If you want peace, you don’t prepare for war, but for negotiations.

According to an ancient aphorism attributed to Aeschylus, “in war, truth is the first casualty”: nothing could be truer as we have experienced in the last two years, during which the falsehoods propagated by politicians and mainstream media are countless. If reality can be distorted to convince the public of the righteousness of certain political choices—a phenomenon to which we have become accustomed—the problem becomes dramatic and dangerous when the ruling class loses all connection with the facts and becomes a victim of its own self-delusion.

Immediately after the invasion of Ukraine, the narratives presented were different: Russia, with a GDP equal to that of Spain, would quickly be brought to its knees by sanctions and the economic war waged against it by the G7 countries; the Russian army is in dire conditions and lacks cutting-edge technology (according to Ursula von der Leyen, the Russians were taking chips from stolen washing machines in Ukraine); President Putin’s health is compromised… But more than two years after the fateful day of February 24, 2022, the International Monetary Fund predicts a 2.6% growth rate for the Russian economy in 2024, while Germany, the EU’s locomotive, is in recession. The Russians had adapted to the sanctions as early as 2014 and prepared to be self-sufficient in the fields of IT and banking. The Russian army is well-equipped, supplied, and has technologically advanced weapons, from hypersonic missiles to electronic warfare tools.

As sociologist Emmanuel Todd notes in his recent essay “The Defeat of the West” (Gallimard), it is the Western military industry that is lacking and unable to guarantee supplies to Ukraine. Prior to the war, Russia’s GDP was less than 5% of the total GDP of the G7. A small economic power and a military power “in miniature,” equal to one-tenth of that of the USA, which has proven capable of producing more weapons than the entire West. This poses a double problem: the first to the Ukrainian army, which loses the war due to lack of resources that the West cannot supply, as well as manpower; the second is more important and devastating for the dominant economic science, which finds itself without conceptual tools to understand how such a situation is possible. This is the crucial point: financial turbo-capitalism may be able to dominate the virtual market, but the real economy, on which even the war economy is based, can be much more resilient, as the Russian economy has shown, diversifying its sources and foreign trade.

Finally, Putin seems to be in excellent physical and political shape. The widespread consensus in the recent elections is due to two decisive factors: the difference between present-day Russia and the one Putin inherited from Yeltsin in the 1990s (devastated by a deep economic-social crisis, while since 1999 per capita GDP has tripled and the country has emerged from the tunnel) and the renewed Russian national pride, supported by the widespread perception of being in an existential war against the West.

In more than two years, the war has caused the deaths of over half a million soldiers and the devastation of a country. The profound misunderstanding of reality is making the danger of a conflict between NATO and Russia, which could escalate into a nuclear annihilation war, increasingly imminent. There has been no public reflection on the failure to interpret basic facts since February 2022. Leaders like Letta, Draghi, and Von der Leyen, to name a few, have never found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to explain the reasons for their incorrect stance. Faced with the initial narrative failure, we are now witnessing a complete change in narrative: the Russian army, instead of being an army of desperados with shovels to be defeated on the battlefield, has become a threat to the whole of Europe. Therefore, says Charles Michel, “we must produce more weapons and train soldiers: if we want peace, we must prepare for war.” War against the country with the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet is an obvious madness, which once again reveals the inadequacy of this ruling class.

As Jeffrey Sachs, an enlightened voice, points out, a very simple point: instead of perpetuating rhetoric against Russia and Putin at every opportunity, it is necessary to sit down at the table and negotiate. Whether we like the counterpart or not, we do not choose it. Everything has been said and done by Western governments in the last two years, except for this obvious step. Moreover, as former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett among others reminds us, it was the West, and particularly Boris Johnson, who thwarted the agreement between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey in March 2022. Two terrible years have passed; it is time to say enough to this madness.