A Bloody Delay of Bankruptcy (2/2)

While he was visiting the grave of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery — the actual grave lies far from the memorial, in the rear Jewish section of the cemetery — the red-green coalition in Berlin also wanted to break up Deutschland AG, and so fired up finance capitalism. The tax exemption of capital gains in 2002 enabled the banks to sell their industrial holdings tax-free and invest the proceeds in stock-market bets. This had two fatal consequences: first, German banks were very quickly caught in the vortex of the 2008 financial crisis, which without this reallocation they might have been partly spared. Second, the international financial industry was able to buy its way into German companies and thereby influence management decisions.

In London in the spring of 2009 the wind of the financial crash blew human fates like empty beer cans through the rain-soaked streets. The bankers no longer had money quite so loose in their pockets. The share-release parties were cancelled. At business dinners they saved themselves the companions, all of whom had one button too many open on the blouse. Privately they did without the numbers; instead of excesses, family was back in fashion, and the call girls were sent away and could see where that left them. The oligarchs got capitalism, the football clubs like Roman Abramovich,[^27] the golf courses, the clubs and salons; the girls from Ukraine got the exploitation, the collective blame and the street corner, where more and more young women from south London joined them.[^28]

He was there himself when Polish construction workers on Jamaica Road broke into an empty block of flats with no heating and no running water. In London rain and icy March cold they needed a roof over their heads and somewhere to sleep, for they had been fired from one day to the next; the banking crash was driving the construction firms into bankruptcy, on the construction sites the cranes suddenly stood still, outstanding wages were no longer paid, and those who had hoped to earn more in overalls in the East End than at home as a teacher or professor simply lacked the money for the flight back to Warsaw.[^29] In a pub in Brixton he had to break up a fight, because Poles and Britons, drunk, were about to go for each other and were already reaching for the chairs: “Stop guys and cool down, you won’t get a better life with fighting each other, all this shit is about class, not about race. You can find decent men in any country!”

The banking crisis was passed down the line; both Polish and British workers had the water up to their necks, and the rage long encapsulated in the daily struggle for survival — the rage left behind by neoliberalism, the wage cuts, the work intensification, the redundancies, the fear of one’s own failure, the exhaustion, the resignation — broke out, most violently where the quake had caused the greatest damage. Among the Britons at the table, the suppressed fury left behind by neoliberalism had long since been successfully displaced into a racist reflex.[^30] The last thing these people, battered by capitalism, needed were lectures on diversity or lessons on the climate; but they were receptive to reason and respect, and above all nobody wanted to make a fool of himself in front of foreigners, least of all in front of a German: “Did you hear this gentleman? Friends, I think he’s right. Let’s stay friends and have another pint!”

With the taxpayer’s money the governments rescued the banks — more than a trillion pounds, that is a thousand billion, was spent by the British state on bank rescues from 2007 onwards; but the subsequent recession turned out even more costly, the economy shrank by ten to 15 per cent, jobs were lost, debts rose dramatically, and austerity measures in the social and education sectors followed. Once again the financial industry had won.[^31]

The financial crisis dragged two decisive structural changes in the financial system in its wake: first, it brought a shift from bad loans to government bonds, and second, a displacement of these bonds away from the banks into the shadow banking system. The rescue of the banks with taxpayers’ money has led, according to the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, to a reduction in risk in the banking sector while at the same time the debt burden of states has risen as never before in peacetime. At the same time, fund assets have migrated out of bank balance sheets, while they have risen dramatically at hedge funds, investment funds, pension funds, insurers and financial investors. This increases the risks, because in the shadow banking system investments are often leveraged with derivative mechanisms in order to exploit price fluctuations optimally while easing the burden on equity capital. This raises the danger of procyclical fire sales and can shake states’ refinancing conditions.[^32] Thus Germany’s budget too has fallen into the Babylonian captivity of international financial investors in the largely unregulated shadow banking system, who earn billions from the Ukraine war and can put pressure on any state that wants to step out of the front of warmongers by selling off its bonds.

