How Europe Is HELPING Russia Win The Proxy-War | Col. Jacques Baud

## Crisis of Diplomacy: The Broken Lines of Communication The most striking image emerging from the exchange with Col. Jacques Baud is not of shattered frontlines but of severed telephones. Diplomacy, he insists, has collapsed as an active instrument of conflict management: channels that should have remained open between Western capitals and Moscow were cut or allowed to wither. Restoring contact has lately become the urgent task, not because leaders are ready to negotiate the substance of peace, but because they finally accept the necessity of talking at all. That failure to keep or even maintain simple lines of communication is not a quirk of temperament; it is a structural failure with far-reaching operational consequences. In wars between comparably capable states—the characterization Baud repeatedly emphasizes—communication is not a luxury. It is an indispensable mechanism for understanding intent, managing escalation, and shaping exit ramps. Baud draws on his background in strategic intelligence and conflict resolution to underline how extraordinary this diplomatic breakdown is. Historically, even adversaries have preserved channels for back-channel talks, for neutral intermediaries, for the exchange of views that prevents misunderstandings from translating into catastrophe. That machinery—Vienna Conventions, diplomatic immunities, a culture of exchange—has been allowed to rust. The result is two cohorts not only shouting past one another but interpreting different realities. Western leaders debate “how” to support Ukraine or how far to punish Russia; Moscow reacts to signals it often interprets differently. In this vacuum, small incidents can balloon. The conversation makes clear: restoring meaningful, sustained diplomacy should be the priority if the aim is to limit bloodshed and avoid broader regional conflagration. ## Narrative Warfare and the Cost of Overconfidence One of the discussion’s central observations concerns narrative control. For decades European foreign policy operated on an assumption of normative superiority: present your case forcefully in the domestic and international public spheres and your interpretation will set the terms. Col. Baud highlights how that confidence has eroded; instead of open information markets where competing accounts vie for legitimacy, we now see measures of censorship and exclusion. Bans on media outlets, sanctions against journalists, and new regulatory moves indicate an insecurity about the story being told as much as a concern about foreign influence. This turn matters because modern conflict is as much informational as kinetic. Where the narrative is shaky, so too is the political will that sustains military and financial support. Baud points out the paradox: the West’s repeated public underestimation of Russian strength produced a propaganda advantage for Moscow. By forecasting Russian collapse—no ammunition, no tanks, military incompetence—the West inadvertently granted Russia the space to demonstrate resilience and to recalibrate perceptions. Narratives did not simply reflect the facts on the ground; they shaped the political lifeline—military aid, sanctions, alliances—that underwrites ongoing operations. When public optimism diverges wildly from battlefield realities, support becomes brittle. ## Misreading Russia: Intellectual Laziness or Strategic Blindness? A recurrent claim in the discussion is that Western policymakers and many analysts have failed to understand what Russia wants and how it calculates risk. This failure is not presented as a momentary lapse but as a chronic tendency rooted in intellectual habits established over decades. Baud traces a pattern whereby Western strategy often substitutes belief for comprehension: if one presumes one’s model of modernity or liberal order is universally valid, there is little incentive to decode an opponent’s historical grievances, strategic culture, or red lines. The consequence is disastrous when the opponent is a peer with symmetric capacity and a distinct worldview. Baud’s contention—that Russia understands the West better than the West understands Russia—emerges as a key explanatory variable. This asymmetric comprehension has operational import: misjudging Russian intentions fuels flawed policy prescriptions, from reliance on sanctions to optimism about battlefield outcomes. More dangerously, it leaves room for strategic manipulation. If one side misreads the other’s thresholds and motives, coercive measures can harden resistance rather than produce concessions, while military aid risks being calibrated to narratives rather than to strategic ends. ## Why Europe Followed: Institutional Bonds and Leadership Failures The exchange moved from analysis to diagnosis when it asked: why did Europe so quickly align behind a policy that, at its core, is a U.S.