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Theft of Russian wealth is tying the entire EU bloc to a sinking ship, or worse, all-out war

Strategic Culture Foundation | December 5, 2025

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is pushing ahead with a reckless plan to confiscate over €200 billion in Russia’s sovereign wealth for the purpose of propping up the corrupt NeoNazi Kiev regime and prolonging a futile proxy war.

It is hard to imagine a more crass course of action. Yet the so-called European leadership around Von der Leyen is zealously steering towards disaster. At least the hapless captain of the Titanic tried to avert collision with an iceberg. The Euro captains are heading full steam ahead.

Von der Leyen’s proposed scheme is fancifully called a “reparations loan” and pretends, through legalistic rhetoric, not to be a confiscation of Russia’s assets. But it boils down to theft. Theft to continue the bloodiest war in Europe since the Second World War, which marked the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Von der Leyen, a former German defense minister, is supported by other obsessively Russophobic Euro elites. The EU’s foreign minister Kaja Kallas, a former Estonian prime minister, asserts that the seizure of Russian money and pumping it into the Kiev regime is aimed at forcing Moscow to negotiate a peaceful end to the nearly four-year conflict. Such twisted logic is an Orwellian distortion of reality.

Belgium and other European states are extremely wary of the unprecedented and audacious move. Belgium, which holds the majority of frozen Russian wealth – some €185 bn – in its Euroclear depository, is anxious that it will be financially ruined if Moscow holds the EU liable for illegal seizure of wealth. Other EU members, like Hungary and Slovakia, are concerned that the Russophobic leadership is undermining any diplomatic initiatives by the U.S. Trump administration and the Kremlin to negotiate a peace settlement.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that any confiscation of Russian assets by the EU leadership – regardless of financial rhetorical packaging – will be viewed by Moscow as theft of sovereign wealth. Russia has vowed it will respond robustly with legal challenges under existing treaties to exact compensation. This is what Belgium is fearful of and why it is resisting von der Leyen’s loan reparation scheme.

The European leaders are to hold a summit on December 18-19 to decide on the proposal. So desperate are the Russophobic elites that they have been assiduously piling political pressure on the Belgian government to relent in its opposition to go along with the scheme. In trying to get Belgium onboard, von der Leyen has written legal guarantees that all EU members will share any legal and financial repercussions. Thus, the unelected European Commission president is taking it upon herself to write a suicide note for the whole of Europe.

Essentially, the proposed loan reparation scheme is based on using Russian immobilized investments in EU banks as a guarantee to give €140 bn in an interest-free hand-out to Ukraine. The financial life-line is necessary because Ukraine is bankrupt after four years of fighting a proxy war on behalf of NATO against Russia.

Ukraine and its NATO sponsors have lost this conflict as Russian forces gather momentum with superior military force. But rather than meeting Russia’s terms for peace, the Euro elites want to keep on “fighting to the last Ukrainian”. To sue for peace would be an admission of complicity in a proxy war and would be politically disastrous for the European warmongers. In covering up their criminal enterprise and lies, they are compelled to keep the “defense of Ukraine” charade going.

Given the rampant graft and embezzlement at the core of the Kiev regime as indicated by the recent firing of top ministers and aides, it is certain that much of the next EU loan will end up in offshore bank accounts, foreign properties and being snorted up the noses of the corrupt regime.

Von der Leyen’s artful deception of theft claims that the Russian assets are not confiscated permanently but rather will be released when Moscow eventually pays “war damages” to Ukraine. In other words, the scheme is a blackmail operation, one that Russia will never comply with because it is premised on Russia as a guilty aggressor, rather than, as Moscow and many others see it, as acting in self-defense to years of NATO fueled hostility culminating in the CIA coup in Kiev in 2014 and weaponizing of a NeoNazi regime to provoke Russia. Therefore, under von der Leyen’s scheme, Russia’s frozen funds will, in effect, never be returned and, to add insult to injury, will have been routed through to the benefit of Kiev mafia.

Such a criminal move is highly provocative and dangerous. It could be interpreted by Moscow as an act of war given the huge scale of plunder of the Russian nation. At the very least, Russia will pursue compensation under international treaties and laws that could end up destroying Belgium and other EU states from financial liabilities. How absurd is that? Von der Leyen and her Russophobic ilk are setting up Europe for bankruptcy by stealing Russia’s wealth for propping up a corrupt NeoNazi regime that has already sacrificed millions of Ukrainian military casualties?

Alternatively, if the EU leadership does not get away with its madcap robbery scheme at the summit on December 18-19, the “Plan B” is for the EU 27 members to take out a joint debt from international markets to carry the Kiev regime through another two years of attritional war.

The insanity of the EU leaders is unfathomable. It is driven by ideological, futile obsession to “subjugate” Russia. Von der Leyen, as well as Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, are descendants of Nazi figures. For these people, there is an atavistic quest to defeat Russia and assert European “greatness”.

They lost their proxy war in Ukraine with much blood on their hands. But instead of desisting from their destructive obsession, they are desperately trying to find new ways to keep it going.

The criminal, irresponsible Euro elites like von der Leyen, Kallas, Merz, Macron, and NATO’s Rutte, are lashing the EU financially to a sinking ship. They are bringing the entire European bloc down with them, splintering as they go.

What these elites are doing is destroying the European Union as we know it, and they profess to uphold. Ironically, it is they, not Russia, that is the biggest enemy to democracy and peace in Europe.

December 7, 2025 Posted by | Corruption, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

A “ripple-on” effect following Sanae Takaichi’s remark

By Vladimir Terehov – New Eastern Outlook – December 7, 2025

The scandal triggered by a comment made by Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi on November 7, 2025 about the Taiwan issue is still reverberating and shows no sign of dying down.