The holes in the budget that had opened up after the meltdown in the financial system served as a welcome pretext for dismantling the welfare state further. Faced with the choice of rescuing the financial sector or the welfare state, the government left no doubt that the City enjoys priority, and so signalled to the whole world that foreign money is in good hands here. The financial industry had to be kept alive, even if the rest of the world sank into chaos, misery and war.[^33]

For more than three centuries the City of London has financed wars and sold insurance against the resulting destruction, and in doing so the financial centre uses the emerging chaos as a weapon. Lloyd’s of London is the insurance pillar of the City’s network of financial control, not actually an insurance company but a corporate body functioning as a marketplace on which several financiers, joined together in syndicates, come together to bundle and spread risks. Lloyd’s has a reputation for always delivering, but this comes at a price. In 1898 the company formalised a long-standing practice by introducing the “Free of Capture and Seizure” clause, with which war risks were struck out of insurance policies and the possibility was created of demanding excessive premiums on the outbreak of a conflict. This clause was applied in the First and Second World Wars, with the beginning of the civil war in the Donbass and the accession of Crimea to Russia in 2014, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 — and after the attack on Iran by the USA and Israel.[^34]

In 1999 almost the entire world was opened up to unregulated derivatives trading, so that government bonds, oil flows, shipping routes and war-risk insurance could be broken down into credit default swaps, hedges and other derivative products and thereby made the plaything of speculation. The decisive lever was the WTO agreement on financial services of 1997 (the Fifth Protocol to the General Agreement on Trade in Services), which came into force in 1999. Under it, all 156 nations in the WTO had to abolish the separation between commercial savings banks and investment banks that speculate with derivatives. The WTO agreement became the battering ram for opening global markets to this derivatives business. Derivatives trading thereupon exploded and developed into one of the most concentrated and most profitable businesses in the world, and it is controlled by a few large banks.[^35]

In the City of London the machinery of war insurance and the machinery of derivatives work hand in hand, for the former ensures the raising of chaos premiums, and the latter harvests them through rehypothecation and legal seizure. The hedging of war risks is a form of insurance, but the derivatives market is a far larger insurance trap, for derivatives are sold as protection against market risks while in fact being a speculative gamble that skims profits off all important economic flows.[^36]

In June 2025 the notional value of outstanding over-the-counter derivatives was put at 846 trillion dollars, 16% more than the previous year[^37] — that is almost a quadrillion, a one with 15 zeros. As early as 2016 the volume of transactions on the financial markets exceeded turnover in goods and services by more than a hundredfold.[^38] When this bubble bursts, it will trigger a wave of insolvencies that will force the fire sale of liquid assets. The stock-market insider David Rogers Webb documented the legal mechanisms by which the derivatives dealers claim everything for themselves.[^39] For quiet changes to the Uniform Commercial Code and to corresponding EU regulations have turned ordinary investors into mere “entitlement holders”, who merely hold a legal claim against their securities dealers, while in any insolvency shares, bonds and deposits legally serve as collateral for the derivatives complex — collateral that has been rehypothecated many times over. If the derivative collateral fails, then the rehypothecated house of cards erected upon it collapses, margin calls will follow, the chain of priority in access is triggered and the great raid begins.[^40] It would be the meltdown of the financial system.

To prevent that from happening, ever new collateral must be pumped into the system — oil and gas deposits, rare earths, coal and iron ore, minerals of every kind — which can serve as objects of speculation on future profits and thereby as the new basis for derivatives trading. At the beginning of 2013 the then Dutch Prime Minister and later NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte concluded a contract with Shell and the Ukrainian government allowing the energy giant to extract shale gas over an area of almost 8,000 square kilometres in the region between Kharkiv and Donetsk.^41 The energy multinationals Chevron and Exxon had also signed such extraction contracts. In total the three companies had pledged investments of 32 billion USD, which already permits conclusions about the profits expected. A consortium of Exxon, OMV Petrom and the state enterprise Nadra Ukrainy alone wanted to invest up to 12 billion USD in developing the largest deposit by area, the Skifska oil and gas field in the Black Sea.[^42] Friedrich Merz, as CEO of BlackRock in Germany, evidently made similar arrangements for the financial investor.^43

