes. I hope for peace, prosperity, and tranquility; that’s what the election should bring. But the most important thing is peace.“

A man with the name Wladimir Jewgenjewitsch Tulow, a teacher of Lugansk: “Everything must change. The economic, political, social, and military situation. The most important thing is that people can regain hope. Because we have been living in a circus state run by clowns. In a banana republic where these honorable people talked about sovereignty while simultaneously abolishing it. We have been living in a bandit state. It is still 100% a fascist state. I mean Ukraine, of course, what else?” I could quote hundreds of voices like these.

The results of the referendum: in Lugansk, 98.42% voted in favor of joining the Russian Federation; in Donetsk, 97.51%; in Kherson, 87.05%; and in Zaporhyzhia, 93.11%. Anyone unfamiliar with the situation on the ground might easily think these results were fake. But the results reflected the mood of a population that has either been shelled by the Ukrainian army in the separatist republics or arrested, beaten, and terrorized by fascist battalions in formerly Ukrainian areas such as Mariupol. According to United Nations definitions, both fulfill the criteria for genocide.

The results of the referendum also corresponded to the results of previous opinion polls in the region, for example during the election of President Yanukovych in 2013 or a survey conducted by a Ukrainian newspaper in 2016.

The objection that the opponents of the separatists had already fled is also unfounded: Of the more than 6 million people living in Donbas in 2014, just over 1 million were internally displaced persons, meaning they remained in the region, while more than 1 million fled the war to Russia and only a few sought refuge in the West of the country.

The reasons for these results are obvious: 1. The Ukrainians waged war against the population of Donbas from April 2014 onwards as part of a so-called „Anti-terror operation“; people do not flee into the arms of their enemies. 2. Many Donbas residents have relatives in Russia and thus learned that people in Russia had been slowly getting better off since 2000, while the situation in Ukraine was becoming increasingly difficult. This is an important economic reason. 3. The cultural dimension: the language laws of the coup government, with their suppression of the Russian language and culture, were seen by the people of Donbas as an attack on their identity and human rights. In fact, democracy also means being able to live one’s language, religion, and culture. That is why they saw Ukraine, which has even enshrined an ethnically pure state in its constitution, as a terrorist state. Many of the people I spoke to confirmed this. That is why the Donbas people are seeking refuge in Russia.

With the aggression against the Donbas population, the coup government in Ukraine and their Western supporters created the situation that they are currently critizising. It is the responsibility of the West that these people are Russia-oriented. No one in the West cares what people in this war zone want. They are treated like subhumans. This is also a kind not only of Russophobia; this is a kind of racism of Western politicians and Western media.

It is fascinating that these aggressors think they are being attacked and that they are forced to defend themselves. There is an element of madness in our situation in Europe. Especially the media are trigger happy and blood thursty. They are boosting NATO propaganda and trying to bring people into a war hysteria all over Europe. Therefore, those journalists are responsible for the continuation of the war and for hundreds of thousands casualties. These journalists have blood on their fingers. They must be held criminally responsible. The first thing to flow in war is ink.

These journalists are belonging to a degenerated Western elite, together with mad politicians, academics and company managers, who want to drive their own countries deeper and deeper into the war in Ukraine. They seem to have a narcissistic passion for the destruction of things, the destruction of men, the destruction of reality. The current psychological state of the West is partly this: nihilism, which leads to a passion for war in people’s minds, and a preference for war in geopolitics. We understand the moral background to the West’s new preference for war. The two main elements of narcissism, according to Sigmund Freud, are: Loss of reality and megalomania.

I will mention some of the wars for which the West is responsible, but without Westerners, who are nihilists without knowing it, being able to understand their responsibility: Serbia 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003, Libya and Syria 2008. That is what is striking today: Westerners provoke wars and fuel wars by telling themselves that they are on the side of justice. But this is not true. This shows that the NATO countries start a century of new wars, because it cannot cope with its own decline.

But since 2014, the people of Donbas have achieved more than just challenging the megalomania of Western politicians. They have stopped the imperialist expansionism of NATO countries against Russia, thereby preventing Russia from being weakened and robbed of its natural resources, as openly demanded by US analysts such as George Friedman (Stratfor) and Zbigniew Brzezinsky, or Republican Senator Lindsay Graham.

Thus, the civil war in Donbas and the ensuing war have initiated and accelerated the decline of the West. This war will claim many more victims. Because neither side can back down. If NATO wins the proxy war in Ukraine, there will be a Russian nuclear strike. If Russia wins and keeps Donbas, stabilizing its economy, then the invincibility of the US will be gone, and the European Union will collapse under the costs of war and reconstruction. After the many sacrifices they have made, the people of Donbas will then stand alongside the rising BIRCS states. Because the future belongs to the multipolar world.

TrumpÄs 28-point peace plan for Ukraine is dead on arrival. This plan is a non-starter for Russia. Public opinion in Russia would turn against President Putin, causing his approval ratings to plummet from about 80 per cent. A DPR soldier told me after heavyn shelling in Donetsk: “Putin has let us down. He should have invaded and come to our aid back in 2014. There would have been far fewer deaths here.” For this soldier, a Russian intervention back in 2014 would have avoided the war. Nor, Russia cannot abandon the Donbas anymore. The people refuse to do so and would continue the fight for their rights; the war would go on, because Donbas people would stand up to a return to Ukraine at all means. THis shows that it is easy to enter a war. It is much harder to find a way out.

Peace will not come by Trump’s new peace plan. Peace will only come by accepting Russia’s conditions: the four eastern Oblasts remain part of the Russian Federation; Ukraine remains neutral and does not join NATO; and Ukraine has to be denazified, meaning regime change in Kyiv. The 28-point plan will fail because Donbas people will make it fail.

should cede large parts of its territory and drastically reduce its armed forces. In order to secure peace, it demands that Ukraine slashes the size of its army to 600,000 and gives up missiles that can hit Moscow. Russia would pay an undisclosed rental fee for de facto control of Donetsk, Lugansk, and parts of Zaporhyzhia and Kherson, officials familiar with the deal told The Telegraph. The plan also calls for Russia to freeze its forces in place in Kherson und Zaporhyzhia and to withdraw Russian forces from Kharkiv and Sumy.

The Russian side reacted cautiously. Today, I can give you one reason why. The reason lies in the mood of the Donbas people. This is completely unknown or underestimated in the West.

The war in Ukraine is seen in the West as an “unprovoked war of aggression”, a Russian invasion of Ukraine, and I admit, of course, that it was the Russian army that entered Ukraine. This is the only point Western journalists know. They are following the “3-I-Concept”: incompetence, ignorance and ideology. Like most of our politicians, they never were in Russia or Ukraine, they know nothing about the history of the Donbas and they never were in war zones. That means: They lost the ground of reality.

Unlike many journalists who sit comfortably at their desks and pass judgment on things they know nothing about, as a war reporter, I have spoken to many people in Ukraine and Donbas. It is very clear that I am completely cancelled in German propaganda media. And the journalistic organizations are fighting me, because they subordinated under the power elites and the ruling party cartel.

The historical reality is that NATO’s expansion towards Russia, through Ukraine, and the war waged by the Ukrainian government after the Western organized coup on the Maidan in February 2014, pushed by the West, against the Russians in Donbas, are the real causes of the conflict.

It is absolutely true that, for the Russians, this war is defensive. It is obvious that the Americans and Europeans are the aggressors, having arrived less than a thousand kilometers from Moscow. That is the objective situation. In this perspective, the war in Ukraine did not start on February 24, 2022, but eight years ago, in February 2014, with the coup on the Maidan Square in Kiew and the Maidan massacre, both orchestrated by US, EU and NATO representatives. According to the study of Ivan Kachanovski of the University of Ottawa, “The Maidan Massacre”, who collected more than hundred eye witnesses, evaluated video proofs and went through the investigation files, almost 100 people were killed by snipers placed in buildings occupied by the Right Sector. The snipers came to a large number from Georgia, Poland and Lithuania - professional and militarily trained special forces. The former military leader of the Maidan, Andrij Parubij, was killed in mid 2025 in Lwiw - possibly he knew too much. Ivan Kachanovski quoted eye witnesses, that Western politicians and diplomats were involved in the preparations of the assassinations as well.

After the coup, a wave of violence rolled through Ukraine, against Anti-Maidan protests and demonstrations, who started spontaneously all over the Eastern part of the country. There were many killings, like those in Odessa on Mai 2nd, 2014 and in Mariupol on Mai 9, 2014, when members of the Azow battalion drove with infantry fighting vehicles into demonstrators.

Let me quote some normal people of the war theatre. I interviewed them during the referenda in late September 2022 in Lugansk, Donetsk and Mariupol. The situation was as follows:

At the end of February, Ukraine made a push for negotiations. Moscow agreed. The European Union did not: it supplied weapons worth €450 million. In March, Zelensky offered talks again, and once more the Russians showed themselves willing to talk, but once more the EU prevented this with a second tranche of €500 million. Nevertheless, by the end of March, negotiators in Istanbul had almost reached an agreement. According to this agreement, Ukraine would have regained its territory before the invasion began. However, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called Zelensky on April 2 and visited Kiev on April 9 to urge him to withdraw his proposals, otherwise the West would stop its aid. Thus, it was the West that prevented peace. This reverses the question of who is to blame for the war—to the detriment of the West. In response, Moscow decided to freeze the status quo and incorporate the oblasts of Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporhyzhia, and Kherson in the Russian Federation to rule out a return.

The referenda, which in the West can only be described as sham referenda, took place in late September 2014. Here characteristic voices:

Irina Dikaja, the head of the election commission at a school in Lugansk, a woman in her 50s: “People are lining up to cast their votes. Yesterday it was pouring rain, and people stood under their umbrellas here in front of our school and in front of the election buses throughout the city. Older women cry when they receive the documents and put the ballot in the box. People with disabilities call us and ask us to send someone over, saying, ‘We want to cast our vote.’”

And: “We did not expect such a high turnout. The mood is very positive. Voters hope that this referendum will bring about change. They are voting in the hope that their lives will improve. That is the mood in a nutshell. They are optimistic about their shared future with Russia.”

A 60 year old man: “ This election is very important to me, to my family, and to my country, the Republic of Lugansk. We have been waiting eight years for this referendum. The people of Germany should know that Russian people live here. Everything connects us to Russia: politics, economics, religion; we celebrate the same holidays. We don’t want this kinship to be torn apart... That’s why I want the war to end quickly. And I have great hope for Russia, politically, economically, and in the field of education. I hope for myself, my children, and my grandchildren. Russia is our country, and we are returning to our home port. And I‘d like to tell you something else: we cast our votes without anyone standing behind us with a gun. No one forced us to go to the ballot box. We followed the voice of our hearts.” This voter recalled that the regions east of Dnjepr were originally Russian. These regions were transferred to the Soviet Republic of Ukraine in the year 1922, because they wanted to create a unified administrative zone in order to straighten the Dnjepr River and build a hydroelectric power plant.

A taxi driver on September 24, 2022: “That’s your damn market economy. Where are the EU subsidies? We haven’t seen a penny of them here. We starved here in the 1990s. My father was a miner, my mother a housewife, and we were three siblings. We didn’t get paid for months. That was the capitalism that the West brought us. No one knew when there would be money again, when we would be able to buy something to eat. Things only got better after around the year 2000.” This is how the people of Donbas experienced the blessings of the free West.

A man in his 60s: “I am glad that it turned out this way. Russia was in ruins, and since Putin began to rebuild the country, people have been able to hope again. The year 2014 showed that a country that forbids you to speak your native language, robs you of your culture, and humiliates you, has plunged the Donbas into civil war.”

A female voter in her mid-50s wearing a purple down jacket at polling station No. 5 in Lugansk: “I cast my vote so that peace can finally reign again. So that our People’s Republic of Lugansk can become part of the Russian Federation. So that it can develop, become stronger, and we can finally have peace again. We are all eagerly waiting for things to improve here again. We all hope for that very much.”

A second voter in her mid-50s, passport in her hand: I hope the war finally ends. That the shelling finally stops and no more children die. I really hope so. Because the Ukrainians fired at us. We were one people in Ukraine. Why couldn’t we come to a peaceful agreement? Why did they always bomb us? It was terrible, people disappeared, children were killed. It was like fascism.” According to the OSCE, 14,400 people were killed between 2014 and 2021, and according to unofficial figures, more than 50,000.

Viktoria Litvinova, deputy election supervisor at Secondary School No. 60 in Mariupol, at polling station No. 36 013, clearly shows that she has had a difficult few months during the siege of the city, and the street fighting is still fresh in her memory, the city still was completely destroyed by heavy fighting: “There are also people who have a different opinion, and that is their right. Everyone has the right to his own opinion, and here voters can express it. But as I see it, that‘s the minority. People really like coming to the polls. Older women come and even bless the ballot boxes. I hope for peace, prosperity, and tranquility; that’s what the election should bring. But the most important thing is peace.“

A man with the name Wladimir Jewgenjewitsch Tulow, a teacher of Lugansk: “Everything must change. The economic, political, social, and military situation. The most important thing is that people can regain hope. Because we have been living in a circus state run by clowns. In a banana republic where these honorable people talked about sovereignty while simultaneously abolishing it. We have been living in a bandit state. It is still 100% a fascist state. I mean Ukraine, of course, what else?” I could quote hundreds of voices like these.

The results of the referendum: in Lugansk, 98.42% voted in favor of joining the Russian Federation; in Donetsk, 97.51%; in Kherson, 87.05%; and in Zaporhyzhia, 93.11%. Anyone unfamiliar with the situation on the ground might easily think these results were fake. But the results reflected the mood of a population that has either been shelled by the Ukrainian army in the separatist republics or arrested, beaten, and terrorized by fascist battalions in formerly Ukrainian areas such as Mariupol. According to United Nations definitions, both fulfill the criteria for genocide.

The results of the referendum also corresponded to the results of previous opinion polls in the region, for example during the election of President Yanukovych in 2013 or a survey conducted by a Ukrainian newspaper in 2016.

The objection that the opponents of the separatists had already fled is also unfounded: Of the more than 6 million people living in Donbas in 2014, just over 1 million were internally displaced persons, meaning they remained in the region, while more than 1 million fled the war to Russia and only a few sought refuge in the West of the country.

The reasons for these results are obvious: 1. The Ukrainians waged war against the population of Donbas from April 2014 onwards as part of a so-called „Anti-terror operation“; people do not flee into the arms of their enemies. 2. Many Donbas residents have relatives in Russia and thus learned that people in Russia had been slowly getting better off since 2000, while the situation in Ukraine was becoming increasingly difficult. This is an important economic reason. 3. The cultural dimension: the language laws of the coup government, with their suppression of the Russian language and culture, were seen by the people of Donbas as an attack on their identity and human rights. In fact, democracy also means being able to live one’s language, religion, and culture. That is why they saw Ukraine, which has even enshrined an ethnically pure state in its constitution, as a terrorist state. Many of the people I spoke to confirmed this. That is why the Donbas people are seeking refuge in Russia.

With the aggression against the Donbas population, the coup government in Ukraine and their Western supporters created the situation that they are currently critizising. It is the responsibility of the West that these people are Russia-oriented. No one in the West cares what people in this war zone want. They are treated like subhumans. This is also a kind not only of Russophobia; this is a kind of racism of Western politicians and Western media.

It is fascinating that these aggressors think they are being attacked and that they are forced to defend themselves. There is an element of madness in our situation in Europe. Especially the media are trigger happy and blood thursty. They are boosting NATO propaganda and trying to bring people into a war hysteria all over Europe. Therefore, those journalists are responsible for the continuation of the war and for hundreds of thousands casualties. These journalists have blood on their fingers. They must be held criminally responsible. The first thing to flow in war is ink.

These journalists are belonging to a degenerated Western elite, together with mad politicians, academics and company managers, who want to drive their own countries deeper and deeper into the war in Ukraine. They seem to have a narcissistic passion for the destruction of things, the destruction of men, the destruction of reality. The current psychological state of the West is partly this: nihilism, which leads to a passion for war in people’s minds, and a preference for war in geopolitics. We understand the moral background to the West’s new preference for war. The two main elements of narcissism, according to Sigmund Freud, are: Loss of reality and megalomania.

I will mention some of the wars for which the West is responsible, but without Westerners, who are nihilists without knowing it, being able to understand their responsibility: Serbia 1999, Afghanistan 2001, Iraq 2003, Libya and Syria 2008. That is what is striking today: Westerners provoke wars and fuel wars by telling themselves that they are on the side of justice. But this is not true. This shows that the NATO countries start a century of new wars, because it cannot cope with its own decline.

But since 2014, the people of Donbas have achieved more than just challenging the megalomania of Western politicians. They have stopped the imperialist expansionism of NATO countries against Russia, thereby preventing Russia from being weakened and robbed of its natural resources, as openly demanded by US analysts such as George Friedman (Stratfor) and Zbigniew Brzezinsky, or Republican Senator Lindsay Graham.

Thus, the civil war in Donbas and the ensuing war have initiated and accelerated the decline of the West. This war will claim many more victims. Because neither side can back down. If NATO wins the proxy war in Ukraine, there will be a Russian nuclear strike. If Russia wins and keeps Donbas, stabilizing its economy, then the invincibility of the US will be gone, and the European Union will collapse under the costs of war and reconstruction. After the many sacrifices they have made, the people of Donbas will then stand alongside the rising BIRCS states. Because the future belongs to the multipolar world.

