Europe’s Ukrainian war: When language replaced strategy, defeat became inevitable.

Europe’s information sphere has learned to narrate war rather than report it, and the cost of that confusion now shapes strategy, industry, and the prospects for peace.

Europe no longer reports its wars; it narrates them. The press, once a check on power, has become the circulatory system of official myth. Governments brief journalists; journalists recycle the briefings as insight; policymakers then cite the press as proof. In this loop, information does not illuminate policy it justifies it.

The pathology is subtle. Editors do not set out to deceive; they absorb the assumptions of those they cover. When every major newsroom depends on security sources and NATO press pools, the distinction between reporting and repeating collapses. The result, as Glenn Greenwald says to quote him exactly is, “a culture of stenography dressed as journalism.”

1. The Mirror of Propaganda

The Ukraine war made the mechanism visible. Early legends the “Ghost of Kyiv,” the “Snake Island martyrs” were disproven within weeks, yet their function was never accuracy; it was morale. When sanctions rebounded, analysts turned moralists overnight, explaining de-industrialisation as a price worth paying. When the Nord Stream pipelines vanished, the topic simply became “too complex to assign blame.” The objective was coherence, not truth.

Matt Taibbi calls this merger of media, tech, and state messaging the industrial censorship complex: partnerships that launder narrative control through “fact-checking” and “content moderation.” Once facts are moralised, journalism becomes theology. As Chris Hedges warns, propaganda’s deepest danger is that “we come to forget that truth ever existed.”

Europe’s information class now consumes its own product. By defending the narrative rather than the news, it convinces itself first. Ministers then legislate on those same illusions, mistaking belief for intelligence. The system is self-referential: governments brief, media amplify, policy hardens, and the feedback loop becomes doctrine.

Across the continent, the few dissenting outlets — Declassified UK, The Grayzone, Consortium News, The Cradle are treated as contaminants. Algorithms bury them, regulators investigate them, colleagues erase them from panels. The profession that once prized doubt now brands it disloyalty.

This is Europe’s real information war: not the propaganda it exports, but the propaganda it inhales. A society that believes its own press releases loses the capacity to correct itself. And that, long before any tank crosses a border, is how wars are lost.

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2. The Foreseeable Catastrophe

This war was foreseen in the fine print of the 1990s. George Kennan called NATO expansion a “fateful error.” Defence Secretary William Perry later admitted he nearly resigned over it. Ambassador Jack Matlock warned the US Senate that enlarging a Cold War alliance to Russia’s doorstep would ignite the gravest crisis since the USSR’s fall.

Those warnings were not hindsight; they were on the record. Yet the political class chose a crusade. The EU defined legitimacy as expansion. NATO rebranded power projection as “democratic reassurance.” A generation later, both institutions confront the strategic geometry they refused to calculate.

Jeffrey Sachs told the European Parliament earlier this year that Europe “outsourced diplomacy to Washington and moralised itself out of strategy.” That judgment now looks restrained.

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3. The Rhetorical Regime

How did Europe lose the ability to think strategically? The answer lies in language, the weapon that disarmed its own realism.

After the Cold War, Brussels learned to govern through speech acts: “European choice,” “shared values,” “ever closer Union.” Frank Schimmelfennig’s concept of rhetorical entrapment explains the mechanism: once policymakers proclaim that enlargement equals virtue, any hesitation becomes sin. No minister wants to be accused of betraying “Europe.”

What began as integration became moral coercion. Diplomacy was redefined as “appeasement.” Neutrality became “cowardice.” Realism was “Putinism.” Scott Ritter calls this “the triumph of narrative over arithmetic”: decisions taken for how they sound in a communiqué, not how they work on a battlefield. Ray McGovern notes that Moscow and Beijing now cite NATO expansion as the core of their joint security doctrine — a reality Europe still edits out of its own discourse.

