By Ben Aris, Substack, 5/8/26

How can Europe cover the $100bn the war in Ukraine costs? The EU just signed off on a €90bn loan for Ukraine agreed at a summit on December 19 to get it through the next two years. But the increasingly dysfunctional European economy doesn’t have the cash to make the loan. So, it borrowed it.

Russia is also spending extraordinary amounts – even more than the EU. Russia’s 2025 federal budget allocated about RUB13.5 trillion ($145bn) to “national defence”, according to the official budget. The difference is that Russia does have the money and is spending cash.

Collective debt

When the EU approved its €90bn Ukraine support loan, the announcement was framed in Brussels as a demonstration of resolve — the largest single financial commitment to the war effort since the invasion began. What received less attention was the structural oddity at its heart.

It’s a loan by Europe to Ukraine. but it is a strange loan as Ukraine doesn’t have to repay it until Russia pays Ukraine war reparations – which will never happen. Another oddity is that this is European collective debt, issued by the European Commission, backed by the EU’s own budget, not a loan by the member states.

The EU as a whole is on the hook for the bonds that will be issued to cover the loan and that is unusual. Unlike the US treasury bills that are issued at federal level, literally making the states united, the EU is not a federation and usually borrowing is a sovereign affair. In fact, it has only happened once before. To fund the post-Covid recovery spending, the EU created the so-called €750bn NextGenerationEU facility in 2020 (now €806.9bn) that has just expired – half of it distributed as grants and half as loans – that was also EU-level collective debt backed by the EU budget.

The first of their kind, the bonds made the European Commission one of the world’s largest supranational bond issuers, borrowing on capital markets. By 2026, the EU is expected to have issued around €800bn in long-term bonds and EU-Bills under the scheme, with little left over.

A key feature of the Ukraine loan is in the meantime the borrowing costs are paid by European taxpayers and are accumulating whether or not Ukraine wins. Repayment is scheduled to run until 2058. Interest costs mean the shared EU taxpayer bill is likely to be in the region of €600bn-€800bn over the full period to 2058, with the upper end possible if borrowing costs stay elevated. Spread over roughly 30 years, that would average about €20bn-€27bn a year across the EU budget.

Collective EU debt is a constitutional novelty. The EU is not, and has never claimed to be, a federated state. Big countries like Germany hate the idea, as Berlin doesn’t want to be responsible for debt collectively with the likes of poorer countries like Spain or Portugal. Borrowing money has been, and will remain, a sovereign responsibility for the foreseeable future.

When the US Treasury issues bonds, it does so as the sovereign issuer of the world’s reserve currency, backed by the full faith and credit of a 250-year-old federal government. When the EU issues bonds for Ukraine, it does so as a supranational body whose members remain fragmented sovereign states that are only loosely joined together by trade and selective regulatory authority. It is issuing collective debt on behalf of a bloc that has no unified fiscal authority, no common treasury and no power to tax its citizens directly.

Consequently, the NextGenerationEU collective debt was seen as something of a revolution, described at the time as a “Hamiltonian moment” for Europe, a reference to Alexander Hamilton’s consolidation of American state debts in 1790 that is widely credited with making the US a coherent economic union.

That makes the Ukraine €90bn loan a second revolution. Together, the two instruments have committed the EU to approximately €840bn in collective borrowing — a sum that, while still modest compared with the sovereign debt of individual large member states – represents a qualitative shift in what the EU is. Each bond issued for Ukraine is another small step toward the fiscal union that European federalists have sought for decades — and that northern European governments have consistently resisted.

The decision to adopt a second collective EU debt issue is dripping with irony. The original idea of issuing the Reparation Loan – basically confiscating Russia’s frozen $300bn and giving that to Ukraine as a “loan” – got shot down by Belgium as it remains illegal under the EU’s own rules. But it would have cost Europe nothing.

However, as IntelliNews reported, without more money, and quickly, Ukraine was facing a macroeconomic collapse as soon as April, so the EU went for the next best option: issue more EU collective debt. The third option on the table was even less appealing: each country issues bilateral debt to Ukraine and funds interest payments out of their own taxpayer-funded budgets.

The irony is those countries most resistant to European fiscal integration — including the Netherlands, Germany, the Nordic states — are amongst those that are Ukraine’s strongest supporters and were desperate to find the money to keep Kyiv in the war. They were the ones that pushed the idea of new EU collective debt through.

It’s all Euro debt now vs Russian cash

Nearly all of Ukraine’s funding is now debt. Under the Biden administration the burden was evenly distributed after the West started funding Ukraine in September 2022 to prevent another looming government financial collapse, with the EU always providing slightly more than the US. Former US President Joe Biden was generous, and the larger part of money sent to Kyiv was grants that don’t have to be repaid, whereas the EU has always provided more loans that do have to be repaid (eventually) than grants.

Team Europe overtook the United States as Ukraine’s largest total supporter in 2025, with EU member states providing €65.1bn in military equipment against the US contribution of €64.6bn. The latest €90bn loan brings the committed total to €283bn and counting.

Since US President Donald Trump came to power, the US has sent no money to Ukraine. At the same time, all the money coming from Brussels is now in the form of debt. As a result, Ukraine’s debt-to-GDP ratio has climbed steadily from the mid-30s pre-war and will breach 100% of GDP this year. Kyiv has already suspended payments on its outstanding Eurobonds as it can no longer afford to service them. How it will resume paying investors’ coupons post-war remains an unanswered question.

