Panic time for Europe's warmongers?
Key Markets report for Wednesday, 16 April 2025
Project Ukraine is coming apart at the seams and Europe’s ruling oligarchies are getting increasingly frenzied to do something - anything - to prolong the war, open new fronts, or cobble up a Coalition of the Willing to reinforce the withering Ukrainian troops. But it’s headwinds… So far as the coalition is concerned, it turns out they’re not exactly willing: out of 30 candidate nations, only six are prepared to send troops to Ukraine where the supposed peace-keeping mission could turn into a war fighting mission faster than you can say “freedom and democracy.”
We know five of the willing: Britain, France, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The sixth state, for some reason, remained unknown . By now, we have reasons to suspect that it is the Netherlands. Namely, Le Monde reported that General Onno Eichelsheim, the highest ranking officer of the Dutch Army, signed a letter ordering 76,000 Dutch military personnel - both active and civilian - to prepare for military operations “as quickly as possible.”
The general believes that the Netherlands may be forced to mobilize “faster than expected.” General Eichelsheim has been eiching to send Dutch troops to Ukraine for some time now: he has been among the most enthusiastic supporters of Emmanuel Macron’s plan to send European troops there. Bien-sur, this would be to fight for our values like libertay, democratie and droits humaines. That’s all well and good, but why all the haste?
In yesterday’s report I mentioned UK’s foreign secretary David Lammy’s tour of the Western Balkans. His statements also gave an impression of haste and panic; he warned against Russia’s malign influence in the region which could take advantage of Balkans’ deep ethnic and religious divisions to stoke conflicts. Lammy also said that it would be extremely irresponsible to ignore Western Balkans, which seems to be growing closer to Moscow and Beijing.
Just how far the British have been from ignoring Western Balkans will become clear next. British investigative journalist Kit Klarenberg reported on this more than two years ago. Here are a few highlights from that report:
“Ever since the war in Ukraine began, speculation has swirled about a ‘second front’ opening in the Balkans - in particular, Bosnia and Herzegovina… In response, NATO member states have preemptively flooded Sarajevo with troops, and Britain has led the influx. … London has secretly bankrolled and created media outlets to disseminate slick pro-British, pro-NATO, anti-Russian propaganda… the media ramps up the threat daily, while elite British military think tank RUSI has branded Bosnia and Herzegovina the inevitable frontline of new fracas between the West and Moscow.”
An interesting tidbit from Klarenberg’s report is the source of vexation for the British propaganda machine in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In a leaked document cited by Klarenberg the British agents acknowledged that a key “barrier to combating disinformation” was that “certain Kremlin-backed narratives are factually true.” In other words, truth = Russian propaganda = truth. Somehow, truth is perceived as a “barrier to combating disinformation” by the agents of the Western empire.
Spreading “intense and cohering fear”
Whatever the case, the ultimate objective of the propaganda is, and has been for years now, sowing Russophobia and Serbophobia in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Even though the people in the Balkans aren’t remotely disposed to waging wars of any kind, the fear is being actively fomented. In a February 2020 paper produced by British state behavioural science advisors, they openly underscored the need to induce “intense and cohering fear” among the general population and ranked such fear as the first of all other considerations.
The sinister mindset never changed as we saw in the war-promoting Financial Times article titled, "Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state." Its author, Janan Ganesh spelled out that we must rearm and prepare for war. Mr. Ganesh knows just what to do in order to move the reluctant population along: "The question is whether the public agrees. .. Chronic discomfort isn't enough. An element of real fear has to come in..."
OK then, this means that we should expect many more fearsome stories about how evil the Russians are and what evil things they might do to us unless we all come together, go to war and kill them first. Another way of getting the unwilling rubes to go to war is to bring the war closer to home. If the fear of Russians seems abstract and too remote, we can prime their sense of priorities by triggering a war against more easily appreciated evil. For the people of Western Balkans, the Serbs could fit the bill.
Somehow, for some reason a new military alliance has been scotched up for this purpose. It’s a military alliance between Croatia, Kosovo, Albania and Bulgaria, all neatly surrounding Serbia from the west, the south and the east. Whose brainchild this alliance was and how and why it came to be is nothing short of dismaying for the people in Croatia who perceive no discernible reason why we should be in such an alliance.
But just as nobody asked the British people about their entangling alliances with France, Sweden, Poland, Ukraine, Israel, Turkey and Qatar, so nobody asked the Croats, nor the Bosnians, nor the Bulgarians. Instead, it has been decided for us that Western Balkans is the “inevitable frontline of new fracas between the West and Moscow,” and we must do our part. Some intense, cohering fear should help shake us from our stupor and get off our back ends.
If all this were submitted as a plot for a war film, I expect that it would probably get rejected as too far out to be credible: who could possibly be that evil? Well, by now we should know.
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