Below is the speech presented by Harley Schlanger to a conference in Moscow on September 18-19, 2026, sponsored by the World Peoples Assembly. Schlanger was a featured speaker on the panel, The Spirit of the Elbe Today: Historical Experience and Challenges of the 21st Century. The two-day conference is titled New World: Values that Unite and is taking place at the World Trade Center in Moscow. Schlanger was introduced as the “Official Representative of the Board of Directors of the Schiller Institute,” and as “an analyst and journalist for the Executive Intelligence Review, expert on geopolitics and international security.”

“The Truth never dies, but lives a wretched life” (Yiddish proverb)

As the wars underway in Ukraine and Southwest Asia are following the trajectory of becoming “Permanent Wars,” a new danger has emerged, one which represents a threat to human life on the planet. Officials in the U.S. and Europe are including in their plans the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons in these conflicts. The Under-Secretary for Policy in the U.S. Department of War, Elbridge Colby, suggested that the use of tactical nuclear weapons would provide an “option” for President Trump which is “not out of the question” to break the “stalemate” with Iran; while the French have offered a nuclear umbrella to Germany and eight other EU countries to deter a Russian attack, which western leaders insist is virtually inevitable within the next two to three years.

These two conflicts [in Ukraine and in Southwest Asia] share a common ruse, in which military action is justified by western leaders through the promotion of false narratives, which assert that they are responding to illegitimate actions by the other side. These “narratives” are examples of “soft power,” and are concocted outside of the historical context which generated the conflict.

A similar method of persistent dishonesty has been promoted for Ukraine, in which the launching of the Special Military Operation (SMO) by Russia on February 24, 2022 is presented as an unjustified attack on Ukrainian “democracy” by President Putin. This false narrative ignores the meticulous effort by Putin to detail the actual historical events which convinced him that the SMO was necessary to defend Russia’s sovereignty. These included the breaking of the promise made to President [Gorbachev], that there would be “not one inch” of eastward expansion of NATO; the admission that the promises made by Merkel, Hollande and Poroshenko in drafting the Minsk Accords were never intended to be acted upon, but were a means to buy time to arm Ukraine; and the repeated denial that Nazi militias were involved in the killings in the U.S.-funded Maidan uprising, and in the attacks on the Russian-speaking populations in eastern Ukraine, which resulted in more than 14,000 deaths.

This was exacerbated by the ridicule directed against Putin’s arguments for legitimate security guarantees for Russia, especially regarding the demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine. Any honest appraisal of Ukraine’s history of “ultra-right nationalism” would confirm that the collective West was denying the history of Ukrainians who joined the Nazi SS in the 1940s, and participated in Nazi genocide against Ukraine’s Jewish, Polish and Rumanian populations. The embrace of the Nazi racial outlook expressed in public marches honoring Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera was ignored, and the existence of neo-Nazi militia members in the Azov Battalion was whitewashed, as this unit and others were incorporated into the Armed Forces and Security forces of Ukraine.

The denial of the support for Nazi genocidalists was exposed again recently, when Zelensky honored members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, highlighted by the reburial this year, with full honors, of Nazi ideologue Andriy Melnyk on May 25. Melnyk was responsible for the mass murder of Poles and Jews in Volhynia during the war, and his re-burial in Ukraine was denounced by leaders of Poland’s government, but was largely ignored by the pro-Zelensky western media apologists.

Of special importance in a review of the West’s promotion of a fraudulent history, is the role of the British. The imperial forces run by the City of London have a long history of identifying Russia as their leading adversary. Russia was the target in the 19th Century of the “Great Game” struggle for supremacy in Eurasia, and in the Crimean War. This strategic assessment was formalized by Halford Mackinder’s geopolitical doctrine, and intensified at the end of the Second World War, with Russia identified as the greatest threat to “western democracy” during the Cold War.