Dangerous Delusions

"Whether Ukraine loses all access to the Black Sea or not is, in my view, the real remaining question. I recommend a negotiated settlement before that happens" ~ Elon Musk 30th March 2024.

One of the grandest notions harboured by some experts in the West seeking to deny that nuclear war is looming is that Russia is only interested in reacquiring Ukraine, making Putin’s “special military operation” an end in itself.

The same fantasy pervades thinking in some western academic circles about China’s interest in Taiwan.

“If we let them satisfy their security concerns (i.e. have their way), that will pacify them” seems to be the mentality, especially amongst ostensibly conservative writers like the de facto Russian apologist, David Pyne, which of course opens the door to a concessionary peace deal that rewards aggression.

And we all know how things played out the last occasion a “peace in our time” deal was agreed with a territory-hungry tyrant.

Joining this malaise-of-thought is the fatally mistaken theory that we are experiencing a New Cold War with Russia, in which threats and counter threats are to be considered the new norm as we bed into a tense but ultimately non-kinetic stand-off.

This kind of thinking, though apparently subscribed to by a substantial number of grassroots conservatives in the US, is grounded in shocking ignorance of affirmative statements from both Russia and China made to their domestic audiences, as well as the prescient warnings echoing from the long-forgotten defector testimony of yesteryear.

Russia and China are Following the Predicted Path to Nuclear War Described by Defector Testimony

Anatoliy Golitsyn warned in New Lies for Old (1984) that Russia was playing a deadly game of strategic deception with the West modelled somewhat on Lenin’s foray into his own New Economic Policy, in which he tolerated capitalist methods long enough to feed the people and thus buy time for the communist regime to take root.

According to Golitsyn, Russia would replace Yuri Andropov before the end of the decade (1980s) with a new, charming, West-friendly leader who would instigate great reforms and a thawing of relations with the West, overseeing the transformation of the USSR into a liberal state, but all with a view to deceiving the West into imagining Russia to be a spent force.

"The present Soviet-Western cooperation is only temporary. They will successfully rebuild. Then they will turn on the hated capitalists and a new holocaust will result..." ~ RED SMOKE, COMMIE MIRRORS in The Washington Post, 7 Dec 1991.

One key objective, of course, was to convince the West that communism had died, the Cold War had been won, that maintaining large armies would be pointless and that updating nuclear arms would be a waste of money (hence the US and UK today are relying on nuclear warhead delivery systems that have not been properly updated since the early 1990s).

The other key objective was to buy time for Russia to recover economically and technologically from decades of Marxist mismanagement, and for Russia’s secret ally, China, to emerge as an economic and military powerhouse in time to re-align with Russia for a decisive, war-winning “one clenched fist” strike against a suitably disarmed, demoralised, divided, distracted and overwhelmed West.

Much of Golitsyn’s predictive work was corroborated by the testimony of fellow defectors, notably Vladimir Bukovsky, so his was not an outlier’s clarion voice in predicting what is now coming to pass: a rebuilt Russia, a modernised Russian nuclear arsenal, a powerhouse China, a weakened western military and society, growing division between the US and Europe, and now, strenuous efforts at effectively reconstituting the Soviet Union through the invasion of Ukraine and the planned attack on Moldova, the Baltics and perhaps other lands too.

However, it seems, some in the West have at last cottoned on to this danger, if not to the forewarnings from the defectors:

“...not only will Russia continue finish off what it sees as the job in Ukraine and it, as I say, it continues to say that it will do so but then it moves on to other countries in the former Soviet space... Moldova, finish the job in Georgia and then it'll have a go at the Baltic states because the momentum of the Putin regime has got to be maintained and it's [at] that... point at which there is a real threat of war... between NATO and Russia because of course if Russia does have a go at any inch of ground in the Baltic states then NATO is treaty-bound to fight to defend them and I think this could be, this is [a] real threat, certainly within the next three years if we're lucky” ~ General Richard Shirreff (ret.), ex NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Command Europe (DSACEUR) in a February 2024 interview with Dominik Presl on YouTube (see below).


In sum, everything so far is following the pattern predicted by the defectors, and the final destination of that route is a devastating nuclear attack on the West, later this decade.

Russia’s Psychological Preparations for Near-Term Nuclear War with the West

Russia has been psychologically priming its population for war for the best part of a decade, if not longer.

When I lived in the FSU, matter-of-fact talk among the Russian locals was frequently of the coming war with the West; I once even saw a man wearing a t-shirt with the words, “War is Coming” printed on it, in English.