TrumpÄs 28-point peace plan for Ukraine is dead on arrival. This plan is a non-starter for Russia. Public opinion in Russia would turn against President Putin, causing his approval ratings to plummet from about 80 per cent. A DPR soldier told me after heavyn shelling in Donetsk: “Putin has let us down. He should have invaded and come to our aid back in 2014. There would have been far fewer deaths here.” For this soldier, a Russian intervention back in 2014 would have avoided the war. Nor, Russia cannot abandon the Donbas anymore. The people refuse to do so and would continue the fight for their rights; the war would go on, because Donbas people would stand up to a return to Ukraine at all means. THis shows that it is easy to enter a war. It is much harder to find a way out.

Peace will not come by Trump’s new peace plan. Peace will only come by accepting Russia’s conditions: the four eastern Oblasts remain part of the Russian Federation; Ukraine remains neutral and does not join NATO; and Ukraine has to be denazified, meaning regime change in Kyiv. The 28-point plan will fail because Donbas people will make it fail.

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Billions of dollars have poured into Ukraine since the war began. Where does it actually go?

That’s the question at the center of a striking conversation with Ralph Bosshard — a former OSCE observer and Lieutenant Colonel in the Swiss Army — whose account of the war diverges sharply from the version most of us have been given.

Bosshard doesn’t deal in vague suspicion. He talks specifics: seized fortunes and gold shipments moving through Hungary. A drug cartel operating under the name “Himprom.” Money laundering routed through cryptocurrency and offshore shell structures. And a question that cuts to the heart of Western military aid — how much of the weaponry sent to the front line actually arrives there?

His answer is unsettling: a substantial share, he argues, may be disappearing into channels that have nothing to do with the battlefield.

The uncomfortable part isn’t just the money. It’s who’s allegedly moving it. Bosshard describes a web connecting intelligence services, oligarchs, and organized crime networks — and warns that the consequences aren’t staying contained inside Ukraine’s borders. Corruption and organized crime, he argues, are no longer a problem that can be filed away as a distant, Eastern European issue. They’re beginning to reach into Western institutions themselves.

As Bosshard puts it:

“We’re all being turned into mafia states somehow, if we don’t fight organized crime.”

Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, this is testimony worth sitting with. Bosshard isn’t a fringe commentator — he spent years as a military officer and OSCE observer, watching this conflict from the inside. That perspective alone earns him a hearing, even where his claims are hard to verify and harder to accept.

Watch the full conversation here:

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Volgograd. To some, it’s just another Russian provincial city. To others, it’s the place where Europe’s fate was decided.

Patrik Baab travels to the Volga River to visit the city once known as Stalingrad. Wandering past the battle’s colossal monuments, talking with residents, and taking in the texture of contemporary Russia, he builds a picture rarely seen in Western media.

How do people here remember the war? What does Stalingrad mean to Russia’s sense of itself? And how do the people of this city view the current confrontation between Russia and the West?

This isn’t a report filtered through politicians or military strategists. It’s the perspective of a city that stands, more than almost any other place on earth, for sacrifice, memory, and historical experience.

A journey through history and the present. A journey to the roots of Russian identity. A journey to Volgograd.

Watch the full report here:

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Christian persecution in the middle of Europe? That’s the uncomfortable question at the heart of this conversation.

While Berlin and Brussels paint a picture of a values-based democracy, priest André Sikojev describes a reality that’s hard to reconcile with that image: priests arrested, monasteries stormed, and a church with a thousand-year history banned by state decree.

In this conversation, we dig into questions that rarely make it into mainstream coverage:

• The relic mystery — how sacred remains were smuggled out of the Kyiv Monastery of the Caves under dramatic circumstances.

• Geopolitics in the altar room — the role Sikojev says Western intelligence services have played in building a new “state church.”

• Systematic pressure — why, in his account, attacks on believers and the erosion of religious identity form part of a broader strategy.

Sikojev offers a firsthand view into a country he describes as caught between military rule and the sale of its own cultural roots — a conversation about faith, power, and what he calls the West’s silence.

Watch the full conversation here:

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At the edge of historical forgetting: historian Irina Alexandrovna Skortschenko warns of a dangerous blindness to the mechanics of escalation. In this in-depth conversation, she examines the erosion of historical awareness in a society that seems to be forgetting the lessons of the 20th century’s catastrophes.

Together, we trace the slow normalization of war-thinking: the rhetorical arms race, and the dehumanization of “the other.” Skortschenko brings both the weight of lived memory and scholarly distance to a present in which diplomacy is increasingly dismissed as weakness.

Her sharpest observations touch on:

• The loss of remembrance culture — why forgetting the atrocities of the Second World War clears the path for new conflicts, and how the reshaping of historical narrative is manipulating our actions today.

• The mechanics of fear — how social insecurity is instrumentalized to prepare the ground for military solutions, even as social cohesion breaks down.

• The bridge between East and West — why understanding the Russian perspective and Eastern European history isn’t taking a side, but a precondition for peace.

This conversation is an urgent appeal for level-headedness, and a warning against sacrificing the complexity of world politics to simple good-versus-evil narratives. The perspective of an expert able to name these historical fault lines with such precision is an essential contribution to an honest and necessary debate.

“Whoever closes their eyes to the past goes blind to the dangers of the present. We have to find the courage for dialogue before the language of weapons has the last word.”

Watch the full conversation on my channel here:

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Is the West facing the end of 500 years of dominance?

Renowned political scientist and former officer Dimitri Trenin lays out a picture of world politics that looks past the media’s surface to the tectonic shifts underneath. This isn’t just about regional conflicts, he argues — it’s about what he calls a “functional world war,” and the birth of a new, multipolar order out of the wreckage of old certainties.

Trenin walks through the dangerously charged standoff between the nuclear powers — from the slow-burning escalation in Ukraine to what he sees as Russia’s decisive strategic turn away from the West. He takes aim at Europe’s political elites, describing what he calls their “apocalyptic blindness” and unconditional loyalty to the United States — a stance he argues is undermining Europe’s own economic and civilizational foundations.

His sharpest points land on the deeper strategic fault lines:

• What does the loss of strategic autonomy mean for Germany?

• How are the erosion of the petrodollar and the rise of the Global South reshaping the balance of power?

Trenin argues that by weaponizing the global financial system and disregarding Russia’s “red lines,” the West has taken on a risk that could threaten human existence itself. His analysis is a call to look at geopolitical realities without ideological blinders — and to question the costs of Western hubris.

Whatever your own politics, the perspective of an analyst who has studied the power structures in Moscow and Washington for decades offers essential grounding for a serious debate.

“We have to understand that the era of Western supremacy is ending irreversibly — and that ignoring this new multipolar reality can lead to catastrophe.”

Watch the full conversation here:

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Are we standing at the gates of hell?

Poet and thinker Hans-Eckardt Wenzel on the moral compass of our time. At a moment when the threats of past decades barely register in our everyday consciousness, Wenzel warns of a dangerous detachment from reality. In this conversation, he examines what he calls the “apocalyptic blindness” of a society that believes it’s living in paradise while standing at the edge of the abyss.

Wenzel breaks down the mechanisms of alienation he sees at work — from our slow habituation to the unthinkable, to the coarsening of language, to what he calls the “theatricalization of politics.” He takes a hard look at the role of elites, whose disconnection from reality, in his view, puts the survival of humanity as a species at risk.

His most striking points touch on:

• The disappearance of dialogue — why war is the perfect monologue, and how the death of real conversation is eroding society from within.

• The power of language — how thought-taboos and what he calls the “destruction of realistic art” are stripping us of the intellectual tools we’d need just to name the crisis we’re in.

• The lesson of the East — what the collapse of East Germany can teach us about how political systems tip over — and why, this time, there’s no safety net waiting to catch us.

Wenzel’s analysis is a plea for a return to the human, and a warning to perceive reality without ideological filters. Regardless of where you come from: the perspective of an artist who lived the rupture between East and West firsthand offers essential grounding for an honest debate.

“Hope can also be a trap that blocks our view of the catastrophe. We have to call things by their name to break their power over us.”

Watch the full conversation on Patrik Baab’s channel here:

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Is the West facing the end of its global dominance?

Journalist and Middle East expert Karin Leukefeld lays out a picture of world politics that looks past the daily headlines to the deeper shifts underneath them. This isn’t about isolated conflicts — it’s about what she sees as the slow erosion of US hegemony and the emergence of a new, multipolar world order.

Leukefeld walks through the volatile situation across the Near and Middle East — from the military escalations in Lebanon and Gaza to Iran’s growing role as an independent power in the region. She takes a critical look at the United States and the EU, arguing that their imperial ambitions often clash with the stability international law is supposed to guarantee.

Her sharpest points land on the economic and geostrategic fault lines reshaping the map: What does the rise of the BRICS bloc mean for Europe? How are China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the global scramble for oil and gas resources redrawing the balance of power? Leukefeld argues that Germany and the EU, through their current policies, risk being left behind by these new realities.

Her analysis is a call to see geopolitical developments as a whole — and to question the costs of Western double standards.

Whatever your own politics, the perspective of an expert who has reported from the region for decades offers essential grounding for a serious debate.

“We have to understand that the world no longer revolves solely around the West — and that ignoring these new realities comes at a high price.”

Watch the full conversation here:

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He worked as a deminer. Then, in an instant, an explosion changed his life forever.

In this conversation with Wadim Tretiakow, we talk about the raw reality of mine warfare, the moment he lost his sight, the long road back to living a life, and the message he wants the next generation to hear.

A moving testimony about courage, sacrifice, and the human cost of war.

Watch it now:

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“The lack of critical thinking among intellectuals” is particularly noteworthy in times of capitalist crisis. Antonio Gramsci wrote: “European intellectuals... no longer represent the cultural self-awareness and self-criticism of the ruling class; they have once again become direct agents of the ruling class...”[1] Their function is, particularly in the face of upheavals in the system of exploitation and problems of legitimacy, to “organize a group’s social hegemony and its state power,” especially “during those moments of crisis in command and leadership when spontaneous consensus breaks down.”[2]

The Endemic Crisis of Capitalism

The underlying issue is the endemic crisis of capitalism. By this I mean, first and foremost, the growing lack of investment that has built up over the past few decades and stems from the problem of overaccumulation. There is, so to speak, too much capital. Overaccumulation means that capital owners can no longer find long-term investment opportunities to achieve the desired returns.[3] This leads to a prolonged downturn in the global economy, which, according to Robert Brenner’s analysis, is attributable to the downward trend in the rate of profit in developed industrialized nations. This has been well documented, particularly in the case of the United States and Germany.[4] Investors can counteract the decline in the rate of profit through a number of measures: cutting wages, streamlining production, sourcing cheaper raw materials, components, and inventory, and tapping into new markets. This is why the rate of profit fluctuates widely. However, no structural recovery is evident in terms of long-term trends.[5]

Neoliberalism in the 1980s brought about the internationalization and global deregulation of the financial system. Financial markets were the place where one could still make a quick buck in the face of falling profit rates in industry. Wall Street and the City of London became new centers of economic power because they gained massive leeway relative to nation-states. In the financial markets, value is not extracted through investment in means of production and labor to generate profit from the sale of goods, but rather through investment in financial securities with the expectation of selling them later at a higher price: money is meant to generate more money, without the production of goods. As early as 2016, the volume of transactions on financial markets exceeded the turnover in the goods and services sector by more than a hundredfold. Through the creation of derivatives—that is, derived and bundled securities—stock market bets can be placed on price fluctuations.[6] Financial capitalism emerged because profit rates in the real economy had fallen. Now it has itself become a cause of crisis.

The 2008 financial crisis triggered the most severe global recession since World War II and, shortly thereafter, led to the euro crisis, which remains unresolved to this day. With financial markets having largely collapsed, central banks opened the floodgates and flooded the system with money.

Financial Capitalism and Its Bubbles

During the COVID-19 crisis, the crisis spread to nearly all market segments, including the shadow banking system and the financial system as a whole. Once again, it was the central banks that prevented a liquidity crunch and responded effectively to the crisis. But the crisis itself has not gone away. Rather, the central banks’ monetary injections are creating an illusion of stability in the system: “Today’s global financial system and the capitalism of Western industrialized nations,” says Joscha Wullweber, “can no longer function without the permanent, highly unconventional, extensive, and in some respects very extreme interventions by central banks. If they were to cease these measures, the banking system, the global financial system, and economic systems worldwide would collapse.”[7]

The example of Germany: The groundwork for the financialization of the economy was laid in 2002 when the Schröder-Fischer administration exempted capital gains from taxation. This allowed banks to sell their industrial holdings tax-free and invest the proceeds in structured securities. This had two consequences: First, German banks were very quickly swept up in the 2008 financial crisis, a fate they might have been spared in part had this reallocation not taken place. Second, the international financial industry was able to buy into German companies.

The financial crisis marked a turning point at which two crucial structural changes began to take hold in the financial system: a shift from bad loans to government bonds and from banks to the shadow banking system. According to the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, the bailout of banks with taxpayer money has led to a reduction in risks within the banking sector, while at the same time the debt burden of nations has risen to levels never before seen in peacetime. At the same time, fund assets have migrated off bank balance sheets, while they have risen dramatically among hedge funds, investment funds, pension funds, insurance companies, and financial investors. This increases risks, as investments in the shadow banking system are often leveraged using derivative mechanisms to optimally exploit price fluctuations while simultaneously reducing the burden on equity capital. This heightens the risk of procyclical fire sales and can destabilize government refinancing conditions.[8] As a result, Germany’s budget has also fallen into the Babylonian captivity of international financial investors operating within the largely unregulated shadow banking system—investors who are making billions off the war in Ukraine and can pressure any government seeking to break ranks with the warmongers by triggering a sell-off of its bonds.

Second, U.S. financial investors have been able to acquire stakes in German companies. Today, only about one-third of the shares in the 40 DAX-listed companies remain in German hands. Investors from North America, in particular, have increased their stakes to more than 25%. In more than half of the DAX-listed companies, foreign investors hold the majority of shares.[9] Germany is no longer in control of its own affairs; decisions are made elsewhere. The economic foundation has increasingly fallen under the control of U.S. financial investors. This is ultimately the basis for political dependence as well. This explains why the business community has also accepted the devastating sanctions policy without public protest.

These sanctions have backfired. By cutting off energy ties with Russia, the German economy has fallen into a recessionary spiral. Competitiveness is crumbling, deindustrialization is in full swing, companies are closing or relocating their production facilities, and job cuts are underway. This deindustrialization process has now reached the tipping point where it has become irreversible. Since the COVID-19 crisis, more than 341,000 industrial jobs have been lost—that is, one in every 17 jobs—and foreign direct investment reached a 17-year low in 2025.[10]

Digital Capitalism: When the Market Becomes Private Property

The transition to digital capitalism, which is now emerging “from the smoldering ruins of neoliberalism,” is bringing about sweeping changes in the financial markets and the manufacturing sector.

On the financial markets, the use of artificial intelligence is accelerating trading activity, thereby increasing risks. Blockchain technology is giving rise to new trading and speculation platforms that have so far eluded government oversight. However, this does not lead to the demise of capitalism, but rather to the radicalization of its fundamental mechanisms. It accelerates the concentration of capital and the emergence of social inequality.[11] Philipp Staab writes: “Digital capitalism is not only, from a systematic perspective, a machine for producing social inequality, but also, in a broader sense, a new form of social domination.”[12]

In the U.S., there are plans to use dollar-backed stablecoins to create new demand for U.S. Treasury bonds and reduce the risk of a failed debt auction. In fact, stablecoins such as Tether and Circle are now among the top 20 holders of U.S. Treasuries. The GENIUS Act of July 2025 quietly linked stablecoin reserves to the demand for U.S. Treasuries. Under this law, every issuer of stablecoins must back their coins with secure assets. According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s definition, these are U.S. Treasury bonds. This means that every dollar flowing into stablecoins is automatically directed into U.S. Treasury bonds. Every crypto investor thus becomes a forced lender to the U.S. government as soon as they use stablecoins. U.S. regulators have full access to the investments, and inflation in the dollar also devalues the digital assets.[13] This new form of control reinforces the dominance of the dollar.

Russia is referring to U.S. plans to address its immense debt burden—approximately $40 trillion as of the end of May 2026[14] - to devalue the dollar via stablecoins. The intention is to replace the debt with dollar-backed stablecoins, decouple the stablecoin from the dollar, and then devalue it massively—which amounts to an attempt to make the world pay off U.S. debt. Such a financial reset would allow the U.S. to reduce its debt burden while maintaining the dollar’s dominance as the reserve currency. It remains unclear whether this is actually feasible.[15]

Moscow is working on its own ruble-backed stablecoin called “A7A5,” which is set to be launched on the Tron blockchain. This is part of a strategy to reduce dependence on U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins such as Tether (USDT), which Russia has used in the past to settle oil transactions with China and India.[16]

In the digitized real economy, value creation and the circulation of goods are also undergoing radical changes. The focus is now on proprietary markets. Their leading companies are Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon—all of which are monopolies. “Traditional monopolies operate in markets,” says Philipp Staab, “but the leading players in digital capitalism ARE markets.”[17] The market itself is being privatized.

This is a fundamental difference from neoliberal ideology, which centers on neutral markets: the dominant markets are privately owned. What matters most to them is reach—that is, the size of their user base. To generate reach, services from other business areas are cross-subsidized. Consumers are lured in with ostensibly free offers, but they pay for them behind the scenes by handing over their data: If a product costs nothing, then the user is the product. Unlike traditional monopolies, the market owner’s power—and thus their profit model—manifests itself in four forms of control: first, in information, the central raw material; second, in discretionary access control; third, in the selection of services; and fourth, in price control—specifically, over producers and consumers.[18]

The key commodity in these proprietary markets is user data. Value creation hinges on the collection and aggregation of data. This, in turn, affects both producers and consumers. User data is harvested in both the production and consumption spheres. Users and producers think they are searching the web with Google; but Google is searching them. This enables not only behavioral and performance monitoring, but also predictive behavioral steering through the selection and ranking of search results.