The Donbass is rich in mineral resources such as hard coal, iron ore, important minerals such as lithium, manganese, titanium, cobalt, rare earths, graphite and other metals that are decisive for the energy transition. 95% of Ukraine’s energy resources lie in the Donbass.[^44] These resources are an important incentive for the war.^45 Shell, Exxon, Halliburton and Chevron wanted to extract these resources with the help of fracking technology and export them to the EU.[^46]

US Senator John McCain turned up in 2014 at the coup on the Maidan. In 2008 the major energy companies had supported his election campaign with a total of two million dollars, and in return McCain voted in the Senate against support for renewable energies and against higher taxation of the oil companies, which spared the Big Energy complex fiscal costs of some 13 billion USD. In May 2014 Ukraine’s largest private energy company, Burisma Holdings, appointed the son of US Vice President Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors. A few weeks earlier, the former Polish Prime Minister Aleksander Kwaśniewski and the campaign manager of the later US Secretary of State John Kerry, Devon Archer, had already joined the body. As early as the end of April 2014, four weeks before his son joined Burisma, Joe Biden had visited Kyiv and spoken with the coup government about Ukraine’s energy supply, promising to support the country in implementing the contracts concluded in 2013.[^47]

But the companies had reckoned without their host. Of all regions, the gas-rich Crimea and eastern Ukraine resisted the 2014 coup on the Maidan. In the Donbass the ousted President Yanukovych had received more than 90% of the vote in the 2010 elections; the population was not prepared to accept the violent regime change, and in Crimea 96.77% voted in a referendum for the return to Russia.[^48] At all access points to the Yuzivska gas field — in Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Volnovakha, Lysychansk and Rubizhne — citizens occupied the town halls and blocked the transport routes. Within a few weeks the extraction region turned into a civil war zone. The rebellion in the Donbass deprived Western corporations and banks of the possibility of converting the natural resources into their own collateral.

On 30 April 2014 the International Monetary Fund approved an aid package of 17 billion USD.[^49] Kyiv’s Western sponsors put pressure on the new government to act against the uprising and to regain control in the east and south.[^50] From a report by the US broadcaster CNBC we know that Kyiv’s approach was “politically driven by key IMF shareholders” in order to support the Yatsenyuk “kamikaze” government in its reform efforts. The International Monetary Fund threatened: should the central government lose control over the east, the aid programme would have to be recut.[^51]

On 13 March 2014, alongside the army, the 60,000-strong National Guard was mobilised under the new security chief, the militant right-wing extremist Andriy Parubiy.[^52] CIA Director John Brennan personally organised from Kyiv the deployment of dozens of CIA and FBI special units to build up a security structure against the insurgents.[^53] By military means the coup government also wanted to push through the extraction of fracking gas.[^54]

US foreign policy had prepared the energy corporations’ offensive in Eastern Europe since 2010 with the “Global Shale Gas Initiative”: “This is a diplomatic royal flush,” said the head and coordinator for international energy affairs David Goldwyn, who recommended that Washington should promote access to new exploration areas in order to secure investment.[^55] The point was to integrate energy resources into the Western hemisphere, to reduce dependence on Russian gas in Ukraine and in Europe, and thereby to achieve a geopolitical shift of power.