-led design? Baud’s answer is a mix of structural ties and leadership deficiencies. NATO’s institutional pull, historical patterns of transatlantic convergence, and the political dynamics created by post-Cold War enlargement all made it relatively straightforward for many European states to fall in line. Smaller and newer members, particularly those whose security memories are shaped by recent history, often adopt maximalist positions toward perceived threats to deter future aggression. Yet beyond institutions lies a more unsettling explanation: weak leadership. Across major Western democracies, Baud argues, electorates have been offered a shallow menu of personalities lacking vision, experience, or curiosity. Leaders who are intellectually rigid or politically risk-averse will gravitate toward the comfort of unanimity and symbolic gestures rather than tough trade-offs. That kind of leadership breeds policy by narrative and spectacle—sanctions, media campaigns, and public posturing—rather than the painstaking work of diplomacy and compromise. When elites cannot offer persuasive rationales to citizens for costly or risky policies, they constrict debate and substitute coercive consensus for democratic deliberation. ## Civic Fatalism and the Erosion of Democratic Resilience The conversation also grapples with an emergent societal phenomenon: fatalism. Baud notes a disquieting decline in civic engagement and scrutiny, even in countries historically steeped in democratic accountability. When citizens grow weary of war narratives and feel chronically misinformed, apathy and resignation spread. That democratic fatigue has a feedback effect: governments facing low public scrutiny feel emboldened to take risky foreign-policy choices without robust domestic justification. When public skepticism is channelled into censorship or delegitimization of dissenting voices, the democratic quality of decision-making deteriorates further. This erosion did not happen overnight. Baud links it to broader trends—polarization, the degradation of public institutions, and the pandemic-era suspension of normal civic routines—that have cumulatively weakened popular capacity to challenge official narratives. The effect on foreign policy is concrete: when an informed, engaged public that demands accountability shrinks, leaders encounter fewer obstacles to pursue escalatory or long-duration strategies. In turn, Europe becomes more susceptible to prolonged entanglement in conflicts that rest on contested premises. ## Implications and a Modest Roadmap for Recalibration If the analysis offered in the conversation has a prescriptive edge, it is not fixated on grand illusions of rapid rapprochement. Instead, it suggests modest but urgent priorities. First, rebuild communication channels. This means institutional investments in diplomacy—dedicated envoys, back-channel mechanisms, and platforms for technical negotiation that can address escalation management even absent agreement on core political questions. Second, restore a more pluralistic information ecosystem at home. Curtailing censorship and allowing counter-

How Europe Is HELPING Russia Win The Proxy-War The numbers of EU (and Western) own-goals is getting so large, we can't even keep count anymore. In this talk we review the follies of the transatlantic clowns who are running a show that by now has produced over a million dead in Europe. Today I’m talking to a country men of mine, Colonel Jacques Baud, a former military intelligence analyst in the Swiss Army who later also worked as the Head of Small Arms and Light Weapons & Mine Action in the Political Affairs and Security Policy Division of NATO. He has been one of the voices of reason across many different channels on YouTube and various other outlets, so I’m happy he’s joining me me today. Links: Goods Shop: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com #M3 You know, as I always say, if you read Sun Tzu or other strategists of the past, you know that one of the practices in war is to present yourself as weaker than you are. Now, in this conflict, who presented the Russians as weaker than they are? The West. So the Russians don't even need to have propaganda or disinformation—the Europeans did it for them. #M2 Hello, everybody. This is Pascal from Neutrality Studies, and today I'm talking to a countryman of mine, Colonel Jacques Baud, a former military intelligence analyst in the Swiss Army, who later also worked as the head of small arms and light weapons and mine action in the political affairs and security policy division of NATO. He has been one of the voices of reason across many different channels on YouTube and on various other outlets. So I'm very happy he's joining me today. Colonel Baud, welcome. #M3 Thank you very much for inviting me. Thank you. #M2 It's fantastic having you, because you have years of experience—first in the Swiss Army, then also related to NATO. You've worked in the European environment of the post-Cold War era. I was wondering how you are looking now at these past three years of the horror show we've seen between Ukraine