Now that neoliberalism has already largely liberalized and made employment relationships more precarious, new risks and increased workloads are emerging: In manufacturing and sales, digitalization is being used to streamline operations and cut jobs. So while the cascades of data and profits flow upward to the platforms, the “cascades of risk” flow primarily downward.[19] Added to this is massive job loss triggered by the use of artificial intelligence. According to the report “Mercer Global Talent Trends 2026” by the consulting firm Mercer, 63 percent of the executives surveyed see artificial intelligence as an opportunity to automate work processes and increase returns.[20] In extreme cases, competition becomes self-destructive: companies use artificial intelligence to cut back on their workforce; but workers are also consumers, and if the lost income is not replaced, purchasing power erodes—and with it, demand for the products.[21]

The Economy of Resentment

On the consumer side, the internet and social media—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—enable a quick, immediate response. This makes it easier for emotion to take precedence over a thorough examination and consideration of the issues. Reason-driven reactions and processing take a back seat to speed and emotionalization. Wolf-Dieter Narr observed a long-term shift in behavior years ago.

It consists “in a decline in the individual’s innate mechanisms of reflection and processing”: “Stimuli and expectations generate responses without the individual being capable of processing them, making choices, or offering resistance.” As a result, the criteria and information for control are lost; the individual can only reduce the complexity of the information overload by trusting it. As early as 1979, Narr warned of “the danger of a society of conditioned reflexes […] more precisely: a society of individuals devoid of resistance, drowning in the mire of their irrelevant subjectivity, capable at best of irrational outbursts”.[22]

This prediction takes on particular significance in the transition from neoliberalism to digital capitalism. As Wolfgang Engler has pointed out: “In all societies upended by neoliberalism, there is widespread anger.”[23] It is directed against the ruling elites, who have increasingly put wage earners under pressure through cuts to social benefits, privatization, deregulation, and a shift in responsibility for life’s risks from the state to individuals.

If this anger remains bottled up for a long time amid the daily struggle for survival, the emotionalization and manipulation of emotions on social media become an outlet for the release of pent-up frustration. Mainstream media coverage and numerous social media channels engage in this practice of channeling and directing subliminal anger because it generates clicks, circulation, advertising revenue, and ratings.

For the monetization of resentment to work at all, it must stimulate an emotional demand among the audience. Both producers and consumers benefit superficially: the former through click counts, the latter through the satisfaction of their impulses: “Logical arguments,” says Heinz Abels, “are powerless against emotional interests. Even the most perceptive people behave like fools when a required insight encounters emotional resistance.”[24]

This has given rise to a new media monetization model. It is no longer primarily information-based, but rather driven by resentment. At its core, then, this is about monetizing resentment. Or, in short: generating hate as a business model. This monetization of resentment occurs primarily through proprietary platforms. Services like Twitter, where opinion-forming takes place almost exclusively among the chattering classes, drive this process. The brevity of these platforms forces the intensification and compression of emotional arousal curves.

Joseph Vogl precisely identifies the dangers looming in the political economy of resentment: “Thus, the economy of resentment fuels the system of competition; it supplies opinion markets and merges with automatic evaluation mechanisms; it creates limited spheres of experience, multiplies isolated pseudo-communities, and privileges plebiscitary figures of authority, and it transforms the anxiety caused by global markets, transnational interventionist forces, and economic dependencies into tangible formulas of denunciation, which can then apply equally to the border crossings of migrants, European bureaucrats, greedy investors, or conspirators in the financial industry. Criticism fermenting in resentment always takes a ‘police-like’ path; it investigates and suspects, and seeks out supposedly liable and concretely graspable surrogate objects to account for the effectiveness of abstract systemic processes.”[25]

This plays right into the hands of the power elites, who know that the anger they have stirred up must under no circumstances be directed at them. That is why they use propaganda to shift that aggression toward internal enemies—such as alleged conspiracy theorists, right-wingers, or COVID deniers—or external adversaries, for example by stoking anti-Russian sentiment and demonizing Putin.[26] The political economy of resentment fosters the mobilization of fear and the politics of exclusion, which the ruling elites exploit to control society and as a technique of governance. The political economy of resentment fosters the mobilization of fear and the politics of exclusion, which the ruling elites exploit to control society and as a technique of governance.

This political concept includes the populist “us-versus-them” approach and, with it, the promotion of identity-based thinking, which is based on declarations of allegiance rather than on insights:

“Debates on matters of faith,” according to Zygmunt Bauman, “do not aim for consensus, but rather to portray the opposing side as hopelessly deaf and blind to the ‘facts’ and driven by malicious intentions […] Under these circumstances, the recipe for success for populists is to keep the anger constantly simmering.”[27] That harmony of hearts then turns into a chorus of hate speech.

Six Transformations of a Dying Capitalism

All in all, we are currently experiencing a multi-crisis, a kind of multiple sclerosis of the capitalist system: a crisis of overaccumulation and finance, a crisis of the nation-state, an educational crisis, a social crisis, a crisis of democracy, and a crisis of legitimacy. “The capitalist system,” according to Andrej Fursow, “is now facing a systemic, final crisis”.[28]

Fursow points out that capitalism is an expansive system that spreads out, thereby externalizing crisis and exploitation. To counteract the falling rate of profit, capital appropriates peripheral regions rich in raw materials and cheap labor. With the collapse of the socialist bloc, however, these non-capitalist peripheral zones disappeared. Capitalism now encompasses the entire globe. Consequently, there are no further opportunities for expansion. Now, the intensification of capitalism is on the agenda.[29]

That is why we are stepping up our capital utilization efforts by focusing on four key areas:

First, capital is launching an attack on human health: there is growing evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan where research on biological weapons was being conducted on behalf of the United States.[30] The vaccination programs poured billions into the coffers of pharmaceutical companies and financial investors and served to acclimate people to the state of emergency. The classification of COVID-19 as a dangerous pandemic was not based on scientific assessment but was politically motivated.[31] The adverse effects of a gene therapy that has not been sufficiently tested are well documented, but have so far had no political consequences.[32]

Second, there is an attack on human reproduction: Andrei Fursov counts population reduction among the elite’s key projects: “It is much easier to control 2 billion people than 7 or 8 billion. The population project is funded by the same entities that have already funded the environmental movement, among other things.”[33] At the 2018 World Economic Forum, Bill Gates highlighted the alleged risks of population growth.[34] The billionaire explained that, in the age of artificial intelligence, most people are no longer needed to perform social functions.[35]

Third, the assault on the human brain: We are currently witnessing a process of de-rationalization and the “destruction of reason.”[36] The destruction of the education system is continuing. “Binge-and-purge” learning—cramming, regurgitating, and forgetting—for multiple-choice exams at universities prevents students from thinking in terms of broader contexts or analyzing issues; instead, it promotes fragmented thinking and reliance on authoritative guidelines.[37] The large number of children and young people from immigrant backgrounds in Europe makes it impossible, under current conditions, to maintain educational standards. The abolition of the GDR’s polytechnic education system following German reunification has made it more difficult to integrate theory and practice, thereby contributing to a decline in educational standards. Emmanuel Todd points out that Russia trains more engineers than the United States, despite having a population less than half the size.[38] In addition, the “economy of emotion,” NATO’s “cognitive warfare,” and the workings of the “censorship complex” are accelerating the shift toward a society of conditioned reflexes: “The hostility of all against all,” as Joseph Vogl puts it, provides “the catalyst for a new pre-war era”.[39]

We are experiencing a crisis of transmission, which is also linked to the increasing presence of audiovisual media in everyday life and the decline of the written word. Every medium organizes its information according to specific principles. The written word requires linearity and discursivity. Visual media are characterized by a “breakdown of logocentric narrative structures and novel interweaving of linguistic, visual, and musical elements; that is, the linearity of the written medium is replaced by a ‘non-narrative logic of association’ that—if at all—can only be unravelled psychoanalytically.”[40] The media transformation therefore also entails a reshaping of information.

Writing is synonymous with a truth matrix that defines an era and serves as a guiding principle for human society. Yet its dominance appears to have waned in Western culture, while in other cultures, such as Islamic culture, its significance is actually on the rise. In our culture, writing is now merely one form of media expression among others, no longer the form of expression by which society is guided. For a certain way of thinking and representation, however, writing cannot be circumvented. In the present day, where visual media have become the dominant media in the Western hemisphere, this means that truth is coming to the surface, while the written word appears obsolete.[41] We are witnessing a process of de-illiteracy. But the visual surface is easily manipulated—if not technically reproducible—through the use of digital technology and artificial intelligence. The world of images is a post-factual world. For images have lost their mimetic function, at the very latest through the use of artificial intelligence. “Verifiable facts play no role. We live,“ says Colin Crouch, ”in the post-factual age”.[42] This opens the door to historical amnesia and historical distortion.

The fourth sphere is the blood-and-bone mill. The mechanism through which capital is valorized—where the drive for expansion and intensification converge—is war. For crisis-ridden financial capitalism, in which the ratio of capital employed to profit deteriorates and the rate of profit consequently falls, war is a form of bloody bankruptcy postponement. If wars are waged successfully, new resources and minerals such as oil, gas, rare earths, or black soil, as found in Ukraine, can be seized, along with new cheap labor, new markets, and key geostrategic positions. In any case, war is a money-laundering machine in which money is flushed from the pockets of citizens into those of finance capital amid a flood of corpses. Essentially, capital is destroyed, and the process of primitive accumulation can begin anew. In short, it is not about winning wars. From the perspective of capital, it is about wars continuing because they are highly profitable. The politicians of the EU and the U.S. do not want war; they must want war because the house of cards built on financial speculation, corruption, and money laundering is collapsing.

In 2024, the volume of derivatives trading was estimated at more than one quadrillion USD—that is, 1,000 trillion, or a one followed by 15 zeros. If this bubble bursts, it will trigger a wave of bankruptcies that will force the fire sale of liquid assets.[43] To prevent this from happening, new assets—oil and gas reserves, coal and iron ore, minerals of all kinds—must constantly be injected into the system, serving as objects of speculation for future profits and thus as a new foundation for derivatives trading. The Donbas is rich in mineral resources such as coal, iron ore, and important minerals like lithium, manganese, titanium, cobalt, rare earth elements, graphite, and other metals that are crucial for the energy transition. 95% of Ukraine’s energy resources are located in the Donbas.[44] These resources are a major incentive for the war.[45] Shell, Exxon, Halliburton, and Chevron wanted to use fracking technology to extract these resources and export them to the EU.[46]

From the very beginning, the war in Ukraine was about pushing Russia out of the energy market and generating new profits.[47] This was urgently needed, as companies had financed their investments in new extraction technologies through high-interest loans. The investment bank JP Morgan estimated the financial bubble surrounding the fracking industry at approximately $550 billion. Should these high-risk bonds default, there is a risk of a scenario similar to the subprime mortgage crisis at the start of the 2008 financial crisis.[48] This means that it was imperative to generate profits through fracking exports and secure new collateral for loans.[49] That is precisely what the war in Ukraine is about; that is what the 2003 war against Iraq—which violated international law—was about; and that is what the 2026 invasion of Iran will be about: seizing resources, forcing markets to open up, controlling logistics routes, securing new collateral for new loans, and leveraging profits through derivatives trading.

This multi-crisis is giving rise to a series of trends that are transforming capitalism as we know it and hollowing out the structures of the nation-state and parliament. Amid the smoldering ruins of neoliberalism and behind the democratic facades of parliamentarism, a new form of elite rule is emerging, characterized by a radicalization of class division, the dismantling of democracy, and rampant irrationalism: “In ‘liquid modernity,’” writes Zygmunt Bauman, “the sedentary majority is under the rule of the nomadic, extraterritorial elite... In a remarkable reversal of millennia-old tradition, the great and powerful today develop a preference for the fleeting and the transient, while the losers desperately try to keep their junk running.”[50]

I identify the following six transformation processes:

1. Deindustrialization and financialization:

Capitalism in European countries and the United States has largely lost its core industrial base. Manufacturing operations have been relocated to Asia, primarily to China, and in the microelectronics sector, also to Korea and Taiwan. The long-term decline in the rate of profit is leading to anti-growth. Economic stagnation is accompanied by a deterioration in living conditions, increasing precariousness, ecological strangulation, and overregulation. The environmental movement was organized by the Rockefeller Foundation and paved the way for deindustrialization.[51] Not a single new green technology is profitable on its own; they are all subsidized, right down to wind turbines and electric cars.[52] Financial capitalism increases systemic risks and fuels inequality. It accelerates the search for new collateral to cover old, bad loans. “Political and military emergencies coincide with economic crises.”[53] The financial elite are pushing for a major European war against Russia because they fear that the credit system will collapse unless they seize Russia’s mineral resources and thereby secure new collateral.

2. Market deregulation and digitalization:

The market, the central mechanism of capitalism, is falling into private hands among the leading companies of digital capitalism. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook ARE the market. They thus exercise de facto control over access, products, prices, and information. Behind the superficial appearance of free offers—which are secretly paid for with the extraction of data—a new form of market power, as well as social domination and control, is taking root in surveillance capitalism.[54] Exploitation is intensifying to benefit the military and tech industries, while small businesses are being crushed. Digital capitalism is a driving force behind exploitation and is at odds with democracy. No sector today is as closely monitored and controlled as the internet. In the words of Palantir founder Peter Thiel: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”[55] Digitalization enables the authoritarian manipulation of public opinion and behavior, as well as the manipulation of public emotions, in preparation for a new war.

3. De-nationalization and supranationalization:

We are currently witnessing the ossification of democratic institutions and the party system. The ruling party cartel represents the interests of the warmongers and financial capital, not the people. Andrei Fursov writes: “The more democratic the facade of Western society became in the 19th and 20th centuries, the less real power it had. Real power is shifting to closed clubs and supranational structures, etc.”[56] - such as the WHO, the European Union,[57] NATO, the Bilderberg Group, and U.S.-controlled and U.S.-funded think tanks such as the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, the Brookings Institution, the RAND Corporation, the Heritage Foundation, the Atlantik-Brücke, etc. Supranational organizations will play an increasingly significant role in the future. They are stripping the populations of nation-states of their remaining opportunities for participation and oversight and orchestrating the war and repression agenda of an extraterritorial elite. Public affairs are being privatized: A consortium led by BlackRock and JPMorgan aims to mobilize private capital for the reconstruction of Ukraine.[58] An inner circle around U.S. President Trump is said to be planning to turn the devastated Gaza Strip into a comfortable haven for the wealthy.[59]

4. De-democratization and autocratization:

Sanctions and censorship are being used to test a new form of control regime. These sanctions are a precursor to martial law and are apparently intended to accustom the population to a new regime of arbitrary rule, which can then be fully implemented with the declaration of a state of emergency. In this way, transatlantic-corrupted, transnational elites seek to consolidate their power while maintaining the facade of democracy. These elites fear losing control. That is why they are now going all out. Antonio Gramsci writes: “When the ruling class has exhausted its function, the ideological bloc tends toward disintegration, and ‘spontaneity’ is then followed by ‘coercion,’ in increasingly less veiled and indirect forms, up to outright police measures and coups d’état.”[60] This is the permanent coup d’état I mentioned, drawing on François Mitterrand’s remarks. Population control and reduction are intended to secure control and elite rule in the long term. In the long run, a transnational oligopoly will face a vast army of helots.

5. De-rationalization and de-literacy:

The dismantling of the education system, digitalization, and NATO’s cognitive warfare are contributing to the destruction of reason. The Enlightenment’s claim to universality and its focus on rational discourse are being replaced by identitarian thinking, which prioritizes the legitimacy of one’s own group and places this social unit above all others—a shift that leads to racism and its specific manifestation, Russophobia. The infantilization of politics also includes the falsification of history and attempts to reverse blame. Through the use of artificial intelligence, information gathering is confined to the mainstream; unconventional thinking is weeded out, and unwanted information is filtered out. AI thus serves not to unleash intelligence, but to enable administrative control of thought and behavior by the elites. This is leading to a new era of de-literacy, at least in Western cultures. For only stupid, resentment-driven people allow themselves to be driven into new wars.

6. De-civilization, militarization, and a relapse to barbarism:

Once again, the directives are coming from Washington. At the 26th meeting of the Ukraine Contact Group on February 12, 2025, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth pushed through a new division of labor. The European NATO member states must take a leading role in the war in Ukraine. This includes expanding arms production, preparing the public for higher military spending, and convincing them of the threat posed by Russia.[61] In other words, this order means: The population is to be prepared for war by instilling fear. This signals that Washington intends to militarize society. Once Ukraine has been bled dry, the U.S. proxy war against Russia is apparently set to be expanded to encompass all of Europe.[62] The destruction of civil society and its transformation by state-funded non-governmental organizations—“Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organizations”—is accompanied by the restructuring of social institutions and organizations into conduits for the power elites. Together, they disseminate propaganda narratives designed to shift blame for aggression onto specific social groups or onto external adversaries, in the service of a politics of division. With phrases such as: “The” Russians have a “different relationship” to violence and death[63] or “Russians are animals, pigs,”[64] by banning Russian flags and insignia on commemorative days, Russophobia—as a form of racism—is once again being made acceptable in everyday life and capable of gaining mainstream support. The “economy of affect” and the prevailing identitarian mindset are leading to a civilizational regression into resentment-driven provincialism, base instincts, and a resurgence of barbarism.

Toward a Bio-Fascist Technocracy?

