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Massive Ukrainian drone attack on St. Petersburg escalates US-NATO war against Russia.

Under these conditions, there is a growing admission within the US and international media that NATO and Russia are entering a “world war.” In one of the foremost examples, the Financial Times published Saturday a column titled, “Are we sleepwalking into World War III?”

The old imperialist powers retain a military superiority they no longer possess economically.

Andre Damon,18 October 2026, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/10/19/yudl-o19.html

Ukraine attacked Russia with more than 1,000 drones overnight Saturday, in the largest bombardment of St. Petersburg since the Second World War. The attack, in which Russia’s Defense Ministry counted 1,015 drones across 15 regions, Crimea and the Black Sea, was one of the heaviest bombardments of Russian territory since the war began.

These strikes are directly funded by the NATO powers, which have provided Ukraine with over $100 billion in weapons, and are carried out on the basis of targeting data provided directly by their militaries.

The latest attack is a response by the NATO powers to the warning Russia gave European governments on September 30, that threats to Russia’s territorial integrity would be met with “the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons.”

Faced with this blunt warning that their actions risk triggering a nuclear war, the NATO powers are escalating. On October 12, General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s top commander in Europe, threatened to “break” the enemy’s “warfighting system,” including “anything and everything that supports, sustains, or controls that force.”

Under these conditions, there is a growing admission within the US and international media that NATO and Russia are entering a “world war.” In one of the foremost examples, the Financial Times published Saturday a column titled, “Are we sleepwalking into World War III?” by its chief foreign affairs commentator, Gideon Rachman. The title of his essay is taken from a 2012 book by Australian historian Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, which provided an apologetic explanation for the policies of German and European imperialism.

According to Clark, the war was the unforeseen outcome of mistaken judgments. The governments of the time and their leaders were not guilty of planning and starting war to achieve geopolitical and economic objectives. This benign interpretation of the war was especially welcomed by the German government and media, which praised Clark’s work and turned him into an intellectual celebrity.

Building upon Clark’s metaphor, Rachman depicts the imperialist powers as similarly clueless about the consequences of their actions. He writes, “Regions and countries that have for decades taken peace for granted—western Europe, east Asia, the Gulf states—now have to wrestle with the prospect, or the reality, of war.” It has become “commonplace,” he notes, “for world leaders to speculate publicly about the outbreak of a third world war.”

Rachman, citing a quote attributed to Leon Trotsky, declares, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

But the US and European leaders are not political somnambulists who are “sleepwalking” into World War III. They have been marching toward it with eyes open since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The first President Bush proclaimed a “new world order” on the eve of the 1991 Gulf War. That war was followed by the intervention in Somalia, the bombing of Bosnia and the 1999 war against Serbia, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the proxy war in Syria and the US-backed Saudi war in Yemen.

Since 2022, these wars have merged into a single global conflagration. It includes the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine; the Israeli genocide in Gaza, armed and defended by Washington; the bombing of Iran in June 2025; and the war against Iran launched on February 28 of this year.

The objective is the redivision of the world among the old imperialist powers. This violent and ongoing project includes the breakup of the existing Russian state, which will open up the vast Eurasian landmass to unfettered capitalist exploitation. For the oligarchs of finance capital, the loss of a few hundred million lives would be a small price to pay for this rich prize.

In Rachman’s telling, however, the danger of world war proceeds entirely from the actions of Russia and China. In this narrative, the threat of “world war” began with the decision Putin made in February 2022, with no antecedent history. Rachman asserts that an inflection point was reached when “Putin launched his ‘special military operation.’ In that time, the global political atmosphere has been transformed.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine did not come out of nowhere. It was a reactionary and desperate response by the Russian capitalist oligarchy to years of provocations by NATO. NATO’s own leadership has said as much. In an interview published by the Washington Post in May 2023, then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared that the war “didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014.”

Stoltenberg continued, “And since then, NATO has implemented the biggest reinforcement of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War … Until 2014, NATO allies were reducing defense budgets. Since 2014, all allies across Europe and Canada have significantly increased their defense spending … this is a huge transformation of NATO that started in 2014.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine did not come out of nowhere. It was a reactionary and desperate response by the Russian capitalist oligarchy to years of provocations by NATO. NATO’s own leadership has said as much. In an interview published by the Washington Post in May 2023, then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared that the war “didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014.”

Stoltenberg continued, “And since then, NATO has implemented the biggest reinforcement of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War … Until 2014, NATO allies were reducing defense budgets. Since 2014, all allies across Europe and Canada have significantly increased their defense spending … this is a huge transformation of NATO that started in 2014.”

But the Maidan coup was itself an outcome of decades of imperialist policy that had pushed the boundaries of the NATO alliance to Russia’s doorstep.

Rachman correctly centers the driving force of the eruption of global war in “a shift in the global balance of power.” He notes that, “In 1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the G7 nations—the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Japan—accounted for around two-thirds of global economic output … By 2022, the G7 represented about 43 percent of global GDP.”

This shift, according to Rachman, is “encouraging revisionist powers to challenge the global dominance of the US and its allies.” China’s share of world output rose from under 2 percent in 1989 to about 17 percent in 2024, according to World Bank figures.

