Kaja Kallas stood at the 62nd Munich Security Conference, at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof where the Atlantic Empire had assembled not to project power but to perform its own autopsy while the patient was still breathing — and delivered what she imagined was a prosecutor’s closing argument against Russian weakness.
Let’s pause here because this matters: Kallas. Kaja Kallas. The woman who in March 2022 announced Russia’s economy would collapse within months from sanctions. Who predicted Ukraine would be in NATO by 2024. Who declared Russia “strategically defeated” in summer 2023. This is the woman who appointed her husband’s business partners to key government positions in Estonia – a scandal that would have ended any normal political career but instead launched her to Brussels, where corruption investigations don’t follow (some would argue its a prerequisite) and accountability doesn’t exist. Failed upward from Tallinn to Brussels, from incompetence to immunity, from making cartoonish predictions to fittingly becoming the voice for EU foreign policy.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, a position she occupies not because of competence but because she’s reliably, predictably, catastrophically wrong in exactly the ways Brussels requires.
And there she stood, telling the assembled Eurocrat seals that Russia is “no superpower.” Its economy is “in shreds.” After four years of full-scale war, Moscow has “barely advanced beyond the 2014 lines” at a cost of 1.2 million casualties.
Outside, 120,000 registered protesters swarmed Munich’s streets — the largest mobilization in the conference’s 63-year history. They understood something Kallas inside did not: this war is bankrupting Europe while enriching Kaja’s paymasters.
Inside, Friedrich Merz—the Blackrock German Chancellor who inherited a smoking crater where a thriving economy once stood, opened proceedings with words that should have made every person in that room reassess their entire worldview:
“This order, as flawed as it has been even in its heyday, no longer exists.”
The rules-based international order. Dead. Merz confirmed it. Not Putin. Not Xi. The supposed center-right champion of German industry, the supposed defender of the old economic model, forced to pronounce last rites over the very system that built his career. The German Chancellor, standing at the podium in Munich, declaring the post-1945 settlement finished while Marco Rubio sat in the audience taking notes.
But Kallas pressed on. Because Kallas always presses on. She had her Marvel universe inspired talking points, lovingly prepared by staffers who also don’t understand how the world works. She had her narrative. And she had one number she desperately, urgently, catastrophically needed the room NOT to think about.
Let’s talk about that number.
The Arithmetic Written in Zinc Coffins
January 29, 2026: Russia transferred 1,000 Ukrainian bodies across the Belarus-Ukraine border. Ukraine returned 38 Russian bodies.
Read that again. One thousand to thirty-eight.
The year 2025, complete accounting: Russia transferred 14,480 bodies back to Ukraine. Russia received 391.
That’s a 37-to-1 ratio. Thirty-seven Ukrainian dead for every Russian killed. Through 2025 into early 2026, some exchanges touched 40-to-1.
These aren’t estimates. These aren’t Telegram channels or Russian Ministry of Defense claims. This is the only metric in this entire war that both sides have every screaming incentive to report honestly. When Russia hands over 1,003 bodies and receives 26 in return, casualty ratios stop being propaganda and start being evidence that would hold up in any court in the world.
This is the mathematics of bloody industrial attrition, written not in PowerPoint presentations but in the weight of corpses transported across international borders under the witness of the Red Cross.
And here’s the bitter cosmic irony: at this very conference, Zelensky declared: “The Ukrainian army is the strongest army in Europe.”
Not a single European leader objected. Not Kallas. Not Merz. Not Macron. Not Epstein (Keir’s proxies) compromised Keir Starmer. They all nodded along.
The strongest army in Europe.
Being systematically destroyed at 37-to-1 ratios. By a nation whose economy Kallas insists is “in shreds.”
The strongest military force Europe can field – armed with NATO weapons, fed NATO intelligence, trained by NATO advisors, guided by NATO satellite reconnaissance, executing NATO doctrine written at Fort Leavenworth and Sandhurst— is being methodically annihilated at ratios that would make the Wehrmacht’s catastrophe at Kursk look competitive.
