
Faced with a Russia that tries to extend its influence to all countries, Europe must rethink its security and role in the world, former Croatian admiral Ivica Mandic tells The Geopost.
“Russia’s goal is not to change public opinion. Russia’s goal is to secure control over political decision-making. Like in Austria? Absolutely, absolutely. “It’s not just in Austria. It was and is, in Montenegro, in Kosovo, in Croatia, in Serbia, everywhere. Such operations. Where a lot of money has been spent. The worst example is that they have created a whole network, a large network, in which they have spent large amounts of money, almost 10 billion dollars in Ukraine,” he emphasizes in the interview for The Geopost while talking about the challenges facing Europe after the Cold War.
The former Croatian military officer shares his view of Russia’s influence in the region and beyond. He underscores the importance of a unified approach to preserving values and stability on the European continent.
“Russia has worked to weaken NATO, aiming to create divisions among allies… Only a strong and united Europe can ensure stability and progress for all.”
You can read more of what Mandic has to say here:
Mandic: It is very important to understand that, after the Cold War, this is about building the culture of the European Union. It is about building the European Union, or Europe as a whole. All of Europe imagined that there would never be war again. Never. And at the moment, for example, last year, the figures are for 2023. So 42% of the federal budget of the Federal Republic of Germany is allocated to social protection. In the meantime, a dozen theories have emerged that have harmed the armies more than anything else.
The theory of asymmetric war. Every war is asymmetric, there is no such thing as a symmetric war. Every war is hybrid, there is no such thing as a non-hybrid war. Because, it is forgotten, war is not won with armies, war is won with all the elements of power. And that is where Europe has simply turned around and put other objectives in their place, a green Europe, a clean ecology, etc. Everything is fine.
But the security systems, the military systems, the military system in terms of national defence is simply forgotten. It is as if Europe had quickly forgotten the Second World War, etc. And what happened was that the result was that, once again, we were on the other side of the end of the Cold War. What was it? The collapse of the Soviet Union. In principle, Gorbachev drove away a lot of the Eastern countries, because today it would be interesting to calculate how much national wealth Russia lost by selling just oil in this way. From the former Yugoslavia, from East Germany, these zones simply came to it. In that part of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation suffered the most. And these changes happen, so the Communist Party is abolished, some form of democracy comes.
No matter how much we talk about it with Yeltsin, there are elections and more. The West has been very careful not to let this happen because of nuclear weapons in Russia and anarchy. Then it was a great help to Russia. However, some people have not started to pay attention to what is happening in Russia. Yeltsin has left the political scene and Putin is coming. And watch out now. His rise is a link to something that Europeans should be ashamed of. For the Chechen war. Who he is provoking. By speaking out.
And then they were there against these Chechens because they were using everything they could in a strange place where they were carrying oil, where is the oil, where is this, where is that, gas and so on. So, strategic bombers, 27 tonnes of bombs dropped, all that. And we came and turned our heads like Europe. So, it was not a stern warning for us the security and defence of Europe and the value that it represents must be defended at all times. Not from time to time or leading to the sowing of something called the Cold War. No, it is defended all the time.
No, that is not what this means. They have both been silent for a long time. That did not happen, and the first provocation and the first sign that they had recovered to some extent from the economic collapse was the provocation in Pristina. It was very calculating and they knew exactly that the West was not going to go to war over something called the air base in Pristina when the troops arrived in 1999, so it was very calculating, deliberate and not accidental.
There are also certain problems within the West. So, when it comes to coalition and allied action, the resident Head of State or Government, depending on the constitutional solution, who is the Commander-in-Chief of the army, is never exempt from responsibility and command of the army. Simply put, Tony Blair ordered General Jackson not to go in. Not only that.
Clark knows that Tony Blair, as Prime Minister, has the right to issue such an order to his general. So this duality of command in allied operations is necessary and there is a legal basis for it. You have to see it all the time. So you never have problems if you have unique objectives. But what if the objectives break down at some point? And Tony Blair told Jackson not to go there. I am not going to insist on some kind of base or the danger of a third world war, especially a nuclear one. When Russia recovered economically, so did the layer that came to power, and that in a bloody way, that part of the million or so Chechens who live there. They denied that it was terrible, and we kept quiet about it, exactly what we as Europe should not have kept quiet about.
It should have alerted us to see what is happening to Russia, or what is going to happen. We did not do all that, and something did happen, and it was not hybrid action or influence, but something much more subtle. So, basically, through the intelligence services and the part of the nationalised companies that they had, they were targeting and targeting people from the political elite in various countries.
And what happens in principle is that the Russians don’t want to change public opinion with something called information operations, but they support this person to succeed, because as such he benefits, as such he is a defender of Russia and Russia means something to him.