Public debate followed the same script. Journalists learned that to question strategy was to invite moral indictment. Academics learned to write about “values” rather than “interests.” A political culture that once produced strategists now produces spokespeople.

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4. 2025: The Delusion in Data

The rhetoric survives, but reality no longer complies. Europe’s self-portrait as a moral superpower now collides with hard numbers.

In the United Kingdom, official data show energy-intensive manufacturing at its lowest level in 35 years. Germany’s chemical and steel sectors, once the spine of the European economy, operate on emergency margins. Brussels calls this “the green transition.” Industrialists call it insolvency.

Across the front, Russia has not collapsed; it has retooled. Studies from RUSI and Chatham House confirm that Moscow’s defence spending reached roughly 6.3 per cent of GDP by 2025, and output in armour and artillery now exceeds pre-war levels. What sanctions aimed to starve, mobilisation has fed. The West believed it could sanction Russia into submission; instead, it incentivised autarky.

Economically, the war has become a mirror. Europe’s virtue costs it growth; Russia’s isolation buys it self-reliance. The delusion is quantitative now, not philosophical.

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5. War Fatigue: The Cracks in the Façade

Moral unity once shamed dissent. That spell is fading.

Gallup’s 2025 survey shows 73 percent of Ukrainians disapprove of US leadership, and optimism about NATO accession has collapsed from 64 percent in 2022 to barely a third today. Across Europe, longitudinal polling from Oxford Academic and Ipsos records the same fatigue: majorities still sympathise with Kyiv but no longer believe victory is achievable at acceptable cost. Even in Poland, support for permanent eastern NATO deployments has plateaued.

The political translation is clear. Parties campaigning on pragmatism rather than crusade — from Germany’s AfD to France’s right and Italy’s centrists — now capture the protest vote once monopolised by anti-EU populists. The rhetoric of “defending values” no longer pays electoral rent.

Inside Ukraine, the mood has turned stoic rather than evangelical. The moral vocabulary imported from Brussels — “European future,” “freedom struggle,” “civilisational choice” — sounds thin in bombed-out Kharkiv or conscription queues in Lviv. Exhaustion is not betrayal; it is recognition.

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6. The Security Dilemma Europe Refused to Name

At Vilnius, NATO removed the Membership Action Plan hurdle and declared, without caveat, that Ukraine’s “future is in NATO.” To Moscow that sentence is a deadline, not an invitation. The Kremlin’s logic is brutal but consistent: if Ukraine cannot be neutral, then the geography around NATO must change first.

John Mearsheimer has articulated this for a decade: Russia’s minimum condition for peace is a neutral Ukraine, no NATO bases, and recognition of the 2014 to 2022 security imbalance. One need not endorse the invasion to understand that ignoring a nuclear power’s red lines while courting its neighbour was not realism; it was hubris.

Douglas Macgregor’s field analyses align with that logic: absent negotiation, Russia will entrench along defensible corridors, annexing the areas it cannot risk losing and leaving a rump Ukraine economically dependent and politically paralysed. That outcome, long dismissed as propaganda, is fast becoming policy by inertia.

Meanwhile, Russia’s foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, warns that NATO’s deepening involvement is “escalation disguised as virtue.” Reuters and The Times both carried his remarks. They were not bluster; they were notice. Europe’s response has been silence.

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7. Arithmetic of an Unwinnable War

Behind the speeches lies the spreadsheet.

EU ministers now eye profits from frozen Russian assets to finance Ukraine’s budget — a measure of fiscal strain, not moral resolve. Analysts estimate sustaining Kyiv’s defence and reconstruction will require hundreds of billions of euros over the next four years. Even The Economist warns that without massive new funding, NATO unity will fracture.

Industrial arithmetic is worse. Ammunition production lags consumption. American stockpiles are finite; European lines cannot yet replace them. Euractiv reports that deploying heavy NATO formations eastward would take weeks or months, underscoring the gulf between rhetoric and readiness. Strategy must match means. Europe is discovering that sermons do not manufacture shells.

