Goa, India – The Western narrative claims that Russia has launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. This narrative, endlessly repeated by the Atlantic establishment, conveniently removes the political timeline that made war inevitable.
NATO’s three-decade eastward push has reached Russia’s borders, creating a security nightmare that the great powers cannot tolerate. The US definitely won’t do that. Russia reacted not from imperial hunger but from a built-up strategic anxiety that the West arrogantly ignored.
Europe made a spectacular miscalculation. EU leaders believed they could defeat Russia economically, disrupt its fiscal core and claim geopolitical victory through sanctions. Instead, Russia adapted, diversified, and exposed Europe’s vulnerabilities: the energy crisis, political divisions, and the disturbing truth that Brussels cannot think independently of Washington.
These are the same former colonial powers that are still obsessed with telling the world how to behave but are incapable of self-reflection.
And at the center of this tragedy stands Volodymyr Zelensky, a celebrity turned wartime figurehead manufactured by Western public relations agencies. His term in the country has long expired, corruption scandals deepen with each passing week, and Ukraine’s political system is dysfunctional. Yet the EU is shielding him because admitting its miscalculation is politically suicidal. Infusing his myth with Zionism, Europe and Zelensky are now operating in tandem, each supporting the other while Ukraine disintegrates.
Prime Minister Modi’s whirlwind seven-hour visit to Ukraine only added to the mood of the theater, a token performance aimed at Western recognition rather than Ukraine’s salvation. It brought no strategy, no transformation, no diplomacy. Just an optical system.
Even Donald Trump’s wild claims that he could end wars within 24 hours, ridiculed as disingenuous, inadvertently revealed truth. True diplomacy could have brought the war to an early end. But NATO whispered to Kiev the illusion of membership, Washington offered weapons instead of solutions, and the EU gave illusions of victory.
Biden’s foreign policy establishment mistook moral lectures for strategy, prolonging a conflict that Ukraine was never prepared to win.
Ukraine is now in a corner. It has lost about 20 percent of its territory and its entire industrial zone and faces trillions of dollars in economic destruction. Millions of people fled. Tens of thousands of people are lying dead. Ukraine is falling apart – not just because of Russian firepower, but also because of the egos of the EU, the chaos of America, and the NATO institutions that pretend to be mourning and then continue to create wars.
And this pattern is not new. Under the banner of humanitarian intervention, NATO humiliated a historical civilization and dismantled Yugoslavia. It ravaged Afghanistan for 20 years before walking away in disgrace. Once Africa’s most prosperous country, Libya collapsed, leaving behind chaos and an open-air slave market. This is a NATO record. First the moralizing, then the bombing, and always denying responsibility.
If the Warsaw Pact was disbanded in 1991, what is the moral or strategic justification for NATO to survive in 2025? Its purpose is no longer defense, but projection. While the Warsaw Pact disappeared, NATO metastasized, spreading its bases, missile systems, military infrastructure, and ideological influence across regions it had no natural right to form.
NATO expansion since 1995 has destroyed the possibility of peace after the Cold War. Clinton destroyed order. The 2008 Bucharest summit lit the fuse by pledging Ukraine and Georgia to join. Even Chancellor Angela Merkel, not known for her geopolitical boldness, recognized the existentially destabilizing madness of Ukraine’s membership in NATO. Her warning is one of the few moments of honesty in an era of Western recklessness.
Western sabotage of the Minsk agreements sealed Ukraine’s fate. Minsk was treated not as a path to peace, but as a means to prevent the arming of Kiev. This will go down in history as one of the grossest acts of malice in European diplomacy.
Today, Ukraine is a tragic victim of NATO’s obsession with encircling Russia and the West’s refusal to accept a multipolar world. The remedy is fundamental but obvious. There is no NATO in Ukraine, and ultimately there will be no NATO.
Guarantees outside NATO are the only sustainable way. What Europe needs is a new pan-European security agreement that includes Russia and Ukraine and is rooted in arms control, troop reductions, demilitarization and mutual guarantees.
The OSCE has previously hinted at such a mission. It must be revived and strengthened. Europe will never achieve autonomy until it is freed from the shadow of NATO. Peace will never be possible while the Cold War regime dictates 21st century geopolitics.
The world is no longer unipolar. Colonial contracts drafted in Washington and Brussels no longer have legitimacy. BRICS, Russia, and the Global South argue for a world in which the West is one voice among many, rather than the imperial director of world affairs. Europe will either accept this or become strategically irrelevant.
And yes, reparations should be part of the discussion. Europe pushed Ukraine into a war it could never win, fueled the illusion of NATO protection, financed the illusion of military victory, and prolonged the catastrophe that Ukrainians alone would bear. Accountability requires the EU to help rebuild the countries it has sacrificed.
A new world order must arise. It must be built on human dignity, true sovereignty, and cooperation, not on NATO militarism or American exceptionalism. Lennon’s dreams are no longer lyrics; In a world drifting toward eternal war, it is the only political imagination that can save us.
“You may say I’m a dreamer, but
But I’m not alone.
We hope you will join us someday.
And the world will live as one. ”
– John Lennon –
(Ranjan Solomon is a writer whose themes include peace, geopolitics, and the collapse of Western hegemony.)