The “ripples on the water” provoked by her remark on the global political arena not only refuse to fade, they keep reaching new actors.

Japan’s Defense Minister visits an island near Taiwan

The NEO has already touched upon Takaichi’s earlier statements about the probability of Beijing opting for a military solution to the Taiwan issue and thus posing an “existential threat” to Japan. Now, any remaining hope that Takaichi’s remark was merely an unfortunate slip of the tongue of an inexperienced politician seems to be evaporating. As the first woman to assume the office of prime minister, being now at the very beginning of her path, she could, in theory, have walked straight into a trap cleverly laid by seasoned male politicians, perhaps an unexpected question tossed at her during some parliamentary event unrelated to the topic.

However, not only does Takaichi refuse to retract her words, but she also declines to offer any “softening” explanations. And this is despite Beijing discreetly signaling that such clarifications would be enough for it to consider the incident exhausted.

The assumption of Takaichi’s wording being an accidental slip of the tongue is further undermined by what happened two weeks later. Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi appeared on the small island of Yonaguni—Japan’s westernmost inhabited island, home to 1,500 people, lying closest to Taiwan’s eastern coast. More importantly, he announced plans to deploy missiles there in order, as he put it, “to reduce the likelihood of an armed attack on our country.”

He did not specify what kind of missiles he was taking about. Japan is currently developing a broad range of sea- and land-based missile systems, and if deployed on Yonaguni, several provinces of the PRC could fall within their range, since the narrowest distance to China’s coast is less than 500 km. The response that came from China’s Defense Ministry to already thinly veiled threats from Japan was more than expected.

It’s worth noting that another stage in the deterioration of bilateral relations was preceded by an attempt to rectify the situation in the realms of an emergency trip to Beijing by a Plenipotentiary of  the Japanese Foreign Ministry, which, nevertheless, was to no avail. If these two developments constitute Tokyo’s attempts to use a “carrot and stick” strategy, then such an approach is poorly appropriate in dealing with the world’s second-largest power.

Deepening and widening the emerging crisis

There are currently no hints at the possibility of reversing the deterioration of the relations between the region’s two leading states set in motion by Takaichi’s remark. Her previously arranged meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in South Africa never took place. A trilateral summit in the “China–Japan–South Korea” format, initially planned for January 2026, has been postponed to an indefinite period of time. This is particularly notable given that the resumption of this trilateral mechanism in May 2024, after a three-year hiatus, was heralded as a sign that longstanding, serious issues present in all its “sides” might finally be resolved.

Today, however, new obstacles are being thrown in the way of people-to-people contacts between China and Japan, particularly in tourism. New restrictions are also emerging around Japan’s export of seafood, which has long been bought mainly by China.

Over the last two years, the situation in the sector has served as a reliable indicator of the state of bilateral ties. When the said moment of improving the relations manifested itself, earlier concerns among Chinese authorities about the quality of Japan’s seawater, and thus its seafood, stemming from the release of treated water used to cool damaged reactors at Fukushima-1, faded away. Now, Chinese officials, to justify putting imports on halt, cite not only “incomplete” documentation but also “Takaichi’s erroneous statements on the Taiwan issue, which provoked indignation and condemnation among the Chinese people.”

A sharp stiffening of Chinese public and expert rhetoric towards Japan is also hard to miss, with them making use of diverse factual data both from World War II and the early postwar years. Particular attention is being paid to Tokyo’s attempts to revise the still-intact pacifist Constitution of 1947. Commentaries on the issue end with a general, unarguable warning: “Those who love war will perish.” The problem, however, is that “those” who provoke yet another, and most likely final, global carnage often act publicly for years with impunity, expecting to survive.

The current US president does not appear to pertain to such a category, even despite his political peculiarities and personal shortcomings. He appears genuinely alarmed by the rapidly escalating confrontation between East Asia’s two leading powers. Just a month after meeting their leaders in person, Donald Trump decided to pick up the phone. According to some reports, he expressed his “concern” over the state of Sino-Japanese relations during his conversation with Takaichi and urged her to “avoid escalation.” Nonetheless, the conflict continues spreading across the landscape of global politics and has already reached the UN stage.

The issue surfaced in late November during a phone call between Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Emmanuel Bonne, diplomatic adviser to the French president, as well as during Wang Yi’s meeting with UK National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell that came to China on a visit. Notably, Bonne himself had visited China only a month earlier.

Reaction in Taiwan

It is worth reiterating that Taiwan is far from being a passive pawn in the geopolitical games of major powers around the Taiwan-related problem. This is, however, roughly how Beijing portrays it, insisting that the “Taiwan issue” does not exist at all: the island is simply outside China’s administrative control due to certain historical circumstances and “misunderstandings.”

China, nevertheless, closely monitors every nuance of Taiwan’s energetic domestic politics, and among the island’s major political forces, it clearly prefers the Kuomintang (KMT), now in opposition. Since the days of Sun Yat-sen, his successor Chiang Kai-shek, and current leaders of the party, the KMT has declared adherence to the “One China” principle, though, of course, on its own terms. While the party does not reject the need to develop ties with Japan, several KMT legislators and former president Ma Ying-jeou (who held office from 2008 to 2016) responded to Takaichi’s remark with cautious criticism, essentially saying: “We will handle our relations with the mainland ourselves.”

By contrast, the representatives of Taiwan’s current administration, starting with President Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party, have expressed full understanding of both Takaichi’s comments and Japan’s defense plans mentioned above. Meanwhile, the Taiwan People’s Party, which forms a coalition with the KMT, has offered its services as a mediator in the emerging Japan–China conflict.

Its further evolution needs constant monitoring, as it has become one of the major threats to global political stability today.

Vladimir Terekhov, expert on Asia-Pacific affairs

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December 7, 2025 Posted by | Militarism | , | Leave a comment

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