Russia, on the other hand, raises the bulk of its military spending in cash. Russia’s 2025 federal budget remains overwhelmingly financed by current tax revenue rather than borrowing.

Of the government’s planned RUB40.3 trillion ($433bn) in revenues for 2025, around 73% came from non-oil and gas taxes (including VAT) and duties, while a further 27% is derived from oil and gas income linked to energy exports. Together, these “cash” revenues account for nearly the entire operating budget.

By contrast, debt financing represents a much smaller share of overall funding. Planned domestic borrowing through OFZ bonds and other debt instruments totals roughly RUB5.4 trillion ($58bn), equivalent to about 13% of total federal resources available for spending in 2025, or around 4% of projected GDP.

The sanctions have cut Russia off from the international debt markets. It has no choice but to borrow by issuing its OFZ treasury bills – tapping its own banking sector’s circa RUB20 trillion ($225bn) pool of liquidity, or four-times more than the entire federal deficit. Additional funding from the rainy-day National Wealth Fund and privatisations contributes only a marginal share.

The fly in the ointment is that while Russia’s total debt is only about 18% of GDP – by far the lowest of any major country in the world – war pressures have pushed up yields dramatically making this borrowing very expensive and interest payments are already eating up about 9% of all government spending – about three times more than is normal. However, most of the big heavily indebted countries in Europe are in the same boat. The situation in the US, with over $39 trillion of debt, is even worse.

The difference in Russia’s debt profile and that of the US and Europe is enormous. In dollar terms Russia’s total external debt is roughly $290bn-$320bn. As of early 2026, Russia could pay off every penny of its debt tomorrow just from its international reserves should the war stop. The US and Europe will have to run decades-long austerity programmes and be blessed with strong growth to get their debt back down to, say, the Maastricht maximum recommended level of 60% of GDP.

Russia budget deficit headache

All this is not to say Russia is having an easy time paying for the war. It relies on cash and not debt to fund its war, but thanks to the enormous cost of the war it is still very short of money. (chart)

According to Finance Ministry data released this week, the deficit reached RUB4.6 trillion ($58.8bn) in the first quarter, already eclipsing the RUB3.8 trillion ($48.6bn) gap originally projected for the entire year, The Moscow Times reports.

The shortfall represents a staggering RUB2.6 trillion increase over the deficit recorded during the same period in 2025. CBR governor Elvia Nabiullina’s unorthodox experiment to slow economic growth to bring down persistently high inflation rates is causing a lot of pain as the economy is teetering on the cusp of a recession. That is hitting the tax take. Between January and March, total revenues fell by 8.2% to RUB8.3 trillion, while spending jumped 17% to RUB12.9 trillion.

The pain was felt most acutely in the energy sector, where oil and gas revenues plummeted 45% to RUB1.4 trillion. Non-oil and gas tax revenues offered a modest cushion, rising 7.1% to RUB6.9 trillion, but were insufficient to offset the drop in hydrocarbon income or the accelerating costs of the state’s domestic and military obligations.

War windfall

The war in Iran is about to bring some badly needed relief. Russia is currently running around a RUB1 trillion ($11bn) deficit each month, but the April number should be a lot better. Reuters calculated that Russia’s primary oil tax revenue was set to approximately double to RUB700bn ($9bn) in April as higher oil prices from the Iran war fed through with a one-month lag — which was expected to dramatically improve the monthly budget position.

In other words, the oil and gas tax take in April is now equivalent to the entire budget deficit and the entire oil and gas export revenues (not the same as the tax take) almost doubled to $19bn in April. Russia Inc is not back in profit, but the pressure is off for now.

The calculation of just how much the monthly balance in April will be is made more complicated by the front-loading of spending in January and February the Ministry of Finance (MinFin) introduced at the start of 2023 to smooth budget balance over the course of the year. The Ministry habitually prepays contracts early in the year to avoid letting them stack up until December when some 20% of the budget spending used to happen. By March the deficit had already shrunk to approximately RUB1.1 trillion and this front-loading effect will fade away in April further improving the Kremlin’s finances.

Taken together, the estimated April total revenue should be around RUB700bn from oil and gas and another RUB2.3. trillion of non-oil revenues, or a total of approximately RUB3 trillion ($33bn). Set against the average spending of RUB3.2-3.5 trillion a month, the deficit is expected to fall to around RUB200-500bn in April – a notable improvement, but still in the red.

Calculating the budget balance

Russia’s oil and gas revenues rebounded sharply in April as surging crude prices linked to conflict in the Middle East boosted export earnings to an estimated $19bn, up from $9.8bn the month before – but that is just a balance of payment number and not the taxes the government earns from the trade.

The Russian government typically collects approximately 60-65% of oil export revenues as taxes through the mineral extraction tax (MET) and related charges. The rest stays with the oil companies as profit. That means the government can expect somewhere around RUB700bn-RUB1 trillion in taxes from the March oil exports, depending on the exchange rate. So, the Reuters’ estimate looks about right, and maybe a little on the low side.

