According to the apocryphal story, the aloof French Queen Marie Antoinette dismissed revolutionary disquiet among starving peasants during a bread shortage with a notorious (and probably mythical) line: “Let them eat cake.”
This weekend, two men offered Europe their own dish to eat, a hearty Russian solution to chaos and conflict.
On Sunday, as France counted the cost of its worst riots in years, disorder now spreading to Italy, the Russian ultranationalist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin declared on X that Russians were ready to “reinstall the order in France or Germany.”
Generously, Dugin also offered for the “Russian army” to “save” Europe from a “globalist elite that is killing it,” adding: “Invite us instead of fight with us and provoke us to come (and save you anyway).”
The same day, President Donald Trump had defended waiving new sanctions on Moscow and his diesel deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump told Kyiv its bargaining position only gets worse: Ukraine’s “male population is low, wounded, and/or dead.”
Their prescription for Europe’s two great disorders, unrest in its streets and war on its eastern flank, is the same: let them eat borscht. Blood-red in color, and sour to the tongue. Accept Russian order; swallow Russian terms.
The culinary metaphor is more fitting than you may realize.
In 2022, UNESCO fast-tracked Ukrainian borscht cooking onto its list of heritage in urgent need of safeguarding because of Russia’s invasion. Moscow whined. But the Kremlin’s offer has always been Ukraine’s own dish, served back under Russian ownership.
The trouble for both chefs is nobody wants to eat the Russian slop on offer. Not even with a gun to their heads.
Same Kitchen, Different Appetites
Dugin, the chief theorist of “neo-Eurasianism,” is a strange character. Deemed an influential thinker, Dugin is often called “Putin’s brain” in media reports, despite holding no office. It’s not easy to feel sorry for Putin—but that is a cruel jibe.
Still, his unlikely pairing with an American president is less odd than it first looks, because the two share a diagnosis as well as a cure.
Dugin, who is ultraconservative on social issues, has long cheered on Europe’s rising populists against what he calls liberal globalist elites, and yearns for a multipolar global reordering along ethnic and religious lines.
Trump’s National Security Strategy, published last December, warned that Europe faces “civilizational erasure.” It blamed migration and EU institutions, which it said undermine sovereignty, and promised to cultivate opposition to the continent’s course from within. The Kremlin’s spokesman called the document “largely consistent" with Moscow's vision.
The menus read as if they came from the same kitchen, but the appetites differ.
Dugin hungers for the imperial, even mystical, casting Russia as heir to Rome and Byzantium in his audacious pitch to restore European order with the Russian army.
Trump’s concerns are more parochial. “My decision on Russia is a very simple one,” Trump said on Truth Social, defending himself against critics of his decision to crank pressure on Kyiv while easing it on Moscow.
“I am in the process of negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.”
He then showed his real hand: domestic political blowback. Trump blamed Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries for hurting diesel markets, America’s included, and credited Moscow with doing little to help its treaty partner Iran, with which the U.S. is still at war.
U.S. diesel averaged a record $6.29 a gallon in September, and Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by nearly eight points two weeks before the crunch midterms. Trump’s Iran war is deeply unpopular for its effect on the cost of living.
While the fuel bill is America’s, Trump wants the price for lowering it to be paid by Kyiv.
What’s on the Plate
Both Dugin and Trump are selling a product with a grim track record. From the Tsars to Josef Stalin and now to Putin, Russia sees few big problems that can’t be solved with a little dose of mass death and human suffering.
The independent Russian outlet Mediazona has confirmed by name some 276,000 Russian war dead, though other estimates put the figure of casualties, which includes wounded, as high as a million.
U.S., European and NATO officials single out the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, as its most aggressive spy service, blamed for sabotage and assassination plots across Europe. They also see the Kremlin’s hand in rampant disinformation campaigns.
At home, Russia’s central bank holds its key rate at 14 percent and expects growth of between zero and 1 percent this year, an economy ravaged by the impact of the Ukraine war and Western sanctions.
Those who speak out against the ills of Putin’s rule find themselves harassed by police or imprisoned. Or worse: murdered.
That is the kind of bleak Russian “order” Dugin is offering a France whose genuine marchers—not the far-left or Islamist agitators—were mostly protesting living costs and school conditions.
In the EU’s spring Eurobarometer, 83 percent of citizens viewed Russia unfavorably. The Russians may be coming, but they're not wanted.
Trump’s recipe is subtler but no less one-sided. On October 9, he announced that Putin had agreed to supply more than 4 million tons of diesel, and the Treasury authorized Russian diesel imports into the U.S. through April.
A week later, two days before they took effect, he waived tough new sanctions under the Graham Act, named for the late Republican senator and Russia hawk, which passed the Senate 86-11.
Kyiv says Washington paused the ballistic-missile warnings it depends on, after threatening to do so unless Ukraine stopped hitting Russian refineries. Trump has said sharing continued. He has also said Ukraine needs a new president.
Moscow’s price, restated repeatedly this year, remains the rest of the Donbas, where fighting has ground to a brutal stalemate.
Late Sunday, Russian ballistic missiles struck Kyiv, hitting a medical center, according to the city’s mayor.
Sent Back to the Kitchen
Ukrainians are not refusing peace. They are refusing this particular Russian recipe for it.
In a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll this summer, 60 percent rejected ceding the Donbas, yet 59 percent said they could accept, mostly reluctantly, freezing the war along the current front line in exchange for security guarantees.
The EU has a €90 billion (over $100 billion) loan in place for Kyiv’s needs in 2026 and 2027. In Washington, Republicans have joined Democrats in condemning both the diesel deal and the waiver.
Even Trump’s own strategy says America needs a strong Europe to stop any adversary from dominating the continent.
Of course, Trump is right that the deadly war is going nowhere soon and has already killed hundreds of thousands. Many more will die.
Ukraine is stretched thin, and someone has to force a settlement. Leaning on the weaker party is often how wars end, however unfair or unpleasant that may be. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the waiver a “60-day pause.”
If, by mid-December, Moscow accepts a freeze on current lines with real guarantees for Kyiv, the deal most Ukrainians say they could live with, Trump’s pressure will look like hard-nosed peacemaking he can justify, even if pursued largely through self-interest.
But the risk is that the Kremlin pockets this temporary relief and then keeps demanding the Donbas without agreeing to stop fighting. It would prove what Ukrainians say they already know about Russia and its true peace-making intentions.
For now, Dugin and Trump can keep ladling out Russian borscht for everyone. But they can’t force anyone to eat it.