The West’s Russophobia endangers us all

Britain’s rightwing Daily Mail, September 3 2026

Let’s leave aside the vanishingly small prospect of Kemi Badenoch or other Conservative leader forming a future UK government. The real venom in this story from the agenda-setting Mail lies in its opening sentence. The Mail knows as well as I do that the natural home of Britain’s Right has shifted to Mr Farage’s Reform but that’s not the point. Ms Badenoch may be an irrelevance but prepping Western publics for war – up to and including the thermonuclear kind, and in any event to be paid for by more neoliberal ‘austerity’ missold as belt tightened necessity – is not.

Not the sole or most decisive rebuttal of Russophobic warmongering; simply the most graphic.

Papers like the Mail, and in slightly more nuanced form our liberal media, may not tell us what to think but do tell us what to think about. Which by happy coincidence is what best serves the interests of Wall Street while the mediocrities who run Europe were as young men and women wooed, flattered and groomed via US Leaders of Tomorrow programs into the internalising of Atlanticist worldviews ¹ which prioritise Washington’s ever more reckless efforts to thwart the rise of multipolarity over the interests of the peoples and economies they nominally serve.

For instance by depriving Europe of cheap Russian energy …

Polish MEP Radek Sikorski ² is married to the US born Russophobe and Atlanticist, Anne Applebaum

… to boost US exports of LNG at thrice the price while driving German manufacturers, formerly Europe’s powerhouse, into liquidation or relocation in the USA.

And by talk of a Russian ‘threat’ our leaders and media don’t set out in detail – for the good reason that, insofar as such a threat even exists, it arises from decades of provocation detailed on this site, most fully in this post – whose bogeyman invocation serves a sociopathic US elite bent on slowing or even reversing its waning global hegemony

And to hell with the consequences.

Witness the war against Iran. Ditto the collusion in genocide on the Palestinian people, ³ and its attendant criminalising of protest.

Over to Craig Murray, September 3 2026. A man of principle, this former Ambassador sacked by Tony Blair ⁴ and later jailed by Scotland’s warped judiciary doesn’t identify the Atlanticist links I do, which is oddly remiss of him, but speaks truth nonetheless:

Nonsense Drones and Novichok

Europe urgently needs to re-establish access to Russian oil and gas. Gas prices are high – as all UK energy consumers know – and German gas storage is at a record low for September. Gulf production is degraded, supplies are cut off and its long-term strategic stability undermined.

German manufacturing already suffered a 9.5% production loss from 2022 to 2026 following the Russian gas shutdown, with the loss in energy-intensive manufacturing (inc petrochemicals, chemicals, metals, glass/ceramics/stone, paper, mineral oil etc.) at 15.2%.

Western Europe can regain access to Russian hydrocarbons either by accepting a negotiated peace in Ukraine, or by attempting regime change in Russia. The political class in Europe have evidently decided to go all out for regime change.

It would of course be much easier, and much safer, to settle the Ukrainian conflict. We can identify the following reasons the European political “elite” is not taking that path:

• • Loss of face and political capital by in situ leaders who have gone all in for conflict with Russia – von der Leyen, Kallas, Merz, Rutte, Stubb etc …

Here’s where Craig Murray misses the most important truth of all. Those he names here – to which we can add Sunak, Starmer, Macron, Baerbock and so many others – do the bidding, for reasons set out here, of Washington and Wall Street …

• • Generational family and national hatred of Russia by those wanting to reverse World War II in Eastern Europe – von der Leyen, Kallas, Merz, Stubb etc
  • Deep common interests between the political personnel and the military-industrial complex

… while here, in these three bullet points, Craig reveals the limitations of his idealist worldview. For all his principled and courageous stances on Islam Karimov, Julian Assange, Alex Salmond and much besides, he locates the Armageddon bound drivers of Russophobia in subjectivism. Not that I deny the psychological realities he sets out. (Indeed, one such, the willingness of the West’s governments to advance Washington/Wall Street agendas at the expense of their own citizens and economies, is studied here.) But those psychological realities are means not ends, catalysts not causes. I see as dangerously misleading liberalism’s propensity to prioritise ideas over material factors as the engines of history.

Note that none of these motives has anything to do with the welfare of their people, and still less “democracy” … 

Agreed.

… I find it very hard to think of any occasion when a drive towards war had such little foundation.

