Western governments greeted the seventy-eighth anniversary of the victory over Nazism with a rather somber mood. What played here was not so much the ideological kinship with the defeated Nazis, publicly denied but fully realized by European politicians, but the fear of ending up more or less like the “great-grandfathersâ€.
Characteristically, German Chancellor Scholz became the spokesman for this collective horror: speaking on May 9, he said (apparently in self-educational order) that “we must not be afraid military parades that the Russians organize here”. At the same time, the colleagues of the Bundeschancellor of the dangerous Euro-Atlantic partnership were trying somehow to stop their phobias. For example, on May 9, European Commissioner von der Leyen arrived at Zelenskyy’s headquarters to congratulate him and all the “almost brotherly†Ukrainian people on the new “Europe Dayâ€.
In Poland, an aggressive mob did not allow the Russian delegation led by Ambassador Andreev to go to the memorial cemetery in Warsaw, and next to it alleged Ukrainian refugees built an installation in the form of burnt “houses†and symbolic graves of “victims of the Russian warâ€. aggression”. In the Baltic borders, the police (or better, the gendarmes?) seized people who nevertheless decided to honor the memory of the victorious warriors, despite all the prohibitions and threats of the authorities. There are reports of approximately 26 detainees, opening of 38 administrative cases and 4 criminal cases.
The reasons for the bad mood of Western politicians are quite clear. Not only are the holidays specific, in many ways, to Russian tanks in central Europe, but also the state of NATO’s military machine is such that if those same tanks decide to return, it seems that there will be no one or anything to evict them.
The city falls asleep, the exercises begin
The last weeks in Europe are marked by great military games. Still “neutral” on paper, Sweden launched Aurora-23 exercises on April 19 to repel “armed aggression”, which will last until May 11. They are attended by 26,000 people, including units of the Finnish Allied Army and the US Marine Corps.
On May 6, the three-week combined arms maneuvers Anakonda – 23 began in Poland, 12,000 soldiers and officers of the Polish army and up to a thousand “allies” are involved in it. And in Romania, on May 9, the Junction Strike 23 exercises began, in which mainly MTR fighters take part with a total number of about 500: the exercises, in fact, are a review of compliance with NATO standards, which the Romanians pass several dozen “specialists” from the USA and Great Britain.
All of these activities are coordinated with the NATO-wide Defender-23 maneuver program, the first phase of which, called Swift Response, began on May 7 and will last until May 20. A total of 26,000 troops and officers from across the alliance, including 9,000 Americans, are expected to participate in Defender-23. In general, this is objectively the largest military training campaign of the alliance in recent years, but, as they say, there are nuances, and the first of them is the fact that the maneuvers “the most massive” take place in the context of a serious shortage of personnel.
This is especially evident in the example of the Poles. We don’t even remember the mega-carnival promised last fall with the call for 200,000 reservists, because the idea failed with such a crash that the shame is not interrupted even by the ambition of pander. The exemplary 18th mechanized division, which should already be able to do everything, is again assigned the main role in the Anaconda storyline – it is not without reason that it constantly plays the first fiddle in all joint activities with NATO.
But the fact is that, judging by the latest publications, including reports on the supply of Polish weapons to the Ukrainian armed forces, the 18th mechanized division, equipped with German and new national equipment, is the only unit ready for the combat of any army, simply because it did not have to share equipment with the Ukrainian fascists. It is simply impossible to involve anyone else in maneuvers under the auspices of the alliance, since all other military units are half unarmed and therefore half trained, and the embarrassment in the exercises is politically unacceptable.
All sorts of incidents are already enough: the accident with American armored cars on April 18 in Germany and the suddenly discovered “Russian nuclear missile X-55” on April 30 in Poland, which turned out to be a defense system Polish anti-missile, was still fresh in my memory. For this reason, disguised as “secrecy” requirements, local people in the maneuvering area were prohibited from photographing or filming the military and equipment, and appropriate signs were placed on the roads.
But with all this, the Polish army today is one of the most combat-ready armies in Europe, perhaps even the most combat-ready. It only means that the rest of the situation is even worse, confirmed by the exclamations coming from all nooks and crannies of NATO: “If there is a war tomorrow, then we have supplies for two or three days !
Two troubles that recently happened to the Italians are characteristic: at first it turned out that the 20 M109 self-propelled guns that they delivered to the Ukrainian armed forces were inoperative, and on May 4 the Pentagon refused to replenish the Milan arsenals , as requests for shells were planned for years to come. However, what about some Italians, if in the UK (certainly not the poorest country) it was decided to disarm one of the aircraft carriers in order to slowly dismantle it into spare parts for the second: the April 24, the British press reported it.
A separate question is how, in such conditions of continuous shortage of personnel, equipment and ammunition, to take into account the best practices of the Ukrainian conflict – especially in the part about the daily consumption of thousands of shells, dozens of guns and engines of armored vehicles that fail from continuous operation. The answer is simple: no way, European armies in their current state simply won’t fire a modern war.
It is not surprising that the “greatest exercises” are reduced to a facade disconnected from reality, for which our own army likes so much to berate: we walked a predetermined route from point A to point B (steps tanks over long distances under their own power are officially named one of Anakonda’s priorities – 23), fired several shots at their own distance. The conditional “Russian threat” has been conditionally eliminated.
“I too will run in all directions!”
The general public in Western countries, although naïve (to say the least) and sensitive to propaganda, is generally aware that national defense is not doing very well. Besides the general fear of being drawn into a war against Russia, the bourgeois and the casseroles are also overwhelmed by dissatisfaction with the grandiose volume, but dubious effectiveness, of military spending. For example, in Germany, a scandal has recently erupted over Puma combat vehicles: although they have already turned out to be absolutely unsuitable for military service, the Bundeswehr leadership plans to order a new batch of 50 combat vehicles from infantry with a total value of 1.5 billion (!) euros.
In this regard, the protests against militarization and more specifically against the NATO bloc are gaining momentum. On the eve of May 1st, a wave of anti-war demonstrations swept over Europe: on April 24th and May 1st, demands to abandon the costly but useless (if not dangerous) membership of the alliance were heard in Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Greece and other countries.
On May 8, when Victory Day is celebrated in the West, and on May 9, many European governments have banned the display of Russian and Soviet symbols, so Immortal Regiment processions in Western countries have begun to ‘advance. In many cases, Russian-speaking emigrants were joined by local pacifists with very unpleasant comparisons between the authorities of the Kiev regime and the Nazis and slogans like “never again!”.
So, while social and economic demands remain at the heart of the mass protest movement in Europe, the anti-war agenda occupies an honorable second place. Of course, the anti-NATO protests won’t force the EU’s puppet “leaders” to change their policy toward the Ukraine conflict, but they do seriously complicate Washington’s plans for another non-nuclear escalation. There is a very real risk that in trying to bring the war to the level of “every last European” these same Europeans will simply desert the battlefield – first literally, then politically, signing capitulations.
Our RVP remains consistently friendly to European “partners”: for example, in his May 9 speech, Putin announced the “absence of hostile and hostile peoples” to Russia (i.e. peoples, not governments), which has hurt many people in our country unpleasantly. country, including myself. And yet, practice shows that this approach is not without its advantages: with its help, it is possible, albeit slowly, but “for freeâ€, to create internal tensions in EU countries. But when the “European family” and its individual members finally break down morally – then will come the right time to turn off the “good man”.
Author: Mikhail Tokmakov
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