Russia’s Permanent Divorce - Stanislav Krapivnik

The Insider’s Judgment: Biography and Uncomfortable Truth

An analyst shaped by two strategic worlds, examining the collision between NATO doctrine and Russia’s industrial war machine.

Stanislav Krapivnik is a Russian-American military analyst and former U.S. Army officer with operational experience and a focus on modern industrial warfare, strategic doctrine, and geopolitical power transitions.

Born in the former Soviet Union and later emigrating to the United States, Krapivnik served in the U.S. military before transitioning into geopolitical analysis. His background combines firsthand military experience with a comparative understanding of both Western and Russian strategic cultures.

Over the past decade, he has become a regular commentator on the Ukraine war, NATO force structures, and the broader confrontation between the Atlantic alliance and Eurasian powers. His assessments concentrate on force ratios, artillery production, air defense systems, manpower reserves, and the industrial sustainability of prolonged high-intensity conflict.

Krapivnik is particularly known for challenging Western claims of Russian military collapse, arguing instead that modern wars are decided by depth of production, logistical endurance, and strategic patience rather than media narratives. His perspective frequently emphasizes structural constraints within NATO economies and the limits of expeditionary warfare against a peer adversary.

His analysis is defined by an operational lens: battlefield geometry, industrial throughput, ammunition stockpiles, and escalation thresholds. He consistently warns that misreading Russia’s capacity for mobilization and adaptation carries significant long-term risks for European security.

Between 1917 and 1918 — Which Model of Collapse Applies

We’re looking at something between a 1917 moment with the Russian Imperial Army and a 1918 moment with the German Imperial Army — and we’ll see which way this goes.

The front lines in Ukraine are no longer moving by the month. They are no longer moving by the week. They are moving by the day. Stanislav Krapivnik — a former U.S. Army officer born in Donbas during the Soviet era, a man who left for America as a child, served in the U.S. Army, and returned to Russia fifteen years ago — watches all of this from close range. His frame of reference is not the newspaper. It is military history and direct observation.

His opening question to anyone who wants to understand the current situation is blunt: which historical model of collapse are we watching? In 1917, the Russian Imperial Army did not collapse militarily. It collapsed morally. The provisional government that had overthrown the Tsar created soldiers’ unions that could vote down any order from their commanding officers. What followed was chaos: some units laid down their weapons and walked home, others fought only defensively, others continued trying to advance. It was not a rout. It was a disintegration from within.

In 1918, the German Imperial Army experienced something different. It did not fracture. It simply went home — streaming in from every direction, total and sudden. The cause was different, the mechanism was different, and the political aftermath was different in ways that shaped the next century.

Krapivnik declines to tell you definitively which model Ukraine now resembles. He offers both as a framework and lets the evidence accumulate. What he is certain of is the structural dynamic at work.

The Mechanics of Attrition

The core error in Western military commentary, Krapivnik argues, is an almost complete inability to think in terms of attrition warfare. NATO doctrine is saturated with maneuver thinking — the swift encirclement, the decisive breakthrough, the corps-level operation that reshapes the front in days. It is analytically elegant and historically seductive. It is also, in this war, largely irrelevant.

“Most Western field-grade officers really can’t understand attrition warfare,” he says. “They’re so boxed into maneuver warfare that they have no clue what it involves. They can’t get out of the big movements, the big division- or corps-level operations.”

Attrition warfare works on a different clock and produces a different visual signature. For extended periods, almost nothing seems to happen. Small gains, contested villages, tactical adjustments. To an audience conditioned by maps and colored arrows, it looks like stalemate. Then the logic of attrition asserts itself. An enemy that has been bled long enough can no longer plug the holes. It can no longer rotate troops into breaches. And then, with startling speed, the front gives way entirely.

The Huliaipole Illustration

For two years, Russian forces could not approach Huliaipole. The geography was against them: the city sits on high ground surrounded by flat, open farmland, perfectly suited to drone interdiction. Every approach column was visible, targetable, and destroyed. Several companies of armored vehicles were lost in attempts to close the distance. To the east lay fortified villages anchoring a defensive line that stretched fifty to sixty kilometers north.

Then the sustained attrition of Ukrainian forces elsewhere hollowed out that line. Villages fell. The defensive architecture that had held for two years lost its structural integrity. Russian forces covered the remaining distance in days, approached from the east, then looped north of the fortifications entirely and began rolling them up from behind — troops advancing from three directions simultaneously, with the only remaining exit pointing toward the city itself.

