What they're saying: "The Russian attack marks a turning point. It is our duty to do our best to help Ukraine defend against the invading army of Putin. That's why we're supplying 1,000 anti-tank weapons and 500 stinger missiles to our friends in the Ukraine," Scholz tweeted. Germany will also lift its ban on other countries exporting German-origin weapons, allowing the Netherlands to transfer 400 rocket-propelled grenade launchers to Ukraine.

The big picture: Germany is the largest economy and most powerful country in the European Union, making its voice and policy positions critical to the effectiveness of the West's response to Russia's invasion. Germany is highly reliant on Russian natural gas and had been an obstacle in discussions about imposing the harshest sanctions on Moscow, fearing the economic and energy reverberations.

Massive public pressure, including from Ukrainian officials, appears to have led Germany to drop its opposition to a number of the toughest measures, including halting the certification of the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

By December 2021, the Kiev government had amassed up to 125,000 troops along the contact line with the Donbass republics. At the same time, OSCE reported more frequent use of heavy weapons, prohibited under the Minsk Agreements, by the Ukrainian Armed Forces against the breakaway regions. At the same time, the Western mainstream media have kept silence for years about the shelling of the Donetsk and Lugansk Republics by the Ukrainian government forces and neo-Nazi battalions.

Just a limited number of independent American and European journalists and freelance photographers have been working in the Donbass region, chronicling the invisible war of the Ukrainian government against its own people. According to the UN, over 13,000 have been killed in the region since the Maidan coup d'etat of February 2014.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated on Thursday that Russia started a military operation to protect Donbass in order to clear the country of Nazis. "Ideally, it is necessary to liberate Ukraine, clear it of Nazis, as well as pro-Nazi people and ideology," Peskov told reporters.

It features one promotional video of men marching with torches that would “kindle the flames of righteous anger that will burn until dawn.” At the festival itself, a large screen installation flashed words such as “victory” and “honor” – in German – and the unmistakable phrase “White Power” in English. It was organized by the Azov Regiment, a one-time “volunteer battalion” that became notorious during the civil war in Ukraine’s east, and is now part of the country’s National Guard. Azov’s logo is the “Wolfsangel” rune used by the 2nd SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’ in WWII.

Their leader, Andriy Biletsky, once said that Ukraine’s purpose was to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade” against the “Semite-led Untermenschen.” “Ukraine really does have a far-right problem, and it’s not a fiction of Kremlin propaganda. And it’s well past time to talk about it,” journalist Michael Colborne wrote last December in the Forward, a Jewish daily. He has since written about Azov using MMA as a recruiting tool, and the Nazi festival in Kiev.

After 9/11, we became laser-focused on a threat from an ideology – political or radical Islam or Islamism – not from a great power. We ‘went to war against terror’. The US led and Europe mostly followed. In the end, we succeeded, and failed. We succeeded in preventing another 9/11, killing Osama Bin Laden, and crushing Islamic State. We mostly failed to create a stable Iraq and utterly failed to create a stable Afghanistan.

But the real failure was to ignore the resurgence of two of the old great powers, China and Russia. Not just to ignore, but to enable their rise. Americans helped China’s rapid growth, especially after the Beijing government was allowed into the World Trade Organisation. Americans told themselves a fairy story that China would liberalise.

As for Russia, its return to military power was enabled by Europeans buying Russian natural gas and oil and turning a blind eye to Putin’s increasingly despotic rule. Europeans told themselves a fairy story that Russia would liberalise. Last year, Biden abandoned the people of Afghanistan to the Taliban. This year it is the turn of the people of Ukraine to be thrown to the wolves.

At key Cold War junctures, Kremlin leaders miscalculated by launching, approving, or threatening aggressive actions that ultimately proved counterproductive to Soviet interests. From sending tanks into Hungary in 1956 to pressuring the communist government in Poland to snuff out the Solidarity trade union movement in the early 1980s, the Soviets’ efforts to bring countries to heel reminded Western leaders why they had banded together against Moscow in the first place.

Today, it appears Putin may be repeating the errors of his Soviet predecessors. His attack against Ukraine is buttressing Ukrainian opposition to Russian influence and breathing new life into and unifying the Western alliance.

Speaking at a United Nations videoconference in the fall of 2020, Justin Trudeau raised eyebrows, with a hint of a potential link between the global pandemic and the Forum. "This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset," Trudeau said. "This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts, to re-imagine economic systems that actually address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change,” he added, evoking a “reset” concept much promoted by the WEF from the onset of the pandemic, that frames the crisis as an opportunity to fundamentally change the way that developed societies function.