So, from the smoldering ruins of neoliberalism, something new is emerging—something that the term “digital capitalism” may not adequately describe. Perhaps it is a “bio-fascist technocracy,” as Andrei Fursov puts it. New social formations emerge in wars. For with one exception—the Soviet Union—there is no hegemon that has voluntarily and peacefully stepped down. Dying world powers lash out and try to grasp at any straw, clinging to anything that promises to preserve their power and economic substance, and in this way drag their vassals down into the abyss.

The war in Ukraine and the invasion of Iran are two theaters of war in the West’s final battle. We find ourselves in a transitional period between a unipolar and a multipolar world, between dying neoliberal capitalism and a new social order that is still in its infancy.

First and foremost, everything depends on whether the forces striving for a multipolar world can prevail in their conflict with the United States, the hegemon. At present, it does not appear that they can achieve this through peaceful means, nor are there any signs of greater democratization on the horizon.

Second, it is crucial that people in Western countries regain their capacity to act and their autonomy in order to stand up to their warmongering and anti-democratic elites. This would require a popular front for peace and democracy and a two-pronged strategy combining parliamentary and extra-parliamentary initiatives.

At the moment, however, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The majority of people in Germany appear exhausted and resigned, as if by the ongoing state of emergency and the multiple crises. I see no sign of an uprising. The Germans are dozing their way into ruin. In the tragedy of King Lear, William Shakespeare has his character the Earl of Gloucester say: “Such is the curse of the times, when fools lead the blind!” Yet those who do not stand up to the warmongers end up on the front lines.

[1] Gramsci, Antonio: Gefängnishefte Bd. 3, Heft 5, Berlin1992, S. 659f.

[2] Gramsci, Antonio: Gefängnishefte Bd. 3, Heft 5, Berlin1992, S. 515

[3] Harvey, David: The Limits to Capital. London 2006

Harvey, David: The Enigma of Capital - and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oxford 2010

Callinicos, Alex: Bonfire of Illusions. Cambridge 2010

[4] Brenner, Robert: The economics of global turbulance. New Left Review H. I/229, 1998, S. 1-265

Brenner, Robert: Boom & Bubble - Die USA in der Weltwirtschaft. Hamburg 2002

Brenner, Robert: New boom or new bubble? The trajectory of the US economie. New Left Review, II/25, 2004, S. 57-100

[5] Norfield, Tony: Derivates and capitalist markets: The speculation heart of capital. Historical Materialism, H. 20/1, 2012, S. 103-132

[6] Nachtwey, Oliver: Die Abstiegsgesellschaft. Über das Aufbegehren in der regressiven Moderne. Berlin 2016 (3), S. 51-53, 61

[7] Wullweber, Joscha: Zentralbankkapitalismus. Berlin 2021, S. 17f.

[8] „For instance, with broker-dealer balance sheets having smaller heft in the financial system post-GFC, liquidity in sovereign bond markets increasingly relies on open-ended mutual funds, hedge funds and other asset managers. These entities often face signbificant liquidity mismatches, rely on short-term funding backed by government securities as collateral o rare either frequently highly leveraged or exhibit leverage-like behaviour. As a result, their liquidity provision is less stable and more likely to evaporate during periods of market stress. Hedge funds, in particular, have increasingly bevome a significant source of procyclical liquidity, especially in government bond markets. These investors actively pursue relative value trading strategies that seek to exploit small price differences between related financial instruments. To boost the returns on these small price differences they heavily leverage their positions. One method often used is to pledge government securities as collateral in the repo market to borrow more cash with which to purchase additional government securities. This practice has further evolved in recent years, with investors borrowing amounts equal to or higher than the market value oft he collateral provided… Hedge funds‘ relative value strategies are highly vulnerable to adverse shocks in funding, cash or derivate markets, as evidenced by some recent episodes. During the market turmoil of March 2020, for instance, margin calls in Treasury futures markets triggered fire sales, resulting in destabilising delevageraging spirals.” Tooze, Adam: Chartbook 401: The dollar system in an age of market-based finance – financial globalization beyond banks, Substack, 25.07.2025

Chartbook

Chartbook 401: The dollar system in an age of market-based finance - financial globalization beyond banks (The World Economy Now, July 2025)

This is the third in my on-going series that seeks to track broad developments in the World Economy Now…

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a year ago · 121 likes · 6 comments · Adam Tooze

[9] DAX-Konzerne überwiegend in ausländischer Hand. Ernst Young, Stuttgart, 31.07.2025, https://www.ey.com/de_de/newsroom/2025/08/ey-wem-gehoert-der-dax-2025

[10] More than 341,000 industrial jobs have been lost in Germany since 2019. Handelsblatt, 25.05.2026, https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/studie-seit-2019-mehr-als-341.000-industriejobs-in-deutschland-verschwunden/100227722.html

Stellenabbau in der Industrie hält an - mehr als 340.000 Jobs verschwunden. Die Welt, 25.05.2026, https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article6a13ce59350a34b38da83024/stellenabbau-mehr-als-340-000-industriejobs-seit-2019-verschwunden.html

Ausländische Investitionen in Deutschland erneut rückläufig - niedrigster Stand seit 2009. Ernst & Young, 21.05.2026, https://www.ey.com/de_de/newsroom/2026/05/ey-standort-deutschland-2026

[11] “Consolidated proprietary markets, on the other hand, perpetuate the transfer of economic wealth from labor to capital.” Staab, Philipp: Digitaler Kapitalismus. Markt und Herrschaft in der Ökonomie der Unknappheit. Berlin 2020(2), S. 275, 290, 301.

[12] Staab, Philipp: Digitaler Kapitalismus. Markt und Herrschaft in der Ökonomie der Unknappheit. Berlin 2020(2), S. 301.

[13] Der GENIUS Act: Wie Washington Stablecoins in Kriegsanleihen verwandeln will. Kanzlei Mount Bonnell, 17.08.2025, https://uskanzlei.com/blogs/aktuelles/genius-act-usa-stablecoin-schuldenfalle

[14] Stocker, Frank: Amerikas Schulden-Strudel - und die Gefahren für Sparer weltweit. Die Welt, 26.05.2026, https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/plus6a11854dbe29d4b4607a47ba/geld-amerikas-schulden-strudel-und-die-gefahren-fuer-sparer-weltweit.html

[15] Washingtons geheimer Krypto-Plan: Was bedeutet der Streit um Stablecoins? 21bitcoin, 09.09.2025, https://21bitcoin.app/news/washingtons-geheimer-krypto-plan-was-bedeutet-der-streit-um-stablecoins

[16] Schleu, Philipp: Washingtons geheimer Krypto-Plan - Putin-Berater warnt vor massiver Schuldenentwertung. Der Aktionär, 09.09.2025, https://www.deraktionaer.de/artikel/krypto/washingtons-geheimer-krypto-plan-putin-berater-warnt-vor-massiver-schuldenentwertung-20386135.html

[17] Staab, Philipp: Digitaler Kapitalismus. Markt und Herrschaft in der Ökonomie der Unknappheit. Berlin 2020(2), S. 30

[18] Staab, Philipp: Digitaler Kapitalismus. Markt und Herrschaft in der Ökonomie der Unknappheit. Berlin 2020(2), S. 32

[19] Staab, Philipp: Digitaler Kapitalismus. Markt und Herrschaft in der Ökonomie der Unknappheit. Berlin 2020(2), S. 270

[20] Müller, Bernd: Mercer-Studie: Fast alle CEOs planen Stellenabbau durch KI-Einsatz. Telepolis, 25.05.2026, https://www.telepolis.de/article/Mercer-Studie-Fast-alle-CEOs-planen-Stellenabbau-durch-KI-Einsatz-11305624.html

[21] “Displaced workers are also consumers, and when their lost income is not replaced, each round of layoffs erodes te purchasing power all firms depend on. At the limit, this becomes self-destructive: firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand... Even if AI-driven layoffs sweep across industries, and even as every firm recognizes that vanishing paychecks mean vanishing customers, not ohne of them will stop. Each firm reaps the full savings of replacing its own workers yet bears only a sliver of the demand it desteoys; the rest lands on rivals. No firm can afford to be the one that holds back. This is the trap: an automation arms race that only intensifies as AI improves, that leaves workers and firm owners alike worse off, and that no market force can break.” Falk, Brett Hemenway u. Gerry Tsoukalas: The AI Layoff Trap. The Wharton School Research Paper, Wharton University of Pennsylvania, 02.03.2026, S. 1, 30, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6448898

[22] Narr, Wolf-Dieter: Hin zu einer Gesellschaft bedingter Reflexe. In: Habermas, Jürgen (Hg.): Stichworte zur Geistigen Situation der Zeit. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1979, Bd. 2, S. 489–528, hier: 491, 523.

[23] Engler, Wolfgang: Die offene Gesellschaft und ihre Grenzen. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2021, S. 104

[24] Abels, Heinz: Triebabfuhr. In: Ders.: Wirklichkeit. Über Wissen und andere Definitionen der Wirklichkeit, über uns und andere, Fremde und Vorurteile. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag 2009, S. 257

[25] Vogl, Joseph: Kapital und Ressentiment. Eine kurze Theorie der Gegenwart. München: Beck 2021(2), S. 181f.

[26] Schneider, Michael: Der “böse Russe”, die deutsche Geschichtsvergessenheit und die Blindheit der Berliner Außenpolitik. In: tkp – der Blog für Science und Politik v. 1. Dezember 2022. https://tkp.at/2022/12/01/derboese-russe-die-deutsche-geschichtsvergessenheit-und-die-blindheit-derberliner-aussenpolitik/

[27] Bauman, Zygmunt: Retrotopia. Frankfurt a. M. 2018(2), S. 84f., 88

[28] Fursow, Andrej: Die von Stalin gefürchtete Wiedergeburt. Mitte der 1960er Jahre gab die sowjetische Führung die Zukunft auf. 12.09.2024 (Андрей Фурсов: Перерождение, которого опасался Сталин. Советское руководство отказалось от будущего в середине 1960-х годов) https://dzen.ru/a/ZuLEESPl5UPFey63)

[29] Fursow, Andrej: Die gegenwärtige Weltkrise: ihre soziale Natur. Schiller-Institute, 14.04.2013, https://schillerinstitute.com/de/media/andrej-fursow-die-gegenwartige-weltkrise-ihre-soziale-natur/

[30] Wurde in Wuhan im US-Auftrag an Biowaffen geforscht? Transition News, 31.01.2026, https://transition-news.org/wurde-in-wuhan-im-us-auftrag-an-biowaffen-geforscht

Pohlmann, Dirk: Wuhan, Biowaffen und “Das große Abkoppeln”. Free21, 14.08.2021, https://free21.org/wuhan-biowaffen-und-das-grosse-abkoppeln/?fbclid

[31] Feistel, Felix u. Dejan Lazic´: Der geheime Staatsstreich: Wie die Corona-Putschisten die Macht übernahmen. ZKP, 09.04.2024, https://tkp.at/2024/04/09/der-geheime-staatsstreich-wie-die-corona-putschisten-die-macht-uebernahmen/

[32] Mayer, Peter F.: Eine Flut von Impfverletzungen werden in Studien dokumentiert. TKP, 10.12.2023, https://tkp.at/2023/12/10/eine-flut-von-impfverletzungen-werden-in-studien-dokumentiert/

[33] Fursow, Andrej: Die gegenwärtige Weltkrise: ihre soziale Natur. Schiller-Institute, 14.04.2013, https://schillerinstitute.com/de/media/andrej-fursow-die-gegenwartige-weltkrise-ihre-soziale-natur/

[34] Bill Gates has a warning about population growth. World Economic Forum, 19.09.2018, https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/09/africas-rapid-population-growth-puts-poverty-progress-at-risk-says-gates/

[35] Baxter, Dmitry: Bill Gates Declares Most Humans “No Longer Needed” in AI Era - “We’ll Decide” Who Survives. The People’s Voice, 27.05.2026, https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/bill-gates-humans-no-longer-needed-ai-era-decide-survives/

[36] Lukács, Georg: Die Zerstörung der Vernunft. Bd. 1-3. Darmstadt und Neuwied 1981(3), 1980(2), 1974

[37] Henn, Dagmar: Verlernt zu lernen. Peds Ansichten, 31.05.2026, https://www.kettner-edelmetalle.de/news/brussel-greift-nach-der-krone-wie-der-eugh-die-demokratie-der-nationalstaaten-begrabt-26-05-2026

[38] Todd, Emmanuel: Der Westen im Niedergang. Ökonomie, Kultur und Religion im freien Fall.Neu-Isenburg 2024

Altwegg, Jürg: “In diesem Krierg geht es um Deutschland.” Der französische Historiker Emmanuel Todd sagte den Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion voraus. Heute sieht er dei USA im NIedergang. Die Weltwoche, 07.09.2023, https://weltwoche.ch/daily/in-diesem-krieg-geht-es-um-deutschland-der-franzoesische-historiker-emmanuel-todd-sagte-den-zusammenbruch-der-sowjetunion-voraus-heute-sieht-er-die-usa-im-niedergang-frankreich-werde-au/

[39] Vogl, Joseph: Kapital und Ressentiment. Eine kurze Theorie der Gegenwart. München: Beck 2021(2), S. 182

[40] Schulte-Sasse, Jochen: Von der schriftlichen zur elektronischen Kultur. Über neuere Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Mediengeschichte und Kulturgeschichte. In: Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich u. Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer (Hg.): Matreialität der Kommunikation. Frankfurt a. M. 1988, S. 429-453, hier: S. 433f.

[41] Wiegerling, Klaus: Medienethik. Stuttgart 1998, S. 24-29

[42] Crouch, Colin: Postdemokratie revisited. Berlin 2021, S. 243

[43] Webb, David Rogers: Die grosse Enteignung. Straßengel 2024

Brown, Ellen: All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame. Global Research, 13.04.2026, https://www.globalresearch.ca/all-wars-bankers-wars-iran/5922072?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

[44] Ford, Matt: Russia Is Crashing Ukraine’s Hopes for Energy Independence. The Atlantic, 08.04.2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/russia-is-crushing-ukraines-hopes-for-energy-independence/360281/

[45]

[46] Krainer, Alex: All wars are bankers’ wars. So was Kiev’s 2014 anti-terror operation. Substack, 15.04.2026, https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/all-wars-are-bankers-wars-so-was

[47] Nye, Joseph S. Jr.: A Western Strategy for a Declining Russia. Project Syndicate, 03.09.2014, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/joseph-s--nye-wants-to-deter-russia-without-isolating-it

[48]Ölpreis: Prognose von Morgan Stanley belastet. Boerse.de v. 09.12.2014, https://www.boerse.de/nachrichten/Oelpreis-Prognose-von-Morgan-Stanley-belastet/7522862

Daniljuk, Malte: Neue Energie für Europa. Telepolis, 17.01.2015, https://www.telepolis.de/article/Neue-Energie-fuer-Europa-3369425.html

[49] Ebinger, Charles K.: The Department of nergy’s Strategy for Exporting Liquefied Natural Gas. Brookings Institution, 19.03.2013, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-department-of-energys-strategy-for-exporting-liquefied-natural-gas/

[50] Bauman, Zygmunt: Flüchtige Moderne. Frankfurt a. M. 2003, S. 21f.

