Consortium News: 24-12-2025,
While other powers are presumed to have legitimate security interests that must be balanced and accommodated, Russia’s interests are presumed illegitimate. Russophobia functions less as a sentiment than as a systemic distortion — one that repeatedly undermines Europe’s own security.
The captive of Sevastopol by the British allied armies, Sep. 8, 1855, after a siege of 318 days. (Popular Graphic Arts/U.S. Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons)
Europe has repeatedly rejected peace with Russia at moments when a negotiated settlement was available, and those rejections have proven profoundly self-defeating.
From the nineteenth century to the present, Russia’s security concerns have been treated not as legitimate interests to be negotiated within a broader European order, but as moral transgressions to be resisted, contained, or overridden.
This pattern has persisted across radically different Russian regimes —Tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet — suggesting that the problem lies not primarily in Russian ideology, but in Europe’s enduring refusal to recognize Russia as a legitimate and equal security actor.
My argument is not that Russia has been entirely benign or trustworthy. Rather, it is that Europe has consistently applied double standards in the interpretation of security.
Europe treats its own use of force, alliance-building, and imperial or post-imperial influence as normal and legitimate, while construing comparable Russian behavior — especially near Russia’s own borders — as inherently destabilizing and invalid.