The central obstacle identified in this was the energy partnership between Germany and Russia. A confidential paper by the RAND Corporation from January 2022 — whose authenticity was of course immediately denied — states plainly that the US economy, and the banking system in particular, cannot function without an inflow of financial and material resources from external sources. In order to secure a transfer of resources from Europe to the USA, an economic crisis would have to be brought about in Germany. To that end it would be necessary to interrupt the cheap supply of Russian energy, and the only feasible way was to draw Germany into a war in Ukraine.[^56]

From the very beginning, the war in Ukraine was about pushing the Russian competitor out of the energy market and generating new profits.[^57] This was urgently needed, because the companies had financed their investments in new extraction technologies through high-interest loans. The investment bank JP Morgan estimated the financial bubble around the fracking industry at around 550 billion USD. Should these high-risk bonds default, a scenario similar to the default of property loans at the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis threatens.[^58] That means profits from fracking exports urgently had to be generated and new loan collateral obtained.[^59] That is exactly what the Ukraine war is about too; that is what the 2003 war against Iraq in breach of international law was about, and that is what the attack on Iran will be about in 2026: taking possession of resources, forcing markets open, controlling logistics routes, winning new collateral for new loans and leveraging the profits in derivatives trading.

One of the key shareholders mentioned by CNBC was presumably Ariane de Rothschild, CEO of the Edmond de Rothschild Group. On 18 March 2014 she wrote to Jeffrey Epstein that she had sat a long day on the bank board, that the numbers were acceptable but not satisfactory to her, that she was putting them under pressure to be more innovative about asset management funds while restructuring, that she was at a dinner with a client and fed up, that she missed their talks and hoped he was well, that she would be at home the following evening — and that they should discuss Ukraine. Epstein replied that the upheaval in Ukraine should provide many opportunities, many.[^60] And indeed: given Ukraine’s liquid collateral, estimated at 10 to 12 trillion USD, one can certainly speak of great opportunities — and of the collapse of the financial system if this collateral fails to materialise.

It began with the greed for new profits and the pincer grip on new collateral for the speculators. The 2014 coup in Kyiv and the junta’s attack on the population in the east and south of Ukraine were supposed to deliver this collateral. This created the conflict that led to a full-scale war with Russia, and that could widen into another devastating world war in Europe. All wars are bankers’ wars. They did not get the minerals in eastern Ukraine. That is why they cannot go back. They want the war.

There is no history without the crime scene on which it is committed.[^61] London 2003 was the analytical test case in which time and space stretched. He had to admit: it only really struck him when the financial crisis of 2008 caused the house of cards of flimsy speculation to collapse, and when in February 2014 the first blood flowed in Ukraine.

The summer was already turning towards autumn. At the end of August he took his leave of the studio on Great Chapel Street and of the building behind the railings, which has long since ceased to exist because it had to make way for underground construction and land speculation. The news machine had spat him out again and ran on with other, ever more supple young talents who produced films and live links as if on a conveyor belt and hoped for the great career. He took one last walk through Covent Garden as far as Brick Lane, then ordered lunch in Chinatown, took a drink at dusk in the Hour Glass and read on the bar mat the advertisement for Spitfire beer: “Ref, watch the Germans. They always want to nick some extra yards!”[^62] The jocular warning to the referee about the German menace in football played on the long-term memory of the Battle of Britain and the London nights of bombing. Memories that are being reawakened today by a chancellor who wants to make the Bundeswehr “the conventionally strongest army in Europe”.^63

London remained in the fever of stock-market bets, in which the fortunes of Ukrainian oligarchs were also invested, and the robbed followed their stolen money, climbing at nightfall into the sports coupés in front of Chelsea Cloisters and throwing the pizza boxes exhaustedly into the corridor at night. The great rip-off was running, casino capitalism was sucking up ever more resources ever faster, a pyramid scheme meant to rescue old bad loans and flimsy stock-market bets with new collateral. War — a gigantic laundry that flushes the stolen money of citizens over mountains of corpses into the accounts of corporations and financial investors. Iraq 2003, Libya and Syria 2008, Ukraine 2014, Iran 2025 and 2026 — the merchants of death must want war so that the house of cards of derivatives does not collapse: one long bloody delay of bankruptcy, the road into the final catastrophe of the capital system.[^64] London was the gate to hell and he had not even noticed it.

He took a taxi from Sloane Avenue to Heathrow and did not look back. It was a wonderful summer.