The March result – the first full month of the Iran war – is based on an average price for oil of around $77, but the cost has been rising since then. To go into profit, the Russian budget needs a total additional RUB950bn a month, or only RUB250bn more than the windfall in March. That means the average price of Russia’s Ural blend oil would have to rise to $105 per barrel to close the gap – so Russia is already close to breaking even, but not quite there yet.

Another complicating factor is the size of the discounts Russia offers on its oil over Brent. Since sanctions were imposed this discount can be as large as 30%, but since the Strait of Hormuz were closed at the start of March it has shrunk dramatically, and indeed, Urals has even earned a $20 premium to a barrel of Brent in the last two months.

Suddenly, oil is no longer a commodity; the price of a barrel now also depends on who you are selling it to and how you are going to get it there. On a single day the price of oil has varied between $90 and $174 depending on who the customer is and where it is coming from. The quoted price for a barrel of Urals has risen to over $120 in the last two months, but at the time of writing Urals was trading below $100 again at $98.5. Where the average settles at won’t be clear until the end of the month.

Fiscal claustrophobia

As individual countries, most of Europe is close to running out of fiscal space to expand borrowing to fund Ukraine. Ukraine itself has already found itself at the end of the fiscal space cul-de-sac and with growth slowing thanks to the same chronic labour shortage that Russia is suffering from, that space will only tighten further.

Russia on the other hand has, on paper, acres of fiscal space to continue the war, although the rising cost of borrowing is starting to constrain it as well. That is one of the reasons the spike in oil prices is so important as it creates more wiggle room. And the Kremlin also still has the option of raising taxes further. It remains to be seen how much more room the two-percentage point VAT hike in January will create, that alone accounts for 40% of the government’s income.

Europe’s constricted fiscal space is going to be an issue as funding Ukraine is not the only Russia-related call on its capital. Germany has committed €500bn in defence and infrastructure spending, crossing its constitutional debt brake in the process. Poland is spending 5% of GDP on defence — the highest in Nato. The Baltic states are targeting 5-6%. And European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called for €800bn of spending to modernise Europe’s armies as part of the ReArm plan and more recently the efforts to build a Euro Nato.

Then there is the Climate Crisis. Europe needs €584bn in grid investment alone by 2030 to support the energy transition — a figure that predates the rearmament surge and must now compete for fiscal space with defence spending. One top of that, Europe needs to increase its battery investment ten-fold to close the battery gap to complete the green energy transformation. And there is also Europe’s lack of competitive edge crisis. The Draghi Report recommended spending €800bn a year for four years to fix this problem – a call that has since got lost in the noise.

Eleven of the EU’s 27 member states are now running budget deficits above the bloc’s own 3% of GDP Excessive Deficit limit. France is at 5.1%. Romania at 7.9%. Germany has just crossed the threshold it spent a decade enforcing on southern Europe. The EU’s own stability rules — the Stability and Growth Pact — are being strained by the fiscal demands of a war it did not plan for and cannot easily exit.

The IMF stresses that Ukraine’s fiscal and external financing needs are large and that risks are “exceptionally high” due to the duration and intensity of the war. Each additional year of conflict adds to the EU’s borrowed liabilities without adding to its productive capacity.

By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter, 5/13/26

On behalf of President Donald Trump, the Justice Department issued grand jury subpoenas that targeted Wall Street Journal reporters involved in covering the war against Iran. 

“The government’s subpoenas to The Wall Street Journal and our reporters represent an attack on constitutionally protected newsgathering. We will vigorously oppose this effort to stifle and intimidate essential reporting,” stated Ashok Sinha, the chief communications officer for Dow Jones, the Journal’s publisher.

According to the Journal, the subpoenas stemmed from a February 23 article that reported that “Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and others at the Pentagon warned the president about the risks of an extended military campaign against Iran. Other news outlets, including Axios and the Washington Post, published similar stories that day. Trump launched the war five days later, on Feb. 28.”

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Unnamed administration officials “familiar with the matter” told the Journal that Trump complained to Attorney General Todd Blanche about “media leaks.” Blanche subsequently sought subpoenas “targeting the records of reporters who have worked on sensitive national security stories, one official said.”

The Journal additionally reported, “In one meeting, Trump passed a stack of news articles he and other senior officials thought threatened national security to Blanche with a sticky note on it that said ‘treason,’ another administration official said.”

“The government’s investigation of The Wall Street Journal has nothing to do with ‘national security,’” Freedom of the Press Foundation advocacy director Seth Stern declared. “It’s an outrageous attempt to silence sources, intimidate journalists, and bury the truth about President Trump’s unpopular decision to launch a war even his own generals warned against.”

Stern described the subpoenas as a “direct threat to the public’s right to know,” and added, “Since the Department of Justice has abandoned the First Amendment, it’s up to the courts to restrain the government’s attempts to crush investigative journalism.”

“This isn’t a leak investigation—it’s an attempt to shut down reporting,” said Committee to Protect Journalists CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “Conflating journalism with treason is dangerous and anti-democratic. We call on the Justice Department to withdraw these subpoenas now.” 

Back in 2025, Attorney General Pam Bondi revised the Justice Department’s policy for subpoenaing members of the press and encouraged the pursuit of reporters, editors, news producers, and other media staff in leak investigations. 

Theodore Boutrous, Jr., who represents the Times in its lawsuit against the Pentagon’s media restrictions, contended that the Trump administration is using grand jury subpoenas to “invade directly into the reporter’s relationship with sources and the newsgathering process, which is meant to allow the American people to get information about the government.” 

