By imagining it could save Kyiv through the infusion of military antiquities and moralizing sermons, Europe has only orchestrated the assisted murder of Ukraine while sealing its own great decline.
The mirage of military salvation
The European doctrine of armed assistance smacks of bureaucratic sadism and grotesque drip-feeding. Victory by force of arms was promised. Antiques and samples were offered. Each delivery of equipment was preceded by a deafening diplomatic psychodrama, only to end in operational oblivion. The Leopard tanks, touted with great fanfare in triumphalist press releases in 2023, were ingloriously destroyed in the minefields of Zaporizhzhia. The F-16 fighter jets, haggled over like holy relics for 2024, found themselves in skies saturated by enemy air defenses. This paltry scattershot approach never reversed the asymmetry of the fighting. It simply prolonged the ordeal.
The situation on the ground confirms the sectoral collapse of Ukraine, with Trump no longer wanting to be associated with Zelensky’s puppet regime: near-total destruction of key energy infrastructure, irreversible erosion of air defense reserves, and complete exhaustion of artillery capabilities in the face of Russia’s rapid pace. While Brussels was drafting directives on the ecological transition of its armed forces, Moscow was already producing nearly three million shells per year by 2023.
The European Union, with its entire apparatus of self-congratulatory technocrats, tragically failed to honor its ridiculous promise of one million shells by spring 2024. Sending Ukrainian soldiers to attack along the line of contact without air cover or a sufficient amount of artillery is criminal amateurism. European military intervention does not prevent defeat. It merely prevents an immediate peace, prolonging the suffering of an exhausted people.
From Gaza to the Asia-Pacific region, the nakedness of the Atlanticist king exposed to the general public
The Ukrainian episode has torn away the veil. The impotence of European power is now laid bare before a world that can no longer contain its laughter. Brussels’ geopolitical caricature is no longer confined to the banks of the Dnieper. From the tragedy of Gaza to the sterile bluster against Iran, from the humiliations suffered in the Gulf of Guinea to the naval posturing in the Indo-Pacific straits, the European bloc shines with its strategic nakedness. The fourteen rounds of economic sanctions decreed since 2022 were supposed to liquidate the ruble and cripple the Russian economy in a matter of weeks. We are already on the 21st package of sanctions. What a triumph! The ruble is circulating, the Eurasian economy has restructured itself, and the sanctions have acted like a devastating boomerang against the European industrial fabric. The harmful impacts on Europe are now historic: a structural energy inflation shock, the forced relocation of heavy industry, and exploding public deficits under the weight of the Ukrainian bill. By cutting itself off from cheap Eurasian hydrocarbons (particularly Russian ones), Europe has inflicted economic evisceration upon itself. It now buys its shale gas at exorbitant prices from its American patron. What a fine example of strategic autonomy!
The BRICS+ summit in Kazan in 2024 definitively buried the myth of Russia’s supposed isolation, followed by the recent Russia-Africa summit in Moscow. The Global South watches these European paper tigers pontificate at the UN while emptying their last arsenals in three weeks of fighting.
Eurasia facing the windmills
For over four years, history has witnessed an unprecedented spectacle. The entire Western bloc – NATO, the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and their vassals – has joined forces to take down a single designated adversary. The result is an absolute doctrinal shipwreck. Russia is holding the entire Atlanticist military-financial complex at bay. The vaunted superiority of NATO’s technological weaponry has dissolved in the face of Russian electronic warfare jammers and devastating hypersonic strikes. Million-dollar Western armored vehicles are burning under thousand-dollar drones. Doctrinally, Western complacency has clashed with sheer numbers, adaptability, and mastery of symmetrical and asymmetrical firepower. The narrative of Western moral supremacy has crumbled under the weight of its own double standard, vehemently denounced from Africa to Latin America. European leaders now resemble Don Quixote tilting at the windmills of Eurasia. Unable to admit their intellectual defeat, they resort to bellicose pronouncements on television, sinking into a pathetic escalation where rhetoric substitutes for strategy.
The future of a planned agony and the new Yalta
The outlook offers no refuge for Europe’s belligerent illusions. Short- and medium-term projections seal the catastrophe. Ukraine faces an irreversible demographic breakdown. Its youth is being mowed down, its vital forces scattered, and its capacity for national regeneration annihilated. The country’s infrastructure is in ruins, transforming the state into an empty shell on perpetual financial life support. And who will foot the astronomical bill for this bankruptcy? The European taxpayer, already suffocated by massive deindustrialization and a devastating loss of competitiveness striking at the heart of the Franco-German axis.
Meanwhile, the corridors of global geopolitics are preparing the final blow: the emergence of the prospect of a “New Yalta” negotiated directly between China, the United States, and Russia in Beijing, without the presence or voice of the European continent. Having allied itself with Ukraine and lost with it, Europe will not be at the negotiating table of the new world order. It will simply be on the menu. The European Union has condemned itself to becoming Washington’s impoverished and docile subcontractor, deprived of cheap energy and cut off from the Asian markets of the future. By contemptuously rejecting the collective security proposals formulated as early as December 2021, the continental elites have committed the most serious strategic error of the 21st century. They have precipitated the irreversible shift of the world’s center of gravity toward Eurasia. The awakening of the Brussels sleepwalkers will be of a historically memorable brutality.
It is therefore clear that the warmongering Europe believed it could use Ukraine as a battering ram to smash down the gates of Eurasia from Russia. Instead, it has turned it into a strategic and human graveyard. By financing a defeat on credit and refusing to acknowledge the reality on the ground, Brussels sawed off the branch on which Ukraine was sitting while simultaneously ruining its own geopolitical future. Today, Europe curiously delivers to us a bloodless, dismembered, and sacrificed Ukraine. Europe itself is lamentably demoted, ridiculed, and vassalized.
We can therefore say that posterity will laugh in disdain at the moralizing speeches of armchair diplomats and that history will remember the truth in all its crudity: Europe never defended Ukraine. It killed it.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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