For Françoise Thom, economic warfare isn't just one aspect of the conflict: it is the Kremlin's primary and historic weapon against the West. The strategy is immutable, whether Tsarist, Soviet, or Putinite. The trap always snaps shut in two stages: first, lure the West with the promise of colossal profits to plunder its technology and capital; then, expropriate and expel it once its military power is modernized. The true masterstroke came after 1991. Massive aid from the IMF and the World Bank, meant to save Russia, became the fuel for state-sanctioned looting. Billions were siphoned off by a new caste of oligarchs. This stolen money wasn't just hidden: it was laundered and recycled right in the heart of our capitals, with the complicity of our own financial institutions. This fortune then became a weapon of "contagion." Its venom: corruption. The goal was no longer just to get rich, but to rot Western democracies from the inside out. To buy off elites, fund political parties, paralyze political will, and spread the idea that everything is just cynicism and a power struggle. Blinded by its own greed, the West let it all happen. It sold the technology that rebuilt the Russian military. It turned a blind eye to the financial flows that rotted its institutions. Today's war is therefore no accident. It is the bill for thirty years of willful blindness. It is the price of believing business could be done with a regime that saw us as only one thing: prey.