On 24 February 2022, Russia launched its military intervention in Ukraine. The NATO Surveillance Committee was then one of the few voices in Belgium to refuse to unilaterally condemn Russia, and to highlight NATO’s fundamental responsibility for the outbreak of the conflict. “ This war did not, in fact, break out today”, we wrote the day after Russian tanks entered Ukraine, “it was prepared step by step, ever since the dissolution of the USSR, through NATO’s systematic expansion towards Russia and its arrogant dismissal of legitimate mutual security concerns. ” This stance earned us much criticism and attacks, and even led to attempts to expel us and caused rifts within the peace movement.

Four years on, our stance remains unchanged, but matters may have become clearer to many of our comrades and friends: in the meantime, the genocide unfolding in Gaza, the pogroms in the West Bank, the terrorist massacres and the invasion of Lebanon, and the ‘Shock & Awe’ attacks against Iran, have laid bare the sheer hypocrisy of the moral posturing by European Union politicians and the media in their condemnations of Russia; the unchecked over-militarisation, the systematic corollary attack on social gains, the attacks on freedom of expression and the rule of law, and the arbitrary nature of ‘European’ sanctions (think of the Jacques Baud case) – all of this has opened the eyes of many to the creeping rise of fascism and the race towards war, all under the pretext of a ‘Russian threat’ that is entirely fabricated, if not entirely inverted.