by Amal Zadok
Europe is dismantling its own civilisation to prolong a lost war, and the politicians doing it know exactly what they are doing. They are not confused; they are complicit. They are burning welfare states, gagging dissent, and sacrificing a generation’s future to avoid admitting a simple truth: Russia had real red lines, NATO trampled them, and now Europe is paying the price.
Europe’s leaders like to pose as guardians of democracy while they preside over the slow death of everything that once made Europe worth defending. They sign off on sanctions lists drawn up behind closed doors; they cheer as central bank reserves are frozen indefinitely; they applaud each new “security” package that chips away at protest rights, press freedom and academic debate. Then they go on television and talk about “values” and “European civilisation”, as if those words were not now empty shells. The pursuit of moral self‑image has replaced actual morality.
The persecution of Jacques Baud exposes this hypocrisy in its purest form. Here is a retired Swiss colonel and former NATO and UN expert, punished not for planting bombs or hacking systems but for saying what every serious strategist knows: that NATO expansion, Western interference in Ukraine and the refusal to negotiate over Russia’s legitimate security concerns helped lead directly to war. For speaking this uncomfortable truth, Brussels has slapped his name onto a sanctions list, frozen his assets inside the bloc, and banned him from travelling through Schengen countries. In old Europe, dissidents were debated; in today’s Europe, they are digitally exiled.
This is not defending democracy; it is criminalising analysis. When unelected EU bodies can, with a few strokes of the pen, wreck the financial life of a neutral country’s citizen for his opinions, Europe has crossed a line. It is no longer merely hypocritical; it is structurally authoritarian. The Soviet Union had internal exiles and blacklists; the EU has asset freezes, travel bans and reputational assassination. The technology is different, but the logic is eerily similar: label someone a tool of the enemy, strip him of rights and make him a warning to others.
The Baud case is not an isolated mistake. It sits atop a wider architecture of repression disguised as “hybrid war” defence and “counter‑disinformation”. The EU has built task forces and “hybrid threat” units dedicated to watching media and social networks for signs of “pro‑Russian narratives”, and then leans on platforms under the Digital Services Act to suppress what it labels manipulation. NGOs and media that question NATO’s role or call for peace are smeared as “pro‑Russian”; protest movements are kettled, surveillance cameras multiply, and police powers expand under the pretext of guarding against Russian influence. A whole new vocabulary has emerged—“information manipulation”, “foreign interference”, “threats to the information space”—whose purpose is not to clarify but to intimidate. If you criticise the line, you risk being painted as a security problem, not a citizen exercising a right.
Meanwhile, the same leaders who attack free speech are waging a brutal war against their own social contracts. To feed the Ukraine war machine, they have embarked on the biggest rearmament drive since the Cold War, blowing open budget rules that just a few years ago were described as sacred. Germany’s 100‑billion‑euro Sondervermögen defence fund sits outside ordinary fiscal limits, while the European Peace Facility has been repeatedly topped up to finance arms for Ukraine and reimburse member states. Suddenly, deficits no longer matter if they are for tanks and missiles, but when nurses, teachers or pensioners ask for support, the answer is that “fiscal space” is limited. Money exists in hundreds of billions for arms, but not for the people who built Europe’s prosperity.
This is the political choice at the heart of Europe’s self‑destruction: schools or shells, hospitals or HIMARS, social housing or artillery. And at every fork in the road, Europe’s leaders choose war. They divert cohesion funds, development money and investment budgets into defence and Ukraine, while development analysts warn that higher defence spending is already squeezing aid and social investment. They talk about “European sovereignty” while making their economies dependent on imported energy and American weapons, and call it “solidarity with Ukraine” when they slash services at home. A continent that once defined itself by universal healthcare, affordable education and labour protections is becoming a militarised peninsula shadow‑governed by NATO, technocrats and bond markets.
Worse, they are doing all this for a war that their own allies now quietly admit cannot be won in the maximalist sense that was loudly promised in 2022. The fantasy of pushing Russia back to pre‑2014 borders survives mostly in speeches. In the documents and analyses the elites actually read, the language has shifted to “stalemate”, “deterrence” and “managing escalation”. The war has become an expensive holding operation at Europe’s expense, draining resources and political focus while Russia adapts, re‑arms and deepens ties with non‑Western partners. The strategic result is perverse: the more Europe sacrifices, the stronger Moscow’s hand becomes in a world that is moving toward multipolarity.
This is why acknowledging Russia’s red lines is not appeasement; it is sanity. For decades, Moscow warned that NATO’s march to its borders, the militarisation of Ukraine and the refusal to build a joint security architecture would cross a threshold. Western leaders pretended not to hear. They gambled that Russia would accept humiliation forever, and that gamble has failed catastrophically. Instead of admitting it, Europe’s leaders are trying to bury the evidence under censorship laws, sanctions lists and nationalist hysteria.
