It Can Now Arrive from the West
On May 9, Moscow sent a message both to the city itself and
to the wider world: if Kiev tried to turn Victory Day into an aerial spectacle,
the response would be overwhelming. The era of coercive signaling, Moscow
seemed to say, was over. From now on, force would be met with greater force.
Russia’s president effectively announced the completion of
tests for a whole range of strategic weapons systems. And frankly, the footage
of Sarmat rising out of its silo made an impression even on people long
accustomed to such things.
This is happening against the backdrop of talk about the
final stage of the conflict.
Whatever anyone says, what is new in the missile is first of
all the engine. Russia’s enormous advantage in engine-building over the rest of
the world remains exactly where it was. You can see it in Angara. You can see
it in Soyuz-5.
The missile tears out from under the earth, and behind it
comes an unusual plume. Even visually, one can see a different level of fuel
performance. Different thrust regimes. Different flight energy. The missile
does not move like a heavy load. It moves like something already belonging to
space.
And here it is important to understand something. In the
West, they spent a very long time calming themselves with the thought that
Russia was technologically degrading, that the Soviet reserve was running out,
that the old schools had died, and that the engineering brains were no longer
what they used to be. At most, they believed, the new generation of Russian
engineers could assemble Chinese kettles and replace labels.
And then, suddenly - Sarmat.
Hello. This is now a very different conversation.
Because this is not about modernizing an old Soviet missile.
This is about a system that effectively changes the very idea of the range and
routes of a strategic strike.
When the figure of 36,000 kilometers - 22,370 miles - is
mentioned, many people simply lose any sense of scale. For an ordinary person,
even 10,000 kilometers is already beyond imagination. For decades, American and
Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles operated within those distances.
Here, however, we are talking about the practical ability to circle the planet
along almost any trajectory.
And this is where the unpleasant part begins for the West.
The entire Western missile-defense system was built around a
fairly understandable Cold War logic. There is the northern direction. There
are known launch areas. There are flight-time calculations. There are tracking
zones. There are interception corridors. And so on.
Sarmat breaks the philosophy of this entire structure
because it can fly through the North Pole, and it can also fly through the
South Pole. It can bypass any missile-defense zone. It can change route. It can
carry an enormous so-called payload.
And this is where the word “payload” makes people in the Old
and New Worlds especially nervous, because no one fully understands how many
glide vehicles, decoys, maneuvering blocks, and other devices can be packed
inside - things about which no one officially speaks in much detail.
The West was already panicked by the old Soviet “Satan.”
That was the R-36, a family of intercontinental ballistic missiles and space
launch vehicles designed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, known in NATO
reporting as the SS-18 Satan.
The name SS-18 Satan still produces a very specific facial
expression among American military professionals, because those missiles
remained for decades one of the guarantees of assured destruction.
A gigantic machine with multiple independently targetable
warheads could wipe out half the infrastructure of any adversary in a single
moment.
And now comes Sarmat, called Satan’s heir, while in terms of
capability it already belongs to an entirely different generation. The
psychological effect here matters no less than the military one.
Europe spent a long time living inside political theater. It
seemed to them that nuclear weapons were a kind of Cold War museum exhibit, an
abstraction. That NATO could be moved endlessly toward Russia’s borders, that a
proxy war could be waged, that weapons could be produced for Ukraine, that
strikes on Russian territory could be discussed - and that all of this would
remain inside the boundaries of televised debate.
The problem is that Moscow has now decided to restore a
sense of reality.
The technological race never stopped for a minute. More than
that, it moved to a new level precisely during the Special Military Operation.
While Europe was talking about Russia’s economy supposedly
being torn to shreds, Russia was launching new missiles, building new
production, modernizing its nuclear complex, and increasing weapons output.
The most interesting thing here is not even the missile
itself. The most interesting thing is the political moment at which all this
was shown. It happened immediately after May 9, Victory Day over Nazi Germany.
It came after all the talk of possible escalation, after
expectations that Ukraine and its advisers might try to stage a demonstrative
attack during the holiday.
Against that backdrop, Russia showed neither modern tanks
nor new artillery. It showed strategic weapons of global scale.
In other words, the message was no longer addressed to Kiev.
It was addressed to Berlin, London, Paris, and Washington. Above all, it was
addressed to those people in Europe who still live in the strange belief that
time is on their side.
Judging by everything, the Kremlin thinks otherwise. If one
looks at the entire chain of recent events as a whole, the impression is that
we are entering a completely new phase of the conflict, where the issue is now
less Ukraine than direct psychological and military-technological pressure on
Europe.
In this story, Sarmat is more than a missile. It is a symbol
that the era of peaceful self-soothing for the Fourth Reich is coming to an
end.