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8. The Domestic Reckoning

Every sanction, every embargo, every moral gesture carries an invoice. For two years, European leaders told their publics that the pain was noble. Now voters call it self-sabotage.

Magnier and Helmer, tracking the economic fallout, note how Europe now buys Russian hydrocarbons laundered through India and China while pretending moral purity. The Nord Stream sabotage — still unsolved, with Swedish and Danish investigations closed for “jurisdictional limits” — has erased decades of industrial advantage. The only taboo larger than neutrality is truth.

This is the practical meaning of the rhetorical trap: when the narrative forbids admitting error, silence becomes policy.

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9. Settlement: The Unsayable Word

Europe still frames negotiation as appeasement. Yet the alternative is strategic erosion. The minimal architecture of a viable settlement is obvious to anyone not paid to deny it:

• A formal declaration from NATO and Ukraine codifying a 20 to 30 year moratorium on Ukrainian membership and a ban on foreign bases.
• OSCE supervised verification zones along new frontlines.
• Phased sanctions relief linked to compliance rather than trust.
• A European led reconstruction and energy programme that restores Ukraine’s economy without extending NATO’s map.

Jeffrey Sachs, echoing these elements before the European Parliament, called it “a diplomacy of responsibility.” It is also the only diplomacy left.

Critics will say such a framework rewards aggression. That charge confuses recognition with endorsement. Managing a security dilemma is not moral surrender; it is civilisational hygiene. The purpose of diplomacy is to end wars, not narrate them.

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10. The Numbers of Disillusion

Even by the metrics of propaganda, the “win first” thesis is exhausted. Gallup shows Ukrainian morale and NATO enthusiasm falling in tandem. Ipsos data reveal majorities across Western Europe now rank cost of living and energy above “support for Ukraine” as priority issues. These are not Kremlin talking points; they are democratic ones. The rhetorical regime that once kept dissent unsayable is cracking under household budgets.

Russian state media predictably exploits this fatigue, calling Europe’s 800 billion euro rearmament drive “brainwashing to mask industrial inadequacy.” Dismiss the rhetoric, keep the metric: Europe’s combined defence manufacturing still trails Russia’s mobilised output. Even Brussels’ own Defence Agency concedes “fragmentation” and “duplication.” Attrition is an accounting problem Europe refuses to audit.

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11. 2025 to 2030: The Coming Narrative Collapse

If nothing changes, the next decade writes itself. US political volatility — another administration questioning NATO costs — could leave Europe financing an open-ended war alone. The alliance’s European core already disagrees on duration, weapons, and diplomacy. The Atlantic Council warns of “strategic exhaustion by 2027.” Moscow’s own narrative, as repeated by Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov, is fixed: without a neutrality clause, no ceasefire.

The risk is not just defeat in Ukraine but disintegration of the rhetorical order that underpins the EU itself. A union built on moral vocabulary cannot survive a world that demands balance-sheet realism. When the words fail, the institutions follow.

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12. The Reckoning

Europe’s tragedy is intellectual. It mistook language for policy, emotion for strength, and moral theatre for security architecture. The war did not create that confusion; it revealed it.

Every stage of the conflict — from NATO’s open-door declarations to energy-price convulsions — has demonstrated one thing: the rhetoric of virtue cannot substitute for strategy. As industry contracts, public patience thins, and allies hedge, Europe faces a binary it can no longer postpone.

It can keep its catechism, or it can keep its sovereignty. It can defend its values, or it can defend its interests. But the illusion that it can do both has expired.

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Kennan’s warning from 1997 reads now as epitaph: “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post–Cold War era.” The error was not only American. Europe adopted it as creed.

If the continent wishes to survive as more than a rhetorical project, it must rediscover the one art it unlearned — diplomacy. Neutrality, realism, and restraint are not moral failures; they are the grammar of peace.

Until Europe speaks that language again, it will continue to win the argument and lose the war.