These ratios explain why Ukraine is now press-ganging men in their sixties off the streets of Kiev. Why Zelensky lowered conscription age to 25, then discussed lowering it further. Why Ukrainian cities empty of military-age males who’ve fled west or gone into hiding. The mathematics of 37-to-1 don’t merely deplete an army. They deplete a nation.
What Russia Has Actually Accomplished
Let me explain something to Kallas and every other credentialed fool in that Munich conference room:
Russia is not merely de-militarizing Ukraine. Russia is de-militarizing NATO itself.
Every Patriot battery destroyed. Every HIMARS knocked out (complete with its US manned crew). Every M1 Abrams burned. Every Leopard 2 turret blown forty meters from its chassis. Every Storm Shadow shot down. Every ATACMS intercepted. Every British Challenger turned to scrap. Every French Caesar reduced to dust.
These are not Ukrainian losses. These are NATO losses.
The systems Ukraine fields ARE NATO systems. The intelligence comes from NATO satellites, NATO AWACS circling Polish airspace. The targeting packages for strikes into Russian territory originate from NATO fusion cells in Ramstein and Lakenheath. The “advisors” operating sophisticated Western systems requiring security clearances? NATO personnel, wearing Ukrainian patches for cameras, dying in Ukrainian uniforms for the narrative, coming home in boxes marked “training accident.”
This has never been a bilateral conflict. This is NATO—32 nations representing over 50% of nominal (more on nominal to come) global GDP, facing Russia in industrial attrition.
And NATO is losing in humiliating fashion.
Here’s what that means in doctrinal terms that should terrify NATO planners: Every war scenario, every operational plan, every contingency – all assume ammunition resupply. The assumption is now demonstrably false. NATO’s Article 5 has an unspoken corollary: the alliance is only as strong as its weakest member’s industrial base. Every member’s industrial base is now much weaker than Russia’s. Article 5 is a security guarantee not worth the paper its written on..
NATO Admiral Rob Bauer warned in October 2023 that the West had reached “the bottom of the barrel” in ammunition. That was over two years ago. It’s worse now. Wait times for large-caliber ammunition have metastasized from 12 months to 28 months. Stoltenberg admitted before leaving office: “Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production.”
The United States, the country that built a Liberty Ship every day during World War II— suspended deliveries of Patriots, Stingers, 155mm shells, Hellfires, and GMLRS to Ukraine in July 2025. Not because Washington abandoned Kiev (though it desperately wants to end the haemorrhaging). Because Pentagon audits revealed US stockpiles threatened America’s own war-fighting capability against China.
The arsenal of “democracy” is running on fumes.
A Nammo consultation estimated it would take 40 years to replenish depleted NATO stockpiles at 2024 production rates. Forty years to replace what Russia burned through in less than four.
Russia, meanwhile per Estonian Foreign Intelligence produced 7 million artillery shells – the real figure is higher, mortar rounds, and rockets in 2025 alone. A seventeen-fold increase from 2021’s 400,000. While Europe built bike lanes, Russia built shell factories.
NATO’s combined 2025 output? Approximately 1.7 million shells across the United States and all of Europe.
Russia produces in under three months what NATO produces in twelve, while Russia occupies only one theater of war – to say nothing for the losses faced during the 12 day war with Iran or the losses dating back to 2019 with the Houthis.
The Industrial Collapse We Called Strategy
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has stood at podiums across Europe repeating one warning with increasing desperation: “Russia produces in three months what the whole of NATO produces in a year.”
NATO, whose combined GDP is supposedly 25 times larger than Russia’s, produces in twelve months what Russia produces in ninety days. Russia’s ammunition production exceeds the entire Western alliance by factors of four to seven.
The US aims for 100,000 shells monthly by late 2026. Russia already produces approximately 600,000 per month. Germany’s Rheinmetall plans to hit 700,000 shells per year by 2026. Russia produces that in five weeks.
But this, Kallas assures those true believers in Munich — none of whom have ever operated a lathe or understood that power flows from making things — is the output of a nation “in shreds.”
