EU Leaders Are Struggling As Nobody In Europe Buys The Russia Scare Stories Anymore

Good day, Aontacht readers,

And I thought I might be a little late to this story as it happened last week however I did want to observe and see what the rest of the week brought to it.

By now you should be familiar with the script, so familiar in fact that you should be able to write it yourself. A mysterious incident followed by an accusation levelled at Russia. And then, inevitably, the call to open wallets for more weapons, more sanctions, more militarisation, more solidarity with whatever the current emergency happens to be. The routine has been running so long and so smoothly that it doesn’t need rehearsal because the actors have done it a million times before.

The latest instalment, as you’ll probably know, involves an alleged drone attack on Leipzig Airport in Germany. German officials, citing unspecified intelligence, have claimed Russia was behind the incident, despite the fact that it caused no damage whatsoever and the evidence presented amounts to what appears to be a passport belonging to someone who visited Germany in the days prior. A passport, and a cheap drone that managed to menace one of Germany’s major airports without breaking a single window.

Within hours, governments across Europe issued statements that were so similar in language and timing that you’d be hard pressed not to notice the coordination. These were almost copy/paste; the same phrases, the same framing, the same conclusions, delivered almost simultaneously by officials who had apparently all arrived at identical judgments independently and spontaneously.

‘Hybrid warfare.’

’Solidarity with Germany.’

‘Stand firm against Russian aggression.’

It is the kind of coincidence that strains credulity, and it would strain it even if the underlying story were remotely plausible, which it’s not.

Furthermore, and excuse me if this is a bit of a tangent, but…we are being asked to stand with Germany on this. The same Germany that, in the same week, approved almost one billion dollars in arms sales to Israel, a state the International Court of Justice has found to be plausibly committing genocide, a genocide that has been running for three years, in full view of anyone with a phone and an internet connection. That Germany. The one denying a genocide is taking place whilst simultaneously arming the perpetrators is now asking for our solidarity over a drone that left no mark on anything except a press release.

It’s like they forget that we live in 2026 and that people see these two stories sitting side by side and they sit there and ask themselves a very reasonable question: do I trust this country? And increasingly, the answer is no.

From what I can see, no one but the most hardcore imperial cheerleaders and NATO enjoyers is buying it. Not in Germany. Not across Europe and certainly not outside of the western sphere of influence. And there is a straightforward reason why: the story is so transparently ludicrous that anyone paying even minimal attention can see through it, and after years of being told to be afraid of Russia by governments that have demonstrably lied to them about other things, people have grown rather tired of the exercise. Let’s dive into that for a moment.

The Logic Of A Desperate Empire

Let me state the obvious, since the European political class appears constitutionally unable to do so. At a time when Russia holds the upper hand in Ukraine and has repeatedly stated its openness to negotiation and dialogue, the idea that Moscow would carry out a symbolic drone strike on a German airport, one that caused no damage and achieved nothing except giving European governments a reason to demand more military spending, is not just improbable but actually insane. Russia would have nothing to gain and everything to lose from an action that could invite direct NATO involvement in a conflict it is currently winning. The only entities that benefit from a story like this are Ukraine, which needs European support to continue, and the military-industrial complex, which needs European fear to keep the money rolling in its direction.

As one political scientist has observed, European leaders have found what amounts to a perpetual motion machine of political survival, which is frightening their voters with Russia, using that fear to excuse almost anything from the migrant crisis to economic stagnation to the degradation of public services, and then pointing back at Russia whenever the excuses wear thin. Friedrich Merz currently has abysmal approval ratings.

The French president is similarly unpopular. Burnham has only just gotten power in Britain and is already clinging on. Across the continent, a political class that has run out of ideas and credibility is desperate for anything that might distract from its own failures, and Russia is the most convenient distraction available, a foreign enemy that can be blamed for everything and that never quite materialises into the existential threat it is supposed to represent.

The People Have Checked Out

The result is a profound and growing disconnect between the political class and the populations it claims to represent, and it is visible in the polling, in the elections, in the collapse of centrist parties across Europe, and in the simple fact that when Germany announced the Leipzig story, the response from much of the European public was not alarm but exhaustion and scepticism. People are tired of the fearmongering. They are tired of being asked to send endless billions to a war in Ukraine while their own public services crumble and their own social safety nets are cut to fund military budgets. They are tired of a political class that treats them as subjects to be herded rather than citizens to be served.

The same European leaders demanding solidarity against Russia are silent on Palestine. The same governments sanctioning Moscow continue to trade with and diplomatically protect Tel Aviv, and people can see this. The selective application of outrage and principle is visible to anyone willing to look, and more and more people are looking.

The EU is planning to increase its total military budget to €800 billion which is a figure that will deprive the civilian economy of resources it desperately needs in these times, and the justification for all of it rests on a Russia threat narrative that a growing proportion of Europeans simply do not believe. A cheap drone that left no damage and a passport that apparently identified itself has not changed that. If anything, it has made it worse, because it suggests that the people manufacturing the narrative have stopped worrying about whether it is plausible and have simply decided that repetition is enough. It is not enough anymore. The passport story is not the Pink Panther. It is the sound of an empire scraping the bottom of the barrel, and the people of Europe can hear it.

And on that thought, I will let you go.

This article was originally published in The Spectacle.