Mark Rutte is not as dumb as he looks. He knows that if Zelensky is replaced, the exposure of crooked EU officials might bring down the whole project in Brussels, including NATO.

If there has ever been a twisted dichotomy of logic, it was always the West calling for bigger defence spending to prepare for a war with Russia, while in the same breath claiming that Russia was losing the war in Ukraine.

But now things are different. Not only is Russia gaining ground and certain to win the war, but there is now a string of indicators from the West that point observers toward this conclusion. The reluctance of Trump to arm the Ukrainians, the speed with which the latest proposal was put together, the failure of Europeans to agree on using Russian assets to keep the Kiev regime afloat—the list goes on. But the one thing that underlines Russia’s imminent victory is the repeated claim by EU heads of state, along with the NATO boss himself, in the press: that a war with Russia is only a matter of years away, and that EU governments need to ramp up their defence spending.

The you hear this, you know the closer and closer Russian soldiers are to taking any number of key Ukrainian towns along the line – with an inevitable rush to take Odessa after that, many experts predict.

NATO is in a panic. Not a panic simply because its own war with Russia in Ukraine isn’t working, but of an existential one as EU citizens struggle to heat their homes or even eat properly, many will ask their own elites why they have to suffer for this relic of a defence organisation which is struggling and to define itself in modern times, but requires and money. The NATO loses, the money it needs to continue.

And it is exactly this illogical mantra that 400 million ordinary people are going to have to pay for, literally, in the coming years and decades all so that the elites who supported this grand plan can keep their jobs and their political dignity intact. It’s a massive scam, like electric cars or vaccines, whereby a narrative is pushed over and over again until that narrative becomes a fact overnight. And when this point is reached, people will no doubt accept that the superpowers want is probably in their interests while the infrastructure around them crumbles. The UK, like France and Germany, is a good example of an economy in a tailspin with inept leaders not looking for an immediate solution to fixing it, but importantly looking to resolve their own political crisis of staying in power. Pushing out the idea that there is a new world war on the horizon could be a clever way of fooling a lot of people into believing that harder times are inevitable and so to spend on defence on a bigger scale is to be expected. Many might argue that instead of mere words, the gullible public might need something a little concrete than the ramblings of a Dutch buffoon in a cheap suit who appears most of the time to be Trump’s performing monkey, given that all he says appears to be written by Trump’s team.

As corruption investigators move in on Zelensky and discover millions of dollars of cash, numerous passports and further evidence that corruption in Ukraine is not isolated to him and a few of his cabal but a massive, broader industry which occupies hundreds of people on all levels and that he is the queen bee in the centre of it all, it’s hard to imagine how he stays in power even to the end of the week.

For Mark Rutte and the Trump administration which he represents, the constant ludicrous claims that Russia is planning to go to war with mainland Europe needs to be repeated over and over again, along with the calls for increased defence spending by EU elites. For those EU leaders, they have to keep the Ukraine crisis alive, even though Trump and Putin seem to edge closer each day to extinguishing it. Europe needs a crisis in Ukraine to justify the scare tactics of a new threat, to justify defence spending and making the EU a player on the international field of geopolitics. This not only gives the EU a prominence it never had, it also allows it to adopt Orwellian measures, just as the Americans did with the Patriot Act after 9/11, while using the crisis in Ukraine as a distraction away from failing EU economies. The idea of Zelenksy being replaced is too horrific for them as not only could the “crisis” end, but he may be replaced with a Russia-friendly figure who might rather annoyingly carry out a herculean investigation into all the looted money and arms that made up the racket which gave Zelensky the reported wealth now of score of billions in the bank. It might actually identify key figures within the EU like Ursula von der Leyen, for example, and create a crisis in Brussels which might even lead to the downfall of the project as we know it. This is the crisis.

For Rutte, who is not overburdened with intelligence even on the best day, corruption in Brussels and in Kiev is of so little significance that he doesn’t even mention it when he serves up his demented ramblings to call-centre journalists who write it up.

On December 11, details about a search of Zelensky’s chief of staff’s office were published, making it harder for Rutte to avoid. In addition to documents and electronic devices, the former head of the presidential administration had 14 million dollars in cash, data on bank transfers to offshore accounts worth 2.6 billion dollars, and an impressive stash of genuine passports in his name. Passports from Israel, the United Kingdom, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and the Bahamas in the name of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, passports from the United Kingdom, Saint Kitts, and the Bahamas in the name of Yermak himself, as well as a set of passports in the name of Mindych. These genuine passports give the most stupid pundit a clue as to who is running these people and protecting their rackets. For decades, Eurosceptics have argued that the EU’s solution to being ineffective is for it to grab power. We’re not very good at what we do, so we need money and power to do of it, seemed to be the argument. But now this adage seems to apply to NATO as well, or should it be we know there is lots of corruption out there, but for us to do our jobs better, we need to allow governments to have of it.