Previously, the Washington Post received a grand jury subpoena that was linked to the Espionage Act prosecution against Aurelio Perez-Lugones, who is accused of disclosing information about U.S. military operations against Venezuela. (This is the same case where FBI agents raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson and seized her electronics.) 

Tim Richardson, who is the journalism and disinformation program director at PEN America, stated, “Even for an administration that brands protest as lawlessness and dissent as disloyalty, it is still alarming to see standard reporting practices framed as ‘treason.’”

“As Americans question a war now in its tenth week, the government is using a leak investigation to intimidate reporters in the hopes of shielding wartime decision-making from the public,” Richardson added. 

After the Iranian military shot down a United States military aircraft over Iran, the Pentagon searched for two crew members. An “administration official” told the Journal that the “stack of news articles Trump provided the acting attorney general was about those rescue operations.” 

On April 3, Trump showed his anger at coverage of the rescue operations, particularly how an unnamed outlet had reported that one airman was safe but the other airman had not been rescued yet. “We’re going to go to the media company that released it, and we’re going to say national security, give it up or go to jail.”

The Trump administration has waged a campaign against the news media that discourages scrutiny of not only the war against Iran but all U.S. military operations.

On May 12, Trump posted the following on his social media platform Truth Social, “When the Fake News says that the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us, it’s virtual TREASON in that it is such a false, and even preposterous, statement. They are aiding and abetting the enemy!”

“All it does is give Iran false hope when none should exist. These are American cowards that are rooting against our Country,” Trump added. The same day the New York Times reported that Iran still has “significant missile capabilities” despite claims to the contrary by Trump officials.

In mid-March, Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth scolded the press for supposedly showing “mercy” to U.S. “enemies.” He stressed that news media should rewrite headlines to make them more suitable to the Trump administration. 

“For example, a banner or a headline: “Mideast war intensifies,” splashing on the screen the last couple of days, alongside visuals of civilian or energy targets that Iran has hit, because that’s what they do,” Hegseth said. “ What should the banner read instead?”

“How about, ‘Iran increasingly desperate,’ because they are. They know it and so do you, if it can be admitted,” Hegseth added. A few weeks later, it was the Trump administration that reached out to Pakistan to broker a ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran.

Plus, prior to the war on Iran, Hegseth and the Pentagon ramped up hostility toward the press by adopting unconstitutional media restrictions that effectively allowed for viewpoint-based discrimination against reporters. 

Judge Paul Friedman stated when the court ruled against the policy, “[I]n light of the country’s recent incursion into Venezuela and its ongoing war with Iran, it is more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing. So that the public can support government policies, if it wants to support them; protest, if it wants to protest; and decide based on full, complete, and open information who they are going to vote for in the next election.”

By Patrick Lawrence and Christian Muller, The Floutist, 4/29/26

29 APRIL—’Arte, ‘the’ Franco–German television channel, broadcast a documentary earlier this month titled L’Europe dans la main de Poutine? “Europe in Putin’s grip?” opens with a scene in the Kremlin on 18 March 2014, when President Putin announced the formal annexation of Crimea after a referendum concluded two days earlier. This film is available simultaneously with a two-part doc’y entitled “Putin’s Secret Weapons,” which purports to review the Russian Federation’s “state-directed terror,” its routine theft of Western technology, its “opaque network of spies,” its stockpiles of hypersonic missiles, and so on. “The country could strike Europe within minutes,” the film advises viewers.

Russophobic paranoia of this sort is nothing new, of course. You can go back to Czarist Russia’s 19^th century modernizations and find evidence of it, and then on to the British defeat in Crimea (1853–56), the Red Scare that followed the Bolshevik Revolution, the second Red Scare of the Cold War decades. I trace the current wave to Putin’s 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, where he assailed the United States’ pretensions to global preeminence. Then came the cynically manipulated Russophobia Donald Trump provoked when, as he rose to political prominence in 2016, he advocated a new détente with Moscow.

What we have seen since the Biden regime intentionally provoked Russia’s February 2022 intervention in Ukraine ranks with any of these previous occasions as measured by the fear-mongering, the war-mongering, and the manufactured delusions that are now woven into daily life, as the just-noted documentaries suggest. This is especially evident in Europe, where unimaginative “centrists”—incompetent to a one, in my view—have been as deer in headlights since Trump II stepped back from Washington’s profligate support of the bottomlessly corrupt regime in Kiev during the Biden years.

French, Belgian, and British troops are just now completing three-months of “war-gaming” in the field—ground forces, armored vehicles, paratroops, underwater divers—in the most extensive such exercises since the Cold War. The three Baltic states are provocatively permitting the Ukrainians to launch drone attacks from their territory into northern Russia. Johann Wadephul has made the certainty of a Russian attack within five years—four at this point—a standard warning in his public pronouncements since Chancellor Merz named him foreign minister last year. Berlin and Paris are in talks to extend France’s nuclear deterrent to the rest of Europe. With the Merz regime in the lead, the Continent has begun dismantling its once-admirable welfare systems in favor of a cross-border military-industrial complex of its own.