Not agreed. I see firm foundation in Washington’s desire to shore up its fading hegemony, and the licence to global appropriation it conferred, ⁵ by tying Russia down to allow greater focus on its main adversary, China, while having Europe bear the costs of doing so.

Consider this. The United Kingdom, like many Western countries, is openly supplying the Ukraine with long-range missiles, manufacturing plans for long-range missiles, and personnel to service them, in the full knowledge that Ukraine is using those missiles in an attempt to devastate civilian infrastructure deep within Russia, killing many Russian civilians in the process.

Yet we are repeatedly told by both politicians and the media that Russia is the threat to the UK, when very plainly it is the opposite which is the truth. Until this year, Russia had in three hundred years of history never had any plans to invade or occupy the UK – while the UK invaded Russia in 1854 and 1917. I presume the Russians are currently working on defensive plans against the UK, given the disgraceful warmongering of our government.

The notion that the boundaries of a Ukrainian state, which had never existed in history until 1991, are so sacrosanct they cannot be adjusted to avoid World War III, is mad. They were only ever internal Soviet boundaries. Ukrainian is a new nationality, but the Ukrainians are entitled to a state if they wish one. What they are not entitled to do is insist on the old Soviet boundary, when they have:

• • closed Russian schools, universities, bookshops, theatres, cinemas, libraries, kindergartens, banks and churches
  • banned the Socialist Party, Communist Party, Left Party, eleven other parties and eight trade unions
  • continued the systematic glorification of Nazi and genocidal figures from Ukraine’s past – alienating Poland in the process.

The notion that nuclear war should be fought over who is Mayor of Lugansk has so little public support that Russophobia is being assiduously stoked by Western governments and the EU itself …

You can read the full piece here, though it’ll cost you. Craig operates a paywall.

* * *

1. For the psycho-cultural mechanisms by which the mindsets of Europe’s leaders, and those of the West at large, are captured by US elites see Road to WW3, Part 3.
2. Sikorski let the cat out of the bag with his same day applause for the act of ecocide and economic terrorism which sabotaged Nordstream. He swiftly removed his tweet once it became clear Washington would deny authorship or foreknowledge – despite both Joe Biden and Victoria Nuland having publicly promised the pipeline’s destruction.
3. Let’s stop being distracted by the TweedleRed/TweedleBlue pantomime through which corporate oligarchy masquerades as democracy. Let’s focus less on the surface noise of that pantomime, more on what the USA actually does in the world. That’s a radical ask, I know, given that already noted ability of agenda-setting corporate media to tell us what to think about in ways that serve power more by what they omit than what they tell us. But when applied to America’s behaviour in the Middle East, such a shift from rhetoric to actuality reveals a close alignment of Greater (Biblical) Israel expansionism with decades of US foreign policy, regardless of which figurehead sits in the Oval Office.

   

   That continuity, spanning every administration since Clinton’s to belie the quaint notion that Elm Street America has any say in its government’s behaviour, is the theme of my four post series on US Neocons & Israel’s far Right.

4. As I wrote seven years ago:

   In the early noughties [Craig Murray] was Tony Blair’s man in Tashkent, capital of the former Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan. When Murray found that its boss, Islam Karimov, had the delightful habit, when taking time out from topping up the wealth of his already obscenely rich family, of boiling opponents in oil, he went public.

   Bit awkward, that. For Tony I mean. Karimov was allowing ‘coalition’ fighter jets to use Uzbek air bases for their unlawful strikes on Iraq.

   Murray had to go.

5. Not for nothing did Frances’s Valery Giscard d’Estaing decry the dollar decoupled from gold, while still the world’s reserve currency as per Bretton Woods 1944, as “America’s exorbitant privilege”. This from my August 16 post, The end of capitalism:

   The significance of a fiat dollar in the hands of the world’s most powerful empire ever – yet for all that, one flailing in a toxic decline of which men like Trump are symptoms not causes – is one I return to over and over on this site. With creditors obliged to hold trade surpluses in dollars or Treasury bonds, America has since Reagan and arguably Nixon been the only nation in history to make debt pay. Now though, Greek tragedy fashion, Washington’s efforts to cling to post-USSR unipolarity – by, inter alia, weaponising SWIFT and ‘confiscating’ the Western held assets of disobedient states – serve instead, as overplayed hands will, to hasten its demise. As Russia, China and even Japan are incentivised to shed dollars, and Russia and China to build alternative cross border payment systems, the global south watches in the wings as an epic struggle takes alarmingly overt and kinetic forms.