Then in August 2021, Dutch MP Gideon van Meijeren asked Prime Minister Mark Rutte about a letter he wrote to WEF Founder Klaus Schwab in which he said that Schwab’s book, “Covid-19: The Great Reset,” published on July 9, 2020, within the first few months of the pandemic, “inspired him to build back better.” The phrase also happens to be the name of US President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda, which includes increased wealth transfer into the murky black hole of climate change and “social spending.”

It would be easy to chalk it all up to creepy rhetorical coincidence if there wasn’t an actual link between Schwab, Davos, and elected officials like Rutte and Trudeau. It’s a link about which even Schwab himself has bragged. In 2017, he told an audience at Harvard University’s John F Kennedy School of Government: “What we are very proud of is the young generation, like Prime Minister Trudeau… We penetrate the cabinets.”

He’s not kidding. Current Canadian finance minister and deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, is on the WEF’s board of trustees, alongside former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor, Mark Carney. Freeland was last seen announcing asset freezes and crackdown measures against truckers and supporters in the streets of Canada demanding an end to heavy handed Covid mandates and restrictions. And Carney recently qualified the Freedom Convoy as “sedition” in a hysterical opinion piece published in the Globe and Mail newspaper. Much more light deserves to be shed on this supranational entity, its string-pullers, and the extent to which their agenda trickles down into our daily lives.

And of course, in this situation, we have a question: what to do next, what to expect? We know well from history how in the 1940s and early 1941s the Soviet Union tried in every possible way to prevent or at least delay the outbreak of war. As a result, the country was not ready to fully meet the invasion of Nazi Germany, which attacked our Motherland on June 22, 1941 without declaring war. The enemy was stopped and then crushed, but at a colossal cost. In the very first months of hostilities, we lost huge, strategically important territories and millions of people. The second time we will not allow such a mistake…

What I think is important to emphasize further. The leading NATO countries, in order to achieve their own goals, support extreme nationalists and neo-Nazis in Ukraine in everything, who, in turn, will never forgive the Crimeans and Sevastopol residents for their free choice - reunification with Russia. In this regard, in accordance with Article 51 of Part 7 of the UN Charter, with the sanction of the Federation Council of Russia and in pursuance of the treaties of friendship and mutual assistance ratified by the Federal Assembly on February 22 this year with the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic, I decided to conduct a special military operation.

Its goal is to protect people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years. And for this we will strive for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, as well as bringing to justice those who committed numerous, bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation.

The results of the Second World War, as well as the sacrifices made by our people on the altar of victory over Nazism, are sacred. But this does not contradict the high values ​​of human rights and freedoms, based on the realities that have developed today over all the post-war decades. It also does not cancel the right of nations to self-determination, enshrined in Article 1 of the UN Charter.

In this regard, I appeal to the citizens of Ukraine. In 2014, Russia was obliged to protect the inhabitants of Crimea and Sevastopol from those whom you yourself call 'Nazis'. Crimeans and Sevastopol residents made their choice to be with their historical homeland, with Russia, and we supported this. I repeat, they simply could not do otherwise.

Dear comrades! Your fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers did not fight the Nazis, defending our common Motherland, so that today's neo-Nazis seized power in Ukraine. You took an oath of allegiance to the Ukrainian people, and not to the anti-people junta that plunders Ukraine and mocks these same people.”

When conflict erupts, you are going to see a swarm of media stories in western nations trying to outline the complexity of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine since the fall of the Soviet Union, while ignoring certain inconvenient truths. You will see many of these stories construct a narrative which then oversimplifies the situation and paints Russia as the monstrous aggressor. The goal will be to convince the public that our involvement in Ukraine is a moral and geopolitical necessity. There will be attempts to gain American favor and a call for US boots on the ground. Joe Biden will be at the forefront of this push.

The surface trigger for the confrontation is obviously rooted in the 2009 decision by western powers and Ukrainian officials to consider the country for membership in NATO. Most of Russia’s actions when dealing with Ukraine can be owed to NATO involvement in the region, including the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. Strategically, it makes sense. Imagine if Mexico suddenly announced it was joining a military alliance with China and that Chinese military assets were going to be transferred near the US southern border? It probably would not end well.