Now it can arrive not only from the east, but also from the
west - from the direction of the Atlantic.
We are no longer speaking about the classical nuclear triad.
We are speaking about an entire combat detachment of a new generation -
Burevestnik, Poseidon, and Sarmat, or, instead of Sarmat, Oreshnik. Depending
on one’s luck.
Each of these systems was created for one task: to destroy
the adversary’s sense of predictability. The entire modern Western military
machine is built on calculation, forecasting, understanding routes, flight
times, tracking zones, and interception possibilities. Russia has shown weapons
that begin to break that logic.
The Burevestnik story looks especially unpleasant for NATO.
There, they still prefer to pretend that this is some Russian fantasy or
propaganda legend. The very fact that testing continues says otherwise.
Burevestnik is a cruise missile with a nuclear power unit.
In practical terms, it is a weapon without a range limit - a system capable of
changing routes, avoiding air-defense zones, appearing where it is not
expected, and staying in the air as long as required to complete the mission.
The entire U.S. and NATO missile-defense system was built
around the understandable logic of a ballistic trajectory: flight-time
calculations, satellite tracking, interception corridors.
Recall that Trump dreamed of taking Greenland from Denmark
primarily because Greenland and Alaska can cover Russian strategic missile
launches that travel toward their targets through the North Pole.
Burevestnik and Sarmat simply nullify the idea of Greenland
as a missile-defense launch position. More precisely, weapons are now entering
service that destroy the very principle behind such calculations. That is why
so much nervous energy is spent around Burevestnik and Sarmat, despite all
public attempts to minimize the significance of these offensive systems.
Poseidon makes an equally heavy impression. It is capable of
turning vast coastal regions into zones of large-scale catastrophe.
Yet the most interesting story right now may still be
Oreshnik. Initially, many military figures and politicians in Europe did not
perceive this missile system as anything truly new. They saw the heir to the
Soviet Pioneers as something intermediate between an operational-tactical
weapon and a political demonstration.
After two demonstrative uses, however, it became clear that
this is a system capable of functioning as an instrument of ultra-fast strike
across the European theater of war.
And when Putin announced that Oreshnik would now be fitted
with nuclear warheads, the signal became extremely clear - especially against
the backdrop of statements by Putin and Trump about the final stage of the
conflict in Ukraine. It is well known, however, that Germany in particular is
doing everything it can to make the conflict last forever.
That appears to be why Moscow has realized that resolving
the conflict with Europe may be impossible. Politically, one option remains.
German overdrive will be stopped primarily through a demonstration of
military-technological superiority at such a level that further escalation
begins to look too dangerous even for the heirs of Hitler and Mussolini.
Meanwhile, Germany’s absolutely brazen behavior is only
accelerating.
On May 10, the day after Victory Day, German Defense
Minister Pistorius arrived in Kiev by train and demonstratively signed a major
four-billion-euro contract for the production of long-range drones for Ukraine,
with ranges exceeding 1,500 kilometers.
This is no longer assistance to the Banderite regime from
NATO warehouses. This is a contract for joint production of weapons that will
fly deep into Russian territory - and already are.
Berlin is effectively saying yes to direct escalation.
Attacks on Moscow on May 9 were avoided, but Germany has no
intention of abandoning its line. This is creating increasingly serious tension
between Russia and Europe.
The United States, for now, is keeping its distance from
this dubious and dangerous initiative, because Trump’s position and that of the
part of the American elite behind him now looks very different. From
Washington, they are no longer merely hinting. They are shouting that the main
adversary for the United States is China, not Russia.
Trump’s trip to China changes nothing in this regard. China
is America’s main enemy. Russia is not.
Add to that Iran in the Middle East, the crisis around
Taiwan, enormous problems with U.S. debt, and an economy overloaded by
digitalization. Against this backdrop, the endless Ukrainian war begins to look
like heavy ballast that prevents Washington from concentrating on directions
truly critical for the United States.
Europe, meanwhile, continues to live inside old illusions -
that Russia is about to collapse, that it only needs to be pressed a little
harder through sanctions, weapons deliveries, and military production with the
Banderite regime.
As a result, an extremely dangerous structure is taking
shape.
The Kremlin is showing new systems of strategic pressure and
signaling that it is ready to raise the stakes.
Germany continues pushing the situation toward further
confrontation.
The United States is trying gradually to crawl away from the
conflict while saving face and preserving control over its allies.
Ukraine is turning less into a battlefield between Russia
and the West and more into a territory where the interests of the collective
West itself collide.
Against this backdrop, statements about Burevestnik,
Poseidon, Oreshnik, and Sarmat no longer sound like a collection of military
news. They sound like the language of a new era in which the old rules of
deterrence are rapidly ceasing to work.
