Alliances aren’t master-vassal relationships… or maybe not.

You can save your dignity by finally passing the Russian money to Ukraine...

🤣🤣🤣🤣

He's doing the best job I have seen a PM do in my lifetime.

So we basically steal it & have Russia level Belgium with rockets. Sure I guess...

They seem to be in the multipolar world anno 2026 AD.

As a reminder, Russia has confiscated - or, as you call it, stolen - 95% assets of European companies leaving Russia. They simply imposed newly invented taxes and forced "discounts" as a condition to leave. Logically, Europe should have "leveled Russia with rockets" long ago, yes?

Wasn't that after US would turn the Ruble into rubble, wasn't it? After they kicked Russia out of SWIFT?

You got me there as well. Europe is paper. All blah, no action. We have no rockets.

Russia kicked itself out from the Western market by annexing Crimea and invading Ukraine. As a reminder, the 2014 EU sanctions were personally targeted at specific companies and individuals, but then Putin introduced actually harsh sanctions on food imports (!) from EU punishing Russian consumers 😆

And than EU sanctions Russia on energy (!) imports & now they wonder why they only have a bark & no bite. And expensive energy. Moral of the story, bad politics has led us to the current mess we're in. De Wever might actually be "da guy" we need at our hemisphere to try to set things straight. He's a strategian, has no friends & a political beast. Nothing compared to what's in most senate/congressional/parliamental buildings at the moment.

You're 100% right about moronic energy policies pushed by Germany up until 2021 but EU, if anything, played a positive role here - it was EU and Member States other than Germany that since 2015 had been pushing the EU energy diversification directive which at the end of the day prevented much larger disaster when Russians executed their blackmail in 2021. The battle to save nuclear power was also a complex game of interests where EU played a positive role by providing the scientific assessment (JRC etc) to counter the hysterical arguments from German "greens" and gas industry. Trump routinely blames "EU" for continuing to purchase Russian gas and oil four years into the war, but there's nothing further from truth - it's not "EU", it's a small group of Member States which do so exclusively because energy policies is one of many competences that are explicitly excluded from EU subsidiarity which means these countries are free to do so until they agree to stop these purchases voluntarily - which should happen from 1 January 2027.

As I like to say on EU energy politics: Europe (ie Germany) is looking at its foot with a sawed-off shotgun & thinks it can fix the problem using that precision tool.