As 2026 opens, the war in Ukraine is no longer defined by headlines or symbolic victories. It is being shaped by attrition on the battlefield, mounting financial strain in Europe, and institutional contradictions in the West. This long read examines how those pressures are converging — and whether they point toward an endgame, or a more dangerous phase ahead.
Britain’s next phase will not be decided by choosing Europe or America. It will be decided by whether London remains a trusted switchboard for global capital or becomes a strategic asset to be used...
Private credit is no longer a niche market for institutions. It is being repackaged for pensions and retail investors, changing how losses surface and turning opacity into political risk. This is how the next financial crisis could form quietly, far from public view
War is no longer disrupting global trade. It is being written into the contracts and insurance frameworks that make trade possible. As war risk pricing, listed areas, and standard charterparty clauses harden into routine procedure, conflict becomes a toll. Watch the insurance market, not the speeches. It signals what the world is normalising.
This article examines the EU sanctions imposed on Jack Baud, a former Swiss Army colonel, and compares them with the UK sanctions case of Graham Phillips. It argues that modern sanctions regimes increasingly classify speech as “propaganda” based on executive alignment rather than falsity or criminality, creating domestic coercive effects in peacetime and raising fundamental constitutional concerns about free expression, property rights and procedural safeguards.
The United States has begun sanctioning Europe not with tariffs or lawsuits, but with visa bans. By targeting EU regulators and aligned civil society actors, Washington is signalling that digital sovereignty now carries personal costs. Europe insists this is coercion. But years of regulatory overreach, rhetorical hubris, and blurred lines between platform enforcement and democratic legitimacy have made retaliation politically inevitable.
Europe and Britain are discovering a hard truth: money and slogans do not manufacture shells, fix rail networks, or deliver armoured vehicles on time. In 2025, power is drifting toward systems that can execute, not those that can only announce. Values still matter, but without institutional delivery they turn into rhetoric and publics stop believing
Europe’s Ukraine strategy was built on assumptions that no longer hold. As guarantees become conditional and financial improvisation replaces certainty, the risks are shifting from the battlefield to Europe’s own balance sheets.
The Berlin talks produced an “Article 5 like” security offer for Ukraine that sounds historic but collapses under scrutiny. Europe and the United States are negotiating posture and optics among themselves, while Russia rejects the core premises. This is war management dressed up as peace.
Europe is moving from freezing Russian sovereign assets to institutionalising the freeze and building Ukraine finance on top of it. That shift invites a long legal campaign, concentrates liability in Belgium, and quietly burns Europe’s custody trust premium across global markets
Europe is not being dragged into decline by fate. Its leaders are choosing an energy squeeze, a financial time bomb over frozen Russian assets, and subordination to United States tariffs and war demands, while pretending this is morality and strategy. The only sector with a clear future is the arms industry. Everyone else is being told to absorb the cost in silence.
The European Commission wants to raise a huge loan for Ukraine backed on frozen Russian reserves, using emergency law to bypass national vetoes. Brussels calls it solidarity and insists nothing is being confiscated. In practice it weaponises custody, turns Euroclear into a litigation magnet and tells the rest of the world that reserves held in Europe are safe only until politics changes.
Europe was told it had to cut Russian energy and arm for democracy. In reality it has swapped predictable pipeline gas for volatile imports, pushed energy intensive industry toward the exits and tied its public finances to an open ended rearmament cycle largely designed elsewhere. This piece follows the gas, the factories and the defence budgets to show who really pays for the last phase of US hegemony.
Ukraine was sold to Western publics as a clean moral war: brave defenders, honest aid, a shattered Russia at the end of it. What emerges instead is a corrupt and exhausted client state, a Russia that chooses when and where to advance, and a Germany hollowed out by lost energy and bad bets
Germany’s de-industrialisation is not an accident but a self-inflicted collapse. By shutting nuclear plants, severing cheap Russian gas and accepting costly US LNG, Germany destroyed the energy base that powered its industry. Offshoring core manufacturing to China and arriving late to the electric-vehicle transition deepened the decline. High labour costs, rigid regulation and a bloated welfare model have finished the job. Germany dismantled itself—and now the bill is due.
A decade after the Union parties vowed never to work with the AfD, Germany’s political geometry has hardened into paralysis. The exclusion that was meant to contain the right now keeps the left in power and strengthens the very movement it tried to suppress.
Poland has become NATO’s most anxious frontier a country caught between vigilance and hysteria. A string of drone and airspace incidents along the eastern flank has pushed the alliance toward a posture where accidents can look like acts of war. As Warsaw re-arms and Europe rehearses deterrence, President Karol Nawrocki faces a narrowing choice: keep Poland a shield, or watch it become the spark.
For eight decades Europe nestled under America’s triple canopy, military, technological, psychological. It was a seductive bargain. Washington’s shield let Europe skimp on tanks, pour billions into cradle to grave welfare, and sermonize about liberal values without the gritty cost of standing alone. The Ukraine war tore that illusion to shreds.
The alleged violation was sensationalised and given wall-to-wall coverage in Western media. What was not mentioned is that in April 2025 Estonia passed a law expanding its military authority over its exclusive economic zone,...
BERLIN — The turbulence in Germany’s politics cannot be separated from the choices its leaders have made since 2022. What some analysts describe as a “political tsunami” is also the result of self-inflicted wounds:...
By Jaffa Levy An impulse—to reclaim a sense of belonging—echoed in England this weekend, where flags and protests occurred in the open air. A surge of English and British flags across town centres and...
How sabotage, austerity and Trump’s shadow left the continent exposed By Jaffa Levy Europe has slipped into a brittle bargain. In Berlin, ministers say the welfare state is “too expensive,” even as they prepare...
By Jaffa Levy August 30, 2025 Europe finds itself at a crossroads. As the war in Ukraine grinds on into its fourth year, Western capitals are under pressure to sustain the flow of weapons...
By Jaffa Levy — Reform UK has stopped talking about “turning the boats back.” According to Mark White’s interview for GB News, Nigel Farage now speaks the language of deportations, legal resets, and international...
By Jaffa Levy The silence of Britain’s leaders in the face of mounting warnings has become louder than any denial. There has been no clear rebuttal from the Prime Minister, no assertive statement from...
By Jaffa Levy — August 28, 2025 LONDON — For the first time since 2008, American nuclear weapons are again being stationed on British soil. According to Western defense officials and satellite evidence reviewed...
By Jaffa Levy The Long Read Europe in Denial: Moral Rhetoric and Strategic Decline The continent clings to the language of virtue as its energy arteries are severed, its industries hollowed out, and its...