And we mix all the time. Russia’s goal is not to change public opinion. Russia’s aim is to take power in one country. As in Austria now? Absolutely, absolutely. It is not only in Austria. It was and it exists. In Montenegro, in Kosovo, in Croatia, in Serbia, everywhere. Such operations. Where a lot of money has been spent. The worst example is that they have created a whole network, a huge network, in which they have spent huge amounts of money, almost USD 10 billion in Ukraine. People forget that the commander of the Ukrainian fleet crossed over to the other side in the middle of the occupation of Crimea, and a crowd of oligarchs, one of them, and if a Ukrainian citizen and a Ukrainian were exchanged in a prisoner exchange. Now the rich man has gone again. So what happened with the masses was that they targeted people who had certain aspirations, desires, but also a positive opinion of Russia, to represent their interests, and they went so far as to try to influence the elections by the very technique of running an American presidential election. This is now being revealed, including through who, how, etc. So it is not a question of changing American opinion, but of choosing an actor to work with. And this typing is something that will be the biggest task of the security and intelligence agencies in the future. Prevent it at all costs. Prevent at all costs.
What is happening now is that sanctions have been imposed and the diplomatic corps has been expelled from most countries in the world because of the war. Suddenly, that is no longer the case, or it is in terrible decline, that Russian diplomats are interfering in relations in this way, and it was even sad and funny what they were doing in Serbia itself when they were filmed by Serbian intelligence bribing their colonels and so on. So, there were a lot of things going on where there were politicians, and it is not just politicians in Austria, in Italy, it is the European Parliament, it is the intelligence structures. In Germany, in Austria, in many countries, where it was seen that they were trying in every way, in a targeted way, investing huge resources, to do something which was the ultimate objective, to weaken NATO.
The foundation of any alliance is its cohesion. If you are cohesively united and that cohesion is strong, you are as strong as you want to be. If you are not, you will fail whenever you want to fail.
To illustrate, NATO is something the world has never seen before. So 46.9% of the world’s gross domestic product is produced by NATO. NATO has a population of 959 million. So out of 100 new scientific inventions, NATO countries report almost 90. Meanwhile, NATO’s scientific potential is not up-to-date, because ecology, development and so on, which is not understandable after the Cold War, would happen to be those classical functions of the state, intelligence and counter-intelligence, for what, what? Values, freedoms, equality and so on. So, freedom is not given to be eternal. It works every day. We have simply forgotten to do that.
We have not invested huge amounts of money, we have not specifically trained our staff and, most of the time, worst of all, we have not trained the political elites. And then we now have the Russians having influence. The Russians have influence because you have allowed it, not because they are anything special. So this influence can be looked at from the other side. Their attempts at different influences have failed massively. They are still failing today. Unfortunately, some of their dissidents have been killed, including people who are more distant, because Russia was carrying out a dirty black operation. Russia is working. It is being written about more than something that we need to look inwards to see what is wrong with us so that they can succeed.
Now, when you look at it, only California has a gross product bigger than the whole of Russia. All of Russia. Germany alone has a gross domestic product EUR 1 200 billion higher than the Russian Federation. Now they are telling me that the Russians have a lot of money, they are giving it away and spreading it around and creating a network, and obviously we, as the civilised West, have done nothing to prevent this. So, as usual, authoritarian regimes have existed for 200 years in Russia, or in conglomerates, as the Soviet Union was called, or before it.
The problem of their behaviour when you have lived under an authoritarian regime for 200 years is not new. And now, what has been particularly forgotten to be studied is this strategic culture, so that many of the decisions of the Russians are conditioned, determined by their strategic culture, even to the extent that they are afraid of being surrounded and attacked by NATO. So, I have been everywhere, I do not know, I have spoken to everybody in the world. People would not want Russia if it was given to them for free. Why would they? And, after all, time for reflection, at least for the intellectual elite in the West.
Who has ever seen a country in the 21st century conquered and ruled by war? If you tried to do that to any Western country, especially one that was built on democracy, the first thing that would happen to you would be that your own people, your own nations, would disobey you.
We need to be able to emphasise these basic things all the time. When you look at NATO’s gross product, one question arises: what is Putin deciding anyway? You are a small, small, poor nation, a poor country, and that is what you are, and if Europe closes its market to you, to you and to the US, you will die of a long illness. Die. They used to export 190 billion cubic metres of gas a year to Europe, now they do not export a millimetre. There are always naturally dissonant tones, you will get one Slovakia, one Hungary and some others because of petty little interests, where those petty little interests spoil what is vitally important in the West. The West must address the world as a place of freedom, opportunity and unlimited progress. And you start playing with small things, and that is a sign that you have allowed Russia a kind of geopolitical influence.
Russia will never understand that it is not about the people, but about the political elites. Russia must do everything in this world to completely reverse its policy in principle, to reach a level that the world will like. Their strategist, Arbatov, said this a long time ago. They have done nothing, and all they are doing is not some special power to carry out some kind of intelligence operation or information. Well, it is nothing special. So they have often not dared either. The moment they recover, the moment they have built up a solid strength, that is to say, an army, they will go ahead and even threaten to use nuclear weapons. I was once asked this question on television, when I was being interviewed, about the threats. I asked whether President Putin had told the Russians that, from that moment on, none of them would be alive. So I will go against you, and everybody else will do nothing about it. The second question is when you look at NATO now. NATO is capable of destroying the entire nuclear potential of the Russian Federation with conventional weapons. The problem is that Russia, as a huge country, has, in principle, a small population, 100 million from the Urals, something like 40 or more, 11 time zones, and in 9 of them you have no Internet. The worst operation they are carrying out is a black campaign against their own people. You have no access to information. It would be terrible if they tried to communicate something that is obvious to us. You do not have access.
/The Geopost