Anyone paying attention can discern without much effort that the threat of “Russian aggression” in Europe is a construction with no basis whatsoever in fact. Christian Müller, a Swiss journalist with a long record as an editor and commentator, has chosen this moment to push this reality into the faces of those—including every “centrist” now in power across Europe—who cynically conjure a threat from the East that simply does not exist.

Müller now publishes and edits Global Bridge, an online journal with many distinguished contributors. (Distinguished or otherwise, I am among them.) This week he republished a piece that first appeared in 2021. It is based on a RAND Corporation study that had recently appeared under the title Russia’s Military Interventions: Patterns, Drivers, and Signposts. The full, 186–page research report is here. It is replete with graphs and tables that put Moscow’s security policies in an historical context that goes back to 1946, when the Soviets were rebuilding after the extensive sacrifices the defeat of the Reich required of them. It analyzes all the interventions with which readers may be familiar: There is Afghanistan in the 1980s, Georgia in 2008, Syria in 2015. (The Ukraine intervention, of course, was still to come.)

RAND was as Cold War-ish as any think tank serving the U.S. government was bound to be during those decades, and this makes its conclusions here all the weightier. The Russians are not coming, to turn the title of the old Alan Arkin comedy upside down. They pose no military threat either to Europe or the United States and do not intend to do so. As history shows, it is essentially reactive and acts defensively. We have had this from RAND for six years.

In the RAND report’s language:

Russia engaged in combat only when it felt the necessity to respond to a development on the ground that posed a pressing threat. Moscow sought to achieve its objectives using coercive measures short of military intervention: It undertook combat missions, judging from the two case studies, only when it felt forced by circumstances…. In short, although Russia generally seems more reactive in its decision-making about combat interventions unless its vital interests are directly threatened, Moscow might decide to be proactive in special circumstances (particularly relating to events in its neighborhood).

Given the mounting intensity of the purposely, dangerously cultivated Russophobia now spreading across Europe, Christian Müller could scarcely have chosen a more propitious moment to call our attention once again to the RAND study. Not only does the research discredit all suggestions of “Russian aggression.” The analysis also explodes the notion of “Putin’s Russia”—an egregious trope in the press coverage for many years now—as sheer (please excuse us) bullshit.

The Floutist is pleased to join Global Bridge in republishing this important piece. We are also pleased to feature the acute observations of Paul Robinson, a noted Russianist at the University of Ottawa. The piece first appeared on 6 October 2021—three months before Moscow sent draft treaties to Washington and NATO headquarters in Brussels as the proposed basis of negotiations, four months before Russian forces entered Ukraine on precisely the basis the RAND report describes.

—P. L.

■

Christian Müller.

The RAND Corporation, a world-renowned U.S. research and consulting firm, boasts 1,800 employees in more than 50 countries, who collectively conduct research and communicate in more than 75 languages, and of whom over a thousand—more than half—hold doctorates or even multiple doctorates. RAND is therefore not simply one of countless so-called think tanks. And what is particularly important to note: RAND’s largest clients are the U.S. State Department and the U.S. military: the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. These government clients account for more than half of all RAND revenue.

RAND, this truly gigantic research and consulting firm, has now examined the military behavior of the Soviet Union and Russia since World War II, and especially since the end of the Cold War in 1991. The result is remarkable. RAND demonstrates that Russia’s military interventions are now marginal compared with those of the Soviet Union, and, above all, that these interventions were always linked to an imminent loss and never aimed at gaining additional territory or influence—that is, they were always used to defend the status quo.

RAND’s comparison between the Soviet Union and Russia: The military operations of present-day Russia (red) are no longer comparable to those of the Soviet Union before 1991 (blue).

Paul Robinson, a professor at the University of Ottawa specializing in geopolitical relations and well-known in Canada and the U.S., has closely studied the 186-page RAND report on the Russian military and reviewed and commented on its content on his web portal, Irrussianality. A few of his findings are quoted below as a summary:

A few years ago, I discussed the potential relevance of prospect theory to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Prospect theory states that people are more willing to take risks to avoid loss than to gain. This corresponds to the well-known psychological tendency toward loss aversion. Losing something bothers us much more than not gaining something. In the world of international relations, this means that states are more likely to use military force when threatened with loss than when seeking to acquire something they do not yet possess. It is therefore interesting to see this confirmed in a new study by the RAND Corporation entitled Russia’s Military Interventions: Patterns, Drivers, and Signposts, which analyzes instances of Russian military intervention in the post–Soviet era. The conclusion: One of the main motivations is the prevention of loss.

Elsewhere in Robinson’s work: “In any case, according to the study, it is wrong to see Putin as primarily responsible for Russian military interventions.”

As quoted by Robinson from the RAND study:

If we examine all of Russia’s interventions that meet the threshold described in this report, it becomes clear that most took place before (!) Putin came to power…. Most importantly, there is now a broad consensus among Russian elites on foreign policy issues. There is little firsthand evidence to suggest that Putin’s personal preferences are a major driving force behind Russia’s interventions.

Paul Robinson:

Russia intervenes when it feels threatened by a loss of status, stability, or security in its immediate neighborhood. It does not intervene to pursue “aggressive” or “imperialist” goals or to distract from domestic problems. And it is not a question of Vladimir Putin. Russia will have the same interests and preferences regardless of who is in power.

And once again, Paul Robinson:

In short, all claims that Russia wants to export its authoritarian ideology, destabilize democracy, support the “Putin regime,” or that Russia’s military interventions are driven solely by Putin’s aggressive personality are false.