“It’s like those small snowballs coming down the mountainside,” Krapivnik says. “At first, no big deal. But now you’ve got a lot of dust and snow coming down, and you realize: that’s an avalanche. It’s not a full avalanche yet — but it’s an avalanche. And we’re at the base of that mountain, and it’s all going to come down.”

Beyond Huliaipole, the terrain to the Dnieper is open. Zaporizhzhia city sits at the river with one bridge. Beyond that bridge, the defensive geography becomes even less favorable. What Krapivnik is describing is not a tactical setback that can be reversed with reinforcement. It is structural — the kind of unraveling that, once it begins, follows its own momentum.

The Desertion Crisis - The Mathematics of Survival

The prosecutor general in Ukraine opened up 400,000 cases of desertion. Just to put that in perspective: that’s the entire military of France and the UK combined.

Numbers of this magnitude tend to be absorbed into the background noise of war reporting. Krapivnik refuses that treatment. Four hundred thousand desertion cases is not a footnote. It is a measurement — a precise, legal measurement — of systemic collapse in military morale.

And the demographic of those deserting is more significant than the raw number. It is not the unwilling conscript hauled off the street who is fleeing the front in greatest numbers. It is the veteran. The soldier who has fought for one year, two years, sometimes three or more, and who has conducted a rational calculation with the information available to him. His conclusions are not complicated: the only exits from this battlefield are a body bag or a stretcher. Given those options, desertion is not cowardice. It is survival.

“They’ve figured out,” Krapivnik explains, “you know, I’m leaving this battlefield in one of two ways: I’m either going to be a corpse, or I’m going to leave on a stretcher. That’s the only way this ends for me. You know what — thanks, I’m going home. To hell with all of you.” Tens of thousands of veterans have made exactly this calculation. What remains for the men newly press-ganged off the streets is a question with an obvious answer.

The Backlash Against Conscription

The visual evidence emerging from western and central Ukraine has shifted in character. For months, press-gang videos showed men being pulled from cars, dragged from streets, beaten for resistance. The messaging was deliberate, Krapivnik argues — advertising. Comply, or face this. The alternative was to pay. Current rates for a medical exemption: somewhere between twenty and twenty-five thousand dollars, with inflation.

That calculation is now changing. Men who remain have begun moving in groups — eight, ten, twelve together. When a press gang approaches, the group responds collectively. There have been incidents of fatal resistance. The dynamic has inverted. The threatened have become dangerous.

“This is societal breakdown,” Krapivnik says flatly. “Not only do we not support this government — we’re not going to fight for this government. We’re sure as hell not going to die for this government.”

Ukraine’s Three-Tier Society Under Stress

The class structure that Krapivnik describes is not new to war, but it has reached its logical conclusion in Ukraine. The working and lower-middle class bear the military burden — they are the ones on the front and the ones subject to forced conscription. The upper-middle class buys its way out and emigrates; the exemption papers, the medical certificate, the ticket to Ireland or Germany or Italy, where some of them conduct themselves as ultra-nationalists from a distance of several thousand kilometers.

At the top, the elite parties in Monaco and Malibu. Occasionally they post the Ukrainian national anthem on social media. “These are the guys screaming ‘we’re going to fight to the last grain,’ because they’ve got no skin in the game. They’re not there.” At the bottom, Zelensky does press conferences. None of this coheres into a society capable of winning a war.

The 2023 Counteroffensive - Marketing Genius, Military Catastrophe

Nowhere in human history, I think, has a general said: make sure they know exactly when and where we’re going to be, because we don’t want them to be surprised.

There is a kind of grim admiration in Krapivnik’s assessment of the summer 2023 counteroffensive. As a feat of military public relations, it was, he concedes, impressive. There were commercials. There was anticipation. There was, across Western media, a sustained narrative of impending breakthrough — the Leopard tank as a symbol of resolve, Crimea as a plausible destination, the Sea of Azov as a goal that would split Russian supply lines and force a strategic retreat.

What was absent was the material foundation for the actual military operation. To execute a breach of prepared defensive lines under modern conditions, an army requires, at minimum: air parity or better, sufficient anti-aircraft coverage to suppress enemy aviation, engineering assets in sufficient quantity to move through prepared obstacles, and tube artillery superiority — enough guns to silence enemy firing positions while your forces are exposed during the breach. Ukraine had none of these in the required quantities.