[51] Fursow, Andrej: Die gegenwärtige Weltkrise: ihre soziale Natur. Schiller-Institute, 14.04.2013, https://schillerinstitute.com/de/media/andrej-fursow-die-gegenwartige-weltkrise-ihre-soziale-natur/

[52] Fursow, Andrej: Achten Sie auf ihre Hände. Was hinter der großen Annullierung steckt (Андрей Фурсов: Следите за их руками. Что скрывается за великим обнулением), 22.07.2023, https://dzen.ru/a/ZLtDh0DitEH-Zkig

[53] Agamben, Giorgio: Ausnahmezustand. Frankfurt a. M. 2020(8), S. 23

[54] Zuboff, Shoshana: Das Zeitalter des Überwachungs-Kapitalismus. Frankfurt / New York 2018

[55] “Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel, Peter: The Education of a Libertarian. Cato Institute, 13.04.2009, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/

[56] Fursow, Andrej: Die gegenwärtige Weltkrise: ihre soziale Natur. Schiller-Institute, 14.04.2013, https://schillerinstitute.com/de/media/andrej-fursow-die-gegenwartige-weltkrise-ihre-soziale-natur/

[57] “On April 21, 2026, the European Court of Justice issued a ruling in Case C-769/22 granting the European Commission broad authority to use the values enshrined in Article 2 of the EU Treaty—democracy, the rule of law, human dignity, and non-discrimination—as a basis for taking action against member states. Augsburg constitutional law expert Josef Franz Lindner sees the ruling as a fundamental shift in power. The Commission can now initiate infringement proceedings against member states in any policy area as soon as it alleges a violation of the general clauses. This would undermine the participatory rights of the European Parliament and national governments, circumvent unanimity requirements, and effectively devalue the constitutional identity of nation-states enshrined in Article 4 TEU. Economist Richard Werner described the commissioners as ‘dictators’ and stated that democracy in the EU is at an end.” Brüssel greift nach der Krone: Wie der EuGH die Demokratie der Nationalstaaten begräbt. Kettner Edelmetalle, 26.05.2026, https://www.kettner-edelmetalle.de/news/brussel-greift-nach-der-krone-wie-der-eugh-die-demokratie-der-nationalstaaten-begrabt-26-05-2026

[58] Meiritz, Annett: Blackrock und JP Morgan bereiten Investitionen vor. Handelsblatt, 21.06.2023, https://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/international/ukraine-wiederaufbaukonferenz-blackrock-und-jp-morgan-bereiten-investitionen-vor/29217966.html

[59] Kebir, Sabine: Ein Trump-Tower für Gaza: Wohlhabende Palästinenser dürfen bleiben. Der Freitag, 16.09.2025, https://www.freitag.de/autoren/sabine-kebir/us-plan-the-great-trust-wohlhabende-palaestinenser-duerfen-in-gaza-bleiben

[60] Gramsci, Antonio: Gefängnishefte, H. 1 §44, zit. n. Becker, Lia u.a. (Hg.): Gramsci lesen. Einstiege in die Gefängnishefte. Hamburg 2013, S. 22

[61] “A durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again. This must not be Minsk 3.0. That said, the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement. Instead, any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops. If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they shoud be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission. And they should not covered under Article 5. There also must be robust international oversight of the line of contact. To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine... Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this, Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and non-lethal aid to Ukraine. Members of this Contact Group must meet the moment. This means: donating more ammunition and equipment; leveraging comparative advantages; expanding your defense industrial base; and importantly, leveling your citizens about the threat facing Europe. Part of this is speaking frankly with your people about how this threat can only be met by spending more on defense... We’re also here today and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities preventrthe United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe. The United States faces consequential threats to our homeland. We must - and we are - focusing on security of our own borders. We also face a peer competitor in the Communist Chinese with the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity, and making the resourcing tradeoffs to ensure deterrence does not fail... As the United States prioritizes its attention to these threats, European allies must lead from the front. Together, we can establish a division of labor that maximizes our comparative advantages in Europe and Pacific respectively.” Hegseth, Pete: Opening Remarks at the 26th Iteration of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group Meeting, 12.02.2025, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/petehegsethfirstnatoukrainedefensecontactgroup.htm

[62] Ukraine Is Being Ground Down. Europe Is Being Lined Up Next. Global Geopolitics, 01.06.2026, https://globalgeopolitics.co.uk/2026/06/01/ukraine-is-being-ground-down-europe-is-being-lined-up-next/

Berletic, Brian: Die USA bereiten Europa auf den Krieg mit Russland vor. Diesen, Glenn: The Greater Eurasia, 30.04.2026,

[63] Klöckner, Marcus: Entgleisung bei Markus Lanz. Nachdenkseiten, 14.04.2022, https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=82944

[64] Alt, Franz: Friedenspreis für Russen-Hass. Telepolis, 23.10.2022, https://www.telepolis.de/article/Friedenspreis-fuer-Russen-Hass-7317325.html?seite=all

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Political science is, by its very nature, a highly normative discipline. When it comes to questions of governance—that is, the unequal distribution of social power—political scientists first seek solutions through the analysis of constitutions. This is why “comparative government” is a core discipline within political science. What role do constitutional bodies play, how do they work with or against one another, and how are the “checks and balances” organized? In a further step, one compares constitutional norms with constitutional practice. In all the states I am familiar with, constitutional practice deviates significantly from constitutional norms—with one exception: In the United Kingdom, there is no written constitution, and thus no constitutional norm. The constitution is a kind of common law, deriving from constitutional practice and therefore unable to deviate from it.

The Constitution as an Empty Shell

Constitutional issues are questions of power, as Ferdinand Lasalle wrote.[1] So when people speak of a coup d’état, they usually imagine a coup d’état against the constitution. What we are witnessing today, however, is a coup d’état within the constitutional framework: the constitutional shell remains intact but is being hollowed out; the state of emergency—and with it a new form of authoritarian governance—goes hand in hand with a kind of simulation of democracy. The suspension of the rule of law takes place within the constitution, which is reduced to a cocoon from which a new dictatorship is emerging.

One example of this is the extrajudicial sanctions imposed on individuals. They are stripped of all rights not through a breach or suspension of the rule of law, but by circumventing the procedures of the rule of law—procedures that are formally preserved but simultaneously replaced by a form of arbitrary rule. It is, therefore, the establishment of a dictatorship on velvet paws, whose claws remain invisible to the majority but are all the more effective for it. According to Giorgio Agamben, the state of emergency transforms “into a constant practice of governance.”[2]

The term “permanent coup d’état” was coined by François Mitterrand.[3] It was modeled on de Gaulle’s Constitution of the Fifth Republic and is gaining new relevance today. Mitterrand criticizes the president’s centralized and authoritarian concentration of power and describes how an initial coup d’état becomes a permanent one: The president appoints the government and can dismiss it; he can dissolve Parliament, call for new elections, schedule a referendum; he is elected directly by the people, is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and the nuclear strike force, can declare war and make peace, and can invoke Article 16 of the Constitution. What else is left? When Mitterrand himself was elected president in 1981, he ruled for 14 years and used this very concentration of power himself; indeed, he even personally authorized the bombing of the Greenpeace ship “Rainbow Warrior” on July 10, 1985.[4] The reinstatement of Nazi-era collective punishment in the case of Hüssein Doglu—whose wife and mother had their bank accounts frozen—shows that this is a case of blatant state terrorism directed against dissidents who, for example, adhere to the peace clause of the German Basic Law.[5] So it seems to me that this is aptly described by the term “permanent coup d’état.”

Repression without martial law: German examples

A few examples: Political scientist Prof. Dr. Ulrike Guérot was fired by the University of Bonn because she refused to go along with the propaganda narrative.[6] At the urging of the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, the Hamburg Savings Bank has closed journalist Ulrich Heyden’s account.[7] The Swiss citizen Jacques Baud, the journalist Hüssein Dogru, and others are being subjected to extrajudicial sanctions and deprived of all their rights.[8] The conviction of “Querdenker” activist Michael Ballweg is a prime example of how prosecutors, bound by official directives, abuse due process to drag government critics into court.[9] Journalist Patrik Baab lost a teaching position at the University of Kiel because of his reporting in the Donbas—a decision that the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court ruled was illegal and unconstitutional.[10] The Federal Prosecutor General has issued an arrest warrant for the chairwoman of the Friedensbrücke association on charges of supporting a terrorist organization, after the two Donbas republics of Donetsk and Luhansk—with which representatives of the German federal government were still participating in the Minsk negotiations as recently as 2015—were retroactively designated as terrorist organizations for a period of ten years—a move that is actually prohibited under Article 103, Paragraph 2 of the German Basic Law.[11] The list could go on indefinitely. This means that the approach is coordinated and centrally orchestrated.[12]

Political Persecution, Propaganda, Censorship: A Coordinated System

Political persecution, propaganda, and censorship go hand in hand. Together, they form an “instrument of domination used to advance economic interests, political power, and cultural hegemony.”[13]

The wave of repression against opponents of the war and the government was triggered by NATO. At their summit in Vilnius in 2023, the governments of the member states announced that they would step up their cooperation with the EU in the fight against so-called “disinformation”.[14] This suggests that NATO is pulling the strings behind the scenes in the fight against dissenting opinions. With its “Strategic Agenda 2024–2029,” announced in June 2024, the EU shifted course toward military readiness. In it, the EU Council promises to “strengthen the EU’s resilience as part of a comprehensive approach covering all threats and the whole of society.” The EU classifies everything it considers “disinformation” as an attempt at destabilization, placing it in the same category as terrorism and violent extremism.[15]

NATO Behind the Scenes

Norbert Häring rightly points out that the EU is thereby effectively declaring critics of the government and NATO to be enemies of the state. As a result, an undeclared state of emergency already prevails in the EU: “This means that NATO is effectively ruling from behind the scenes, and the usual constitutional guarantees for peacetime—such as freedom of speech and freedom of information—no longer apply when issues of importance to NATO are at stake.”[16] Last year, the German government stated that it is bound by classified NATO objectives.[17] Research shows that the governments of NATO member states are using all social organizations and forces as a conduit to subject all those who adhere to the peace mandate of the Basic Law to reprisals.

This is a cross-institutional system of political persecution. As the author knows from personal experience, it involves universities such as Kiel University (CAU) and the HMKW in Berlin, academies, foundations, and commissions such as the German-Ukrainian Commission of Historians, foundations affiliated with parties in the Bundestag such as the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the German National Library Association, the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, restaurants such as the “Palenke” in Kiel and conference centers—for example, by refusing to rent out spaces—local governments, online publications such as T-Online from the Ströer Group, newspapers and magazines such as Der Spiegel, the FAZ, the Sächsische Zeitung, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, public broadcasters such as MDR, youth organizations such as the Linksjugend, state- and EU-funded so-called non-governmental organizations such as “Fake Observers,” so-called fact-checkers such as “Correctiv,” bookstores and unions such as Verdi, as well as various internet trolls such as the organization Nafu. Pressure is also being exerted through intelligence agencies.[18]

Ideological Apparatuses as Communicating Vessels

In this way, the ideological apparatuses function like communicating vessels. These are all the apparatuses that organize the intellectual reproduction of society. According to the French philosopher Louis Althusser, the task of ideological apparatuses is to ensure loyalty to the market economy and to state-mandated policies.[19] These ideological apparatuses include schools, universities, academies, think tanks funded by the state or the private sector, so-called nongovernmental organizations funded by the state or supranational bodies, foundations, transatlantic organizations, associations, federations, and political parties, public and corporate media, fact-checkers who do not actually check facts but rather verify compatibility with propaganda narratives, churches, online publications such as Wikipedia, the forgery workshop of intelligence agencies and governments.[20]

These ideological apparatuses now engage in a subtle collaboration with the repressive state apparatuses. What usually follows is a back-and-forth between the ideological apparatuses of bourgeois rule and their interlocking with measures taken by the repressive state apparatuses—the judiciary, the police, state media regulatory authorities, and tax authorities. The goal is to enforce covert censorship by circumventing due process, to compel anticipatory obedience by instilling fear in third parties, and to destroy the economic livelihoods of the targeted individuals. These public executions aim to intimidate the entire population within a new anti-democratic power structure.

Transatlantic Elites and the Academic Precariat

It is no coincidence that, at least at one university, the very people who actively pushed for his dismissal are those who feel a sense of obligation to transatlantic networks such as the German Marshall Fund. This reveals where the real masterminds behind the public campaign of censorship and denunciation are to be found. This is by no means to suggest that these actors receive instructions from Langley. Rather, the haste of their actions proves that they see themselves as having a debt to repay. After all, conference invitations, scholarships, research trips, and the approval of research projects are at stake. They believe it is better for their own careers to act as agents of legitimacy for American interests.[21]

The goal of the collaboration between ideological and repressive state apparatuses is to subject anyone who deviates from the propaganda and war agenda of NATO governments to reprisals. At the same time, they serve the purpose of instilling fear by setting an example, thereby forcing preemptive obedience among the population. However, this instillation of fear through arbitrary reprisals against dissidents did not begin with the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2024. It began in 2020 with the coronavirus and the staged state of emergency. With the help of infection control measures, democratic procedures and individual fundamental rights were suspended by decree, thereby undermining the constitution. The mobilization of fear was intended to paralyze citizen resistance. The ruling oligarchy used the outbreak of the respiratory disease as an opportunity to declare a global state of emergency.[22]

The censorship industry is spreading into all areas of society because it can rely on two social pillars. One of these pillars acts as a transmission belt for NATO and the United States—namely, the transatlantic-corrupted academic elites. The second pillar is the academic precariat.

The primary social agents are thus those elites who are integrated into the hegemon’s worldview. A whole range of elite-integration mechanisms serve this purpose, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, the privately funded German Council on Foreign Relations (founded on its model), the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, the German Marshall Fund, the Atlantic Institute, the Atlantik-Brücke, the American Council on Germany, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and other organizations. They form a “policy-planning network” that functions as a think tank and consensus-building workshop, as a talent incubator and recruitment pool, and as a revolving door into politics, business, and the media. At the same time, they shape a prestige pipeline and numerous career paths—from Fulbright scholarships and funding from the German Marshall Fund to membership in Atlantik-Brücke or think tanks such as the Atlantic Council.[23]

The second social group has a broad impact—the academic precariat. This refers to university graduates who have to scrape by, for example, as freelancers in the media, as project workers at government-funded so-called NGOs, or as temporary employees at think tanks. For all these professional groups, it is a matter of survival to adopt the mindset and wishes of their superiors with anticipatory obedience. They are under constant pressure to inform on others in order to prove themselves to their bosses and remain within the ideological apparatus.

Political persecution, then, is not the work of the intellectually deficient, but rather reveals the academic elites’ submission to the discourse of power. The convergence of academics with NATO ideology is disconcerting, not only—as Karl Dietrich Bracher put it with regard to the Nazi worldview—in view of the primitiveness of the conglomerate of ideas from which this propaganda draws, but “even more so through the blind submission to its emphatically intolerant claim to exclusivity... But this merely demonstrates the process of self-alignment, which extended “from constitutional lawyers to economists, from historians to Germanists, from philosophers to natural scientists, from publicists to poets, musicians, and visual artists.” “Byzantinism, manipulation, and coercion are inextricably intertwined.”[24]

Transatlantic elites corrupted by the system and the academic precariat define what Max Weber once called the “steel-hard shell of servitude,” which “dictates the lifestyle of every individual […] with overwhelming force”.[25] If you want to know how things were back then, you just have to take a close look at today.

The political repression described above is not the product of bureaucratic overreach or spontaneous ideological alignment. It is rooted in a structural crisis of financial capitalism that is driving ruling elites toward war — and toward the elimination of every dissenting voice. This is what we will examine in the second part of this analysis.

[1] Lasalle, Ferdinand: Über Verfassungswesen. Vortrag, gehalten 1862 in einem Berliner Bürger-Bezirksverein. https://www.gewaltenteilung.de/tag/ueber-verfassungswesen/

[2] Agamben, Giorgio: Ausnahmezustand. Frankfurt a. M. 2020(8), S. 14

[3] Mitterrand, Francois: Le coup d’état permanent. Paris 1964

[4] Bremner, Charles: Mitterrand ordered bombing of Rainbor Warrior, spy chief says. The Times v. 11.07.2005, https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/europe-travel/france/paris/mitterrand-ordered-bombing-of-rainbow-warrior-spy-chief-says-3kl9n65m8g2

[5] That will also be rolled out across Europe: Galloway, George: The UK is Now A Police State. Global Geopolitics, 31.05.2026, https://globalgeopolitics.co.uk/tag/police-state/

[6] Egner, Heike u. Anke Uhlenwinkel: Wer stört, muss weg! Die Entfernung kritischer Professoren aus Universitäten. Neu-Isenburg 2024

[7] Ulrich Heyden interview with Patrik Baab, 02.05.2026

[8] Hofbauer, Hannes: Aller Rechte beraubt. Mit außergerichtlichen EU-Sanktionen zum autoritären Staat. Wien 2026

[9] Moser, Thomas: Der missbrauchte Rechtsstaat. Wie die Politik regierungskritische Bürger vor Gericht zerrt. Köln 2026

[10] Schleswig-Holsteinisches Verwaltungsgericht Az.: 9 A 31/23

[11] Hohmann, Ralf: Alles Terror, oder was? Bundesanwaltschaft verfolgt humanitäre Helfer. Volksrepubliken im Donbass zu Terrororganisationen erklärt. UZ v. 06.06.2025, https://www.unsere-zeit.de/alles-terror-oder-was-4804000/

[12] liber-net: Das Zensurnetzwerk: Regulierung und Repression im heutigen Deutschland. 19.11.2025, https://liber-net.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/de-report-de.pdf

Häring, Norbert: Der Wahrheitskomplex. Wie NGO’s im Staatsauftrag unerwünschte Meinungen bekämpfen. Neu Isenburg 2026.

MacMahon, Collin: Der Zensurkomplex. Wie Regierungen, Geheimdienste und NGO’s ihre Büger überwachen und politisch unerwünschte Meinungen bekämpfen. Rottenburg 2024

[13] Hofbauer, Hannes: Zensur. Wien 2022, S. 7

[14] “As we step up our efforts to build resilience, we will continue to work with our partners who are undertaking similar efforts, particularly the European Union. (…) We will continue to combat disinformation and misinformation, including through positive and effective strategic communication. We will also continue to support our partners in strengthening their resilience to hybrid challenges.” Häring, Norbert: Der Bannstrahl der EU gegen kritische Publizisten geht auf einen NATO-Gipfelbeschluss von 2023 zurück. Geld und mehr v. 06.01.2026, https://norberthaering.de/propaganda-zensur/eu-sanktionen-nato-giplel/

[15] “We will strengthen our democratic resilience, including by (…) countering attempts to destabilize us, such as through disinformation and hate speech. (…) We will counter attempts to sow division, radicalization, terrorism, and violent extremism.” Häring, Norbert: Der Bannstrahl der EU gegen kritische Publizisten geht auf einen NATO-Gipfelbeschluss von 2023 zurück. Geld und mehr v. 06.01.2026, https://norberthaering.de/propaganda-zensur/eu-sanktionen-nato-giplel/

[16] Häring, Norbert: Der Bannstrahl der EU gegen kritische Publizisten geht auf einen NATO-Gipfelbeschluss von 2023 zurück. Geld und mehr v. 06.01.2026, https://norberthaering.de/propaganda-zensur/eu-sanktionen-nato-giplel/

[17] Häring, Norbert: Bundesregierung bestätigt Bindung an geheime NATO-Ziele. Geld und mehr, 07.07.2025, https://norberthaering.de/macht-kontrolle/nato-ziele/

[18] All of these examples are documented.