However, by 2022, Rachman notes, the G7 still accounted for “about half of global military spending.” The old imperialist powers retain a military superiority they no longer possess economically. It is they, not China, that have spent the past 35 years at war, seeking to reverse by force what they are losing in the world economy.

The most bizarre element of Rachman’s column is his effort to blame the reemergence of global war on the public’s opposition to it. He writes that “the growth of anti-war sentiment in the US” has “created an opening for revisionist powers,” that US President Donald Trump “is clearly attracted to the idea that the US should retreat from its security commitments to its allies” and that “the greatest risk of a third world war may lie in that very uncertainty.”

Beset by an all-pervasive capitalist crisis and the growth of working class opposition, the imperialist powers seek through war a way out of their problems. The global eruption of imperialist war is only intensifying the class struggle and the capitalist crisis. It is driving workers and youth into struggle around the world, from the United States to France—where students and workers filled the streets this week against a government that has billions for rearmament and nothing for social needs.

The working class and youth must reject and oppose the insane imperialist militarism that is inciting global conflict and threatening humanity with a nuclear conflagration.

October 25, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Russia, Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

“Russia cannot lose”

Dmitri Trenin on the Ukraine Proxy War and Why the West Won’t Win

Ian Proud, Oct 14, 2026, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/russia-cannot-lose?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=220332256&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

I bumped into Dmitri Trenin for the first time in eight years at the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow. He was sat behind me during a session and we renewed our acquaintances. When I was based at the British Embassy in Moscow, Dmitri was Director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre. He was one of the most valued interlocutors for the Embassy, and seen as a person who always offered a balanced Russian perspective on world events. He is now the President of the Russian International Affairs Council, and I was pleased that he agreed to talk to me on my Peacemonger channel.

Trenin offered a clear-eyed view from Moscow of why the Ukraine war has lasted so long and why a diplomatic settlement remains so difficult. He framed the conflict as existential for Russia. From the Kremlin’s perspective, this is not a limited dispute with Ukraine but a proxy war waged by the West, which has invested hundreds of billions of dollars into the war effort.

Russia, he said, cannot afford to end the fighting without achieving the core objectives it set out with: securing the territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, upholding its constitutional obligations after the 2022 referenda in those oblasts, and establishing a security arrangement that prevents Ukraine from becoming a permanent platform for pressure against Russia.

Trenin stressed that Russia does not aim to conquer the whole of Ukraine or invade Europe. Indeed, in an article published early in the war he made the case for Russia not seeking to conquer all of Ukraine and so tie itself into a costly insurgency in the west, while permanently damaging prospects for normalisation with Europe.

He pointed to the years before 2014, when Moscow largely accepted a sovereign Ukraine within its Soviet-era borders, and to the early 2022 talks in which Russia was prepared to accept Ukrainian neutrality and discuss the status of the Donbas, along the lines earlier set out in the Minsk Agreements.

In his telling, Russia’s position hardened in response to Western and Ukrainian actions, not because of a pre-existing plan to absorb more territory in Ukraine.

Security concerns, particularly over NATO expansion and the treatment of Russian speakers and Russian culture in Ukraine, remain central to Putin’s calculus.

The interview also highlighted the very different stakes for the other parties. For the Biden administration the war was cast in ideological terms—democracy versus authoritarianism. For Donald Trump, Trenin argued, it is one piece of a broader effort to rebalance U.S. power and reduce commitments to allies. For Europe, however, the conflict has become existential in a different way.

Trenin said European elites are using the image of a Russian threat to hold the European Union together, justify remilitarization, and brand political opponents as pro-Russian. He described talk of an imminent Russian invasion of Europe as hollow propaganda that serves domestic political purposes more than it reflects actual Russian intentions.

On the question of NATO, Trenin returned to the proposals Russia made in late 2021: permanent Ukrainian neutrality, written into the Ukrainian constitution and international agreements, with no NATO bases, exercises, or military cooperation. He also noted Russia’s earlier call for NATO military infrastructure to be pulled back to 1997 lines.

Any lasting European security arrangement, he suggested, would eventually require some form of military-technical equilibrium and mutual assurances, but that discussion remains secondary to the outcome of the current war.

Looking further ahead, Trenin was cautious but not wholly pessimistic about relations with individual European countries. He said the ball is largely in Europe’s court. If political changes in Germany, France, Britain, and elsewhere weaken the current supranational approach and restore a greater role for national interests, a basic transactional or “neighborly” relationship could become possible.

He does not expect a return to the Greater Europe ideas of the 1990s and 2000s; too much has changed. But he argued that nationalism and the interests of individual states will eventually reassert themselves across Europe, as they have elsewhere in the world.

The conversation reinforced an assessment I’ve held for some time that the war in Ukraine will ultimately be decided by the inescapable mathematics of attrition and whether Europe’s political direction shifts back towards the sovereignty of its members.

Trenin’s account makes plain why Russia will not walk away from the war in Ukraine and why it expects the confrontation with Europe to outlast the fighting itself. As Trenin said to me when we met in Moscow, ‘the relationship with Europe is over’. It was clear during the conversation that that split was as regrettable to him, as it is to me.

October 20, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Russia, Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment