These Last Days News - April 15, 2026
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Europe Vs. Russia In A War: Food, Energy, And Logistics Favor Russia...

YOU DID NOT LISTEN
"I have asked you in countless visitations to earth to pray and pray again that Russia would not send her errors throughout the world. But you did not listen, carried away with the cares of your world, being materialistic, casting aside spirituality for power and greed. What will you gain if you obtain this power and you leave your earth without merit and cannot enter the eternal Kingdom of Heaven?" - Our Lady of the Roses, March 15, 1978

ELIMINATION OF NATIONS
"Sin is insanity, and this insanity shall set in motion the elimination of many nations upon your earth. My Mother has cried in the past for you to pray and do penance, or Russia would send her errors throughout the world." - Jesus, May 13, 1978

The above Messages from Our Lady were given to Veronica Lueken at Bayside, New York. Read more

TheGatewayPundit.com reported on April 14, 2026:

By Antonio Graceffo

A companion analysis I conducted for The Gateway Pundit examined European versus Russian military capabilities without U.S. support, focusing on direct military hardware such as tanks, aircraft, carriers, submarines, and nuclear weapons.

It found that Russia holds decisive advantages in ground-force experience, armored production, submarine power, Arctic dominance, and tactical nuclear weapons. Europe’s theoretical hardware advantages are undermined by readiness failures, fragmented command, and a complete lack of peer-level conventional warfare experience.

Raw firepower is only part of the equation. Wars are won or lost on the ability to sustain operations over time. That means keeping weapons factories running, fuel flowing, soldiers fed, and supply lines open under fire. On every one of those dimensions, Russia’s position is stronger than Europe’s. In some cases, the gap is not even close.

European defense spending has risen sharply since 2022, but remains structurally insufficient for a peer conflict. At the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague, allies committed to investing 5 percent of GDP by 2035, with at least 3.5 percent on core defense. Commitments and current reality remain far apart, however. Sixteen European allies barely exceed the 2 percent threshold, spending between 2 and 2.1 percent of GDP in 2025, and only Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland are projected to reach 3.5 percent this year.

By contrast, Russia’s total defense spending reached RUB 6.3 percent of GDP and 32.5 percent of the federal budget.

Putin claimed in December 2025 that since February 2022, Russia increased tank production by 2.2 times, aircraft by 4.6 times, strike weapons and ammunition by 22 times, infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers by 3.7 times, electronic warfare and communications equipment by 12.5 times, and rocket artillery by 9.6 times, with the defense sector now employing approximately 4.5 million people and accounting for 20 percent of all manufacturing jobs.

General Christopher Cavoli told the US Senate Armed Services Committee in April 2025 that Russia is replacing battlefield losses at an unprecedented rate due to industrial expansion and full transition to a war economy.

In addition to increased production, Russia has been receiving munitions from allies. As of March 2026, approximately 33,000 North Korean freight containers had delivered artillery shells, ballistic missiles, self-propelled guns, and multiple-launch rocket systems to Russia.

Europe’s defense industrial base remains fragmented, with procurement duplicated across dozens of national programs and ramp-up timelines that have repeatedly slipped. European nations remain heavily dependent on US systems for the most advanced capabilities, including stealth aircraft, strategic lift, satellite intelligence, and missile defense. Critical raw materials including rare earths, cobalt, lithium, and titanium are sourced substantially from adversarial or unstable states, with China controlling the processing of many of these inputs globally.

According to RAND analysis cited by NATO military planners, Europe would need 1,400 tanks, 2,000 infantry fighting vehicles, 700 artillery pieces, and one million 155mm artillery shells for just the first three months of a Russian breakthrough scenario in the Baltics, stocks Europe does not currently hold.

Russia is essentially fully energy self-sufficient and is a major exporter. Russia has the largest known natural gas reserves of any state on earth, the second-largest coal reserves, and the eighth-largest oil reserves, with the oil and gas sector accounting for up to 30 percent of federal budget revenues in 2024. Russia produced 10.5 million barrels per day of total liquid fuels in 2024, and Russian refiners produce roughly double the diesel needed for domestic demand.

In a wartime scenario, Russia can sustain its military and civilian economy from domestic energy production indefinitely, without dependence on any external supply route or maritime chokepoint.

