Meanwhile, the EU has blithely operated as the de facto political arm of the Atlantic alliance due to the overlap between its eastward enlargement and that of NATO, culminating in the political tensions in Ukraine over the past decade which foreshadowed this war. In terms of politico-economic organisation, both Russia and Western states are capitalist, despite secondary points of differentiation, that exhibit the same overall structure of a two-tier order in which a tiny minority of what I call “platformarchs” is in control of the entry points to any given industry.