Jacques Baud

Col. Jaques Baud

Jacques Baud (b. 1955) is a Swiss former colonel in the Swiss Armed Forces, strategic intelligence officer, and analyst specializing in Eastern European countries, terrorism, and asymmetric warfare.

He served in Swiss strategic intelligence, worked on United Nations peacekeeping operations (including as head of doctrine), and participated in NATO-related programs in Ukraine around the 2014 Maidan events. He has negotiated with high-level Russian military and intelligence officials post-USSR collapse and trained in American and British intelligence services.

Baud is a prolific author of books on intelligence, terrorism, and geopolitics, published mainly in French by Max Milo Éditions. Notable titles include:

• Gouverner par les fake news (Governing by Fake News)
• Poutine, maître du jeu? (Putin: Game Master?)
• Operation Z
• Ukraine entre guerre et paix (Ukraine Between War and Peace)
• L'art de la guerre russe (The Russian Art of War: How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat)
• Covert Wars in Ukraine.

These works often critique Western media narratives, NATO policies, and misinformation in international conflicts, drawing on official Western, Ukrainian, and Russian sources. In December 2025, the EU placed economic sanctions on him. Baud was placed under a travel ban, his bank accounts frozen, and his property confiscated. No one is allowed to have business relations with him, including to buy food. Due to the EU's extrajudicial sanctions regime, there is no court to make an appeal.

In How the West Led Ukraine to Defeat, Baud wrote:

“

Zelensky's decree of March 24, 2021 for the reconquest of Crimea and the Donbass was the real trigger for the SMO. From that moment on, the Russians understood that if there was military action against them, they would have to intervene. But they also knew that the cause of the Ukrainian operation was NATO membership, as Oleksei Arestovitch had explained. That is why, in mid-December 2021, they were submitting proposals to the USA and NATO on extending the Alliance: their aim was then to remove Ukraine's motive for an offensive in the Donbass. The reason for the Russian Special Military Operation (SMO) is indeed the protection of the populations of Donbass; but this protection was necessary because of Kiev's desire to go through a confrontation to enter NATO. The extension of NATO is therefore only the indirect cause of the conflict in Ukraine. The latter could have spared itself this ordeal by implementing the Minsk Agreements—but what we wanted was a defeat for Russia.

”