Germany lost 245,000 manufacturing jobs since 2019. The hemorrhaging accelerated through 2025: over 10,000 manufacturing jobs lost monthly. Jobs not coming back. Skills disappearing. Knowledge dying (the irony of building a knowledge economy) with the last generation that knew how to make things.
Walk through the Ruhr Valley and see what we chose. Shuttered steel plants turned into “cultural spaces” where people sip overpriced coffee. Dormant blast furnaces converted into museums, as if industry were archaeology. The great forges of Thyssen and Krupp, silent. The rolling mills, cold. “Innovation hubs” where nothing is produced except AI presentations about circular economy and sustainable disruption.
Nobody forced this. The high priests sat in boardrooms and government ministries and chose it, deliberately, with full knowledge.
Germany’s industrial production has fallen for seven consecutive quarters as of early 2026. Manufacturing output shrinking since 2017 — before the war, before COVID. This was policy. This was ideology.
Volkswagen announced factory closures in Germany for the first time in 87 years. Through World War II. Through division and reunification. Through 2008. Never closed. Until now. North of Thirty-five thousand positions cut.
The German Chamber of Commerce reports 82% of German companies face acute skilled labor shortages. You can’t build shells without people who know how to build shells. Industrial share of Germany’s economy collapsed from 40% in 1990 to 27% today—and falling.
ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe announced workforce reduction from 27,000 to 16,000. Bosch, Schaeffler, Siemens, BASF: an industrial obituary for a continent that convinced itself it could replace manufacturing with consulting.
Europe shed 800,000 manufacturing jobs since the pandemic. Russia added 520,000 defense sector jobs since February 2022. By early 2026, Russia’s defense sector employs 4.5 million people building tanks, missiles, shells, drones, electronic warfare systems, artillery, armored vehicles.
This is not the differential between superpower and nation “in shreds.” This is the differential between a civilization retaining capacity to make things and one that financialized itself into post-industrial irrelevance.
We (collective we) convinced ourselves a services economy could substitute for production. That you could run civilization on consultant fees and derivatives. That manufacturing was “old economy” that could be outsourced while enlightened Europe focused on the “knowledge economy.” The irony is that knowledge is leaving, and won’t be returning.
You can’t kill tanks with knowledge economy. You can’t stop hypersonic missiles with thought leadership. You can’t win industrial wars with TED talks about disruption.
The Energy Suicide and the Lie
But for the absolute abyss-depth of Europe’s self-delusion — the moment strategic suicide got dressed up as moral victory, look at Nord Stream.
Kallas boasts Russia has been “disconnected from European energy markets.” She presents this as strategic triumph.
September 26, 2022: underwater explosions destroyed three of four Nord Stream pipelines. 300-400 kilograms of C-4 per detonation. An act requiring state-level planning only the US under Biden possessed, naval assets, technical diving expertise, military demolitions capability.
Europe’s response: pivot to American LNG at triple the price without the certainty on supply. German energy costs for manufacturers went from €60-80 per megawatt-hour to €180-240. German industry began a death spiral from which it has not and will not recover.
The German government also closed remaining nuclear plants. Environmental virtue, they called it. Energiewende. In practice: economic self-immolation while Russian gas gets replaced with American LNG at three times the cost.
Here’s what this means for the German worker, the French factory employee, the Italian steelworker: their jobs exported to America in the form of energy profits. Billions transferred from European workers’ pockets to American LNG companies. The people making these decisions — Kallas, von der Leyen, the Brussels commissariat — will never miss a paycheck. The factory worker in Essen? He’s unemployed. The welder in Lyon? Laid off. The electrician in Madrid? Looking for work that no longer exists.
This is class war dressed as climate policy. A wealth transfer from Europeans to American capital, applauded by European elites who believe they’ll never feel the consequences.
Russia redirected gas exports to China and India — economies that actually make things and grow. Economies representing the actual future of global consumption.