---

[^27]: Baab, Patrik: Roman Abramovich buys success for FC Chelsea. ARD-Morgenmagazin, 15.08.2003 and BR Euroblick, 17.08.2003 (The 6-minute report was cut to remove the passages critical of Abramovich. At the time the football fans among the editors were delighted by the oligarch — or rather by his money. The original manuscript still exists.) Further information: Midgley, Dominic and Chris Hutchins: Abramovich. The Billionaire From Nowhere. London 2005

[^28]: Tempest, Kate: The Bricks that Built the Houses. London 2016

[^29]: Baab, Patrik: Poles in London: The dream is over. Europamagazin, 28.03.2009

[^30]: “In all societies churned up by neoliberalism, mass rage prevails. Long encapsulated in the daily struggle for existence, it finally breaks out, most violently where the quake caused the greatest damage.” Engler, Wolfgang: Die offene Gesellschaft und ihre Grenzen, Berlin 2021, pp. 104f.

[^31]: Hüetlin, Thomas and Mathieu von Rohr: Land voller Angst. Kaum ein Land erlebt durch die Wirtschaftskrise einen so brutalen Absturz wie das Vereinigte Königreich. Der Spiegel, No. 9, 2009, pp. 108–111

[^32]: “For instance, with broker-dealer balance sheets having smaller heft in the financial system post-GFC, liquidity in sovereign bond markets increasingly relies on open-ended mutual funds, hedge funds and other asset managers. These entities often face significant liquidity mismatches, rely on short-term funding backed by government securities as collateral or are either frequently highly leveraged or exhibit leverage-like behaviour. As a result, their liquidity provision is less stable and more likely to evaporate during periods of market stress. Hedge funds, in particular, have increasingly become a significant source of procyclical liquidity, especially in government bond markets. These investors actively pursue relative value trading strategies that seek to exploit small price differences between related financial instruments. To boost the returns on these small price differences they heavily leverage their positions. One method often used is to pledge government securities as collateral in the repo market to borrow more cash with which to purchase additional government securities. This practice has further evolved in recent years, with investors borrowing amounts equal to or higher than the market value of the collateral provided... Hedge funds’ relative value strategies are highly vulnerable to adverse shocks in funding, cash or derivate markets, as evidenced by some recent episodes. During the market turmoil of March 2020, for instance, margin calls in Treasury futures markets triggered fire sales, resulting in destabilising deleveraging spirals.” Tooze, Adam: Chartbook 401: The dollar system in an age of market-based finance — financial globalization beyond banks, Substack, 25.07.2025, https://substack.com/home/post/p-169614598

[^33]: Stäuber, Peter: London. Unterwegs in einer umkämpften Metropole. Vienna 2026, pp. 44–47

[^34]: Brown, Ellen: All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame. Global Research, 13.04.2026, https://www.globalresearch.ca/all-wars-bankers-wars-iran/5922072

[^35]: Brown, Ellen: All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame. Global Research, 13.04.2026, https://www.globalresearch.ca/all-wars-bankers-wars-iran/5922072

[^36]: Brown, Ellen: All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame. Global Research, 13.04.2026, https://www.globalresearch.ca/all-wars-bankers-wars-iran/5922072

[^37]: “The notional value of outstanding over-the-counter (OTC) derivates rose to $846 trillion at June 2025, up 16% from June 2024. This marks an acceleration from the moderate 5% annual upward trend since end-2016.” Bank for International Settlements: OTC derivates statistics at end-june 2025. 08.12.2025, https://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy2512.htm

[^38]: Nachtwey, Oliver: Die Abstiegsgesellschaft. Über das Aufbegehren in der regressiven Moderne. Frankfurt a. M. 2016 (3rd ed.), p. 52. Cf. Schulmeister, Stephan: “Over the past 15 years transactions on the financial markets increased considerably; in 2007 their volume was around 74 times world production. More than 90% of all transactions are accounted for by financial derivatives, the greater part of which is not attributable to hedging but to speculation.” Id.: Handelsdynamik und Preisschwankungen auf Finanzmärkten und das Stabilisierungspotential einer Finanztransaktionssteuer. WIFO, 08.2008, https://www.wifo.ac.at/wp-content/uploads/upload-8546/MB_2008_08_05_FINANZKRISE_TRANSAKTIONSSTEUER_.pdf