This graphic from the RAND study shows that military interventions were even more numerous during the time of Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999) than since under Vladimir Putin’s presidency. (As a reminder, Yeltsin’s second term was only possible thanks to financial support from the US under Bill Clinton .)

Paul Robinson’s final paragraph:

The RAND report ends with a short series of recommendations for U.S. policy. Primarily, the U.S. should avoid putting Moscow in a position where it feels it is about to suffer a major loss in its near abroad. As a think tank report, this is a remarkably sober and sensible recommendation,… which I don’t have much to criticize. Essentially, it boils down to not cornering the bear. In this case, it’s clear. The RAND report contradicts the currently prevailing narrative that Russia is bent on aggression and must be reined in by any means necessary, including incursions into its near abroad. If this RAND report is correct, then the [current NATO incursion to Russia’s borders] is just about the worst thing you can do. But I doubt anyone is listening.

Is nobody listening?

Anyone closely observing current events in the EU, and especially in Germany, must conclude that it seems no one among current or future top politicians is actually listening…. A new project has just been announced: The E.U. intends to provide additional training for Ukrainian officers. Training for military deployment against which adversary? Against Russia, of course. To paraphrase Paul Robinson: Everyone—the U.S., NATO, the E.U., and Germany—is trying to corner the Russian bear, knowing that this is precisely when it will begin to fight back. And this cornering is always justified by the same argument: Russia is aggressive, Putin is an aggressor.

Let’s see if at least RAND’s best clients, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. military, read RAND’s latest comprehensive study—and perhaps even take it to heart.

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Euronews, 5/15/26

No tribunal for Netanyahu? – Natylie

Thirty-six countries, mainly from Europe, have signed up to a special tribunal to prosecute Russian President Vladimir Putin for the crime of aggression against Ukraine, which will be headquartered in the Dutch city of The Hague.

The joint pledge was formalised on Friday during the annual meeting of foreign affairs ministers of the Council of Europe, a human rights organisation that has taken the lead in addressing the jurisdictional gap left by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Ministers endorsed a resolution laying down the structure and functions of the management committee that will oversee the tribunal. Among its tasks, the committee will approve the annual budget, adopt internal rules and elect judges and prosecutors. The countries commit to respecting the independence of the judicial proceedings.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, who took part in the ceremony, hailed the moment as “the point of no return” in the years-long search for accountability.

“The Special Tribunal becomes a legal reality. Very few believed this day would come. But it did,” Sybiha said on social media, evoking the spirit of the precedent-setting Nuremberg trials that brought to trial the surviving leaders of Nazi Germany.

“Putin always wanted to go down in history. And this tribunal will help him achieve this. He will go down in history. As a criminal,” he added.

Friday’s resolution was signed by Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Republic of Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

Australia and Costa Rica were the only non-European signatories.

The European Union also endorsed the initiative, even if four of its member states, Bulgaria, Hungary, Malta and Slovakia, did not add their names to Friday’s resolution.

The list remains open for other countries, European and otherwise, to join.

Alain Berset, the Council of Europe’s secretary general, urged participants to complete their legislative procedures and allocate the necessary funding to ensure the tribunal can start working as soon as possible. The EU has already committed €10 million.

The lack of US engagement under President Donald Trump has previously raised concerns about budgetary shortfalls. Trump’s push for a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia has also cast doubt over the tribunal’s core purpose: a controversial 28-point draft last year floated the idea of blanket amnesty for war crimes.

“The time for Russia to be held to account for its aggression is fast approaching. The path ahead of us is one of justice, and justice must prevail,” Berset said at the meeting.

The tribunal will be complemented by the Register of Damages, which is collecting claims submitted by victims of Russia’s aggression, and the International Claims Commission, which will review those claims and decide the appropriate payment.

Establishing a special tribunal has been a pressing priority for Ukraine and its allies since the Kremlin ordered the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The initiative was deemed necessary because the ICC can prosecute the crime of aggression only when it is attributed to a state party. Russia is not a signatory to the Rome Statute and can use its veto at the UN Security Council to block any changes.

Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, which apply to individuals who commit the atrocities, the crime of aggression is a leadership crime that falls on the people who are ultimately in charge of controlling the aggressor state.

In practice, this covers the so-called “troika” – the president, the prime minister and the foreign minister – together with high-ranking military commanders who have supervised the assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Putin, the mastermind behind the invasion and the prime promoter of its revisionist narrative, is the most wanted target. But he is unlikely to be judged any time soon.

Crucially, the “troika” will remain immune to trials in absentia – meaning without the defendant’s physical presence – as long as they remain in office. The prosecutor might still file an indictment against Putin and his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, but the chamber will keep the proceedings suspended until the accused leave their posts.

By contrast, trials in absentia can be conducted against those outside the troika while they are still in office, such as Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces; Sergey Kobylash, the commander of the Russian Air Force; and Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of the Security Council. Those who are sentenced in this manner will have the right to a re-trial if they ever appear in person.

Top-ranking officers from Belarus and North Korea, two countries that have directly assisted in Russia’s war, might also be prosecuted. Defendants are expected to be judged in groups, rather than one by one, except for Putin.

The tribunal will have the power to impose strong penalties on those found guilty, including life imprisonment, confiscation of personal properties and monetary fines, which will be channelled into the compensation fund for victims.

