Europe’s most vehemently anti-Russian leaders, such as Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen, are not moral beacons but heirs to long-standing ideological lineages that continue to shape Europe’s confrontational posture toward Russia.

When Kaja Kallas steps in front of the cameras and warns that Europe must brace for war or that negotiations with Moscow are “naïve,” the media presents her as the principled voice of a small nation with a painful history. She is framed as a kind of moral compass pointing toward courage while the rest of Europe dithers. It is an attractive story. It is also incomplete in ways that matter.

The Same Old Europe

A more profound and far less comfortable truth runs beneath the surface of today’s European leadership. The figures who speak most aggressively about Russia, who call most loudly for rearmament, who urge escalation over diplomacy are usually those whose personal, institutional, or family histories trace back to the most militant anti-Soviet and ultranationalist currents of the last century.

These currents did not vanish at the end of the Cold War. They simply changed the flag, changed the suit, and changed the vocabulary. The worldview remained. This is not about guilt by ancestry. It is about continuity - political, ideological, and cultural. And it explains why certain voices in Europe consistently treat Russia not as a neighbouring state but as an existential threat whose very existence requires confrontation.

Kaja Kallas is the clearest example. Her grandfather led the Estonian Defence League, a nationalist militia from which the Nazi SS selectively recruited its most fanatical “volunteers.” The organization itself shifted shapes over time, but the ideological core - an intense anti-Russian hostility - survived. Kallas built her career inside that atmosphere. She worked for a Finnish law firm with documented ties to networks that historically engaged in wartime collaboration. And she rose to power on a message of total resistance to Russia, a message so uncompromising that it often seemed untethered from Europe’s actual geopolitical interests.

None of this makes her a Nazi. It makes her the inheritor of a political lineage that views Russia exclusively through the lens of trauma, grievance, and vengeance. It explains her absolutism far better than any “values-based” rhetoric polished for Brussels. But Kallas is only half of the equation. The other half wears a far more cultivated mask: Ursula von der Leyen, the unelected head of the European Commission and perhaps the most powerful civilian in Europe.

A Kinder, Gentler Gestapo

Unlike Kallas, von der Leyen does not shout. She manages, manages, and manages again - quietly, bureaucratically, and with the strange immunity that only accurate establishment figures enjoy. But her family history carries its own shadows. Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was a pillar of West German political life during the decades when Adenauer’s government knowingly employed former SS and Gestapo personnel at the highest levels of administration. Newly released research has shown that these men were not outliers. They formed a significant portion of the chancellery’s early structure. They carried the worldview of a defeated elite into the heart of post-war Europe and rebranded themselves as technocrats.

Von der Leyen inherited that world: the polished surface, the supranational confidence, the belief that governance is best left to elites who are not constrained by public scrutiny. It explains her astonishing ability to survive scandal after scandal - from the opaque, still-unaccounted-for vaccine text messages with Pfizer’s CEO to massive contract irregularities, to procedural violations for which any lesser official would have been removed. In Brussels, power protects itself.

What connects Kallas and von der Leyen, beyond their synchronized hawkishness, is the lineage of ideas behind them. Europe’s unelected technocracy and its militant Eastern fringe share a common ancestor: the old Atlanticist project that emerged from the ashes of the Second World War. Its goal was always the same - contain Russia, shrink Russia, exhaust Russia, and, when possible, fracture it. The names change, the rhetoric changes, the surface softens, but the underlying mission survives in the institutions, foundations, intelligence networks, political dynasties, and corporate empires that shape Europe’s policies today.

It is no coincidence that the fiercest anti-Russian voices in Europe always seem to be the ones lifted into power by the same small circle of elites. Macron - himself a creature of the Rothschild banking machine - was the one who championed von der Leyen’s rise. The same Atlanticist think tanks that cultivated her now cultivate Kallas. The same corporate media that never scrutinized von der Leyen’s vaccine dealings also never probes Kallas’s family connections. Silence is the first language of power.

And this culture of silence extends to history. Few remember that the Mohn family, which built Bertelsmann into Europe’s media empire, openly admitted in the 1990s that their fortune was built with Nazi slave labour. Yet Bertelsmann remains one of the most influential publishers in the world. These are not “old scandals.” They are unresolved legacies that continue to shape the ideological terrain of Europe’s upper class.

The Nature of “Facts” 2025

So when Western fact-checkers rush forward to shout “disinformation,” what exactly are they protecting? Whose interests are served by insisting that Europe’s leaders have no historical entanglements, no ideological inheritances, and no structural continuities? The public gains nothing from this denialism. Only the system benefits - because it allows old power to move inside new institutions without ever being named.

This is why the rhetoric of leaders like Kallas and von der Leyen feels strangely archaic. It carries the scent of another century. It is the language of an older Europe - a Europe that cannot imagine coexistence with Russia because its institutions were, from the beginning, shaped to prevent it.

When Putin expelled Rothschild, Soros, and foreign-funded NGOs from Russia two decades ago, it was not because he hated billionaire philanthropists. It was because those Western networks were executing a familiar mission: the Yugoslav treatment. Break the state - fragment the territory. Privatize the resources. Install the pliant. Moscow understood the script. For the West’s old guard, the Russian refusal was unacceptable. The grudge has never been resolved.

The tragedy is that ordinary Europeans now pay for this unending historical echo. They pay through fuel prices, through food prices, through collapsing manufacturing bases, and through militarization campaigns that hollow out their own public budgets while enriching weapons manufacturers across the Atlantic. They pay while being told that escalation is virtue and diplomacy is treason. And they are rarely shown the simple truth: that today’s hawks are not the architects of a new Europe but the custodians of an old one - one riddled with ghosts it refuses to confront.

Europe does not need another generation of leaders intoxicated with inherited fear. It does not need more unelected technocrats who believe accountability is optional. It does not need more ideological descendants of a century-old conflict telling its people that war is the only language Moscow understands.

Europe needs clarity and the courage to remember. Above all, it needs leaders who refuse to bring yesterday’s ambitions into tomorrow’s crises. Until then, the faces change, the uniforms change, and the rhetoric modernizes. But the worldview remains. And the public, once again, is asked to forget who writes the script.

Phil Butler is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, and an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. Courtesy

https://journal-neo.su/2025/12/02/the-old-europe-behind-the-new-flags/