The political challenge to those leaders must be direct and unforgiving. They must be forced to answer: Why is a Swiss analyst being punished for saying what your own internal assessments admit about NATO and Russia? Why are you tearing apart the welfare state to fight for objectives that Washington has already downgraded? Why are you turning “European values” into a marketing slogan while you silence dissent and criminalise journalism? Why should any citizen believe your talk of “freedom” when you are building a technocratic cage of financial blacklists, legal exceptions and perpetual emergency powers?
Europe does not need more empty language about “resilience” and “unity”. It needs leaders willing to say out loud that the path taken since 2014—sanctions escalation, NATO expansion, proxy war—is killing the very project it claimed to protect. It needs leaders who admit that there are two ways to respond to Russia’s security demands: either negotiate seriously on neutrality, security guarantees and mutual limits, or keep turning Europe into a besieged fortress slowly devouring its own people.
At this point, the deeper threat to European civilisation is not an invasion from the East, but the cowardice and careerism of its own political class. The real “hybrid war” is not waged by Russia alone; it is waged by European elites against their own societies, blending fear, propaganda and economic blackmail to keep voters acquiescent while their rights and livelihoods are stripped away. They have chosen to be prefects of an imperial order rather than servants of their peoples.
The choice now lies with Europeans themselves.
Accept the logic of permanent war, accept the criminalisation of dissent, accept the demolition of the social state—and watch the continent slide into a controlled authoritarianism where the only freedom left is to cheer the next sanctions list. Or reject this suicide pact. Demand accountable leadership, negotiated security with Russia, restoration of civil liberties, and a return to the basic promise that made Europe more than just a market with flags: that ordinary people, not distant cliques, are the sovereigns of their own fate.
If Jacques Baud can be sanctioned today for telling the truth about NATO and Russia, anyone can be next. That is the point of his punishment. But it also means something else: defending him has become a test of whether Europe still has a pulse. A continent that abandons its heretics has already abandoned its soul.
References
1.Bluewin. (2025, December 14). The EU puts a Swiss ex-colonel on the sanctions list. https://www.bluewin.ch/en/news/international/the-eu-puts-a-swiss-ex-colonel-on-the-sanctions-list-3011557.html
2.Harici. (2025). EU sanctions retired Swiss colonel and oil traders for aiding Russia. https://harici.com.tr/en/eu-sanctions-retired-swiss-colonel-and-oil-traders-for-aiding-russia
3.Thyregod, K. (2025, December 23). Sanctioning a Swiss analyst: What the Jacques Baud case tells us. https://kristianthyregod.substack.com/p/sanctioning-a-swiss-analyst-what
4.DiEM25. (2025, June 15). How the EU is using anti-Russia sanctions to criminalise journalism. https://diem25.org/how-the-eu-is-using-anti-russia-sanctions-to-criminalise-journalism
5.European Commission. (2025, December 18). EU fast-tracks new Russia and Belarus sanctions while indefinitely immobilising Russian central bank assets. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_russia_sanctions
6.Bruegel. (2025, November 11). Ukraine: European democracy’s affordable arsenal. https://www.bruegel.org/policy-brief/ukraine-european-democracys-affordable-arsenal
7.European Commission. (2025, May 18). Spring 2025 economic forecast: The economic impact of higher defence spending. https://economy-finance.ec.europa.eu/economic-forecast-and-surveys/economic-forecasts/spring-2025-economic-forecast_en
8.Australian Institute of International Affairs. (2025, December 11). EU increased defence spending – What are the blind spots and fiscal traps? https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/eu-increased-defence-spending
9.Donor Tracker. (2025, July 1). The impact of defense spending on ODA: Outlook and trends. https://donortracker.org/insights/impact-defense-spending-oda-outlook-and-trends
10.CIVICUS. (2025). In Europe and Central Asia, civic freedoms were under increasing pressure in 2025. https://www.facebook.com/CIVICUS/posts/131436039
11.Center for Strategic and International Studies. (2025, September 15). Defense budgets in an uncertain security environment. https://www.csis.org/analysis/chapter-13-defense-budgets-uncertain-security-environment
12.Cremona, M., & others. (2025, April 10). How the war in Ukraine has transformed the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy. Yearbook of European Law. https://academic.oup.com/yel/advance-article/doi/10.1093/yel/yeaf003/8112000
13.Zadok, A. (2025, June 4). The shadow over Europe: Trading liberty for a war against ghosts. Think and be Free! https://thinkandbefree.blog/2025/06/04/the-shadow-over-europe-trading-liberty-for-a-war-against-ghosts
14.Zadok, A. (2025, October 26). Silent Europe: The political clica that traded bread and liberty for war. Think and be Free! https://thinkandbefree.blog/2025/10/26/silent-europe-the-political-clica-that-traded-bread-and-liberty-for-war
15.Euronews. (2025, December 18). EU sanctions Westerners spreading Russian propaganda. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/12/18/who-are-the-westerners-sanctioned-by-the-eu-for-spreading-russian-propaganda
16.Kyiv Post. (2025). Europe targets Kremlin disinformation, cyber networks in new sanctions package. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/66285
©️2025 Amal Zadok. All rights reserved.
Subscribe and never miss an article!
Think and be Free! 