[19] Althusser, Louis: Ideologie et appareils ideologiques d’état. In: La Pensée, Nr. 151, Juni 1970, S. 22. http://classiques.uqac.ca/contemporains/althusser_louis/ideologie_et_AIE.pdf

[20] Buyniski, Helen: Wikipedia: Ein Sumpf aus pblen Machenschaften, Teil 1, Free21, 19.04.2020, https://free21.org/wikipedia-ein-sumpf-aus-ueblen-machenschaften-teil-1/ Teil 3, Free21, 15.08.2020, https://free21.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/01-Buyniski-Wikipedia-Teil3.pdf

[21] Baab, Patrik: Auf beiden Seiten der Front. Meine Reisen in die Ukraine. Frankfurt a.M. 2023

[22] Van der Pijl, Kees: Die belagerte Welt. Corona: Die Mobilisierung der Angst - und wie wir uns daraus befreien können. Dannenberg 2021

[23] Bonilla, Nel: Die Vereinnahmung der Eliten und die Selbstzerstörung Europas. Nachdenkseiten, 07.09.2025, https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=138528&pdf=138528

[24] Bracher, Karl Dietrich: Die Deutsche Diktatur. Köln Berlin 1969, S. 275

[25] Weber, Max: Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus. In: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. 21, 1905, S. 1–110

On June 7, 2026, Armenia will elect a new parliament. This election is a defining choice: will Armenia continue on the path toward association with the European Union — or will it remain in the Eurasian Economic Union led by Russia? The answer to this question determines not only the fate of just under three million people in Armenia, but the geopolitical architecture of the entire South Caucasus.

I spoke about this with Ashot Grigorian: he is an Armenian businessman, a cultural mediator, a man who speaks six languages and lives primarily in Bratislava. He is President of the EU-Asia Business Finance Center Holding, Co-President of the Pan-European Center for Political and Economic Analysis and Prognosis, President of the Forum of Armenian Associations of Europe, and Chairman of the Armenian community in Slovakia.

A Country with 3,000 Years of History — and Shrinking Borders

Armenia is located in the South Caucasus and looks back on a millennia-old history. The Armenian settlement area once covered around 300,000 square kilometres. Today it is barely 30,000 — a fraction of historical Western and Eastern Armenia. Western Armenia fell to Turkey, Eastern Armenia to the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union. With the latter’s dissolution in 1991, the current independent state emerged.

Grigorian emphasises the special historical significance: in the year 301, Armenia became the first country in the world to declare Christianity the state religion. This Christian identity continues to shape the country’s self-understanding — and its geopolitical logic. For all of its neighbours are Muslim: Turkey to the west, Azerbaijan to the east, Iran to the south.

Only with Iran, Grigorian explicitly stresses, has Armenia historically maintained comparatively few conflicts. Tehran is regarded as a strategic partner — alongside Moscow. “This partnership is not ideological, but existential,” Grigorian explains. Without these allies, Armenia would be completely landlocked.

The Genocide and Its Long Shadow

In 1915, approximately one and a half million Armenians were murdered in the Ottoman Empire. A genocide whose recognition remains politically contested to this day. Turkey continues to reject acknowledgement; Azerbaijan stands firmly by its side.

That it is precisely Great Britain, the EU and the USA who are now courting influence in the South Caucasus is explained by Grigorian through a long history of Western interests in the region — since the 18th century, and particularly pronounced at the beginning of the 20th century, when England maintained close relations with Azerbaijan, which at the time possessed significant oil reserves.

The “Trump Corridor”: Washington Discovers Armenia

Today, the USA under Donald Trump is pursuing new strategic ambitions in the South Caucasus. Grigorian reports that Washington is interested in a transit corridor through Armenia — a connection route between West and East that would be of enormous importance for trade and logistics. This so-called “Trump Corridor,” officially also known as the “Middle Corridor,” would affect China, Europe, and Russia alike.

As a sign of growing American interest, Grigorian points to the conspicuously frequent visits of high-ranking US representatives: first Vice President J.D. Vance travelled to Armenia in February, then Secretary of State Marco Rubio followed — but only for a few hours, with a hurried stopover at Yerevan airport and a quick signature on an agreement with the Armenian Foreign Minister. The pace is telling: Washington is in a hurry.

Behind the geopolitical interest, according to Grigorian’s assessment, lies an anti-Iranian component as well. Washington and above all Israel, which has maintained close military relations with Azerbaijan for years, have an interest in using the South Caucasus as a lever against Tehran.

“Israel operates military bases through Azerbaijani territory — very strongly militarily. Nobody in Europe talks about this, not even in Germany.”

At the same time, Grigorian says, the United States wishes to establish a NATO base in Armenia — where Russian Military Base 102 has been stationed in Gyumri for over 30 years: equipped with S-300 and S-400 systems, combat aircraft, and around 6,000 professional soldiers. The stationing agreement runs until approximately 2040. Which government would terminate it is the decisive question.

NATO Reaches Toward the Caspian Sea

The most far-reaching strategic goal of the West described by Grigorian goes well beyond Armenia. With the Trump Corridor — the agreement that Armenia has now signed — a connection is being laid through South Caucasian territory that effectively interrupts the Russian North-South corridor. At the same time, the Chinese New Silk Road is severed at a neuralgic point.

Grigorian sees in this an attempt to create, via Turkey and Azerbaijan, a geopolitical axis connecting all Turkic-speaking countries: Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan — and reaching through Russian territory into Siberia and Central Asia. A trans-Eurasian wedge intended to split Russia from south to north.

“Not just business. Yes, that matters for business. But for Armenia: after one year, Armenia will no longer exist. For Russia, perhaps after five years.”

And then there is the drone scenario. Grigorian outlines a scenario barely discussed in Western media: once the corridor is established and NATO is present at the Caspian Sea, thousands of maritime drones could penetrate through the Caspian Sea, the Volga and other rivers into the Russian interior. The goal would not merely be a military encirclement of Russia — but the destruction of critical infrastructure deep within the country. Shipyards, energy installations, rivers as transport routes.

“After half a year, after one year, we would have to militarily subordinate ourselves to the West. And that is a major problem for Russia. That is extremely dangerous for Russia.”

For Russia, Iran and China, this would be a red line. For Armenia itself, it would mean destruction. For whoever believes Armenia could survive under Western protection while sacrificing its neighbourly relations with Russia and Iran is, in Grigorian’s firm conviction, fundamentally mistaken.

Also part of this picture is Erdogan’s strategy. Grigorian recalls that Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu had already formulated the concept of a “new Ottoman Empire” 15 years ago. Erdogan is a great friend of Putin, Trump, Starmer and Merz — but ultimately a “great cheat” who plays everyone against each other. Europe knows this, but as long as Erdogan is needed as a lever against Russia, people look the other way.

Pashinyan: The Premier Who Is Leading Armenia into a Trap

The domestic problem has a name: Nikol Pashinyan. He came to power in 2018 through a popular movement — promoted, as Grigorian explains, by Western-financed NGOs and foundations that worked specifically against Russian influence in Armenia. Since Donald Trump took office, this work has been significantly scaled back; Grigorian is personally aware of five to six such groups by name.

Grigorian’s criticism of Pashinyan is fundamental: no university degree, a weak journalist, politically inexperienced. Worse still: after the lost Karabakh war of 2020 and the final loss of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023, Pashinyan shifted responsibility onto Russia — even though the CSTO protection obligation did not extend to Nagorno-Karabakh, and even though the Minsk Group with Armenian-Azerbaijani participation had worked for years on a negotiated solution.

Particularly explosive is an allegation that Grigorian bases on sources in Armenian intelligence circles: just a few months after taking office, Pashinyan allegedly made an offer at a meeting with Azerbaijani President Aliyev — Nagorno-Karabakh in exchange for five billion dollars. Lukashenko and the then Armenian President Sarkissian are said to have followed the conversation through intercepted channels. Aliyev is said to have declined. Whether this is true cannot currently be verified.

What can be verified: after the loss of Nagorno-Karabakh, Pashinyan had four bishops of the Armenian Apostolic Church imprisoned — including the billionaire and widely known Samvel Karapetyan, who supported the opposition. Against this backdrop, a broad opposition movement has formed: former President Robert Kocharyan, businessman Gagik Tsarukyan and other parties have joined forces and are polling higher than Pashinyan’s party.

The Election on June 7: A Fateful Day for Armenia

At the time of our conversation, Armenia is on the eve of parliamentary elections — on June 7, 2026. And Grigorian fears electoral fraud — as in 2021. The first manipulation mechanism is structural in nature: Armenians abroad cannot vote at Armenian embassies, but must travel to Armenia especially for that purpose.

Of the estimated three million Armenians in Russia — who in Grigorian’s assessment are predominantly opposition-minded — only a few tens of thousands can cast their votes. 600,000 of them hold an Armenian passport, but Pashinyan refuses overseas voting. A further 100,000 to 200,000 Armenians live in Europe — they too remain without a voice.

The second mechanism: according to Grigorian, Pashinyan has in the past manipulated travel documents for his own interests — meaning: falsified electoral rolls. Whether this will again be possible is doubtful, as considerably more observers are now watchful.

“If there is fraud on June 7 — and I think there will be — then on June 8 everyone will take to the streets. All people are in a highly emotional state.”

Around 20 to 30 EU election observers are expected. Grigorian considers their influence limited. At a symposium in Bratislava at the end of May, which he himself organised, 90 percent of the assembled experts reached an agreed conclusion: EU membership for Armenia within the next ten to twenty years is unrealistic. Grigorian points to the example of Slovakia, which had been working toward accession since the late 1980s and was only admitted in 2004.

The Armenian Diaspora: Russia’s Silent Pawn

One aspect almost entirely absent from Western reports on Armenia is the economic reality. Around 80 percent of Armenian exports go toward Russia and the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Zone. Russian gas costs Armenia $147.50 per thousand cubic metres — in Europe it is over $500. The Armenian nuclear power plant is operated with Russian assistance. Large factories and enterprises are historically intertwined with the Russian economy.

Then there is the diaspora: the three million Armenians in Russia are not an abstract demographic figure — they are the country’s most important source of money. Every month they send remittances to Armenia that feed families, pay rents, and keep businesses alive. This dependency is not coerced: it has grown historically and is an important economic factor in the poor country.

Armenian cognac to Western Europe? “Negligible amounts,” Grigorian says dryly, “compared to what goes to Moscow. We would have no chance in the EU.” The prospect of visa-free travel in Europe may sound alluring — but it cannot replace trade with Russia.

That part of the population is nonetheless receptive to the pro-EU course has, according to Grigorian, less to do with economic reason than with emotional longing: the freedom to travel through Europe without a visa, the possibility of doing business on European markets. This hope is real. But it is not a foundation for economic recovery and political reform.

EU Membership: Illusion as Instrument

Why does Pashinyan nonetheless pursue the EU course? Grigorian’s answer is sobering: not for Armenia, but for himself. He is personally well connected with Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and Keir Starmer. These European leaders exert pressure — and Trump adds to it. The motive is the same in every case: organising a second front against Russia.

On May 5, Ursula von der Leyen and Emmanuel Macron travelled to Yerevan to press Pashinyan to remain on the EU course. Promises were made: visa-free access for Armenians in the EU, investments, symbolic solidarity. What cannot be promised: protection. The EU has no obligation to defend Armenia, possesses no troops in the South Caucasus, has no strategic depth in the region.

In conversation with Patrik Baab, Ashot Grigorian recalls the example of Georgia: at the NATO meeting in Bucharest in 2008, Georgia was invited to NATO membership — but without a firm date. Georgian troops then attacked Russian peacekeeping forces in South Ossetia. The Russian army repelled the attack and advanced to Tbilisi. The West left Georgia alone in that war. Today Georgians are largely glad that Prime Minister Kobakhidze’s government suspended EU accession negotiations until 2028 and rejected EU financial assistance. Armenia too, Grigorian warns, faces the threat of armed conflict if it allows the West to turn it into a second front against Russia.

Russia, Iran, China: Why All Three Are at Stake

Putin, Foreign Minister Lavrov and State Duma Chairman Volodin have spoken in unison: Armenia has been a partner of Russia for 250 years. What is good for Armenia is also good for Russia. Grigorian interprets these signals not as a threat, but as a sincere warning.

For Iran, an American military presence in the South Caucasus would be an existential threat. With Israeli military bases in Azerbaijan to the east and a NATO presence in Armenia to the north, Tehran would be enclosed on two sides. Grigorian considers this the end of Iran as a regional power.

For China, an interruption of trade routes through Armenia would mean the loss of a central section of the New Silk Road. Beijing has a fundamental interest in Armenia remaining in the Eurasian Economic Union.

In this triangle of Russia, Iran and China, Armenia is, as Grigorian sees it, not a player — it is a pawn. A pawn that could shatter with one wrong political move.

An Armenian with a European Heart

What distinguishes Grigorian from a mere geopolitical analyst is his personal grounding. He is European — culturally, intellectually. Johann Sebastian Bach is for him the foremost figure of culture, not only in Germany but in the world. He values European civilisation sincerely.

And it is precisely for that reason that he advocates for bridges rather than fronts. Armenia can — and should — mediate between Russia and Europe. The Russian mentality is in large parts European: philosophy, language, way of thinking. The conflict between West and East is not a clash of civilisations, but a political construct being played out on the backs of small peoples.

For ten years, Grigorian has been President of the Forum of Armenian Associations of Europe. Two years ago he organised in Bratislava the first of his peace symposia. The motto: Bratislava as a capital of dialogue.

“We Armenians are Europeans and we are absolute friends of Russia. There is only one way to prevent a Third World War: Europe must talk with Russia. And we Armenians can help with that.”

Ashot Grigorian, the cosmopolitan Armenian businessman: Armenia must be a bridge between the European Union and Russia — but stands in danger of becoming a buffer in a new Western front against Russia. That is why what is at stake in the elections of June 7, 2026 is not only the fate of Armenia, but also of Europe and the Caucasus.

Introduction: Under Fire

On September 28, 2022, our hotel in Donetsk comes under fire. A 155mm artillery shell flies just past my room on the 5th floor. It misses the “Park Inn” by a few meters and hits the parking lot. The pressure wave sweeps through the lobby. The reception desk, furniture, lamps — everything shatters. A column saves the young woman at the front desk her life. In the lower four floors, all windows shatter (Ria Novosti 2022; ExtremNews 2022). We had just left the hotel; only by chance do we escape death. What does this have to do with the warmongering of the propaganda media? I will try to explain. In doing so, I also draw on my own experiences.

What interests me is: Where do the social driving forces of these propaganda media and their campaigns lie? What accelerates and amplifies them? How can we counter them? The reporting on Israel’s and the USA’s war of aggression against Iran, which violates international law, and on the Ukraine war, has little to do with journalistic information provision. This is already evident in the fact that reporting is not being done from both sides, and that the positions of Iran or the Russian side are largely absent.

We will see why this is the case. I concentrate my reflections on the orchestration of propaganda campaigns on four spheres: 1. editorial decision-making processes, 2. personal predispositions, 3. the affect economy of digital capitalism, and 4. the sphere of political propaganda.

Lars Wienand portrays me as an election observer, even though a clear denial existed. His only source is Russian media on the internet. But the internet is a filter that looks like a window. You only find there what others have uploaded in accordance with their own interests. Therefore, a second source outside the digital world, in the real world, would have been imperative. A phone call to the responsible Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation or a glance at its website would have sufficed to establish that I could not have been an election observer (Civic Chamber 2022). Research time: perhaps 15 minutes. This would also have been reasonable, indeed mandatory, in the current reporting.

The verification of the “what” was omitted; the two-source principle was disregarded. The suspicion arises: Wienand did not want to research his story into the ground. How? This is where it gets interesting. The question of how I came to attend the referendums did not interest t-online. An investigation would have revealed that it was a follow-up trip, planned long before the announcement of the referendums and intended for publication purposes (Baab 2023). But this would not have fit the framing: agenda-setting is always also agenda-cutting (Schiffer 2021, 14).

The question of why the referendums that Wienand calls “sham referendums” turn out the way they do and not otherwise is not even asked. This reveals the lack of subject knowledge of the t-online author. About the conflicts in eastern Ukraine, the history of the region, its culture, the causes of the war, Lars Wienand has no idea, nor does it interest him.

Even if the conduct of the referendums did not meet international standards for free and secret elections, they nonetheless reflect the mood of the population. Historians are agreed on this. For the Donbas has been shelled by the Ukrainian army since March 2014. According to United Nations data, there were more than 14,000 deaths, a large portion of them civilians (Permanent Mission 2022). According to unofficial figures, the death toll amounts to more than 50,000.

The two-source principle was violated. The principle of “et audiatur altera pars” (and let the other side be heard) was not followed. Background information was not consulted. Professional standards were disregarded. A reality check did not take place. This illustrates exemplarily how uneducated journalists dumb down their audience.

But that is not all. Other media such as Spiegel Online, taz, and the NDR media magazine Zapp copy the t-online story without verifying the initial information. In journalism, this is called: a violation of the duty of care. Now so-called experts are brought in who are known to share the same framing (Schiffer 2021, 19, 31). This is how self-referential citation cartels form, which set denunciation cascades in motion with the aim of public ostracism.

This step in turn succeeds through the rapid approach of employers, sometimes directly combined with the demand to sanction the target person, lest one be pilloried as a sympathizer or even an accomplice (Hintergrund 2022). This means: ideologically synchronized apparatuses amplify their destructive effect.

The whole procedure shows that journalists step out of the observer role and become actors themselves. It also shows: it is not about factual accuracy, but about an outrage impulse that, on the basis of the prevailing opinion climate, is supposed to capture attention. Colin Crouch: “Verifiable facts play no role. We live in the post-factual age.” (Crouch 2021, 242 f.)

But why? I will try to analyze this in four steps: 1. at the editorial, 2. at the individual, 3. at the socioeconomic, and 4. at the political level.