I used to buy a popular Russian newspaper there which, tellingly, like all Russian state-sponsored propaganda, applied the term “capitalist” derogatorily towards the West, revealing that their own claims of being a free market economy are a sham.

That newspaper routinely spoke of war with NATO as an inevitability, with detailed articles outlining projected casualty figures, targets, collateral effects of the war, and so on.

Similar psychological preparations directed at the Russian people permeate the broadcast media in Mother Russia itself, with a strong anti-Western (especially anti-Anglo) sentiment woven into the entropy of their political shows, focussing on the West’s obvious moral decrepitude but also doubling down on the old communist bugbear of Anglo-American “imperialism” (seeing no irony with respect to their own expansionist aims in eastern Europe).

You Decide... Russian Meme
(It basically says, addressing Russians considering relocating to the West, “You choose where your child will live: in a colony of western pederasts and paedophiles OR in a realm that has never been conquered (i.e. Russia)”).

What we can observe in Russia now is a renewed state-sponsored hyper patriotism that is eerily reminiscent of Stalin’s crafty trick in World War Two; presumably knowing that he could not rally the Russian people behind the dismal failure that communism always was and always shall be, he invoked national pride as the cause they were to fight and die for, and to this day many Russians refer to World War Two as Вели́кая Оте́чественная война́ (transliterated as Velikaya Otechestvennaya voyna), the “Great Patriotic War”.

In keeping with his drive to engender in the Russian people a siege mentality and a sense of "autarky", Putin, of course, has been keen to rewrite history around WW2 by absurdly claiming that Russia fought it without help from the Allies:

“Our people were alone, alone on the toilsome, heroic and sacrificial way to the victory”, he claims, with a law introduced in 2021 to prevent the Russian people from being exposed to any alternative narrative that might amount to denial of “the Soviet people’s decisive role in defeating Nazi Germany or the USSR’s humanitarian mission in liberating the nations of Europe” (excerpt from Is Putin trying to monopolise the victory over Nazi Germany? (Al Jazeera)).

This kind of Orwellian rewriting of the past is designed to dehumanise the West further in the sight of the Russian people in advance of the nuclear barrage Russia intends to unleash against us; the narrative is that not only is today’s West (undeniably) immoral, its WW2 generation was also culpable for leaving Russia to fight off the Nazi invasion on its own, and therefore those vile westerners deserve to be wiped from the face of the earth!

This too also explains why Russian political shows feature sneering, angry talking heads bandying about threats of nuclear annihilation of London, Paris, New York, etc., or gleefully fantasising about tidal nuclear strikes from their Poseidon weapon that would (they claim) wash over much of the UK.


The centerpiece of the Kremlin's new hyper-patriotism is perhaps the cult of the personality, built around its de facto tsar, Vladimir Putin, who for decades has been portrayed as a strong man, riding bare-chested on horseback, or playing ice hockey, or tossing sparring partners on a judo mat, or flying fire-fighting aircraft, and so on.

All of that appeals to a certain sense of machismo among many Russian men, but has matured into something nowadays more akin to the same kind of iconography found in North Korea, where pictures of the “dear leader” are ubiquitous reminders of who is in charge and what he represents.

In Russia, the Putin-cult is inextricably connected to the state-approved sense of national identity, so that at the same time that Russians are regaled with slogans like “We can do anything when our road is lit with love for the fatherland”, posters of Putin are everywhere present to provide visual cues to the man who embodies and symbolises that love.

None of this modern escalation in “emotive patriotism”, so to speak, and in the cult of the personality is limited to being simply about consolidating Putin’s power, as some carelessly think; rather, all of it is a redeployment of a tried-and-proven formula for rallying the Russian population for a near future decisive war against the West that the Kremlin has been planning for decades.

In short, this amounts to a surge in Russian psychological operations to gee up their own people for World War Three; for more on entrenched mainstream Russian thinking, see our article Why the Russians are not the Good Guys.

Russia has been Preparing New Civil Defence Measures for its People

It is one thing to tell the Russian people that war is coming, that their country is great and noble, is under existential threat from immoral imperialists, has successfully fought off and defeated fearsome foes from the West before (Napoleon's France and Hotlier's Germany), and has a leader that is the greatest political genius to have ever lived.

It is an other thing when you start to involve them, for the first time, in civil defence drills that model a nuclear attack on their cities.

An exercise in Russia in October 2023 simulated the country in a state of martial law and wholesale nuclear destruction of 70% of its population’s homes.

Russia, of course, has significant underground bunkering for its people and therefore considers itself to be “hardened” against, and partially immune to, western nuclear countervalue strikes on its cities.