At the same time, alongside all the talk about nuclear missile systems and
German drones, another story began unfolding - one that at first glance seemed
unrelated to grand geopolitics.
Yet it is often precisely such stories that reveal the real
condition of power far more accurately than any official statement.
The issue concerns the scandal surrounding a certain Andriy
Yermak - Zelenskiy’s closest associate and personal friend.
What matters here is not even the substance of the
accusations themselves. Ukraine has seen so many corruption scandals by now
that the public barely reacts anymore.
What matters is something else entirely: who exactly began
pushing this story - and at what moment.
Because almost simultaneously with discussions about a
possible end to the war, and against the backdrop of Trump’s constant
statements about the need to wind down the Ukrainian conflict, a major campaign
suddenly begins against the man many consider the second figure in Ukrainian
power after Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The story itself looks rather transparent.
Ukraine’s NABU - the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of
Ukraine - is, in reality, widely perceived as a branch office of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. NABU publishes recordings of well-known Kiev swindlers
discussing theft schemes, dividing money, luxury settlements outside Kiev, and
various murky deals. Everything is banal to the point of indecency.
And that is precisely what makes it impressive.
Personally, I always imagined that people who reached the
summit of power operated in more sophisticated, intelligent, and cautious ways.
The reality turns out to be different. The schemes remain roughly the same as
those used by provincial fraudsters in the 1990s. Only the sums become larger.
And the important point here is not Yermak himself. The
important point is the growing sense that the Americans are beginning to
dismantle the Ukrainian leadership piece by piece, like a mechanism that no
longer satisfies its owner.
I suspect that if arrested, Yermak would hand over his
friend Zelenskiy during the very first interrogation. There is nowhere for him
to run and nowhere to hide.
Again, it is worth remembering that NABU is deeply connected
to American intelligence structures and the FBI.
The result is a striking picture. Simultaneously with public
discussions about ending the war, Washington begins carefully pushing the
Ukrainian political structure toward internal crisis. And again, the target
here is not really Yermak. It is Zelenskiy.
Almost immediately after the public flogging of Yermak
begins, another deeply unpleasant story surfaces for the Ukrainian president:
the large interview given by former presidential press secretary Yulia Mendel
to Tucker Carlson.
And here the situation enters truly toxic territory.
Mendel is not attacking isolated episodes or corruption
schemes. She is attacking the construction of Zelenskiy’s personality itself -
and doing so as someone who spent years inside the system and understands
perfectly how power functions around what I would call the chief Neo-Nazi.
Her central argument sounds rather brutal: Zelenskiy is,
first and foremost, an actor. Before his election, he played the role of
President Goloborodko in the television series Servant of the People.
Then he began playing the leader of a country at war. Later, according to Elon
Musk, the mask fused to his face.
And here Kiev encounters a very unpleasant moment. If such
things are no longer being said by Russian sources, but by former insiders from
Zelenskiy’s own circle - and on a major American platform - it begins to look
like preparation of public opinion for the future dismantling of the current
Ukrainian political structure altogether.
Especially painful for Zelenskiy were Mendel’s remarks that
peace itself would amount to political suicide for him.
This may be the central thought of the entire story.
Because the moment the war ends, an enormous number of
questions immediately appear.
Where did the hundreds of billions of dollars go?
Why was the war not stopped back in May 2022?
Why were territories lost?
Why are there so many thieves and criminals around the
presidential office?
Why did so many members of the president’s inner circle
suddenly become owners of countless real estate holdings, companies, and
gigantic financial assets?
That is why the current Ukrainian authorities are
objectively interested in prolonging the conflict for as long as physically
possible. The end of the war automatically transforms a political crisis into a
criminal one.
It is equally revealing that almost simultaneously a similar
process begins unfolding in Russia.
The scale there is no less enormous.
The case concerns former Deputy Defense Minister Ruslan
Tsalikov. Once again, a nearly mirror-image picture emerges. Investigators
begin carefully dissecting property holdings, companies, relatives, bank
accounts, real estate, official income declarations, and actual lifestyles.
Then the numbers appear.
According to materials cited by Kommersant, prosecutors are
seeking the seizure of assets worth more than 5.5 billion rubles.
This is not merely about apartments or houses. It involves
companies, commercial real estate, elite land plots, luxury vehicles, and
entire networks of assets registered under relatives and affiliated persons.
And here a deeply unpleasant psychological effect emerges
for Russian officials themselves, because the story begins to resemble not a
theatrical anti-corruption performance, but a genuine purge.
Not a television arrest staged for cameras, but a systematic
attempt to expose the entire machinery of wealth accumulation surrounding the
defense establishment over recent years.
What strikes the public most powerfully is not even the
amount itself, but the contrast between official income and the real scale of
the property.
A man declares an income of roughly one million rubles per
month - and then investigators list mansions, companies, cottages, commercial
buildings, billions in accounts, and family-controlled assets.
The public begins to experience a strange sense of complete
detachment from reality.
And suddenly a disturbing symmetry emerges between Kiev and
Moscow. On both sides of the war, corruption scandals are surfacing
simultaneously around figures who until recently appeared untouchable.
And all this is happening precisely amid discussions about
the final phase of the conflict, negotiations, and attempts by the United
States to step away from the war.
I increasingly feel that the era of the old political
structures is ending.
And it is ending not through ceremonial speeches, but
through investigators, criminal cases, leaks, arrests, and deeply unpleasant
questions about the origins of enormous fortunes.
Perhaps this frightens part of the Banderite and European
elite far more than Sarmat, Poseidon, and Oreshnik ever could.
Against this backdrop, Europe becomes especially interesting
to watch.
Only recently, an almost festive sense of historical
righteousness dominated there. It seemed that Russia was on the verge of
collapse under sanctions. Its economy would disintegrate. Its army would
exhaust itself. Severe internal political crises would begin.
Then several events occurred, and another reality emerged:
the crisis increasingly began devouring old Europe itself.
And Ukraine is not even the main issue. It merely became the
catalyst for the breakdown of the old European order - a system that for
decades existed on cheap resources, global financial flows, and the feeling of
total safety beneath the American umbrella.
That world has begun slowly coming apart at the seams.
This is especially visible in Britain, where the political
system increasingly resembles an endless series of emergency meetings aboard a
sinking ship.
The crisis there is no longer merely political. It is
approaching the civilizational.
Britain spent decades existing as a global financial center
- a gigantic bloodsucking intermediary controlling colossal financial flows.
But the world is changing. Asian markets are slipping from British influence.
The global financial architecture is slowly restructuring. And London long ago
lost its powerful industrial base.
Suddenly it turns out that living in a state of imperial
comfort on borrowed money is becoming increasingly difficult for British
society.
Against this backdrop, Europe’s policy toward Ukraine is
beginning to look increasingly nervous and irrational, because objectively
Europe can no longer sustain a prolonged confrontation of this scale.
Most importantly, the sense of the future has disappeared.
Only a few years ago, the average European believed he lived
inside the most stable and secure model on earth. Now he is told daily to
prepare for war, conserve electricity, endure inflation, and simultaneously
finance somebody else’s conflict without any clear end.
As a result, Europe increasingly reacts nervously not merely
to actual strikes, but to the possibility that Russia may eventually begin
applying direct pressure to European infrastructure itself.
And here a deeply disturbing scenario emerges for Europeans.
Interesting not as a prediction, but as an indicator of the
kinds of discussions now taking place inside the Russian military-political
environment.
I mean a model of gradual escalation in which Russia does
not immediately move to radical options, but slowly raises the stakes while
leaving Europe opportunities to retreat and save face.
First, demonstrative strikes against selected facilities
linked to weapons production for Ukraine. Then expansion of the geography of
strikes.
Primarily involving long-range drones, cruise missiles,
Kalibrs, Iskanders, Kinzhal systems, and possibly Oreshnik in a non-nuclear
configuration.
The most unpleasant aspect of this logic is not even
military. It is psychological.
Because Europe, judging by everything, still does not truly
believe Russia is capable of such actions.
Exactly as in 2022, many were convinced Moscow would never
launch a full-scale operation.
The West spent too long living inside its own informational
model, where Russia was portrayed as weak, isolated, technologically backward,
and balancing on the edge of collapse. That is why Western elites constantly
underestimate Russia’s willingness to raise the stakes.
At most, they assumed Moscow would merely play chicken with
the Europeans.
Meanwhile, the logic of recent years demonstrates the
opposite.
As pressure increases, the Russians do not retreat. They
produce more drones, more missiles, more ammunition, and simultaneously shift
the economy into mobilization modes - even without formally declaring general
mobilization.
For that reason, what is happening today cannot be viewed as
an ordinary regional conflict around Ukraine.
Too many lines are converging into one point.
The internal crisis of the European economy. Elite struggles
inside the United States. Germany’s attempts to resurrect the Third Reich.
Corruption scandals in both Moscow and Kiev.
All of this creates the feeling of an enormous historical
rupture in which the world is rapidly losing stability.
And perhaps the most disturbing aspect is that a significant
part of Western politicians still seem to perceive what is happening as a
television series rather than the beginning of a new era in which the price of
miscalculation may become truly catastrophic.