EU leaders continue to try to pretend that what they are doing, how they are acting with regards to the Ukraine-Russia war is somehow noble and virtuous. It is nothing of the sort.
The EU leaders need to war to deflect the public’s attention from the absolute mess that they have made of Europe’s economies and general well-being. The EU leaders need the war to allow them to exhort the public to “suck it up” and suffer privations that have been caused not by the war but by their own ineptitude.
There are many and sundry forces at work here. Let’s just look at the ability of Europe to wage war. Prime Minister of Italy Giorgia Meloni recently spoke to her own staff. During her speech, she let it slip what many steely-eyed observers have known for a long time. While the EU may tax its citizens to send money to Ukraine, the EU is in no position to wage a war.
From The Islander:
The War Europe Cannot Supply
Europe can posture for war. It cannot produce for war. Four years into a high-intensity war of attrition, the United States and Europe are confronting a truth they spent decades unlearning: you do not sustain this kind of conflict with theatrical speeches, sanctions, or abandoning diplomacy. You sustain it with shells, missiles, trained crews, repair cycles, and production rates that exceed losses — month after month, without interruption.
By 2025, the gap is no longer theoretical.
Russia is now producing artillery ammunition at a scale that Western officials themselves concede outpaces the combined output of NATO. Russian industry has shifted to continuous near-wartime production (without even being fully mobilized), with centralized procurement, simplified supply chains, and state-directed throughput. Estimates place annual Russian artillery production at several million rounds — production already flowing, not promised.
Europe, by contrast, has spent 2025 celebrating targets it cannot ever materially meet. The European Union’s flagship pledge remains two million shells per year — a goal dependent on new facilities, new contracts, and new labor that will not fully materialize within the decisive window of the war, if ever. Even the dreamed target if reached, would not put it at parity with Russian output. The United States, after emergency expansion, is projecting roughly one million shells annually once and a big if, full ramp-up is achieved. Even combined on paper, Western production struggles to match Russian output already delivered. Talk about paper tiger.
This is not a gap. It is a major tempo mismatch. Russia is producing at scale now. Europe is dreaming of rebuilding the ability to produce at scale later.
And time is the one variable that cannot be sanctioned.
Nor can the United States simply compensate for Europe’s hollowed-out capacity. Washington faces its own industrial choke points. Production of Patriot air-defense interceptors runs in the low hundreds per year while demand now spans Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and U.S. stockpile replenishment simultaneously — a mismatch senior Pentagon officials have acknowledged cannot be resolved quickly, if ever. U.S. naval shipbuilding tells the same story: submarine and surface-combatant programs are years behind schedule, constrained by labor shortages, aging yards, and cost overruns that push meaningful expansion into the 2030s. The assumption that America can industrially backstop Europe no longer matches reality. This is not a European problem alone; it is a Western one.
EU leaders posture about putting Europe on a war footing. The reality is that war requires an industrial manufacturing base that no longer exists in Europe. It will take years if not decades to create a stable base.
In the meantime, Zelenskyy continues to act as if he is leading some moral crusade. He does this because EU leaders keep sending him money that will probably quickly be laundered. Very little will actually be used to fight the war.
The EU will continue to gaslight the public in every way possible. It is certainly reasonable to assume that the recent enforcement action of the EU’s Digital Services Act against Elon Musk’s X was not about safety.
What it is about is constructing an information perimeter around an elite consensus that can no longer withstand open accounting. When citizens begin asking calmly, and then not so calmly, what was this for, the illusion of legitimacy collapses quickly. The EU needs to control what appears on social media if they have any hope of containing the unrest that is festering in many EU countries.
How will it all end? Declines of nations are hard to predict. Will more leaders like Orban in Hungary emerge and become lions in the protection of their citizens? Will the EU fracture and become a hollow shell? How will the citizens of the EU react when the realization sinks home that the war was fought for greed and not principle? How will the citizens of the EU react when they realize that they sacrificed their children’s futures to pad the pockets of the elites?
Only God has the answer.