“These aren’t failures of NATO tactics,” Krapivnik clarifies. “They’re basic guidelines for breaching defensive structures that every army uses, because everyone’s learned this is the best way. The problem for the Ukrainians was that, to complete what they needed to do, they had to have air parity, a lot more engineering assets, and tube superiority. Ukraine had none of those. So basically, they just got a lot of armored vehicles — and they got sent in to die.”

The result: 85,000 dead to take approximately 120 square kilometers. Roughly 12 kilometers wide, 10 kilometers deep. Krapivnik compares the ratio explicitly to World War I. And the wounded, by standard military ratios, numbered approximately twice the dead. The price per kilometer of ground was staggering by any historical measure.

When NATO Believed Its Own Narrative

Glenn Diesen raises the point that Krapivnik endorses: the counteroffensive was partly the product of a command structure that had absorbed its own propaganda. Russian withdrawals from Kharkiv and Kherson in late 2022 had been presented, across Western media, as defeats. Maps changed color. Narratives about Russian weakness proliferated. What was actually being constructed — deliberately, carefully — was the Surovikin Line: a deep, layered defensive system in Zaporizhzhia, carefully engineered for exactly the kind of armored assault that followed.

The Ukrainian military understood what was coming. That is the detail that received the least attention at the time, and perhaps deserves the most now. In the aftermath, senior Ukrainian commanders appeared in the Washington Post acknowledging they had opposed the operation. They knew the conditions were insufficient. They proceeded anyway — under American pressure. The decision about when Ukraine would launch its most costly military operation of the war had been made not in Kyiv, but in Washington.

Holy War - The Civilizational Transformation of Russian Society

For Russian Orthodox Christians, for the more religious believers, this is a holy war. It’s a holy war against evil, against Satanism. And a lot of Muslims in Russia have joined in, seeing it as exactly the same thing.

This section of Krapivnik’s analysis is the one most likely to produce discomfort in a Western reader, and the one he treats with the greatest care and the most gravity. He is not reciting Kremlin talking points. He is describing something he observes directly — a transformation in Russian society that has developed organically, from the ground up, fed by the experience of the war itself.

The people of Donbas, he begins, are the most intensely Russian-identified population he has encountered anywhere. They have paid for that identity with blood since 2014 — a decade of shelling, displacement, loss, and the particular bitterness of knowing that the people shooting at them called themselves Ukrainian. That experience, and the consciousness it produced, has now spread — amplified, accelerated — into the broader Russian population through the families of soldiers, through the communities supporting them, through a sustained encounter with what the war means.

Where early in the conflict there was confusion and, in many cases, genuine uncertainty about the justification for what was happening, what Krapivnik observes now is a crystallization. The war has catalyzed something that was already forming: a widespread, deepening recognition that Russia is not, and has never been, European in the Western liberal sense. It is, Russians are concluding in large numbers, its own civilization — with its own history, its own spiritual foundations, and its own legitimate claim to exist on its own terms.

The Religious Dimension

Chechen units describe the conflict as a holy war against Satanism. Orthodox Christian volunteer formations enter battle under religious banners — the face of Christ, images of angels, insignia that would be unrecognizable in a Western barracks. Muslim soldiers from across Russia have joined them, finding in the same framing a shared enemy: moral dissolution, the erosion of tradition, what they read as an assault on the sacred. These are not phenomena that state television created and distributed. They emerged from the front and spread upward. Vladimir Putin, Krapivnik notes with some irony, has actually been trying to moderate the framing — to keep the official discourse within more manageable political parameters. The society has outrun him.

The Pendulum Swings Inward, Not East

For three hundred years, since Peter the Great, the oscillations of Russian cultural identity have been framed as swings between West and East — between westernization and something variously called Slavophilism, Eurasianism, or simply reaction. Krapivnik challenges this framing directly and finds it insufficient.

The current movement, he insists, is not toward China. There is no cultural admiration for the East in the way there was cultural admiration for the West in the 1990s. Chinese grocery stores are opening. Chinese goods are available. “But to say that Russia is saying ‘we want to be like China’ — no, absolutely not.”

What is happening is an inward swing. A recovery — rapid, sometimes chaotic, sometimes extreme — of Russian civilizational self-consciousness. Russians are remembering, under extreme pressure, that they constitute something distinct. Not better, not worse — distinct. That this distinction has been under sustained attack, and that the attack has clarified rather than dissolved it.

The Business Calculation

For Western executives who have been waiting for conditions to normalize so they can return to the Russian market, Krapivnik has a direct answer. Chevron and Exxon have already tested those waters. The response from the Russian government, as relayed through participants in those negotiations: “We really don’t want these guys back. We don’t need them, and we don’t want them.” The calculation has changed. The era when Western presence was seen as a marker of modernity and prosperity is over. That chapter is not merely closed — it is being actively refused.

The Diplomatic Failure - 140 Years of Ignored Proposals

In 1992, Yeltsin asked to join NATO. In 2000, Putin asked to join NATO. In 2021, Putin proposed direct talks on a European security pact. And now we’re at war.

The diplomatic history that Krapivnik and Diesen reconstruct together is one of systematic missed opportunities spanning more than a century. It begins, in Krapivnik’s telling, with Nicholas II — the first to propose the framework that eventually became the League of Nations, an attempt to build European security architecture designed explicitly to prevent exactly the catastrophe that began in 1914. The proposal was not taken seriously. World War I killed somewhere between fifteen and twenty million people.

In 1949, Stalin asked to join NATO. The request was declined. The Cold War that followed consumed enormous resources, divided Europe, and produced proxy conflicts on every inhabited continent. It was not inevitable. It was chosen.

Yeltsin’s request to join NATO in 1992, in the earliest period of the post-Soviet transition, when such integration might have reshaped the entire European security architecture for the coming century. The request was not taken seriously. Putin asked to join NATO in 2000. Dismissed. The OSCE could have been designated the central European security institution in 1994 — it was not. Medvedev proposed a pan-European security architecture in 2008 — ignored. A EU-Russia union framework was discussed in 2010 — went nowhere. Direct security talks were proposed by Moscow in 2021 — the response was to accelerate what Moscow had identified as the provocation. And now there is a war.

Diplomacy Without a Foundation

The consequence of this accumulated history is visible in the current diplomatic process, which Krapivnik describes with a bluntness that veers into dark comedy. There is no common framework. There is no established channel. There is no history of working-level conversation that might provide a foundation for movement. Decades of diplomatic freeze-out produced exactly what one would expect: no starting point, no common language, no agreed reality from which negotiation could begin.

Current diplomatic efforts — the various proposal documents circulating, the point-by-point frameworks being floated — are, in his assessment, not diplomacy. They are brainstorming sessions dressed in diplomatic language. Real diplomacy means identifying root causes, establishing why they developed, and creating mechanisms to address them. It takes years. It requires sustained conversation. The Korean armistice took two years to negotiate, and the fighting continued throughout. The American exit from Vietnam took seven years.

“You can’t just do the drive-thru of diplomacy,” he says, “get your Happy Meal, and go home.” And the obvious corollary that Diesen adds: Ukraine could have been a bridge between Russia and Europe. Instead it was made into a front line. The bridge was destroyed in the process of converting it into a weapon.

The Constitutional Reality - What Russia Cannot Negotiate Away

Putin is not legally allowed to give up a single square centimeter of Russian territory. The Russian constitution forbids it in black and white. It’s an impeachable offense. End of story.

A recurring assumption in Western diplomatic calculations is that Russian territorial positions are, at bottom, negotiable — that sufficient pressure, sufficient inducement, or the right combination of security guarantees might produce flexibility on the provinces Russia has incorporated. Krapivnik identifies this assumption as a fundamental misreading of the Russian political and legal system.

Putin is, first and foremost, a lawyer. He operates within constitutional constraints that are specific and enforceable. The Russian constitution explicitly prohibits the transfer of Russian territory. The four provinces now incorporated — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson — are, in Russian constitutional law, Russian territory. To negotiate them away would be an impeachable offense. No Russian leader, including Putin, can do this regardless of external pressure, regardless of incentives, regardless of what a Western negotiator believes has been agreed.

“It’s not going to happen. He’s not legally allowed to do that. He won’t do that,” Krapivnik says. “So what do you do now?”

The Evaporating Leverage

Whatever leverage the West believes it possesses in any negotiation is, in any case, diminishing at an accelerating rate. Krapivnik’s estimate: roughly a dozen square kilometers per day, and accelerating as the structural collapse he described in his opening analysis continues. Each day of continued fighting does not preserve Western negotiating options. It eliminates them.

When Huliaipole falls — and he regards this as a matter of when, not if — the open terrain to the Dnieper offers no natural defensive line. Zaporizhzhia city, with its single bridge, is next. Once the eastern bank of the Dnieper is held by Russian forces, the cities on the western side — Odesa, Mykolaiv, Poltava, Kherson, Chernihiv, Sumy — are cut off from any coherent defense. The map transforms. And at some point, what remains of the Ukrainian government faces a different kind of political arithmetic.

Russia’s Economic Reindustrialization - The Sanctions Paradox

By the twentieth sanction package, people just laugh. Bring fifty more — we just don’t care. That’s the level it’s gotten to.

The fear of sanctions in Russia before February 2022 was genuine and, in retrospect, far in excess of what the sanctions actually produced. Krapivnik describes the pre-war psychology with precision: the threat of severe economic punishment had been credible enough, for long enough, that many Russians had constructed catastrophic scenarios in their imaginations. When the sanctions actually arrived, the gap between the imagined disaster and the real impact was striking.

“It’s one thing when you threaten somebody,” he says, “but you haven’t actually done it. In their mind, they’re imagining much worse. Like a child: ‘Oh my God, I’m going to get spanked, this is going to be horrible.’ And then — ‘Oh, I got spanked. That’s it? Really? Spanking isn’t that bad.’”

The consequence of this recalibration has been a shift in the Russian psychological relationship to Western economic pressure. Fear has passed through tolerance to something approaching contempt. Twenty sanction packages have been absorbed. The response is no longer concern. It is laughter.

Reindustrialization at Scale

What the sanctions period has produced, paradoxically, is an acceleration of Russian domestic industrial capacity. The renovation of large-scale manufacturing facilities — some with floor space of thirty to fifty thousand square meters — began around 2006 and has been steadily accelerating. The war and the sanctions have pushed that acceleration to a different level entirely. Alternative supply chains have been established. Import substitution programs that would have taken a decade without pressure have been compressed into years.

Krapivnik notes, with some amusement, that Donald Trump Jr. recently observed that Putin was building factories and implied this was somehow sinister. His response: “Building factories isn’t bad. For us, it’s actually pretty good.” Russia has somewhere between the fourth and fifth largest manufacturing base in the world. It is getting larger. The Western bet that economic isolation would produce political capitulation has produced the opposite.

The Sanctions Literature - Ignored, But Clear

The academic literature on sanctions is unambiguous: they don’t work. The U.S. is the world champion of sanctions — Cuba, for seventy years. The goal was regime change. It has not worked.

This is the thread that Diesen and Krapivnik pull through the conversation: the systematic failure of the economic pressure campaign, and the analytical failure that produced it. Twenty sanction packages have been designed, announced, and absorbed. The logic that produced package twenty is identical to the logic that produced package one. No serious reassessment has occurred. Package twenty-one is presumably being discussed.

The economic literature on sanctions is not ambiguous. Economists who have studied them across multiple historical contexts have reached consistent conclusions: comprehensive economic sanctions against large, resource-rich states do not produce the political outcomes they target. What they do produce is adaptation — the sanctioned country learns to function without the sanctioning country, develops alternative relationships, and eventually reaches a point where the original leverage no longer exists.

Russia is that case, executed at scale. Energy went to China and India. Manufacturing adapted. Alternative financial systems were built or deepened. The ruble survived predictions of collapse. The Russian economy, measured by purchasing power parity, has moved to fourth in the world. The sanctions did not prevent the war. They did not end the war. They have not changed Russian policy on any issue the West has targeted.

What Was Always Predictable

The question Krapivnik poses is simple: at what point does the failure of a repeated strategy require a reassessment of the strategy? If the answer, apparently, is never — if the correct response to twenty failed packages is a twenty-first — then the word that describes this is not policy. It is something else.

The predictable consequence of extreme sanctions — that the sanctioned party will invest in self-sufficiency, cultivate alternative partnerships, and emerge more independent than before — has played out exactly as the literature suggested it would. Every analyst who understood how sanctions work could have told the architects of this policy what would happen. Some did. They were not listened to.

140 Years of Russian Proposals - A Civilization That Kept Trying

Europe seems very intent on butchering somebody — somebody has to get butchered. Otherwise, the only thing that seems to unite Europe in any kind of organization is: let’s go have fun butchering somebody — or each other.

