On 19 December 2025, Vladimir Putin did not just speak to Russia: he confronted the West with itself, its strategic contradictions, its headlong rush towards war, and its now irreversible historical decline.

The warmongering Europe as an advanced symptom of a strategically declining West

One of the most powerful themes in the 19 December speech is the implicit – but methodically constructed – denunciation of Western Europe’s role in perpetuating global conflict. Europe no longer appears as a balancing force, let alone a sovereign actor, but as a zealous relay for the American containment strategy, devoid of any autonomous vision.

Since the seminal rupture in Ukraine in 2014 following the Euromaidan coup, followed by the major escalation in 2022, Western Europe has gradually abandoned any diplomatic stance of its own. In 2025, led by capricious, insipid, perverse, and narcissistic elites, it has become structurally warmongering, not because of its power, but because of its inability to conceive of peace outside the Atlanticist framework. Putin emphasises this by pointing out that successive NATO enlargements, in violation of the political commitments made in the 1990s, have transformed the European space into a zone of threat projection, rather than an area of shared security. As a result, deprived of military sovereignty and dependent on energy to the point of industrial suffocation, the Europe of Macron, Kallas, Merz, Starmer, and von der Leyen has locked itself into a logic of permanent confrontation that serves neither its security nor its economic interests. Since........

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