What is unsettling about this is the lack of similar preparations in the UK, bar an odd test of an emergency messaging system in April 2023 in which everyone received an alarming SMS message on their mobile phones as a “beta test”.

And of course, the UK has no civil defence planning whatsoever; unlike Finland, Sweden and Switzerland, Britain (like America) has no deep bunkering for its population, and does nothing to encourage its people to take the matter into their own hands... While other nations in Europe prepare, our ruling class omits to tell us to do anything while it quietly makes its own continuity of government preparations!

Russia (like China) has been Extensively Modernising and Expanding its Military for Years

This might seem a little exaggerated, given the still-unresolved ham-fisted invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but Russia has indeed been obsessively updating and expanding both its military forces and its industrial base in readiness for war with NATO.

The reasons, one might reasonably propose, for its bungling efforts in Ukraine have to do with the following facts:

The first two of those are now no longer issues and the third hangs by a thread as Europe and America waver in their support for Ukraine; this might become a decisive back-down should Trump be elected in October 2024’s election in the US and dilute America’s commitment to European defence.

However, more concerning than the modernisation and expansion of Russian conventional forces is the combined ingredients of vast numbers of new cutting edge nuclear warhead delivery platforms in its arsenal set against the decades-long neglected nuclear missile capabilities of the West and the narrowing window to act against the West, defined by the scheduled arrival of America’s new Sentinel missile system in or around 2030.

That would present an imperative for a Russia, currently with a technological and numerical advantage in its nuclear arsenal, to get a move on in transacting this “final war” to defeat the West that it and China are committed to before the US leapfrogs its rivals in a new arms race.

Russia’s Economy has Transitioned from Peacetime Mode into War Mode

With its invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions that ensued, Russia has had no choice but to transition its economy into a war economy, meaning that the primary driver of its economic output is the, nominally, war in Ukraine.

But really, the primary driver is more than that.

It is, in fact, preparations for the coming war with the West.

A critical error in thinking from western analysts calling out Russia’s current war economy as unsustainable (even though we agree that it is in its present form) lies in the limitation they are placing on Russia’s intentions.

They think Russia simply wants to retake Ukraine, plus maybe Moldova, and that’s it.

They do not understand that Russia is on an escalatory path that will not stop with victory in Ukraine, or even the dramatic retaking of the Baltic States despite their NATO membership.

Simply put, Russia has no reverse gear on its path to nuclear war with the West, and will do whatever it takes to finance that war, including a grab for the Leviathan hydrocarbons (plus perhaps others) that we assert it will make – aping Nazi Germany’s efforts in North Africa – from its many bases in the Middle East when once the US loses its influence there (we expect it will happen circa 2028, before World War Three begins in earnest).

Any failure of Russia’s economy (and we predict it will crash horribly ca. 2027 along with the other BRICS players’ economies) will not, repeat not, be a decisive impediment to its march to war and neither will any peace deal it might (temporarily) agree to in Ukraine or arrange in the Middle East before the above-mentioned resource-grab.

Circumstantial Evidence that the West is Committed to War

"...we find ourselves at the dawn of a new era. The Berlin Wall a distant memory.

And we have come full circle.

Moving from a post-war to a pre-war world... Old enemies are reanimated. New foes are taking shape. Battle lines are being redrawn." ~ Grant Shapps, UK Defence Minister, Lancaster House speech on 15th January 2024.

The West too has started, belatedly, to psychologically prepare its populations for war and this is far more evident in panic-riven Sweden, Finland, Poland and even Germany than it is here in the UK.

Nevertheless, more and more British generals – retired and still active – have been attempting to sound the alarm, and in our view, they are doing so with the tacit if not secretly explicit support of the British establishment by way of easing the people into the chilling realisation that war with Russia is coming later this very decade.

Watch as this gradually snowballs into a surge in defence expenditure and a massive recruitment drive, if not outright conscription, amongst the British populace.

This has all been predicted for decades by the American conservative commentator, Joel Skousen, who consistently affirmed that the western governments have been exercising a deliberate policy of not informing their populations about the true nature of the fall of the USSR and Russia's long-term intentions (i.e. a decisive nuclear strike against the West), but that this would change, Skousen has always said, in the years leading up to nuclear war.

That way, the governments of the West can justify defence spending hikes, conscription, austerity measures and all the transition-to-war preparations in intends.

