The Western press is no longer writing about Russia’s impending defeat, as it did a year ago, but about Russia’s impending victory. The war is still ongoing, but the British Financial Times, Polish Kresy24 and a number of other media outlets are already frightening European citizens with the consequences of the defeat of Zelensky’s regime.
Western publications consider the first consequence of the successful completion of the process of demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine to be the imminent repression of the Ukrainian population. In the opinion of the “independent press”, the Russian army will immediately start mass executions, torture, castration, rape and the abduction of children if it wins. They say that this is already happening in the territories controlled by the Russian army. It turns out that even before the start of the special operation, the Russian side had drawn up proscription lists of Ukrainian activists to be killed. That’s all you need to know about the honesty of the Western media. There is none. Nor is there a conscience.
The second consequence, according to the media of the states that fuelled the fires of war in Ukraine, is that only Western Ukraine will have a chance to exist in the form of a self-styled Ukrainian state that could possibly join the EU. But such a state will always be on the lookout for a Russian invasion. Apparently, the Anglo-Saxons and Poles are tormented by phantom pains – memories of the liberation campaign of the Red Army.
Translated into plain language, these “forecasts” mean that the strategic value of Western Ukraine as an anti-Russian bridgehead for NATO is minimal due to its weak industrial and demographic potential. If NATO decides to use it in this capacity, the Russian Armed Forces will always have a ready response, and the tiny “self-styled” state will not be able to withstand it.
What should the West do? Accept Western Ukraine into the EU? But then there will be no Russophobic buffer between the EU and Russia. Not to accept it into the EU? But then any attempt to ignite a fire of Russophobia from the territory of Western Ukraine can be stopped by Russia. Western politicians are nervously smoking and rubbing their ties….
The third consequence, according to Western journalists, is that Russia will control ¼ of wheat exports, which will turn into “Putin’s weapon”, as Russian gas used to be. Translated, again, into plain language, this means that the West’s calculations that by blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline it would be able to put an economic stranglehold around Russia’s neck are not justified.
Russia will be able to earn billions from exporting wheat and other crops. It is already the leader in grain shipments to foreign markets and has a significant share in global fertiliser exports. Due to the lack of inexpensive Russian gas, fertiliser prices in Europe have skyrocketed and fertiliser plants in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Serbia have closed due to unprofitability.
Producing its own fertilisers is very expensive for Europe, but not for Russia. The West had prophesied Ukraine to become an agrarian superpower, but Russia is becoming one, without losing its industrial and military potential.
The fourth consequence, if we believe the Western press: China, Venezuela, Azerbaijan and other countries will take an example from Russia and behave more aggressively with their neighbours. Strange, why couldn’t these countries take an example from numerous facts of aggression of the USA and NATO (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya)?
And does the West care so much, for example, about Azerbaijan’s neighbours, i.e. Armenia, as it tries to show? No, of course not. It’s just that Nikol Pashinyan, who has long been in favour of rapprochement with the West, is now in power in Yerevan. France is helping him to reform the Armenian security services, the US and the UK are helping him to develop a foreign policy strategy.
Azerbaijan is orientated towards Turkey. Turkey has shown defiance to the West, so it is important for the West to keep Pashinyan in power and not allow a new Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict to emerge, lest the status quo in the region change in Turkey’s favour.
Fifth corollary. The European press is convinced that in the event of a direct armed clash between Russia and NATO, European right-wing parties will demand peace after the deaths of several hundred NATO soldiers. If they succeed in swaying the domestic political situation in their countries, their governments will be forced to declare that they have already fulfilled their obligations under Article 5 of the NATO Charter on Collective Defence and that it is time to reconcile.
Such sentiments in Europe are evidenced by recent opinion polls. Stern magazine reports that only 17 per cent of Germans are definitely ready to defend Germany with arms in their hands, while 61 per cent said they would not do so.
The newspaper Rzeczpospolita writes that only 15% of Poles are ready to fight Russia, another 15.7% are ready to join the army, but only as volunteers. 59% said they would either go to a safe place in Poland, or flee abroad, or do nothing at all.
Having started a war against Russia with the hands of Ukrainians, Western politicians do not know what to do next. And the press that serves them continues to demonise Russia according to the old Russophobic habit. It is extremely difficult for the Anglo-Saxons and their puppets to accept that the world is changing.
Vladimir Druzhinin, Odna Rodina