As most, if not all, trials will be carried out in absentia, the budget will focus on IT tools and save the expenses related to building and maintaining prisons. The exact amount will be decided between the Council of Europe and the Dutch government.

“There will be no just and lasting peace in Ukraine without accountability for Russia and the perpetrators of the horrific crimes committed against the people of Ukraine,” High Representative Kaja Kallas said in a statement.

“Russia chose to attack and invade a sovereign country, kill its people, deport Ukrainian children and steal Ukrainian land. Russia must face justice and pay for what it has done.”

***

Washington must act to defuse the Baltic powder keg

By Anatol Lieven, Responsible Statecraft, 5/20/26

The Baltic States and the neighboring Russian exclave of Kaliningrad are widely regarded as the most dangerous potential flashpoint for a direct war between NATO and Russia; partly for genuine strategic reasons, and partly because of the intense paranoia at work on both sides.

The U.S. administration needs to engage urgently and intensively to reduce tension in the region.

This tension has spiraled upwards in recent days as a result of Ukrainian drones crossing the Baltic States on their way to attack targets in western Russia. The Ukrainian and Baltic governments have claimed that they were diverted by Russian electronic jamming; but how far this is true is uncertain. It seems at least as likely that, in a number of cases, Ukraine was using safe Latvian and Estonian airspace to get its drones as close as possible to St. Petersburg before entering Russian airspace and encountering Russian air defenses. The drone threat is becoming an acute issue for Russia as Ukrainian drones inflict increasing damage to Russian energy infrastructure.

The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has now issued a harsh warning to the Baltic States. It claims (without providing evidence) that Baltic governments themselves provided “air corridors” for drones from Ukraine, that they are planning to allow the Ukrainians to launch drones from their territory, and that Ukrainian military drone operators are already stationed in Latvia.

The SVR statement ends on an extremely menacing note:

“[I]t would be useful to recall that the coordinates of the decision-making centers in Latvia are well known…The country’s membership of NATO will not protect the accomplices of terrorists from a just retribution.”

Last week, the drones issue forced the resignation of Latvian Prime Minister Evika Silina. A Ukrainian drone (also allegedly misdirected by Russian electronic jamming) crashed into a Latvian oil storage facility. Her government was accused of failing adequately to strengthen Latvian air defenses. She had earlier dismissed her defense minister over this.

NATO, and the Estonian government, finally do appear to be taking this issue seriously. On Tuesday, a Romanian fighter jet based in Lithuania shot down a Ukrainian drone over Estonian territory, after it had previously crossed Latvia. It was high time that NATO and the Baltic governments took action against Ukrainian drones in NATO airspace, given the prospect of a NATO-Russia war if Russia actually fires missiles at targets in Latvia — something for which Russian nationalist hardliners have been baying.

Unfortunately, other Baltic officials seem determined to ratchet up tension, irrespective of the risks to their countries. On Monday, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kestutis Budrys told the Swiss newspaper Die Neue Zuercher Zeitung, “We have to show the Russians that we are capable of penetrating the small fortress that they have built in Kaliningrad…NATO has the capability if necessary to raze Russian air defenses and missile bases there to the ground.”

Budrys said that it is necessary for NATO to demonstrate this in order to deter a Russian attack on the Baltic states that he claimed would spread to the whole of Europe. Indeed, he considers such an attack virtually inevitable, stating that Lithuania has resigned itself to the possibility of being attacked by Russia soon.

Neither Budrys nor the Western media that have reported his statement appears to have noticed the contradiction between simultaneously pointing (correctly) to the extreme military vulnerability of Kaliningrad to NATO attack and claiming Russian plans to attack the Baltic States and start a war with NATO.

And indeed, the military balance in the Baltic demonstrates this very clearly. According to Western estimates cited by the International Crisis Group, while Kaliningrad is an important base for Russian missile forces, it only had 20,000 ground troops there before the invasion of Ukraine, and that number has since shrunk drastically. Including their rapidly mobilizable reserves, the three Baltic states have 136,000 troops, the Poles (who would certainly intervene) some 550,000, and an additional 22,000 troops from other NATO countries are now stationed in the Baltic states.

And yet it is Russia that is supposed to be threatening an invasion? Seriously? In fact, as Russian experts have told me, it is Russia that fears a NATO attack, or an armed crisis leading to a blockade of Kaliningrad, which can be cut off by NATO both by land and sea. With its army tied down in Ukraine, Russia has no troops available to break such a blockade, and therefore, I was told, in this scenario, Russia would have to resort immediately to the threat of nuclear weapons, followed by their actual use if NATO refused to back down. In the case of Kaliningrad, Baltic paranoia is therefore matched by that of the Russians.

Unfortunately, the paranoia of the Balts is being stoked by Western officials and soldiers who also allege, without evidence, that Russia will be both willing and able to launch an attack on NATO within the next few years. This completely ignores the lessons of the war in Ukraine: both the enormous damage done to the Russian armed forces, and the transformation of the battlefield by drones and satellite intelligence. In Ukraine, this has nullified Russia’s advantage in numbers and brought the Russian advance to a standstill. And yet Russia is going to repeat this experience on a vastly larger and more dangerous scale by invading NATO? Seriously?