Who sabotaged Nord Stream? Sweden and Denmark investigated already knowing this was terrorism by a supposed ally, then dropped cases in 2024 without attribution— admitted privately as a decision to “bury the case.” Germany arrested a token Ukrainian, alleging with a straight face that a small team used a rented yacht to plant hundreds of kilograms of military explosives at 80-meter depths.
We’re supposed to believe this. A rented yacht pulling off one of history’s most sophisticated infrastructure sabotage operations.
Seymour Hersh, who broke My Lai and Abu Ghraib, laid out the case for the Biden admin’s involvement. Navy divers, Norwegian support, direct White House authorization. Biden stated publicly in February 2022: “If Russia invades, there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”
Then it ended.
Europe’s leadership chose to believe disconnecting from cheap Russian gas and replacing it with expensive American LNG constituted strategic autonomy. Achieved by becoming dependent on American LNG tankers.
The result? Germany’s industrial base in terminal collapse. GDP contracted 0.2% in 2024, extending 2023’s 0.3% contraction. Half of Germany’s industrial sectors expect job cuts in 2026.
Kallas calls this “strategy.” The correct term is sabotage.
The Missile Gap Europe Won’t Discuss
Russia deploys three operational hypersonic systems. Not “in development.” Operational. Now.
Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, operational since 2018, speeds exceeding Mach 10. Zircon naval cruise missile, serial production since 2024, scramjet-powered, sustained Mach 8-9. Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile, MIRV capability demonstrated in combat November 2024 against Dnipro, range exceeding 5,500 kilometers, striking Paris or Berlin in under 20 minutes.
The Oreshnik reaches targets faster than NATO early warning systems can complete the kill chain. Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles with one missile, multiple targets simultaneously. Nuclear configuration: 100-300 kiloton warheads.
Ukrainian Patriots claim to have intercepted Kinzhals – but only when the missile decelerates to Mach 4-5 during final approach. The Oreshnik maintains hypersonic velocity (Mach 10 in terminal phase) through impact. No deceleration. No window. No intercept.
Europe has no defense against this. None. Less than zero.
Germany activated its first Arrow 3 battery in late 2025. One. The European Defence Fund allocated €168 million for hypersonic countermeasures for 2026, barely covering feasibility studies when actual requirements measure in tens of billions.
Russia also fields: Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, operational since 2019, speeds exceeding Mach 20. Sarmat heavy ICBM, ten tons payload, 18,000 kilometers range. Burevestnik nuclear-powered cruise missile with unlimited range, tested successfully October 2025 with NATO reconnaissance vessels watching helplessly from international waters — Putin’s message explicit: “Let them watch.” They watched. They took notes. They filed reports that got classified and ignored. Poseidon nuclear-powered underwater vehicle, operating depths to 1,000 meters where no Western torpedo can reach, carrying payloads rendering coastal cities uninhabitable for decades.
The technological gap isn’t closing. It’s widening.
But Russia is “no superpower,” says Kallas.
The PPP Numbers Europe Refuses to Acknowledge
Russia’s GDP measured in purchasing power parity: $6.92 trillion in 2024. Fourth-largest economy globally. Behind only China, the US, India. Russia surpassed Japan—the gap doubled to $514 billion in one year. Russia’s economy is now Europe’s largest by PPP , growing while Germany contracts.
The IMF confirms: Russia accounts for 3.55% of global GDP in PPP terms. Japan: 3.38%. The World Bank reclassified Russia as high-income country in 2024.
PPP measures what an economy can actually produce domestically. When running a war economy, producing 7 million shells yearly, building hypersonic missiles, what matters isn’t nominal GDP in dollar exchange rates. What matters is: How much steel can you forge? How much explosive can you manufacture? How many ball bearings, circuit boards, diesel engines, artillery barrels can your economy generate?
Russia’s PPP is 2.81 times its nominal GDP. An economy built on production. Making things.
Europe built an economy on consulting, Orwellian compliance, credit and financialized derivatives. Kallas looks at exchange rates and sees weakness. She should look at production throughput and see European extinction, baring a revolutionary course correction.
