By Pepe Escobar
The Unz Review
March 5, 2026
Four years on, the Special Military Operation (SMO) reads like Russia, slowly but surely, fulfilling its objectives. The key question remains: when and under what terms Russia will end the SMO.
It may not be in 2026. Especially because irrationality permeates the Euro-elites of the disjointed, collective West. They are adamant to extract some sort of "victory" out of the jaws of humiliating strategic defeat.
Cue to the Petit Roi in Paris and his faceless British sidekick in London aiming to patch up a few nuclear warheads to hand over to Kiev, then to be unleashed by British missiles against targets inside the Russian Federation.
That's the result of an SVR (Russian Foreign Intel) investigation.
Dimitri Medvedev, the number two of the Russian government, in trademark unplugged mode, noted that that this "is not about the destruction of the NPT and other things in international law. This is a direct transfer of nuclear weapons to a warring country."
Ergo, under such harrowing circumstances, "Russia will have to use any, including non-strategic nuclear weapons, against targets in Ukraine that pose a threat to our country. And if necessary, against the supplier countries that become accomplices in a nuclear conflict with Russia."
These lines should be read with bated breath, in all seriousness. Were that to ever happen, then that's a clear path towards WWIII.
The Franco-British ensemble has abandoned virtually all red lines in their proxy war in Ukraine long ago. Compound that with Kiev now systematically using long-range cruise missiles against key targets inside the Russian Federation.
Enter the Flamingo - announced by Kiev way back in August 2025, and first presented as the FP-5 at the International Defense Exhibition IDEX-2025, earlier this month in Abu Dhabi.
The Russian Defense Ministry itself confirmed that since February 12, at least 10 Flamingo missiles have been shot down by Russian air defense.
There are satellite images of a Flamingo striking a GRU arsenal no less than 650 km away from Kharkov. Yet way more eyebrow-raising are satellite images of a strike this past weekend against the crucial Votkinsk plant in Udmurtia, no less than 1,400 km away from the battlefiefld lines, and a production site of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
This analysisgoes no holds barred detailing a whole new hair-raising spectrum of volatility unleashed by the Flamingo.
The Flamingo - sub-sonic, not stealth, with a range of up to 3,000 km and capable of carrying a warhead of up to 1 ton - is a product of an UAE-British industrial-military company, the Milanion Group. For all practical purposes it could have been part of the now nullified INF treaty. It's also, for all practical purposes, an ersatz Tomahawk.
The Flamingo technically may not pose too much trouble for Russian sophisticated missile defense systems. And yet one Flamingo may have gone through to hit Votkinsk.
Translation - as harrowing as it gets: a NATO missile, for all practical purposes under American technical guidance, directly hits a factory intimately linked with the nuclear shield of the Russian Federation.
It gets worse: this is the third strike already against Russia's nuclear defensive shield.
There was an attack against Russia's bomber fleet; against the command and control bunker compound in Novgorod, including one of President Putin's residences; and now against a Strategic Missile Tool Plant.
The Russophobic, disjointed West overtaking all red lines is leading even diehard supporters of the SMO to consider ditching diplomacy; after all what really should be demonstrated to Euro-psychos cannot be accomplished by means of the SMO.
It will sound more like a decapitation of NATO, engineered as an object lesson.
Just imagine if the warhead in the Flamingo that hit Votkinsk was a smuggled, dirty nuclear bomb.
So who are these "elites"?
Russophobic dementia will only get worse from now on. President Putin, speaking to the FSB board meeting, revealed that there will be bombing attempts against Russia's Black Sea gas pipelines, TurkStream and Blue Stream:
"They just can't calm down. They don't know what to do to destroy this peace process with an attempt at diplomatic settlement. They're doing everything they can to stage some kind of provocation and destroy everything that has been achieved on this negotiation track."
And still "they" - as in NATO - won't listen to a few basic facts of life:
"It's not possible to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. Well, it just doesn't work out. But they really want it ! They can't live without it. Or they think they can't. They absolutely need to defeat Russia. They're looking for any way, any method, anything at all. They'll push themselves to the extreme. And then they'll regret it."
So "why they can't live without it" ? Because the collective West's zero-sum logic - especially when it comes to Russia - is rooted in centuries of antagonism. There can be no possible agreements - which are no more than tactical tools. There can be no strategic commitments. There may be pauses in pressure - but never the end of pressure.
Even if the current, acute military-political dementia around Ukraine would subside - and it won't - that would never mean that the disjointed West has accepted the notion of a solid peace agreement with Russia.
So who are these "elites" ? The Empire of Chaos, Plunder and Permanente Strikes, the current configuration in Washington, is just the latest iteration. The real ruling Empire may be succinctly described as a transnational dynasty that predates - and outlives - nation-states.
It's post-national; not loyalty to any flag. It's doctrinal; dynastic; and supranational. That's what built the global reach of the British empire, and now dominates globally through via a machinery that includes Chatham House, the City of London, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the UN - which made a pact years ago with the World Economic Forum/Davos - and the EU.
Financially, that translates into control of worldwide money supply; all Central Banks; institutions from Vanguard and BlackRock to BIS; and control of the US industrial-military complex and its European counterpart.
These old money "elites" don't rule through wealth. They rule by writing the rules, controlling courts, contracts, codes and the overarching terminology.
Moreover, the real rulers are wise enough to remain invisible. They are never on mainstrean media; they are busy renewing Ancient Covenants. So it's not about bankers, or banksters, per se; it's about the bloodlines that allow these bankers to operate and control global NGOs, Central Banks, intel agencies, and last but not least, secret societies.
The inevitable consequence of this state of affairs is that peace with Russia is simply out of the picture.
It would go radically against Western Europe's own historical traditions. Mediocre politicians and functionaries such as that astonishing Estonian with the IQ of a dismembered worm could not care less about real lives of real people across the West. A key element of this cognitive dissonance is the effect of eight decades of total American dominance of Europe.
So away from the current kabuki in Geneva, and back to real life, maximum provocation pressure on Russia will only increase. Everything from attempting a naval trade blockade from the Baltic to the Black Sea to outright terrorism - bombing of the Nord Steam-style, all connected with the implementation of the EU Black Sea Strategy, adopted in May 2025: a military instrument to block naval Russia every step of the way via undercover and hybrid ops underwater, on the surface, and targeting coastal infrastructure.
Until the moment comes when "they'll regret it".
Reprinted with permission from The Unz Review.
Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst and author. His latest book is Raging Twenties. He's been politically canceled from Facebook and Twitter. Follow him on Telegram..