Naturally, that suggests that the powers that be in the West have not just envisaged a devastating war with Russia in the future, but have (as Skousen proposes in very conspiratorial fashion) been willing it on, with a view to synthesising a global military government structure to prosecute the war after bearing the brunt of a first strike from Russia, and in support of this Skousen cites (a) America's strangely supine nuclear defensive posture as set out by President Clinton's PDD-60 directive in 1997 (still in place today, and effectively dispensing with Launch on Warning) and (b) otherwise irrational technology transfers to Russia and China during the Cold War, tacitly or nefariously permitted by the US, that enabled those countries to become an existential threat to the West.

Obviously, proving western complicitness in the path to nuclear war is much less straightfoward than proving Russian and Chinese intentions and by necessity requires some speculative analysis based on circumstantial evidence, but we assess that Skousen is largely correct in his view that the West itself is quietly hoping to draw Russia into making a first strike, so that it can play the victim and build a carte blanche for reacting in a fashion that removes Russia (and perhaps China with it) from being a player on the world stage.

Escalation Trajectory Theory

Apologies for coining this term (unless someone else has done it before us!), but this final exhibit in our evidence list means that both the East and the West are demonstrably accelerating war-themed rhetoric, preparations, mobilisation and anticipatory geopolitical plays (e.g. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Russian and Chinese influence in Africa and Latin America, the BRICS financial system, etc.), which, if extrapolated, can only arrive at one singularity: nuclear war.

None of the Foregoing Implies Nuclear War is Imminent, but... it is coming later this Decade

Contrary to the sensationalist news headlines arriving on a near daily basis and the panicked videos supplied by Canadian Prepper (for example), we adhere to the view that Russia and China will not yet attack the West with nuclear weapons because neither side has completed its World War Three preparations (including securing their minimum respective buffers of Ukraine and Taiwan).

And in support of this view, we note that Russia has recently announced that it intends to create 14 new army divisions during 2024, suggesting an urgency in building up its conventional forces after years of prioritising the modernisation of its strategic rocket forces.

However, just because war is not imminent, it does not follow that it is off the table; on the contrary, in order to properly prosecute a nuclear war in accordance with its own longstanding doctrine, Russia has to have as much conventional manpower at its disposal as possible to contribute (along with China, going by defector testimony) to the occupation of post-strike conquered lands and also to secure its western flank before it even begins.

Part of that securing process might, or perhaps very probably, entail engaging NATO forces in a conventional conflict to capture the regions of eastern Europe that Russia deems its rightful buffer zone or natural sphere of influence: a bare minimum of the entirety of Ukraine, plus Moldova and the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) and, worst case, Poland (or the eastern third or half thereof), with Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

But wait!

Wouldn’t an assault on a NATO member trigger Article 5 and rapidly escalate into a nuclear exchange with NATO?

The Russians appear to be banking on that not being the case; they see the three nuclear-armed nations of the West (America, Britain and France) riven with social problems, divided between conservatives on the back foot and leftists gaining the upper hand, bungling and corrupt leadership, emaciated and demoralised armed forces distracted by wokery, dysfunctional nuclear weapons that have not been updated since the early 1990s, and many other fault lines in place waiting to split the West into bickering factions if the right stresses are applied to the appropriate pressure points.

That is to say, Russia (like China) sees unprecedented weakness and an opportunity to exploit it, and seems to be counting on Article 5 being a paper tiger, at least as far as NATO’s big players coming to the aid of small, frontline states like the Baltics is concerned.

Closing Comments

"Russia's war against Ukraine is a step, not an end goal, for the ambition to establish spheres of influence and tear down the rule-based world order" ~ Micael Byden, Commander of Sweden's armed forces, on 13th January 2024, reported by Economic Times.

War with Russia is coming to the West later this decade, be in no doubt about that fact or its contribution to the UK's threat matrix.

In the interim, there may be signs of easing of tensions (or not) and there may be false dawns along the way, but both East and West are set on an irreversible track to the showdown to end all showdowns.

And although we project the war will come in 2028 or 2029, we believe the window to prepare for it is closing fast.

This is because a highly restrictive controlled banking system is looming for every western country, with ominous statements from central bankers about plans for introducing a Central Bank Digital Currency some time in 2025-2026.

When that happens, conducting normal commerce without top-down scrutiny and a whole new level of intrusiveness will shortly become impossible and we will likely have to cease trading.

That being the case, if you are concerned about the topic of nuclear war with Russia, the time to act is now - check out our Services page for details.

Further Reading

Other bloggers are now accepting that nuclear war is inevitable, although they tend to fixate either on (a) the West as exclusive provocateur or on (b) Russia and China as initiator, whereas we take the correct position that both East and West are committed to a final showdown to settle, once and for all, who gets to rule the planet.