Editorial Decisions: A Look into the Black Box

Journalistic decisions are made in editorial offices. This is therefore also where strategic framing takes place. Everyday life is shaped by time pressure, staff shortages, the editorial opinion climate, click pressure, the editorial prerogative of publishers or editors-in-chief, and precarious employment conditions. Decisive here is that freelance contributors play a paper- and program-shaping role, but are mostly paid by the line or broadcast minute, and thus receive what is essentially piecework pay. This places them in economic dependence. Their spirit of contradiction is therefore usually remarkably low.

Most editorial offices function only because a host of freelancers keeps the work running. These “freelancers” also want to receive assignments tomorrow and the day after. Therefore they develop a fine sense for what the boss wants. They make their living from having their topics “bought.” Whoever behaves awkwardly and insubordinately in this system will soon have to find another job; they do not fit the “editorial line.”

The former head of the US Federal Communications Commission, Nicholas Johnson, tells the story of a freelancer “who first comes in with a research topic, writes up the idea, and passes the exposé to his editor. There he is told that the story won’t run. He wonders why, but the next time he is careful enough and discusses such things with the editor first. There he is told that it would be better not to write the story. The third time he thinks of a research story, but no longer bothers his editor with it, because he knows it won’t get anywhere. The fourth time, he doesn’t even think about such ideas anymore” (Lee & Solomon 1991, 98).

In such an editorial climate it is easy for managers to enforce anticipatory obedience by creating fear. The selection criteria in recruitment, the milieu affinity, and the system of freelance work with its dependencies give rise in editorial offices to a subtle system of preemptive submission. Staff then pitch their topics in such a way that the “spin” fits the framing of the editorial line — or they let a topic be “thrown” at them in the conference.

How this plays out in practice is shown by the genesis of the Zapp contribution by Caroline Schmidt and Lea Stuckmeier. The contribution further implies that I had been an election observer for the Kremlin. Verification of the initial information is dispensed with. Moreover, the report refers to a discussion panel with Ken Jebsen. There, in the context of the — documented — intelligence entanglements and secret travels of Uwe Barschel to the GDR, I speak of the “Deep State.” The sympathetic reader might now expect to find a lucid argumentative engagement with knowledge of the investigative file, or a journalistic critique of the discussion panel. After all, whoever conducts good interviews themselves need not fear the competition from Ken Jebsen. But far from it.

Rather, the contribution places me in proximity to conspiracy theories: I speak of the “Deep State,” a term that is also used by conspiracy theorists (Zapp 2022). This method of argumentation has two elements: 1. construction of guilt by association; 2. formation of analogies for the purpose of shifting meaning.

Now regarding the production process. At an online staff meeting on September 29, 2022, the head of the Panorama editorial office, Volker Steinhoff, called in the chat for addressing my relationship to Ken Jebsen and my appearance as an election observer in the Donbas. The Zapp reporters Caroline Schmidt and Lea Stuckmeier did not need to be told twice. For now they knew that such a contribution was desired “from above.” They had a license to denounce.

Immediately upon my return, a registered letter from the personnel director of NDR’s state broadcasting office in Schleswig-Holstein, Gaby Kies, landed in my mailbox. It reads:

“Your activity in Ukraine came to our attention in the context of a press inquiry. We were unable to find a corresponding application for outside employment. Should you be of the opinion that this does not constitute outside employment requiring approval, please inform us of your reasoning.” (Kies 2022)

My lawyer replied truthfully that there was no outside employment. Up to this point, no verification of the initial information had yet taken place on the NDR side. I also did not receive a phone call from the personnel department. The procedure is quite simple: fake news is adopted without verification in order to build employment law proceedings on it.

In this process, the business model of the denouncers is now exposed: freelancers, in violation of simple professional rules and free from research, carry out commissioned work for managers and earn their money doing so. These managers initiate strategic framing through anticipatory obedience, from a milieu-specific perspective, or out of economic performance pressure. Politically, the aim is to narrow the democratic space for debate, to exclude individuals, and thereby to impose discursive control.

Individual Predispositions: The Psychopathology of Hired Scribblers

Evidently, freelancers become willing executors because, in addition to favorable editorial factors, individually characterological preconditions also play a role. Irrespective of individual cases, these are encountered with above-average frequency in the journalistic profession.

Journalism is always also the opposite of information: agenda-setting is always also agenda-cutting. Journalism is always framing, and this framing, in English “bias in media,” always also follows interests: “For it is only in the interplay of interests and journalistic hypotheses,” writes Sabine Schiffer, “that it becomes comprehensible why something is considered relevant and something else is not.” (Schiffer 2021, 14)

Herein lies the essence of propaganda: the constant repetition of key concepts, slogans, and distorted versions of events (Lee & Solomon 1991, XVI). In the attempt to associate me with conspiracy theories and Putin’s politics, the Zapp contribution suppresses everything that contradicts this goal.

This shows: the Zapp contribution is about agenda-cutting, a negative framing for the purpose of denunciation. That the initial information was also not verified here points to the professional weaknesses of the authors. They copy from others and thus conform to the prevailing opinion. This happens on instruction from above, for somehow the film had to pass the acceptance and the legal department. Altogether, this offers a vivid picture of the opportunism of intellectuals.

The construction of guilt by association and the labeling “conspiracy theory” fits wonderfully with the defamation project (Agora 2020).

Freelance work and fixed-term contracts form the basis of permanent precarious employment. This triggers fear and insecurity. This open wound in the life and work process calls for healing. Journalism now offers the possibility of remaining in the dark when healing this wound: the authors hide behind their topics, in which they imagine themselves important and meaningful. They express themselves in reporting on others, and yet something of themselves lies in this, which is precisely what gives their contributions their individual characteristics. Thus a kind of mask is placed over the actual problem, and this mask is then the reportage, the report, the journalistic film. In doing so, a transformation takes place: one’s own precarious situation experiences relief through the self-empowerment of being able to orchestrate a topic. The journalist can play around with ever-new topics and yet remains undetectable.

Perhaps one can put it this way: journalists need the hiding place of their films and texts, and yet they are simultaneously driven by the desire to show themselves and draw attention to themselves. The text offers them protection, conceals their abysses. But this is not about a fragile identity. It is about something else: there is scarcely a more narcissistic profession than that of journalist: to externalize oneself, to convince the world through one’s own ego of oneself, even if in objectified, detached form, that is, in disguise. Journalists are narcissists who do not want to look at themselves directly, who cannot look directly in the mirror (Linder 1981, 27).

Sigmund Freud describes in his study on the narcissistic personality “two fundamental character traits,” namely “megalomania and the withdrawal of their interest from the external world [...] The libido withdrawn from the outer world has been directed to the ego.” (Freud 1914) Perhaps here lies a key to the Zapp contribution. The withdrawal from the outer world mentioned by Freud can explain the partial loss of reality that becomes recognizable in the suppression, for example, of my Russia reportages, in which I independently investigated grievances and which are partly to be found on my page patrikbaab.com. Only this loss of reality enables the megalomaniacal self-empowerment of wanting to stake out the space of debate through insinuations of conspiracy theories or alleged Putin sympathies, and to drive others off the playing field. The narcissistic social character seems to find its second home in journalism.

Christopher Lasch regards narcissism as the congenial illness of the neoliberal epoch and thus transforms a personality disorder into a social disorder. The narcissistic reaction is triggered by the warlike conditions prevailing in neoliberal society, by the dangers and insecurity that surround us, and by the loss of trust in the future (Lasch 2018, 64 f.). The causal responsibility lies in the neoliberal shift of responsibility for life’s failures onto individual actors (Bauman 2018, 156).

Christopher Lasch characterizes the “new narcissist” thus: “He loses the security of group loyalties and regards everyone as a rival for the advantages distributed by a paternalistic state. [...] On the one hand marked in his craving for recognition and admiration by impetuous competitive thinking, he nonetheless mistrusts competition because he associates it unconsciously with unchecked destructive drive [...] He praises cooperation and teamwork while simultaneously concealing deep-seated antisocial impulses. He preaches respect for rules and legal prescriptions in the secret belief that they do not apply to himself. Acquisitive in the sense that his expectations and demands are immeasurable, [...] he demands immediate satisfaction of his wishes and lives in a state of restless, eternally unsatisfied desire.” (Lasch 2018, 4 f.)

Megalomania and withdrawal from the external world have two consequences in journalism: one is the alignment with the prevailing editorial opinion climate, so that group loyalty stabilizes the self-aggrandizement; the other is the abandonment of the reality check. Research becomes a luxury. In its place, intra-editorial alliances are formed. The goal is to extract more profit from a situation than the competition. On the stock exchanges of life politics, writes Zygmunt Bauman, solidarity does not pay off; “instead they reward self-referentiality, egoism, and antisocial forms of self-assertion [...] Every other person’s success feels like my defeat and further diminishes my already meager chances of ‘making it to the top.’” (Bauman 2018, 124 f.)

The narcissistic social character is thus tailor-made for the affirmation of existing relations of domination. For the longed-for libidinal gratification, recognition and admiration, is achieved within the structure of power. Personal recognition and material gratification are distributed by whoever holds power in the apparatus. They thereby allow the narcissistic social character to symbolically participate in their power and promote his social status, for which he willingly accepts the loss of reality in return (Erdheim 1992, 392 f.).

From a psychoanalytic perspective, this also involves a regression into the unresolved Oedipal conflict: emancipation from parents no longer takes place; one trusts authorities in principle. Thus the Oedipal conflict is no longer fought out. The return to the womb becomes the highest form of freedom. “Why,” ask Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “do men fight for their servitude as though it were their salvation?” (Deleuze & Guattari 1979, 39) The blocked Oedipal conflict is the psychological foundation of the anti-democratic disposition. For every democracy is owed to distrust of power elites, is grounded in centuries of experience with the abuse of power by elites, and requires the active containment of power.

Like an undead, the authoritarian personality thus returns in the narcissistic social character and becomes a willing prop of the status quo. The flight from the volatile existence dependent on more powerful actors into conformity causes an authoritarian turn of the narcissistic character and makes it just as dangerous a helper of non-democratically legitimated relations of domination as the traditionally authoritarian social character, characterized by conformism, conventionalism, anti-pluralism, submissiveness and obedience, power-orientation and deference to authority, and a sadomasochistic relationship with others (Fromm 1983, 163).

In journalism, therefore, the widespread narcissistic social character with its central characteristics of loss of reality and self-aggrandizement is a carrier of propaganda and thus a further driver of media warmongering.

The Economy of the Propaganda Press: From Information to Resentment

Media campaigns work only if others join in. The initiator alone cannot prevail. Here is what happens: other media jump on the topic, the pack picks up the scent. One copies from another instead of verifying the initial information.

Important drivers of such media campaigns are rooted in media economics. Media are not a commodity like any other; they have a dual character: journalistic contributions are both economic goods, sold for the purpose of profit generation, and cultural goods that journalistically create a public sphere, contribute to information and opinion formation, and thereby acquire social relevance.

In doing so, private-sector enterprises such as publishers, online providers, and radio or television broadcasters sell attention and thereby earn money on the audience market through distribution revenue and, additionally, on the advertising market through advertising revenue (Brinkmann 2021, 73 f.). From this grows the orientation toward the profit principle. The attention economy arises from the commodity character of journalistic products and has consequences for the selection of topics and presentation formats.

The private-sector motive consists, beyond this, in generating clicks and thereby higher advertising revenue through the production of resentments. To this end, overly thorough research must be avoided: one could become entangled in contradictions. It fits better to operate as journalistic drone pilots, far from political reality in the war zone, targeting individuals and publicly executing them. One leans, to facilitate the work, on the prevailing opinion climate and its prejudices, which are now to be reinforced through scandalization. Their basis, according to Pierre Bourdieu, is journalistic semi-education: “This is one of the reasons why journalists are sometimes dangerous: since they are not always educated, they are amazed by things that are not very amazing, and they are not amazed by things that are truly astonishing.” (Bourdieu 1998, 61)

Sensationalism alone, however, cannot explain the professional errors. Digitalization fundamentally changes the media landscape, both on the producer and consumer side, both with regard to media as economic and cultural goods. These changes amplify and accelerate media campaigns and facilitate the work of the propaganda media.

To understand this, one must understand that value creation and commodity circulation are changing radically. At the center now stand proprietary markets. Their leading companies are Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon — all monopolies. “Classic monopoly enterprises act on markets,” writes Philipp Staab, “the leading media of Digital Capitalism, by contrast, ARE markets.” (Staab 2020, 30) The market itself is privatized.

This is a constitutive difference from neoliberal ideology, at the center of which stand neutral markets: the dominant markets are in private ownership. Decisive for them is reach, that is, the size of the user base. In order to generate reach, offerings from other business fields are cross-subsidized. Consumers are lured with superficially free offers that they pay for on the sly with the surrender of their data. Unlike classic monopolies, the power of the market owner and thus his profit model manifests itself in four forms of control: first in information, the central raw material; second in access control at his own discretion; third in the choice of services; fourth in price control — directed both at producers and consumers.

The central raw material of these proprietary markets is user data. Value creation runs through the collection and aggregation of data. This in turn operates on both the producer and the consumer side.

Even in the production sphere, user data is tapped: the journalist thinks he is searching the internet with Google; but Google is searching him. This enables not only behavioral and performance monitoring, but also prognostic behavioral guidance through the selection and hierarchy of search results. While the journalist believes he finds almost everything on the internet, he is in fact only presented with those excerpts of the world that have passed through the upload filter of privatized selection and censorship via the EU’s Digital Services Act. The result is a digital loss of reality that only becomes apparent to those who search outside the mainstream or who put it to the test on the ground.

After neoliberalism had already largely liberalized and precarized employment conditions in journalism, new risks and work intensification are now added: the internet and social media usually have to be served with the same staff. Thorough verification beyond the internet is scarcely conceivable anymore. While the data and profit cascades flow upwards toward the platforms, the “risk cascades” (Staab) flow primarily downward (Staab 2020, 270).

On the consumer side, the internet and social media — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram — enable a rapid, immediate reaction. This facilitates the affect getting ahead of the thorough penetration and weighing of topics. Reason-guided reaction and processing retreat behind speed and emotionalization. Wolf-Dieter Narr observed a long-term behavioral change already years ago.

It consists “in a decline of individually given mechanisms of reflection and processing”: “Stimuli and expectations generate responses without the individual being capable of his own processing, of choice, of resistance.” With this, control criteria and information are lost; the individual can only reduce the complexity of the information abundance by trusting it. As early as 1979, Narr invoked “the danger of a society of conditioned reflexes [...] more precisely: a society of resistanceless individuals drowning in the juice of their irrelevant subjectivity, at most capable of irrational outbursts” (Narr 1979, 491, 523).

This prognosis acquires special significance in the transition from neoliberalism to digital capitalism. For, as Wolfgang Engler has pointed out: “In all societies ploughed up by neoliberalism, there reigns massive rage.” (Engler 2021, 104) It is directed against the power elites, who have increasingly put wage earners under pressure through social cuts, privatization, liberalization, and a shift of responsibility for life risks from the state to individuals.

When this rage remains encapsulated for a long time in the everyday struggle for survival, the emotionalization and affect management of social media become the safety valve for the discharge of drives. The reporting of mainstream media conducts this business of channeling and directing subterranean rage, because it brings clicks, circulation, advertising revenue, ratings.

For this affect economy to function at all, it must stimulate an emotional demand in the audience. Orchestrated press campaigns take hold because they can dock onto this massive rage. Both producers and consumers benefit superficially: the former through click numbers, the latter through the discharge of drives:

“Logical arguments,” writes Heinz Abels, “are powerless against affective interests. Even the most sharp-sighted people behave like imbeciles when a demanded insight encounters emotional resistance.” (Abels 2009, 257)

In this way a new media exploitation model has emerged. It is no longer primarily information-based, but resentment-driven. At its core, the aim is to monetize resentments. Or in short: the generation of hatred as a business model. This monetization of resentments runs primarily via proprietary markets. Services like Twitter, on which the opinion formation of the chattering classes takes place almost exclusively, drive this forward. The brevity enforces condensation and compression of the excitement curves. Independent research is displaced by the monetization of resentments.

With the new value creation model, a new social relation of domination is constituted. For the distribution of social power is determined by the appropriation of surplus value in the labor process. Philipp Staab writes of an “expropriation of labor”: “Sustainable profits can, in the context of lean digital infrastructures, often only be achieved at the expense of labor [...] Consolidated proprietary markets perpetuate [...] the transfer of economic wealth from the factor of labor to the factor of assets.” (Staab 2020, 274 f.)

Digital Capitalism is thus, even in journalism, a “machine for the production of social inequality” and privileges political-civic conformity (Staab 2020, 301). Since the average profit rate in market capitalist economies has been falling for years, this tendential fall must be countered (Nachtwey 2016, 53–58).

This means that the pressure to conform in editorial offices increases and in turn reinforces anticipatory obedience. Both tendencies affect junior journalists who are largely recruited homogeneously from the upper-middle-class milieu (Hartmann 2018, 11 f.; Jones 2015, 84–123; Klöckner 2019, 25 f.). They share the worldview of their class, set the topics of bourgeois milieus, and look at the world from the perspective not of workers and employees but of tradespeople and owners of the means of production. Their habitus, according to Pierre Bourdieu, is shaped by “respectful conformism” (Bourdieu 1982, 519): they grovel upward and conform. Instinctively they reproduce the interests of the upper bourgeoisie, for these are the collective prejudices of their own social milieu: to flanking the stabilization of the profit rate through journalism and to discreditingly devalue critical voices through “strategic framing” (Schiffer 2021, 21).

In transformation phases such as the transition to digital capitalism, in which the “smoking ruins of neoliberalism” (Staab 2020, 290–293) have not yet been cleared away and the new production regime has not yet stabilized, these bourgeois hired scribblers appear particularly aggressive. The denunciation campaigns aim to isolate those dissidents who warn against an intensification of exploitation and a rollback of democracy by the new production regime.