The Conclusion Kallas Cannot Speak
“Russia’s maximalist demands,” Kallas warns, “cannot be met with minimalist response.” She proposes mutual force reductions. Parity. Balance. Arms control. Conference language for impotence.
This isn’t negotiation. This is fantasy. Russia has no intention of limiting its military. Why would it? Russia outproduces NATO by factors of four to seven. Fields weapons NATO cannot intercept. Employs 4.5 million in defense industries, generating output dwarfing anything Europe manages.
Europe cannot arm itself. Cannot defend itself. Cannot produce shells its own doctrine requires.
The greatest threat isn’t that Russia gains more at negotiation tables than on battlefields as Kaja conjures up in her Marvel alternate comic universe. The threat is that Europe’s leaders still don’t understand what Russia achieved:
Complete exposure of NATO’s industrial hollowness. Revelation that Europe cannot wage industrial war without American support and America is losing interest. Demonstration, written in 37-to-1 body ratios, in 7 million to 1.7 million production figures, Europe’s inability to meet NATO production targets, in hypersonic missiles Europe cannot stop, that real wars reshaping borders and breaking nations are won through industrial throughput and PPP.
Not nominal GDP built on derivatives and services. Industrial capacity. Production. Making things.
And here’s what the Global South watches from the sidelines: BRICS expansion proceeds apace. Nine full members now—Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, UAE, with over forty nations expressing interest. Saudi Arabia participating without formal membership. They’re building alternative payment systems bypassing SWIFT. Alternative trade routes bypassing Suez. Alternative development banks bypassing the IMF. They’re watching Europe lecture the world on values and human rights and rules-based order for decades, now revealed unable to defend itself, unable to make shells, unable to keep lights on without American permission and LNG.
The same Europe that colonized half the planet, that sanctioned and wagged fingers at every developing nation, that insisted there was no alternative to Western liberal economic models, is now exposed as a hollow protectorate dependent on powers it once dominated.
Beijing watches and draws conclusions. New Delhi watches and accelerates indigenous production. Brasília watches and deepens BRICS ties. Jakarta, Riyadh, Ankara, Pretoria — all watching, all drawing the same conclusion about where the future lies. It’s not with a continent that shut down its nuclear plants, offshored its factories, and believed finance could replace industry.
Russia is no superpower, says Kaja Kallas, the woman who predicted that superpower’s imminent collapse three years ago.
Then what the hell does that make the European Union?
A post-industrial theme park staffed by credentialed incompetents who believed we could replace steel mills with consultants? Who thought they could shut down nuclear plants and fight land wars powered by wind turbines? Who looked at Russia’s $6.92 trillion PPP economy producing 7-10 million shells yearly and called it “shreds” while Europe’s industrial base collapsed?
Zelensky declared the Ukrainian army “the strongest army in Europe.” Not one leader objected. They applauded.
The strongest army in Europe. Being bled at 37-to-1 ratios. By a nation Kallas insists isn’t a superpower.
If THIS Russia… outproducing NATO by factors of five to seven, fielding hypersonic weapons Europe cannot stop, maintaining the world’s fourth-largest economy while bleeding Europe’s strongest army at 40-to-1, depleting NATO stockpiles to bare barrels visible for two years… if THIS Russia is no superpower, then Europe is something far than a tragicomedy.
Europe is a de-industrialized protectorate that spent thirty years believing its own propaganda about history’s end, discovering too late that history never ended, it just went to countries that kept blast furnaces running while Europe held sustainability conferences.
Kallas speaks of holding Russia accountable. Making Russia pay. Limiting Russia’s military.
But accountability runs both ways.
The bill for Europe’s self-inflicted de-industrialization, for energy suicide, for willful blindness to industrial warfare’s realities, for thirty years believing finance could replace forges — that bill comes due in shuttered factories, unemployment lines, depleted arsenals, and corpse ratios Brussels refuses to acknowledge.
Russia is no superpower? Then God help Europe when someone explains to Kallas what that makes them.
God help us all!
Reprinted with permission from the Islander.