The most striking single observation in the conversation belongs to Krapivnik, and it reframes the entire historical context: Russia has been proposing pan-European security frameworks for 140 years. Not for two years. Not since the Cold War. For 140 years. And for 140 years, the proposals have been ignored, dismissed, or actively undermined.

Nicholas II at the Hague Conventions. Stalin at the founding of NATO. Khrushchev’s various overtures. Yeltsin’s NATO request. Putin’s two NATO requests. The OSCE proposals. The 2008 Medvedev architecture. The 2010 EU-Russia discussions. The 2021 security talks proposal. The pattern is consistent and, taken together, constitutes something more than a series of failed negotiations. It constitutes 140 years of evidence that one party to the European security question has been trying to build institutions that would prevent catastrophe — and the other party has been refusing.

The catastrophes happened anyway. Two world wars. The Cold War. The conflicts that followed. And now this.

Can Europe Build Something New

Diesen raises the obvious question: what should Europe do now? His own answer, which he acknowledges is a very difficult sell in the current political environment, is that the best thing Europe could do is to make peace with Russia — to end the dividing lines, to build a security architecture that includes rather than excludes the largest country on the continent, to recognize that Ukraine’s tragedy was precisely that it was converted from a bridge between civilizations into a frontline between them.

The feedback he receives, consistently, is that this is impossible. That values preclude it. That Russia must be punished. That any compromise is appeasement. Krapivnik listens to this and offers his own formulation: the politicians producing these responses should be required to pass a basic history and economics test before taking office. An IQ test, at minimum. The answers suggest that neither test is currently being administered.

The Final Reckoning - A Permanent Separation

Those European leaders who think that when this is over it’s going to be business as usual — it’s not. Russia has felt its strength. That age is gone. That’s over.

Stanislav Krapivnik does not offer reassurance at the end of this conversation, because his assessment of the evidence does not support it. What he offers instead is precision — a clear-eyed account of what has happened, what is happening, and what the logical consequences are likely to be.

The war has permanently altered Russia’s relationship to the Western system. Not merely the relationship to Western governments — the relationship to Western economic participation, Western cultural prestige, Western institutional frameworks. The divorce is not diplomatic. It is civilizational. Russian society has undergone a transformation under pressure that has crystallized a distinct identity, rejected external validation as a measure of worth, and arrived at a posture of self-sufficiency that was not chosen strategically but produced by necessity — and then embraced.

The European side of the equation faces a different reckoning. Forty years of defense outsourcing to the United States, combined with the energy dependency that was always the structural vulnerability in the relationship with Russia, and now the political costs of a war that has produced none of its stated objectives. The deindustrialization that was already underway has accelerated. The democratic legitimacy crisis that was already developing has deepened. The resources extracted to sustain the conflict — energy contracts, investment commitments, arms purchases flowing to American suppliers — have compounded a structural weakness that was already serious.

The Permanent Lesson

Krapivnik’s most fundamental observation comes near the end: European leaders who believe this can return to business as usual have not understood what war does. It does not produce temporary disruptions that normalize when the shooting stops. It produces permanent transformations — in the countries that fought, in the societies that sustained the effort, and in the geopolitical architecture that existed before the first shot was fired.

Russia has been permanently altered. Ukraine has been permanently altered. The European security architecture that existed before 2022 cannot be reconstructed, because the conditions that produced it no longer exist. What the new architecture looks like — whether Europe will have the imagination and the political courage to build something suited to the world that has replaced the old one — is the question that will define the next generation of European history.

The alternative is to keep waiting for a return that will not come. To keep sending sanction packages that do not work. To keep rotating through the same analytical frameworks that produced this outcome and expecting different results. To keep treating the largest country on the continent as a problem to be managed rather than a reality to be engaged.

“War changes societies,” Krapivnik says. “It takes on a life of its own. Changes that might never have gone that far end up going much further.” He is speaking about Russia. He could equally be speaking about everywhere this war has touched. The question that remains is whether European leadership is capable of recognizing that the old architecture is gone — and building something suited to the world that has replaced it. Or whether, as Krapivnik’s tone suggests he fears, they will continue to wait for a Russia that no longer exists and a moment that will not return.

Thank You, Stanislav Krapivnik.

Sources & Geopolitical References

Substack – US-Edition

This article is also available as a English-language edition on Substack:

    Russia’s Permanent Divorce from Europe - Stanislav Krapivnik

Original conversation (video)

YouTube-Interview:

    Russia's Permanent Divorce from Europe - Stanislav Krapivnik

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