This is entirely in the interest of the power elites, who know that the rage they have unleashed must on no account be directed against themselves. Therefore they promote through propaganda the displacement of aggression onto internal enemies such as alleged conspiracy theorists, rightists, or COVID skeptics, or external opponents, e.g., through the arousal of Russophobia, the demonization of Putin, or resentments against the Iranian mullahs, who allegedly want to establish a caliphate in Germany too (Schneider 2022). The political economy of resentment favors the mobilization of fear, the politics of exclusion, which the power elites use to steer society and as a governing technique.

Thus the media, like all ideological apparatuses, lay themselves around the interests of the power elites like a protective wall. Instead of enlightening, they conduct the business of counter-enlightenment (Mausfeld 2018, 162 f.). In the value-driven West we are currently experiencing a new destruction of reason. The return to resentment in the media thereby destroys the foundations of democracy. Joseph Vogl believes that this “hostility of all against all has become not only a successful business model, but an extremely viable sense of community. It is not excluded that it will provide the ferment of a new pre-war period.” (Vogl 181 f.)

The author has long since been overtaken by reality. A pre-war period is no longer needed. We are already in a new war at the heart of Europe, which continues to escalate. The economy of resentment has become the raw material of the warmongers.

Power Elites and Satraps — How Political Campaigns Are Orchestrated

The campaign works only if others join in. Therefore one gives it a little push. T-Online and other outlets were not so much in a hurry to verify the accusations against me as they were to call the universities mentioned.

The call from the HMKW indeed did not take long in coming. We are on the edge of the grey zone and have just escaped direct fire. The line is full of static. I hear only: “We will distance ourselves sharply from you [...] What you see there on the ground is pseudo-objectivity!” This surprises me nonetheless. Someone who at best possesses newspaper knowledge wants to diagnose the truth in a war zone by remote diagnosis from a distance of 2,100 kilometers. That would be a challenge even for eastern European experts. But the chancellor of HMKW, Roland Freytag, is not an eastern European expert; his field is psychology. In his own field, one would call something like this a projection.

Again it becomes clear: it is not about factual examination, but about censorship of unwelcome information. The ideological narrative must on no account be broken open. The University of Kiel also immediately cancelled my teaching assignment. In contrast to HMKW, the teaching assignment had, however, already been issued. This opened the way for legal action. The cancellation was carried out in emergency proceedings, since there was allegedly imminent danger. The hearing required under administrative law was therefore dispensed with. The Christian-Albrechts-University sees its reputation endangered because I had allegedly arrogated to myself the role of an election observer in the Donbas, or at least had given this impression. Again no proper verification of the false claim. The Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, Professor Christian Martin, writes: “I also do not know what there is worth seeing in the Donbas.”

This is the declaration of bankruptcy of every science. For its findings are measured against reality. Here too: it was evidently not about proper investigation; but about protecting oneself in a panic from purportedly bad press and eagerly submitting to the prevailing opinion climate.

This shows: it was not about knowledge, but about confession — confession to a party to the war, Ukraine and NATO. This has nothing to do with science. Media, universities, state press offices have one thing in common: they are ideological apparatuses. These are all apparatuses that organize the intellectual reproduction of society. These ideological apparatuses now develop a subtle cooperation with the repressive state apparatuses (Althusser 1970, 22). What usually follows is a ping-pong game between the ideological apparatuses of bourgeois rule and their interlocking with measures by the repressive state apparatuses of the judiciary, police, and tax authorities. The aim is to enforce covert censorship while circumventing rule-of-law procedures, to compel anticipatory obedience through the creation of fear in third parties, and to destroy the economic livelihood of the target persons. The public executions aim at the intimidation of the entire population within a new anti-democratic structure of domination.

It is no coincidence that at least at one university, precisely those who feel committed to transatlantic networks such as the German Marshall Fund actively drove my dismissal. This shows where the real string-pullers of the censorship and denunciation public sphere are located. This is by no means to suggest that the actors receive instructions from Langley. Rather, the eagerness of their actions demonstrates that they see themselves in a kind of obligation that must be discharged. After all, what is at stake are conference invitations, fellowships, research trips, or the approval of research projects. One believes it is better for one’s own career to act as a legitimacy acquirer for American interests.

Then I found out that the domestic intelligence division in the Federal Interior Ministry also maintains a file on me — as an alleged election observer. Such things usually happen on instruction from above. One may therefore ask whether the Interior Minister’s own office orchestrates such denunciation campaigns. Here one must ask whether journalists also collaborate with intelligence services and, for example, do the dirty work for the BND (Federal Intelligence Service), as the federal government has openly set out in its response to a parliamentary inquiry in the German Bundestag (Matuschek 12.3.2023).

The same applies to university members. Beyond this, one sees here that the ideological apparatuses work together like a system of communicating tubes. Thus a censorship and denunciation cartel comes into being as if by itself, promoted by US foundations and NATO front organizations. For the Pentagon alone, 27,000 PR specialists work with an annual budget of five billion dollars, whose goal is to influence media with targeted news, experts for interviews, or footage for television.

Denunciation cascades, triggered by academic and media networks, allied with influencers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc., have one goal as their result: to destroy the economic livelihood of the target persons. What is at issue here, therefore, is not a democratic discussion, but the opposite: the prevention of democratic discourses about structural violence. Those who criticize NATO propaganda are to be deprived of their economic foundation. This does not involve isolated cases. Rather, an example is to be made. The goal is to compel anticipatory obedience through the creation of fear. This is initiated at its core by states or supranational organizations such as the EU and NATO, PR agencies, think tanks, so-called NGOs funded by the state, but also state-funded institutions such as the Zentrum Liberale Moderne or US foundations. Thus a consciousness industry is created, whose drivers are the eco-libertarian and militarist-conservative academic milieus (Mausfeld 2018, 161).

In a broader sense, propaganda campaigns are not directed only against individuals: the exclusion of dissent always goes hand in hand with massive propaganda and indoctrination. In Anne Morelli one can read how in the Ukraine conflict, war hysteria is promoted through propaganda. Including and especially through the propaganda applied by NATO: 1. The Kremlin is guilty of everything, after all it has invaded a weaker neighboring country. We actually want no war. 2. It is an “unprovoked” war of aggression: the opponent is solely and entirely responsible for this war. 3. Putin is a fascist, a butcher. The enemy has the face of the devil — or at least of a villain. 4. In Ukraine, the fight is for “Western values” or “freedom.” The real interests are concealed behind honorable, higher goals. 5. The enemy deliberately commits atrocious war crimes — as allegedly in Bucha. When our people make mistakes, it is just bad luck. 6. We have hardly any losses, but the enemy has enormous losses. One hears this now on both sides; the actual figures are secret. 7. We are fighting for a good cause: the opponent must learn to lose, we are morally in the right. 8. Even poets and thinkers support our cause. 9. The enemy uses internationally banned weapons: uranium ammunition, poison gas, biological weapons, cluster bombs. 10. Whoever questions our propaganda is a Putin apologist, a wretched pacifist, a submission pacifist, a right-wing cross-front agitator, the fifth column of Moscow (Morelli 2022).

Part of the propaganda narrative is to suppress or at least push into the background essential historical facts in connection with this war. Here, without claim to completeness, are the most important: 1. NATO’s eastward expansion up to the Russian borders despite contrary assurances; 2. The coup on the Maidan and the string-pullers responsible for it around Victoria Nuland; 3. The boasting of then-Vice President Joe Biden about how he used financial blackmail to force the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor investigating a corruption affair involving an energy company with President’s son Hunter Biden on the board; 4. The production facilities for biological weapons in Ukraine; 5. The neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and similar organizations; 6. The self-enrichment and secret foreign assets of President Zelensky; 7. Human rights violations in Ukraine; 8. Zelensky’s laws restricting freedom of expression and banning parties; 9. The reprisals against the Russian Orthodox Church; 10. The endemic corruption in Ukraine (Fournier 2023). 11. The blocking of a peace agreement already ready for signature, which had been negotiated between the warring parties in Istanbul in March 2022 — which representatives of all sides involved in the negotiation process have confirmed (Hill & Stent 2022; Bennett 2023; Marcetic 2023; Kujat 2023).

Through the propagandistic elimination of on-the-ground research, a lasting loss of reality arises in the public sphere, which in turn forms the basis for political misjudgments that pave the way for conflict escalation and catastrophes. For from this “self-hypnosis” arises, as Barbara Tuchman writes, a “wish trade” that lets itself not be deterred by facts, and leads to the “most common and most deadly self-delusion: the underestimation of the opponent.” (Tuchman 1984, 15, 38; Mausfeld 2018, 159)

All of this does not go through coercion; it only works with the consent of the academic elites. This active participation shows the susceptibility of the academic elites to anti-democratic thinking. Many academics and members of the elites see their career and their material security as dependent on the United States and its front organizations (Hudson 2022). Thus a conglomerate of academic soul-sellers arises who are either committed to transatlantic organizations or US foundations, or who disseminate their narratives through anticipatory obedience. The actors themselves, as Upton Sinclair notes, do not notice this: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” (Sinclair 1934, 19) There it is: the “iron cage of bondage” which “determines the lifestyle of all individuals [...] with overwhelming compulsion” (Weber 1979, 188 & Müller 2021, 344).

When press organs present propaganda campaigns instead of facts; when leading university members launch an attack on the freedom of the press and thus on freedom of opinion and information; when professors needlessly destroy the freedom of research and teaching; when state-funded NGOs act as organs of denunciation, censorship, and propaganda, then one may justifiably speak of anti-democratic thinking. It is not spreading in circles of the intellectually inferior.

Rather, intellectuals are making themselves the drivers of anti-democratic thinking. They become political-ideological actors in the process of opinion manipulation and thought control and thereby the self-appointed censor with the goal of narrowing the public space for debate to the state-desired sphere, indeed to the soup-plate horizon of their own petty-bourgeois souls.

Faced with this, Noam Chomsky laments the collapse of the democratic space for debate: “Perhaps parts of the intellectual class are so deeply immersed in the propaganda system that they can’t perceive the absurdity of what they are saying. In any case, it is a striking reminder that the arena of rational discourse collapses precisely where one might hope that it would be defended.” (Chomsky 2023)

Namely in academic circles. The longtime war reporter John Pilger speaks of a “consensus of propaganda”: had the press done its job, the Iraq War of 2003 would probably not have taken place (Pilger 2023). The “ideological apparatuses” are aligned to flanking post-democratic rule internally, to the transformation from a social to an armaments state, and to a militarist, neo-imperialist foreign policy.

The road into new wars is paved with the destruction of the democratic public sphere and of democracy. In this transformation, media and universities play a decisive part, for they make themselves carriers of counter-enlightenment and influence the transformation of democratic consciousness. Media campaigns are part of the “democracy management” of the power elites, with whom they are economically and personally intertwined. Their goal is to divert latent resentments away from the actual problems and toward surrogate objects, and thereby to manipulate the consciousness of citizens (Mausfeld 2018, 176).

The propaganda and censorship complex is part of a digital “re-feudalization” (Habermas 1976, 233, 273 f.) of the bourgeois public sphere and of an “involution,” that is, a regression of democracy to an authoritarian, post-democratic state (Agnoli 1978, 10) — but this time through proprietary markets and surveillance capitalism. This de-democratization in the guise of democracy aims at a continuation of elite rule and a stabilization of the profit rate under conditions of crisis.

Results

Propaganda campaigns are not about isolated cases, but about denunciation and exclusion sociotopes. Their aim is the ostracism and exclusion of dissent and thereby the destruction of the democratic space for debate. In the process, the attacks of ideological apparatuses such as media, universities, think tanks, state-controlled so-called non-governmental organizations are infamously interlocked with political persecution by repressive state organs such as the judiciary, police, and intelligence services, and banks are deployed as transmission belts, for example through de-banking. Thus a comprehensive instrument of political persecution, censorship, opinion manipulation, and war preparation comes into being. In particular, the criminal prosecution of political opponents is a classic sign of a dictatorship.

The new production regime of digital capitalism creates the conditions for the amplification and acceleration of propaganda campaigns. For it is no longer about information, but about the monetization of resentments. This has the consequence that the media increasingly conceal or distort facts that do not fit the affect economy. With this, we have arrived in the post-factual age.

Supply and demand condition each other in the affect economy: in all societies furrowed by neoliberalism, there reigns an immense rage. This rage of users can be medially activated, diverted away from the causes of grievances, and focused on surrogate objects. A protest movement is not to be expected. For the dependent employed are lured as consumers with free offers. We are therefore in a blocked conflict.

The channeling of resentments is the business of the ideological apparatuses. In dialectical interaction, the ideological apparatuses of school, church, media, think tanks, foundations, universities, and above all state- and supranationally-funded so-called non-governmental organizations — “GONGOs — government organized non-government organizations” — orchestrate the management of affect. These apparatuses organize the hegemony of the power elites, contribute to the avoidance of legitimation crises, and secure the conditions of reproduction in the elite democracy. In so doing, they succeed in overriding the democratic constitutional order of the Basic Law.

Therefore the space for debate is destroyed most powerfully precisely where one might hope that it would be defended. Academic and journalistic milieus are the ideological drivers of anti-democratic thinking and action. They orchestrate as “foot soldiers” the manipulation of the population, the destruction of reason, and the attacks of counter-enlightenment. For this is exactly what they are paid to do. The campaigns in which they participate as willing executors are ultimately initiated by transatlantic organizations, NATO, and the USA.

The academic auxiliaries mostly come from the upper bourgeoisie and share its perspective on the world. In contrast to their self-image as independent scholars and editors, what arises is a distorted representation of reality, a covert form of censorship, and a journalism that wraps itself like a protective cloak around the political and economic elites.

The fall of the profit rate drives the academic and journalistic apologists of bourgeois rule to close ranks. This leads to the massive ostracism of dissent. The inquisitorial approach against dissenters in the form of media campaigns destroys the democratic space for debate, leads to the destruction of democracy, culminates in a post-democratic form of domination, and in new wars. Warmongering, fanatical agitation, journalistic loss of reality, and delusion go hand in hand.

Hope for a reversal of these trends does not exist under the current conditions: the broad social de-solidarization prevents resistance, as does the blocking of the conflict through the temptations of the consumer sphere. The population dozes into destruction — “Abandon all hope.” (Dante 2021, 43)

On that September 28, 2022, when our hotel “Park Inn” in Donetsk is under fire and we narrowly escape death only by chance, our local driver Yevgeny Khatsko reaches for his phone. He knows his people. He speaks with artillery spotters. “The shell came from Marynka, 30 kilometers away. The Ukrainians have positioned French howitzers there. You have been emailing and calling your lawyers too much. The spotters have triangulated it!” The shells are GPS-guided and have terminal-phase guidance. Evidently, only a gust of wind prevented a direct hit. Stay off the network and always keep moving — that is the most important thing in the wars of digital capitalism.

The death of the on-the-ground reporter — that is the definitive victory of propaganda and the post-factual censorship and repression regime. The salon editors of the eco-libertarian bourgeoisie stir their coffee cups with a shrug.

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Michael von der Schulenburg, a former UN diplomat and current Member of the European Parliament, analyses the war in Iran and the global situation. He poses a crucial question:

Is the West heading towards an escalation that it can no longer control?

The discussion covers:

– the war in Iran and its global dimension

– Europe’s strategic position between two wars

– the end of the UN Charter and international rules

– the growing danger of nuclear war

– misjudgements in Western policy

– the loss of diplomacy and trust

“We are destroying ourselves by doing this.”

The West risks not only military defeats, but is losing its very foundation: a rules-based world order.

Schulenburg criticises above all the political short-sightedness and warns of long-term consequences.

What is the guest calling for?

– A return to diplomacy

– Recognition of geopolitical realities

– A move away from military escalation

A conversation about power, order, responsibility and strategic failure.

Is the West heading towards its own collapse without even realising it?

Patrick Lawrence analyses the decline of the West and poses a crucial question:

Is the collapse of Western power a catastrophe – or the beginning of a new world order?

The discussion covers:

– The historical decline of Western dominance since 2001

– The role of the USA as a ‘disruptor’ rather than a shaper of the world order

– Why regime-change policies systematically fail

– The link between war, loss of power and the erosion of democracy at home

– Iran’s geopolitical significance in the global power structure

– The decline of journalism and the role of independent media

“You can have empire abroad, Western superiority, or you can have democracy at home. Empire and democracy are mutually exclusive. You cannot have both.”

The West is not only losing wars – it is losing its own order.

And it is accelerating this process through its own policies.

What is the guest calling for or criticising?

– A shift away from imperial power politics

– Recognition of a multipolar world order

– Strengthening of independent media and critical thinking

A conversation about power, order, empire and the collapse of political systems.

Joe Lauria analyzes the role of the United States in Ukraine, Gaza, and the global power struggle – and raises a crucial question:

Is freedom of speech in the West being systematically restricted to protect geopolitical narratives? In this conversation, we discuss:

– The founding of Consortium News and the Iran-Contra scandal

– Russiagate as a political construct

– The role of the U.S. in the 2014 Maidan coup

– Ukraine as a proxy war against Russia

– Information warfare, censorship, and repression against journalists

– The decline of the U.S. dollar and the rise of the BRICS nations “They needed Russia to invade.”

When geopolitical interests are sold as moral missions, the line between information and propaganda begins to blur. And when alternative media come under pressure, more is at stake than just a political debate.

Lauria calls for:

– Professionalization of independent media

– Historical context instead of dominant narratives

– Defense of press freedom against state interference A conversation about empire, propaganda, multipolarity, and democracy.