[^39]: Webb, David Rogers: Die grosse Enteignung. Straßengel 2024 (English original: The Great Taking)

[^40]: Brown, Ellen: All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame. Global Research, 13.04.2026, https://www.globalresearch.ca/all-wars-bankers-wars-iran/5922072

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[^42]: Daniljuk, Malte: Neue Energie für Europa. Telepolis, 17.01.2015, https://www.telepolis.de/article/Neue-Energie-fuer-Europa-3369425.html

[^44]: Ford, Matt: Russia Is Crashing Ukraine’s Hopes For Energy Independence. The Atlantic, 08.04.2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/russia-is-crushing-ukraines-hopes-for-energy-independence/360281/

[^46]: Krainer, Alex: All wars are bankers’ wars. So was Kiev’s 2014 anti-terror operation. Substack, 15.04.2026, https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/all-wars-are-bankers-wars-so-was

[^47]: Daniljuk, Malte: Neue Energie für Europa. Telepolis, 17.01.2015, https://www.telepolis.de/article/Neue-Energie-fuer-Europa-3369425.html

[^48]: Krainer, Alex: All wars are bankers’ wars. So was Kiev’s 2014 anti-terror operation. Substack, 15.04.2026, https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/all-wars-are-bankers-wars-so-was

[^49]: IMF approves $17 billion bailout for Ukraine. Reuters, 30.04.2014, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-ukraine-crisis-imf/imf-approves-17-billion-bailout-for-ukraine-idUKKBN0DG1XW20140430/

[^50]: Ukraine’s most senior intelligence officer, Andrii Telizhenko, said that CIA Director John “Brennan gave the green light to use force against the Donbass”, namely on 12 April 2014, and discussed “how the US could support it... A plan to keep the Donbass in Ukraine’s hands... Ukraine must take decisive, aggressive measures...” The following day, 13 April, the junta announced the so-called anti-terror operation against the rebels. Krainer, Alex: All wars are bankers’ wars. So was Kiev’s 2014 anti-terror operation. Substack, 15.04.2026, https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/all-wars-are-bankers-wars-so-was

[^51]: Boyle, Catherine: IMF warns Ukraine on bailout if it loses east. CNBC, 01.05.2014, https://archive.is/llqw0

[^52]: Hyland, Julie: What the Western-backed regime is planning for Ukrainian workers. World Socialist Web Site, 14.03.2014, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/15/pers-m15.html

[^53]: Pilger, John: In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia. Washington’s role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime’s neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world. The Guardian, 13.05.2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/ukraine-us-war-russia-john-pilger

[^54]: Ukrainian army helps installing shale gas production equipment near Slavyansk. TASS, 25.07.2014, https://tass.com/world/742366

[^55]: Quoted from Goldwyn, David L.: Making an Energy Boom Work for the U.S. New York Times, 12.11.2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/business/energy-environment/making-an-energy-boom-work-for-us.html