and Russia, but also the larger European horror show. It seems that everybody is still pushing for war, especially the Europeans, who seem very afraid of the idea of having some -- 1 of 17 -- form of realistic peace agreement—one that especially the Americans are trying to push, and that even Russia is saying they're working toward. How are you making sense of the current situation? #M3 First of all, having, as you said, been part of the Swiss military for a while and worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs afterward, and having been involved in international relations—and also, by the way, my studies at the Graduate Institute in Geneva—what strikes me is the total disaster of diplomacy, generally speaking. At the world level, if I can put it that way, including the US and all that, and at the European level, obviously, with Europe being unable, despite having institutional diplomacy, to use it—or not being able to use it, or not even having the intellectual capabilities to do it. So that's a very interesting point. And at this level also, because we could expect, based on past experience—based on the experience of the 20th century with the two world wars, the war in Vietnam, the conflict with Cuba, Iran, you name it—Switzerland has always played a central role in diplomacy. And today we see that Switzerland is totally sidelined. And that's almost kind of an allegory of the status of diplomacy, I think, in this country. The disaster of diplomacy is reflected in two aspects. First of all, there is the total absence of communication between the West and Russia, meaning that we have even cut all the lines of communication. And if we talk about the dialogue that has resumed between the US and Russia in recent months, it's mainly about restoring this line of communication, rather than discussing the content of peace regarding Ukraine. The first issue was to resume or restore the line of communication, meaning that these lines of communication have been drastically severed. I think that's exactly the opposite of what you would expect from diplomacy, because I was involved in many conflict resolutions for the UN, in Africa and the Middle East. But you can see that even in the most severe situations, you try to keep a line of contact. You try to keep a contact line, just for communication. Even if you don't agree about the essence of the conflict, at least you talk. But this has even disappeared in Europe. That's the first thing that strikes me. The second point is, as you said, I come from strategic intelligence. And the fact that we don't communicate with each other—between adversaries, if you will—means that we don't understand each other. And that's, I think, the worst part of the whole story. And we see that in the various attempts by the U.S. to solve the conflict or to reestablish, or to try to put Ukrainians and Russians at the same negotiation table, they have not been able to bridge the gap in understanding between the two actors. And that's extremely fascinating, because it seems that at least on the Western side—because on the Russian side it's different—they try to understand, and I think the Russians understand us much better than we understand them. And this is not new. -- 2 of 17 -- In fact, if you look at the way the West has approached conflicts such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and definitely even the Palestinian conflict, you see that there is a sense that the Western view predominates over the rest, and therefore we don't need to understand the others. And in most cases in the past, we have imposed our peace somehow, or we have purchased or bought our peace, in a sense. So we could bypass the fact that we didn't understand people. But in this conflict, where we have for the first time in Europe a conflict between peers, so to say, that means we are not dealing with a militia somewhere in the Middle East or some terrorist group or things like this that don't have technological or economic importance or things like that. No, we are talking about a superpower which is in front of us. And therefore, we cannot avoid—we cannot bypass—the problem of understanding them. But still, we don't even try to understand them. And that's exactly what you see today when it comes to the negotiations that the Trump administration started: we now have a gap between the two sides. And people like Keith Kellogg also have not yet understood exactly what or why the Russians are in Ukraine. And that's the key aspect. By the way, diplomacy is also about understanding the enemy, understanding the adversary. That's the reason why you have the Vienna Convention, which provides immunity for diplomats—because they should be the line of contact, the line of communication between different adversaries. The aim of that is to understand what your adversary wants, what it aims at, and things like this. So we have failed on all of that. I think we have here the example of centuries of diplomacy that have just