This war in Europe is existential for the European Union. This newsletter is the 5th published in 2026 and the 51st since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine. May, the fifth month of the year, is important for Europeans. They celebrate both the 1945 armistice and Europe Day . The European Union is based on the deconstruction of a shameful and dramatic past and on the construction of a new chapter to be written for the Old Continent. The number 5 has a very rich symbolism, religious, spiritual, sensory. Russia is perpetually turning back the clock, and the regime keeps repeating the same mistakes. The sad anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl reminds us of it, with its thousands of victims (the number remains unknown) ). Ukraine is its opposite – a country and people, superheroes “5 Magnificent” , fully forward-looking, aware of their identity, confronted with a world of predators. The European Union has awakened from a long blindness, a guilty blindness vis-à-vis Russia, which very early expressed its visceral hostility to European construction. In 1945, Stalin convinced aging leaders at Yalta to tear apart Europe for his own good. The crimes of the USSR were denounced as early as the 1950s by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in "One Day of Ivan Denisovich" and then in his monumental work "Gulag Empire" in the 1970s (1). After Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and finally the attack on Ukraine in 2024, the European Union has finally reacted. The world has changed; powder smells are multiplying. Our fifth sense should alert us.
1-Number 5- a polysemous symbolism
2-Fifth column in Russia
3-Five Magnificent in Ukraine
4-Fifth sense in Europe