[^56]: “The present state of the U.S. economy does not suggest that it can function without financial and material support from external sources... There is an urgent need for resources to flow into the national economy, especially the banking system. Only European countries bound by EU and NATO commitments will be able to provide them without significant military and political costs for us. The major obstacle to it is growing independence of Germany. Although it still is a country with limited sovereignty, for decades it has been consistently moving toward lifting these limitations and becoming a fully independent state... An increase in the flow of resources from Europe to U.S. can be expected if Germany begins to experience a controlled economic crisis... The current German economic model is based on two pillars. These are unlimited access to cheap Russian energy resources and to cheap French electric power, thanks to the operation of nuclear power plants. Halting Russian supplies can well create a systemic crisis that would be devastating for the German economy and, indirectly, for the entire European Union... The only feasible way to guarantee Germany’s rejection of Russian energy supplies is to involve both sides in the military conflict in Ukraine. Our further actions in this country will inevitably lead to a military response from Russia. Russians will obviously not be able to leave unanswered the massive Ukrainian army pressure on the unrecognized Donbas republics. That would make possible to declare Russia an aggressor and apply to it the entire package of sanctions prepared beforehand... The prerequisite for Germany to fall into this trap is the leading role of green parties and ideology in Europe. The German Greens are a strongly dogmatic, if not zealous, movement, which makes it quite easy to make them ignore economic arguments... Personal features and the lack of professionalism of their leaders — primarily Annalena Baerbock and Robert Habeck — permit to presume that it is next to impossible for them to admit their own mistakes in a timely manner.” Research Report — Executive Summary. Distribution: WHCS, ANSA, Dept. of State, CIA, NSA, DNC. Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, 25.01.2022 — Confidential. Further evidence: Berletic, Brian: U.S. Is Grooming Europe for War with Russia. Interview, The Greater Eurasia Podcast (Glenn Diesen), 30.04.2026, Watch on YouTube

[^57]: Nye, Joseph S. Jr.: A Western Strategy for a Declining Russia. Project Syndicate, 03.09.2014, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/joseph-s--nye-wants-to-deter-russia-without-isolating-it

[^58]: Ölpreis: Prognose von Morgan Stanley belastet. Boerse.de of 09.12.2014, https://www.boerse.de/nachrichten/Oelpreis-Prognose-von-Morgan-Stanley-belastet/7522862 Daniljuk, Malte: Neue Energie für Europa. Telepolis, 17.01.2015, https://www.telepolis.de/article/Neue-Energie-fuer-Europa-3369425.html

[^59]: Ebinger, Charles K.: The Department of Energy’s Strategy for Exporting Liquefied Natural Gas. Brookings Institution, 19.03.2013, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-department-of-energys-strategy-for-exporting-liquefied-natural-gas/

[^60]: Ariane de Rothschild to Jeffrey Epstein, Tuesday, 18 March 2014, 20:55: “Hi Jeff, very long day sitting on bank board... Numbers are ok but not satisfactory to me. And i m putting them under pressure to be more innovative about asset mgt funds while restructuring. I m in a dinner with a client Fed up! I miss our talks and hope you re well. Will be at home tomorrow night, will you be free? And lets discuss Ukraine”. On 18 March 2014 at 16:40 Jeffrey Epstein wrote: “ukraine upheaval should provide many opportunities, many”. Quoted from Krainer, Alex: All wars are bankers’ wars. So was Kiev’s 2014 anti-terror operation. Substack, 15.04.2026, https://trendcompass.substack.com/p/all-wars-are-bankers-wars-so-was

[^61]: “From then on there was no history any more without the settings and crime scenes on which it took place. It was the analytical test case of opening up a history that has not only time but also space in mind.” Schlögel, Karl: Moskau Lesen. Munich 2011, p. 13

[^62]: The Spitfire advertisement played on the nationalist prejudice that something cannot be right if football was invented in England but the Germans always win.

[^64]: “However, in 2008 the crisis phenomena once again asserted themselves insistently — they were temporarily flooded with money, but the crisis itself did not go away; it is continuing all the same. And now the world economy is, in essence, on the brink of catastrophe. Moreover, unlike the economic crisis of 1929–1939 or the recession of 1873–1896, which were varieties of structural crises, the capitalist system now faces a systemic, terminal crisis. Capitalism has served its time; something new is needed.” Андрей Фурсов (https://dzen.ru/govoritfursov): Перерождение, которого опасался Сталин. Советское руководство отказалось от будущего в середине 1960-х годов. (Fursov, Andrei: The rebirth Stalin feared. In the mid-1960s the Soviet leadership gave up the future. Blog of 12.09.2024) https://dzen.ru/a/ZuLEESPl5UPFey63