The threat in the Baltics is not of a deliberate Russian invasion, but of escalation to war stemming from a spiral of retaliation. The Ukrainians appear to have made the move in this spiral by directing drones at Russia over Baltic territory. It is essential that Russia not take the next step by launching its own missiles at targets in the Baltic states.

The U.S. administration should act urgently to warn the Russians against such an attack on NATO members, but also to tell the Balts to moderate their language. Above all, it should tell the Ukrainians clearly and categorically that the U.S. has no desire to be dragged into war with Russia, and that if Ukraine exploits NATO airspace to attack Russia, this will mean the end of U.S. assistance to Kyiv, especially in the form of the intelligence sharing that is crucial to Ukrainian targeting.

It is, of course, quite possible that trying to end Washington’s help with targeting is part of the point of Moscow’s threats, and that Russian intelligence knows perfectly well that the Latvian government has no plan to take such a horribly reckless step as to allow Ukraine to wage war from its soil. The Russian government may also be using this alleged threat to divert Russian public attention from its own failure to prevent increasingly damaging Ukrainian drone attacks, as well as from the stalemate on the ground in Ukraine.

However, neither Russia nor the Baltic states are entirely rational in their attitude to Baltic security, and it would be very foolish for Washington to ignore the dangers of this situation. This latest crisis should provide the Trump administration a strong impetus for re-engaging strongly with the Ukraine peace settlement and putting an early end to a conflict that could pose a mortal threat to both Europe and the United States.

By Brian McDonald, Substack, 5/6/26

Brian McDonald is an Irish journalist based in Russia for many years.

Everyone thinks they understand the Budapest Memorandum. Almost no one actually does.

In the manner of things that get loudly misremembered in the trenches of modern discourse, the documents have acquired the aura of a sacred covenant. They are now promoted as a solemn, signed promise by the United States and the United Kingdom to leap to Ukraine’s defence, guns blazing, should its borders ever be crossed. However, that was never the intention and if we are to speak of memory, we might as well begin with the facts.

Back in 1991, when the Soviet Union folded like a tired accordion, three newly independent states awoke to find themselves the accidental custodians of Moscow’s nuclear warheads: Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. This greatly worried officials in London and Washington, who feared the nuclear materials might leak onto the black market. Thus, a scheme called the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program, often called the Nunn-Lugar program, was launched to ensure they were handed over to Russia.

Nevertheless, it’s important to remember these were warheads without a trigger, because the launch codes remained in Moscow. The rockets could no more be fired from Kiev or Minsk than from Kansas or Manchester.

To give it’s full title, The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances in connection with the Republic of Belarus’/Republic of Kazakhstan’s/Ukraine’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, actually three documents signed individually in December 1994, was never conceived as a mutual defence pact or some sort of NATO-lite.



Rather, it was an exchange: these three post-Soviet states would join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as non-nuclear nations. In return, the US, UK, and Russia would respect their independence and existing borders, and promise not to attack them either directly or by hybrid means, such as economic coercion.

In addition the three countries received substantial economic aid from both Moscow and Washington for agreeing to the terms. In 1994 alone, the US sent Ukraine over $600 million in cash payments, while Russia provided fuel rods for nuclear plants and forgave all outstanding oil and gas debts.

The key word in the memorandum was respect and the signatories offered political assurances rather than legally binding security guarantees. There were no enforcement clauses, no compensation protocols, no automatic sanctions mechanism and certainly no obligation for military intervention.

This point matters because nearly every time a public figure invokes the Budapest Memorandum, be it a billionaire with a Twitter account or a former diplomat with a selective memory, they fail to mention these key facts.



By 2006, the United States and Britain had already sanctioned Belarus in response to its elections; a move that, strictly speaking, ran contrary to Article 3 of the memorandum, which called for non-interference in economic affairs. Washington later admitted in 2013 that the document wasn’t legally binding, after another round of penalties were imposed on Minsk.

What’s more there’s another important detail which gets swept under the carpet. Back in the early 1990s, when the Soviet state was being smashed into 15 pieces, Moscow did something no accountant would recommend when it gathered up every ruble of the USSR’s foreign debt and agreed to carry it.



The consequences were brutal and the load nearly crippled the new federation. By the summer of ’98, with oil in the doldrums and the bond traders circling, Russia defaulted. While Kiev, Minsk and Almaty started life debt-free, Moscow, having traded the launch codes for a mountain of invoices, soon found itself receiving lectures about economic virtue from the same capitals that had watched it sink.

The reality is nobody can claim singular virtue here because the Budapest deal was handled casually by every signatory long before tanks or guns ever entered the conversation. Each party simply saw in it what suited them, and discarded the rest.

This definitely isn’t to diminish Ukraine or hold Russia as beyond reproach and we’re certainly not here to litigate the rights and wrongs since 2014. But it’s important to realize that the Memorandum was just an arrangement struck in the afterglow of the Soviet collapse and an understanding among powers eager to close one chapter, as swiftly as possible, and get on with writing the next.

Over time, it has acquired a meaning far larger than the text itself ever contained. Meanwhile, misunderstanding and misrepresentation have done the rest.

In the end, it’s probably fitting that the Budapest Memorandum is so widely misunderstood, given it was basically a strange Cold War coda born of ambiguity and upheld only so long as it was convenient. That, in itself, gives it a special kind of legacy.