In the Jacques Baud case, the EU is sanctioning, for the first time, an analyst not for spreading disinformation but for expressing a politically inconvenient truth, all while admitting he has broken no law. Will it have the courage to go after an American citizen?
The European Union has sanctioned the veteran Swiss Intelligence Officer and Geopolitical analysts, 70-year-old Colonel Jacques Baud.
His crime?
He is a “regular guest on pro-Russian television and radio programs,” which makes him “a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda” who “makes conspiracy theories” such as “accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO.”
Damn, this dude is bad ass.
I quiver in fear at the thought of this septuagenarian “making conspiracy theories.”
What’s a world powerhouse like the European Union to do in the face of such a threat?
Why sanction the bugger, of course!
Which is precisely what Kaja Kallas, the Estonian-born High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, did, promulgating a notice on December 15, 2025 which added twelve “natural persons” and two “entities” to a list of people and entities deemed to have run afoul of Council Regulation (EU) 2024/2642 (“EU Russia Destabilization Sanctions”). Passed in October 2024, this regulation introduced “new restrictive measures against Russia in response to its destabilizing activities against the EU and EU Member States.” The regulation was “designed to respond to Russia’s campaign of hybrid activities against the EU and its Member States.”
The EU deemed this regulation necessary to counter alleged Russian hybrid actions designed to undermine elections, support violent demonstrations, commit acts of sabotage against democratic institutions, economic activities, or services of public interest, exploiting armed conflict for the purposes of illicit trade, and instigating or facilitating armed conflict.
All the above listed actions could—and should—constitute criminal acts if carried out by any person.
The question is, which of these nefarious deeds is Colonel Baud accused of undertaking?
None of the above.
Instead, he has fallen afoul of an additional listed activity, “supporting or otherwise facilitating the use of coordinated information manipulation and interference.” In short, the EU has accused Colonel Baud of “implementing or supporting actions or policies attributable to the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten stability or security in a third country (Ukraine) by engaging in the use of information manipulation and interference.”
Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) is the recent brainchild of the European External Action Service (EEAS), the diplomatic service in charge of executing all international relations of the European Union. Back in 2022 the EEAS collaborated with the EU Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) to study and analyze the threat landscape concerning Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) and disinformation. The mandate for this action was direction derived from the November 27, 2019, European Democracy Action Plan, which tasked the EEAS to “work with Member States, civil society and industry towards refined common definitions and methodologies in order to address different categories of disinformation and influence activities.”
FIMI is defined by the EEAS as follows: “A mostly nonillegal pattern of behavior that threatens or has the potential to negatively impact values, procedures and political processes. Such activity is manipulative in character, conducted in an intentional and coordinated manner. Actors of such activity can be state or non-state actors, including their proxies inside and outside of their own territory.”
By its own admission, the EEAS definition of what constitutes FIMI “puts emphasis on manipulative behavior, as opposed to the truthfulness of the content being delivered.”
In short, the “crimes” Colonel Baud is accused of are procedural in nature and not derived from any actual disinformation or promulgation of lies or mistruths. Take, for example, the allegation that Colonel Baud accuses “Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO.”
The basis for this accusation is Colonel Baud’s 2024 book, L’art de la guerre russe. Comment l’Occident a conduit l’Ukraine à l’échec (The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat), published by Max Milo Editions, a French publisher.
The offending passages read as follows:
Zelensky’s decree of March 24, 2021 for the reconquest of Crimea and the Donbass was the real trigger for the SMO. From that moment on, the Russians understood that if there was military action against them, they would have to intervene. But they also knew that the cause of the Ukrainian operation was NATO membership, as Oleksei Arestovitch had explained. That is why, in mid-December 2021, they were submitting proposals to the USA and NATO on extending the Alliance: their aim was then to remove Ukraine’s motive for an offensive in the Donbass.
The reason for the Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) is indeed the protection of the populations of Donbass; but this protection was necessary because of Kiev’s desire to go through a confrontation to enter NATO. The extension of NATO is therefore only the indirect cause of the conflict in Ukraine. The latter could have spared itself this ordeal by implementing the Minsk Agreements—but what we wanted was a defeat for Russia.
