The timing couldn’t have been worse for the London-led “Coalition of the Willing” and their unquenchable thirst for perpetual war designed to deliver a strategic defeat to Russia.
In the wee hours of Friday morning, Dec. 19, after 16 hours of grueling pressure and negotiations, EU leaders gathered in Brussels failed to adopt a proposal to straight-up steal Russia’s $300 billion in foreign deposits currently frozen in Belgian bank accounts. The plan had been to use those funds to finance Ukraine for yet another round of NATO’s war against Russia.
But the highway robbery failed—at least for now.
Shortly after the EU’s fiasco, the British government also pulled back from their earlier threats to expropriate the Russian assets. Financial Times quoted a backpedaling U.K. government official saying: “We won’t move without international partners.”
What made the timing particularly bad for the London-led war machine was that it occurred only hours before Russian President Vladimir Putin began his yearly “Results of the Year” press conference in Moscow, which this time extended for 4.5 hours. In fact, in the opening minutes of the event, moderator Yekaterina Berezovskaya broke in to announce: “Mr. Putin, colleagues, if I may, I have news that is important for our country, breaking news. It has been reported that Brussels’s attempts to seize our asset have failed.” Putin responded: “They are doing this openly. Therefore, it is robbery. Why aren’t they succeeding? Because the consequences will be grave for the robbers.”
Putin went on to explain that “this will not just be a blow to their image, but this will subvert all the confidence in the euro area.… [Other countries] will look at what is happening—they are already doing so, and they will have suspicions, doubts and fears. What if the same happens to them?... Apart from image-related losses, there will be direct financial losses related to the contemporary financial architecture,” Putin warned.
The timing of the Brussels failure was also terrible for London because the personal representatives of Presidents Donald Trump and Putin—Americans Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and Russian Kirill Dmitriev—will hold two days of meetings in Florida on Dec. 20-21, to discuss the status of the Ukraine talks and to try to keep the negotiations within the guardrails established at the Aug. 15 Anchorage, Alaska summit. London and the EU have done everything in their power to derail that approach and keep the war going, but now, after the Brussels blowout, they can hardly argue that they deserve “a seat at the table.”
But the outcome of those Florida talks is a question mark. So too is President Trump’s continuing threat to launch direct military actions against Venezuela. The same can be said about the genocide in Gaza, and the threats to “contain” China by arming Taiwan to the teeth.
Only by changing the entire international system, which is wedded to geopolitics as if that were somehow Man’s natural condition, can lasting solutions be found for all people in all nations. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche argued the case in her remarks to the 133rd consecutive weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition:
“NATO’s propaganda unit put out an absolutely incredible PR video, in which they claimed that war is forever part of the nature of man—which I absolutely reject as a bestial image of man which we cannot accept and which is propaganda, not reality. I used that to call for replacing NATO with a new security and development architecture which must take into account the interests of every single country on the planet for it to work…. Because we absolutely have to have a different approach to international politics; a New Paradigm where we overcome geopolitics, because geopolitics has been twice the cause of a world war in the 20th century. If we do not stop this insanity, we may end up with no humanity at all, because we all will be dead.”