Europe’s position is structurally the opposite. As of 2025, the EU is still buying 60 percent of its energy from abroad, including 90 percent of its gas and 97 percent of its oil. The post-2022 effort to reduce Russian energy dependency has not produced genuine self-sufficiency; it has produced a new dependency. Russian pipeline gas to the EU fell from 150 billion cubic meters in 2021 to 38 billion cubic meters in 2025, largely replaced by US LNG, which now accounts for 45 percent of the replacement supply.

Replacing Russian pipeline gas with American LNG has simply substituted one strategic vulnerability for another, while adding exposure to Atlantic shipping lane disruption. Europe is facing its third energy crisis in four years, Russian gas cutoffs in 2022, Red Sea chokepoint disruptions in 2023 and 2024, and now the Strait of Hormuz disruption triggered by the US-Iran conflict in 2026. Each crisis has exposed the same structural failure and produced the same promises of reform that have not materialized. European gas storage currently stands at around 30 percent, well below the required 90 percent fill target for November 2026.

Russia is not waiting passively for a future conflict to exploit these vulnerabilities. Russia is already conducting hybrid operations against European energy infrastructure, targeting electricity cables and gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. The Baltic states currently have just four interconnections to the broader European grid, three of which run through maritime zones regularly transited by Russian ships.

A wartime scenario involving sustained hybrid attacks on undersea cables and pipelines, combined with naval interdiction of LNG tanker routes, would place Europe’s energy system under simultaneous pressure from multiple directions it currently has no adequate answer to.

Russia is a net agricultural exporter and self-sufficient in all major food categories. It is the world’s largest wheat exporter and produces sufficient fuel, food, and raw materials to sustain its population and military indefinitely from domestic sources. Europe is broadly self-sufficient in many staple crops but depends on global supply chains for fertilizers, historically sourced predominantly from Russia and Belarus.

Sanctions have already disrupted those fertilizer supply chains, raising production costs across the continent. In a prolonged conventional conflict involving Russian naval interdiction of Atlantic supply lines, Europe would face simultaneous pressure on energy supply, food production, and military resupply, three compounding vulnerabilities with no quick fix.

The GIUK gap, the Baltic straits, and the Bosphorus are all chokepoints where Russian naval and submarine forces could interdict European commerce. Containing Russia’s Northern Fleet alone would require intensive, sustained deployment of maritime patrol aircraft, attack submarines, and destroyers under carrier-based air cover, a capability Europe cannot maintain at that scale without the United States.

European merchant fleet capacity and port infrastructure are adequate for peacetime trade volumes but have not been stress-tested against wartime interdiction, and Europe currently holds no strategic stockpiles calibrated for a major conventional war lasting more than weeks.

The results of this analysis show that Russia can fuel its military indefinitely from domestic energy. It can feed its population without imports. Its defense industry has been operating on a full war footing for three years and has demonstrated the capacity to replace losses at scale. As detailed in the analysis previously published at The Gateway Pundit, Europe lags far behind Russia across most military asset categories. This analysis shows that Europe is not only weaker militarily but also less capable of sustaining a prolonged war, while Russia has already proven it can endure for years.

Without the United States, Europe would stand very little chance against Russia. European leaders appear to be operating under one of two illusions. Either they believe Europe can defeat Russia, or they assume the United States will bail them out. The first is mathematically implausible, and the second becomes less likely following Europe’s refusal to side with the United States against the Iranian regime.

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"The judgment of your God is not akin to the judgment of man. The Eternal Father will only judge by the heart. Your rank, your accumulation of worldly goods does not set you up before another. Many have sold their souls within the holy House of God. Better that you strip yourself and remove all worldly interests now while you have the time to make amends to your God, for many mitres will fall into hell." - St. Thomas Aquinas, August 21, 1972

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Our Lady of the Roses Awesome Bayside Prophecies... https://www.tldm.org/Bayside/ These prophecies came from Jesus, Mary, and the saints to Veronica Lueken at Bayside, NY, from 1968 to 1995.

Directives from Heaven... https://www.tldm.org/directives/directives.htm

D36 - Bishops (Part 1) PDF
D37 - Bishops (Part 2) PDF
D38 - Priests (Part 1) PDF
D39 - Priests (Part 2) PDF
D40 - Infiltrators PDF

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