Jacques Baud in Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat
Nothing Colonel Baud wrote is a lie, distortion of fact, or mistruth.
Moreover, he published his work using a well-known French publisher—not a Russian mouthpiece.
And it turns out every thing Colonel Baud wrote about Ukraine and NATO was true.
Amanda Sloat, the former Biden Administration senior director for Europe at the National Security Council whom Politico has labeled “an architect of President Joe Biden’s Europe policy,” has recently admitted that the Russian initiation of the SMO could have been avoided if the US took NATO membership off the table when it came to Ukraine.
“We had some conversation even before the war started”, Sloat told the Russian prankster/journalists Vovan and Lexus, “about what if Ukraine comes out and just says to Russia, ‘fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO if that stops the war, if that stops the invasion,’ which at that point it may well have done”.
Amanda Sloat
Sloat, however, noted that she was “uncomfortable with the idea of the US pushing Ukraine not to do that, and sort of implicitly giving Russia some sort of sphere of influence or veto power on that”, adding “I don’t think Biden felt like it was his place to tell Ukraine what to do then, to tell Ukraine not to pursue NATO”.
In conclusion, Sloat admitted that
“I guess if you want to do an alternative version of history, one option would have just been for Ukraine to say in January of 2022, ‘fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO, we will stay neutral.’ Ukraine could have made a deal around March/April of 2022 around the Istanbul talks. There is certainly a question,” she added, “almost three years on now, would that have been better to do before the war started, would that have been better to do in Istanbul talks, it certainly would have prevented the destruction and the loss of life”.
Amanda Slout
Damn.
I guess the EU had better fire up its sanction machine.
Amanda Sloat, how dare you say such things!
You see, it doesn’t matter that what she said is true.
What matters is that it goes against the official narrative promulgated by Ukraine, which has been adopted without question by the EU.
Colonel Jacques Baud is guilty of nothing more than telling the fact-based truth, no matter how inconvenient it may be to the established powers in the EU.
He has committed no crime—by their own admission, the EU states that the FIMI “crime” Colonel Baud has been convicted of, without benefit of due process, is nothing more than a “nonillegal pattern of behavior” in which the fact that he told the unvarnished truth is no factor.
Colonel Baud told the truth outside the officially mandated informational pathways established by the EU, and in a manner which contradicted the lies and distortions being promulgated by Ukraine, and he had to be punished.
Well, Ms. Kallas, I have a challenge for you.
I, too, have been telling the truth about the Russian-Ukraine conflict.
I have been put on the Mirotvorets death list by the Unkrainian intelligence service for the crime of telling the truth.
The Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation has listed me as the number one “information terrorist” and demanding that I be treated as an actual terrorist and hunted down and killed.
What the hell.
I need a little more adventure in my life.
Sanction me, Bitch.
Do it.
“F” around and find out.
I’m an American.
We believe in free speech.
Seriously.
Like, we will fight and die over this issue.
Sanction me, and my country will fuck you up.
It’s a damn shame Switzerland has abandoned Colonel Baud to his fate.
The Swiss were once viewed as the defenders of democracy and all that attends it, inclusive of free speech.
But no more. So pick on someone your own size.
Sanction an American citizen.
I dare you [end]
The original article
64-year-old Scott Ritter is a former intelligence officer within the US Marine Corps (USMC), then inspector of the United Nations in Iraq. When in 2003, the US and their British minions were about to invade the country under this false pretext, Ritter was claiming that there was no weapon of mass destruction (WMD) there. He was right.
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The Western disinformation about Ukraine
chronicle of censorship, fake news, whitewashing of the Ukrainian Nazism and war crimes, for the sake of the proxy war that NATO is conducting in Donbass and Ukraine, against Russia
The Atlanticist defeat in Donbass and Ukraine
chronicle of a new catastrophic NATO venture
Nicolas Cinquini 
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