According to several experts, including Mikhail Samous, a military expert from Ukraine, at this point the entire Europe looks helpless when it comes to any possible threat coming from Russia.
To be more specific, Mikhail and his fellow experts assume that Europe has still failed to come up with efficient ways of resisting the kind of a hybrid war Russia has been waging in Ukraine, and even some other places around the world.
Mass media keep on releasing evidences of Russia’s interference with the internal affairs of many sovereign countries, including those located in Europe. For instance, back in summer 2016, Die Zeit claimed that Moscow was trying to influence the results of the parliamentary election in Germany planned for late 2017. The corresponding article described a possible scenario in which Russia manipulates the German parliamentary election. Back then, we didn’t know the results of the latest U.S. presidential election.
To be more specific, President Putin interferes with the parliamentary election in Germany. Amid a conflict between the 2 opposing parties, Moscow initiates a “forum of peace” involving Russia and Germany. During the forum, they claim that the U.S. President-Elect (probably Hillary Clinton, at that time) and Angela Merkel want to start a war between Russia and the European Union led by Germany. Apart from that, they urge for the necessity to put an end to the global hegemony of the United States. According to the authors, this call for action will be welcomed by both political powers.
This is what the plan looked like back then. Given the current state of affairs, if the Kremlin’s agents have been working on this plan to manipulate the EU all that time, they seem to have failed so far. For example, not so long ago, Marine le Pen and her National Front were accused of having close ties with Vladimir Putin. Apparently, this accusation does compromise her position given the fact that she is running for president.
As for Francois Fillon, another candidate running for president, has been interrogated by the police regarding the fact that his wife is now suspected of some kind of financial fraud. By the way, he has been actively advocating the idea of a tighter economic cooperation with Russia.
That said, the experts arrive to a conclusion that Russia’s secret services have been expanding their presence and influence in almost all of the EU states. To achieve their goals, they have been applying various methods, not limited to manipulation, lies and propaganda. They seem to have been financing election campaigns of many political powers and individual politicians in Europe. They have also been betting big on criminal structures in Europe and training military units as well. All of that makes Russia a really serious threat aimed at Western democracies in Europe.
Russia doesn’t care about the political views and ideology of the sponsored political powers in the EU. The only thing the Kremlin cares about is to start escalating the internal conflicts – both inside EU states and between them. Simply put they have been working hard to destroy the EU, the NATO and start a series of new conflicts all across Europe. A weaker Europe means a stronger Russia and more opportunities for Moscow. This is something that the Kremlin sees as a reason for Russia to be recognized a superpower, with the right to decide the fate of other nations. We should pay attention to the fact that the recent statements coming from Russian media have been hinting at the necessity to revise the world order and share it between Russia, the USA and China, while the EU is not event taken into account.
The bottom line, EU nations do not seem to understand the degree of the threat they have been facing all that time. Even though they are now discussing the conflict in Ukraine and Russia’s negative influence on Europe, they don’t seem to have understood the very essence of the threat and how to neutralize it. They keep on looking for the algorithms used by Russia while it’s not about the algorithms, it’s all about the goals, and those goals can take any algorithm required to reach those goals as fast and easy as possible. They are looking for weak spots in any field of a country’s life and hit them later to win the battle.