crumbled in this conflict. Sorry. #M2 No, you're raising a pivotal point. This issue of not understanding the other, and not understanding Russia, is at the core—not only of the problem we see going on, but of what's driving the conflict from the European side. And what I'm wondering is if this is not... by design—and I don't mean like a conspiracy or something. I mean, you know, the design, the logic of the conflict itself—that Europe, for the longest time, for the warfare that we've seen going on over the last 500 years, has often relied upon narrative control, right? Narrative control of what this war is about. Is it a holy war? Is it, you know, the holy wars in the Middle East, right? The Crus... Sorry, what's the word? The... when the Anglo-Saxons and everybody went to the Holy Land for the Crusades, the First World War, the Second World War—you know, this narrative dominance. And what we're seeing at the moment as well, which is one of the things that is so frustrating, is that the European side tries time and again to impose a very certain type of interpretation. And anyone like us who speaks against this interpretation and says, "Guys, it's more difficult, we have to take into consideration the Russian point of view," then gets defamed and called names—to the point where now the European Union, for the first time, has put sanctions on two European Union citizens, on two Germans, which is really, really extreme in my view. But those are journalists— -- 3 of 17 -- Germans who live in Russia and report in English and in German about what's happening in Russia. And this, together, of course, with outlawing RT, outlawing Sputnik, and so on—this is a problem that Europe is facing for the first time. Narrative control. And as you said, it's much easier to impose that on Afghanistan or on Syria because nobody understood what Mr. Assad said anyway, and nobody would listen. Therefore, you can dominate. And if you claim that he used chemical weapons to attack innocent civilians, then that becomes a fact, even if the OPCW and so on say otherwise. You can crowd all of that out. But this time, for the first time, narrative control is not that clear anymore, is it? And Russia actually is very skillful and understands—Vladimir Putin understands English and German. And the Russians have a big advantage over the Europeans. But all of this seems to create a lot of rage inside Europe. Do you also see it like that? #M3 The thing is, you know, if you see my gray hair, I'm probably a little bit older than you, and I lived during the Cold War. During the Cold War, for example, you could buy Pravda or Literaturnaya Gazeta and all these papers at any newsstand in the West, in Switzerland, in Bern. I might be wrong, but I think I even saw Krasnaya Zvezda, which was the military paper of the Soviet army at the time, at newsstands in Switzerland. So, during the Cold War, we were not so afraid of propaganda or whatever, because the Soviets were obviously also keen on having propaganda. But why was that? Because we were convinced and confident that our way of thinking was the right one. And therefore, we didn't need to have any kind of censorship or things like this. We had none. In fact, the Soviets had censorship, but we didn't. Because we were confident that what we thought was right. When you start putting censorship in place, that means you are not so confident that what you do is right. And that's a tragic explanation for that. And you see that in Germany—it's not a surprise that Germans apply censorship and all that—because, in fact, this is the country where people are probably questioning the involvement of the government in the Ukrainian war the most. And for that reason, the legitimacy of the decisions taken by the government is not so solid. Therefore, you need censorship. Now, information works exactly like a Darwinian principle. The good information, in the end, survives, in that sense. That's my explanation—a schematic understanding of that. You cannot impose a view on things ad infinitum. The Soviets tried to do so, and it failed. Now we are trying to do so, and it will fail. In fact, the reason why we are not so confident, why our position is not very solid, is the fact that everything we are witnessing today in Ukraine was described in reports before—meaning that, somehow, some people had in mind the scenario that we are witnessing today. Therefore, the legitimacy of what Ukraine is doing today, and what it has done in the past, by the way—because we know, and I think it's undisputed today, that the democratically elected government of Yanukovych was toppled. -- 4 of 17 -- And I remind you that as he was elected, the OSCE observed the election and saw that as an example of democracy. But it was democratically elected. So now we toppled that. And now we have, of course, to cover this up. And then all the decisions that have been taken since then about the language—which was basically the first decision taken by the non-elected government